U.S. President Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972 was an important moment for the improvement of relations between china and the United States, two long-standing hostile countries, especially the United States, which was eager to get rid of the quagmire of the Vietnam War, and very much hoped that China could play an active role in ending the Vietnam War.
Therefore, Nixon did his best to curry favor with China, as can be seen from the gifts he carefully prepared for Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou.
Among the gifts given to Chairman Mao, including an engraved crystal glass vase, a goblet, and a porcelain swan, are very exquisite and can be called the "national treasure" of the United States.
The gifts to Premier Zhou are more realistic, one is the lunar soil brought back from the lunar surface by American astronauts, representing the scientific and technological achievements of the United States, and the other is obviously a "big package of affordable gifts" to please China: "treasure map".
Chinese is certainly no stranger to the "treasure map", in film and television dramas, literary works, there will often be some "treasure maps", causing countless people to scramble, resulting in a shocking bloody case.
What Nixon gave premier Zhou was something like a "treasure map": a top-secret file of the United States during World War II, in which the specific sinking location of the Japanese freighter Awa Maru, which was sunk by an American submarine in Chinese waters, and a list of the supplies on board.
Here, you need to have a general understanding of the Awa Maru first.
The Awa Maru was a Japanese 10,000-ton cargo ship carrying important supplies during World War II, and was the largest and most advanced civilian ship in Asia at that time. Since ancient times, "the two countries have not fought each other", and the Awa Maru is a ship with a special mission.
During the Pacific War, due to the shameless sneak attack of the Japanese, more than 100,000 Allied troops and civilians were taken prisoner, so Japan and the United States secretly agreed to let a Japanese ship deliver medicine, nutrition and other humanitarian relief materials for these prisoners, and in return, the United States promised not to attack the ship, so the Awa Maru was selected, and the entire ship was painted with white paint and painted with a huge red cross symbol.
However, the Japanese fascists gambled heavily for the sake of war, and even used the Awa Maru to secretly transport weapons, strategic materials and important military personnel, and most of the materials given to prisoners of war by the international Red Cross charity were also detained and misappropriated by the Japanese army. The United States was very angry about this, and it "killed" the Awa Maru.
In March 1945, the Awa Maru secretly arrived in Singapore, was fully enclosed for several days of transit, and then sneaked to Japan. On April 1, while passing through the waters of Niushan Mountain in Fujian Province, China, it was spotted by a US submarine and launched an attack on it, causing the Awa Maru to sink, and all 2008 people on board were killed except for one person!
Afterwards, the United States learned from Japanese documents that the Awa Maru's doomsday trip was loaded with countless treasures and strategic materials, which can be called a super "treasure ship"!
It turned out that the Japanese, seeing that the war was hopeless, secretly loaded the Awa Maru into the Awa Maru and prepared to transport all the 40 tons of gold, 12 tons of platinum, 150,000 carats of diamonds, 40 boxes of jewelry and cultural relics, 3,000 tons of tin ingots, 3,000 tons of rubber, thousands of tons of rice, and so on, which had been plundered from Southeast Asia for many years.
Moreover, among these treasures, there is another top cultural relic that attracts the most attention of Chinese, that is, the world-famous Fossil Peking Ape Skull.
These fossils, a total of five, are all 500,000-year-old ape skull fossils excavated by Chinese and foreign archaeologists from the prehistoric site of Zhoukoudian in Beijing, which are considered by anthropologists to be the ancestors of all Asian races, including Chinese (later considered to be a close relative of Homo sapiens, the direct ancestor of modern humans), and it is conceivable how important it is in the history of human evolution and the emotions of Chinese people, and it is absolutely a priceless treasure!
(Photo: Fossil skull replica of Peking Ape Man)
This huge fortune, even excluding the fossilized skulls of Peking apes, was estimated at more than $5 billion at the time!
So why was Nixon so generous as to give such an important "treasure" to China?
Don't think of the Americans so generously, in addition to the Americans want China to help stop the Vietnam War, there is another important reason, that is, the sinking address of the Awa Maru is in Chinese waters, foreigners are not allowed to enter without permission, so the United States decided to send a "shunshui person".
In any case, this treasure was so important to China at that time that Admiral Ye Fei, then minister of transportation, excitedly said: "What a great fortune!" If China's 800 million people are to divide it, one person will have a pig! ”
After Nixon left, many countries came, especially the Japanese, to request that the Japanese professional salvage company salvage more than two thousand Japanese ghosts on board, in addition, some famous salvage companies in the United States and Europe also wanted to share a piece of the pie, and their reasons were also very good: China did not have a professional salvage company at that time, let alone professional technology and experience.
However, these requests were rejected by our country, and it was finally agreed that the Navy would organize salvage teams to carry out salvage.
After detailed and complex preparations, the salvage work began in 1977. However, salvaging cultural relics and valuables on the seabed, unlike bulky things such as salvaging shipwrecks, requires a lot of professional technology and equipment, otherwise it will not only affect the progress, but also may cause serious damage to the salvaged items.
China has no relevant salvage experience before, the technical methods are relatively rough, directly using the method of blasting, resulting in a large number of items being swept away by the current, or being swept away by the waves after surfacing, the loss is not small. However, even so, a lot of wealth was recovered, and the tin ingots alone were worth 50 million US dollars.
Unfortunately, the fabled 40 tons of gold, 12 tons of platinum, and the most important fossil peking ape skull have never been found.
Of course, there is also a possibility that the Awa Maru has long been "patronized" by some Western developed countries, using advanced underwater equipment such as submarines to secretly carry out some excavations of the Awa Maru. Of course, this is just speculation.
In 1980, China announced that it would stop salvaging the Awa Maru, and may hope to wait until conditions permit before carrying out more detailed and accurate salvage.
Now, more than 40 years later, our science and technology have already undergone earth-shaking changes, I believe that in the near future, we will definitely restart the salvage of the Awa Maru, and at that time, our long-awaited Fossil Peking Ape Man skull is likely to see the light of day!
(References: Fujian Party History Monthly, Legal System Expo, Literature and History Expo)