When people mention archaeology, they can't help but think of archaeologists who hold "Luoyang shovels" and keep plowing soil on the ground, but is archaeology just like this? In fact, there are many kinds of archaeology, and at present, the most important archaeological direction in China is not only ancient tombs, but also "undersea tombs". In the course of a thousand years of history, China began to trade with foreign countries during the Han Dynasty, and other countries around the ancient period had trade with ancient China. In the Tang Dynasty, it was "all countries coming to the dynasty", very prosperous, but foreign trade can not only be limited to neighboring countries, in order to open up overseas markets, trade ships between major ports are also very frequent. But where are the shoes that don't get wet when you walk by the river? There are so many ships coming and going that it is impossible for every ship to reach the coast safely.
The accident ship was "remembered", and Mike Hatcher became a professional treasure hunter
Sailing on the sea often encounters many unexpected dangers, and the probability of a ship accident is like a car accident, which occurs from time to time. Modern ships are equipped with many high-tech products, in the event of a shipwreck can send a distress message at the first time, the ship is basically equipped with lifeboats, life rings and other escape tools, but ancient ships did not have these equipment. If they are shipwrecked, the crew and ships will be buried in the vast sea, and there is almost no possibility of survival. In the course of thousands of years of human history, how many ships have been buried on the seabed? So in the last century, someone had a sudden idea to salvage a shipwreck, and wouldn't he get rich? Soon, this person was put into practice. That man was Mike Hatcher.
Mike is an Englishman who founded a salvage company in 1970 to salvage shipwrecks. The shipwrecks that Mike salvaged at that time were basically World War II warships, and there was not much treasure on these warships, so Mike disassembled the salvaged warships and sold the parts. Or by chance, he salvaged a Chinese shipwreck, which was the first time he salvaged a shipwreck in ancient China, which was full of porcelain, which mike had sold, and this year he made millions of dollars, and Mike knew how expensive Chinese cultural relics were, and that this ship was more profitable than the warship he had salvaged for three years.
Ancient Chinese shipwrecks became the main target, with the Taixing losing more than 600,000 pieces of porcelain
Later, he began to devote himself to the search for ancient shipwrecks in China, and he used clues such as the ship's navigation diary and navigation map to find the accident ship, which was how the Taixing in the Southern Song Dynasty was found by Mike. When Mike Hatcher found the Taysin, he found that the shipwreck was a huge sailing ship, weighing more than a thousand tons, and the ship was full of porcelain, up to millions of pieces. But In order to increase the value of the ship's artifacts, Mike Hatcher, after salvaging the million pieces of porcelain, smashed more than 650,000 pieces of porcelain and threw them into the sea, leaving 239,000 pieces he took to the Netherlands for auction. At that time, Chinese archaeologists were very anxious to hear about this and rushed to the Netherlands with 30,000 US dollars.
But at auctions at the time, no piece of porcelain cost less than $100,000, and archaeologists watched as one Piece after another of Chinese artifacts was bought. At that time, the person in charge of the auction also said that the cultural relics at this auction were not sold to Chinese. Since then, China's underwater archaeology has been forced out by Mike, in order not to let such a tragedy happen again, Chinese archaeologists have struggled to learn underwater archaeology knowledge, looking for ancient sunken ships, in 1987, the South China Sea One was discovered.
However, at that time, there was a lack of salvage technology, archaeologists could only continue to study and formulate a salvage plan, and they did not dare to disclose the discovery of Nanhai No. 1, for fear that thieves like Mike would steal Nanhai No. 1. It wasn't until 2007 that archaeologists began their first underwater salvage effort. Nowadays, the salvage work of Nanhai No. 1 has been completely completed, and the number of cultural relics out of the water has reached 180,000, which is the largest sunken merchant ship found in China at present, and it is also the vessel with the most cultural relics in the water, which has very high research value.