In 2003, the "Nanhai No. 1" Song Dynasty shipwreck came out of the water safely, in this ancient shipwreck, the value of the cultural relics found reached at least 300 billion yuan, but this is not the most important, the nanhai No. 1 water is also a sign of China's first salvage of ancient shipwrecks in the world to achieve success.
However, you may not know that the cause of underwater archaeology was "forced" by people, and this forced us was a British explorer, Mike Hatcher, who had been salvaging Shipwrecks in World War II since 1970, and at a chance, he came into contact with Chinese porcelain.
Attracted by huge profits, he came to the South China Sea and salvaged the Qing Dynasty shipwreck "Taixing", a giant sailing ship weighing more than 1,000 tons, carrying more than 1 million pieces of Fujian Dehua porcelain, and Mike Hatcher smashed more than 600,000 pieces of ordinary porcelain in order to sell it for a good price.
The remaining 365,000 pieces of fine porcelain were shipped to Germany, and in the following year he traveled extensively and applied for an international convention on "unclaimed shipwrecks allowed to be auctioned," which also officially belonged to Mike Hatcher, who earned $30 million in the nine-day auction.
It is precisely because of this huge loss, China also began to focus on the development of underwater archaeology, with the successful salvage of the South China Sea No. 1, China's underwater archaeology also has a place in the world, in recent years, the Chinese underwater archaeology team, and salvaged 4 British shipwrecks in the East China Sea.
These 4 British shipwrecks are also loaded with many cultural relics, according to the identification, many of these cultural relics are from the Yuanmingyuan, the British and French coalition raids on the Yuanmingyuan has always been a difficult page in China's modern history, even European countries, will also burn the Yuanmingyuan as one of the worst cultural destruction actions.
The famous French writer Victor Hugo strongly condemned the atrocity in the "Letter to Captain Butler on the Anglo-French Expedition to China", in order to restore the truth, he also visited some soldiers involved in the looting, the French called the Yuanmingyuan "summer palace", the French commander-in-chief Meng Douban said: "In Europe, nothing can make us feel so luxurious."
A French soldier, Armande Roussie, said: "In two days, I got 30 million francs worth of silk, jewelry, porcelain, bronzes and sculptures, which was simply a psychedelic carnival, how many cultural relics were looted in the Yuanmingyuan, I don't know, but according to basic estimates it should be 1.5 million pieces."
As of 2013, the British Museum has collected as many as 23,000 Chinese cultural relics, many of which are from the Yuanmingyuan, and as for The chinese salvagation of these four British shipwrecks, it has also caused a lot of impact.
Some British media hope that China can return it, but the British side is silent about it, they have not revealed the origin of the 4 shipwrecks, nor why they sank in the East China Sea, even if the British choose to be silent, but the cultural relics of the Yuanmingyuan on the ship have explained everything.