Yesterday I saw a news, I admit that after reading it, I ate a lemon, and my mouth was sour...
A British man named Richard, along with his friend Reg, found 61 silver and copper coins in a field in Jersey with a detector in 2012. Then they directly hired an excavation team and dug out a total of 70,000 ancient coins in 4 days.
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Is the treasure dug up in Britain to be handed over to the state? Yes, according to the Treasure Act enacted in 1996, any excavated object, regardless of its material, is classified as a "treasure" and should ultimately belong to the local museum or the British Museum.
But there is also an important premise: museums must reward cultural relics discoverers or landowners at market prices.
According to news reports, these ancient coins are more than 2,000 years old, and they should be precious artifacts of the Roman era. After the excavation of the ancient coins, the British royal family and the Jersey government argued with the two discoverers, perhaps because of the ownership issue, perhaps because of the dispute over the amount of the reward, and the three parties negotiated for nine years.
Not long ago, the three parties finally negotiated, and the two men promised to hand over all the cultural relics, and they also received a reward of 4.2 million pounds (about 36 million yuan).
This kind of news is grabbed a lot abroad, and I will give a few examples:
Two years ago, a Slovak couple was playing in the wilderness when they came across a wild boar mooring the land and then planed out two bags full of silver coins, including two shiny gold coins. The coins, all of which were silver dinars from the 15th century or so, numbered to more than 1,600 coins, all of which were then handed over to the National Museum by the couple.
There is no need to keep it private, because they have received a prize of 100% equivalent to these ancient coins, which is 6.4 million euros, that is, more than 46 million yuan!
In 2015, a team of treasure hunters in Florida, USA, consulted the data and found a clue to the sinking of the Royal Spanish Fleet more than 300 years ago. They decisively purchased a large number of equipment for exploration, diving, and salvage, and finally fished out 350 gold coins worth $4.5 million.
Such salvage is legal as long as it is authorized by the government, sponsored by a jewelry company in the United States, and divided proportionally afterwards.
Mike Hatcher
The Chinese collector's circle is probably most familiar with this old man, his name is Mike Hatcher, an Englishman, who is an avid treasure hunter who specializes in Chinese treasures. He became a salvage company in 1970, fishing out a Ming Dynasty shipwreck and making millions of dollars in profits.
In 1984, he found the Chinese shipwreck "Godmarsen" during the Qianlong period, fished out hundreds of thousands of pieces of porcelain and tens of kilograms of gold ingots, and made tens of millions of dollars in profits. The China Administration of Cultural Relics also specially sent two experts, Feng Xianming and Geng Baochang, with 30,000 US dollars to rush to buy, but they did not buy a single one.
The craziest one was in 1999, when his team salvaged the sensational Taixing, which produced 1 million pieces of porcelain alone. As a result, this guy smashed 650,000 pieces in order to live with strange goods, and then put the remaining porcelain, gold and silver ingots, bronzes and other cultural relics into a world tour exhibition auction, in that era the profit was about 300 million to 400 million yuan, fortunately the patriotic Chinese rescued a batch. This incident also directly forced the rapid development of China's underwater archaeology.
Ancient money is stored in China
The reason why the "treasure hunting fever" in foreign countries is continuous is because treasure hunters are a formal profession, as long as they obtain legal procedures and pay taxes according to the regulations after making money, there is no problem. The BBC has even produced a documentary called The Treasure Hunters 2014, which is equivalent to encouraging people to go treasure hunting.
And in our country, everyone knows that all excavated cultural relics belong to the state, and many people do not understand why they should do this. In fact, it is mainly to consider the serious problems of cultural relics protection.
China can be described as a treasure everywhere, like Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan and other places, as long as the feng shui is good, it is an ancient tomb pile, but most of them have been dug to a thousand holes. Ancient coin cellars are all over the country, and it is normal to dig out hundreds of pounds or even dozens of tons at a time.
However, under the influence of modern commercial speculation, the concept of "antiques equals value" is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and cultural relics smugglers at home and abroad are even more fishing in muddy waters, and those who are interested in domestic interests go to steal tombs and treasures, and cultural relics crimes are repeatedly prohibited. In recent decades, hundreds of thousands of ancient tombs have been stolen, tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of cultural relics have been lost abroad or exiled to the people, and ancient coins are even more astronomical, and the number is uncountable.
In the face of the grim reality, how much precious historical information disappears with the rampant excavation, and it is naturally everyone's responsibility to crack down on cultural relics crimes. Therefore, the state strictly restricts the circulation scope of the collection market, as long as it involves excavated cultural relics, it is basically no play.
However, with the development of China's economy, it is no longer like before, a village shouts "want to be rich to dig a grave, overnight become a million yuan household", for money dare to do anything. Nowadays, the cultural and economic level of the public has risen, ordinary people honestly engage in a collection, but there are indeed too many restrictions, and cracking down on cultural relics crimes will "accidentally injure" ordinary collectors in many cases.
Therefore, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and other six departments recently issued the "Opinions on Strengthening the Management of Cultural Relics collected by the People and Promoting the Orderly Development of the Cultural Relics Market", which is of great encouragement significance for protecting the rights and interests of private collectors. The Cultural Relics Bureau encourages cultural and cultural institutions in various provinces to provide more public welfare appraisals for private collections in the future, involving the guidance, circulation, auction and support of some fine antiques, and will promote the further outbreak of private collections.
Therefore, we do not have to be jealous of how it is abroad, and the country has a positive attitude towards the gradual opening up of private collections. As long as there are fine products in hand, the premise is not dug up at the moment, then it will get greater returns in the future.