The holy grail of Filipino treasure hunting is a hoard of gold and artefacts reputedly ditched by the retreating Japanese army at the end of the second world war.

Henry Roxas was four years old when he was initiated into the world of treasure hunting. One night in 1971, his father Rogelio Roxas brought home a 1-ton golden Buddha containing diamonds, and 24 gold bars he had dug up from a site in the resort city of Baguio, 210km north of Manila, where a state-run hospital now stands.

A faded photograph shows a young Roxas with his father and mother and the golden Buddha, its head removed to show off the diamonds. The jubilation over the find, however, was short-lived. Soldiers of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos raided their house a week later and seized the treasure.

“It has brought so much misfortune to my family, so much bad luck,” Roxas, 39, says. “It was a heavy burden. My family was torn apart by greedy people who wanted to get their hands on the treasure.”

After the raid, Rogelio, who died in 1993, was jailed on trumped-up charges for two years. His mother fled to the US where she remarried. When his father was released from jail, he took refuge in the southern region of Mindanao. Roxas and his younger brother Gerbic hid in the northern city of Olongapo.

While accounts of his father’s exploits say his family kept the diamonds found inside the Buddha, Roxas says this isn’t true. “We were left with nothing but misfortune and some photographs that Marcos’s soldiers failed to get because they were still at the developing shop,” he says.

On a more optimistic note, Roxas says he is still willing to lead a treasure hunt to the site where his father dug up the golden Buddha. He claims he still has a map of the treasure site where more gold bars, gems and other artefacts can be found.

“My father told me it was a huge vault, with the walls lined with gold bars,” he says. “If I can find a good financier and people to provide security, I am willing to lead them to the treasure. I just want it to be shared with all Filipinos.”

According to unconfirmed accounts, during the second world war Japanese soldiers under General Tomoyuki Yamashita used the Philippines as a transit point for treasures they had pillaged from the rest of Southeast Asia and buried them there, hoping to retrieve the hoard after the war.

The tale is far from being a closely guarded Roxas family secret. Many other treasure hunting groups are also looking for financiers to search the area.

Badong Noble, 65, who has been a true-life Indiana Jones for more than 20 years, has yet to enjoy the fruits of his expeditions. The former bank employee, now with thinning hair and a bad cough, remembers with a passion one night in 1985 when he almost fulfilled his lifelong dream of bringing home a Yamashita gold bar.

“I touched the bars, three of them, but my companions did not want us to leave with only three bars, so they convinced me that we would return later to get them all,” he says. More than 10 years later, he is leading a second dig in Baguio City in a residential back yard. With many still doubting whether the treasure exists, Noble has kept his faith by recalling the humid evening in June 1985 when he and three partners discussed whether or not to take away the three gold bars they had dug up. “I was overruled by my three companions who told me it would be best if we brought out the load altogether,” he says. “That was the biggest mistake of my life.”

Noble, a father of three grown-up children, claimed that an altar boy who helped with the digging got drunk afterwards and began bragging about their find to other people. Soon, everybody in the neighbourhood was gathered around what they thought was a construction site for a small prayer chapel beside a church and began to ask questions.

The next day, the parish priest who had supported the illicit treasure hunt was replaced and that was the last time Noble and his partners were able to go near the site.

“Believe me, there are still a lot of buried treasures around,” he claims. “It’s just down there, waiting for those who persevere and have the right information.”