Eight hundred years later, on this day, the Chinese government spent a huge amount of 300 million yuan to salvage the "Nanhai No. 1", so that the long-hidden oriental culture could see the sky again.
This can be called a heavy stroke in history, and it is also China's best response to the robbers!
Stolen Chinese artifacts
Ancient China's maritime trade was developed, and many merchant ships were shipwrecked in coastal waters, which allowed rampant cultural relics pirates to see the opportunity to get rich.
There was once an Englishman, Mike? Hatcher, who became rich overnight by salvaging shipwrecks in the South China Sea, became a billionaire and was called a marine explorer by his countrymen.
Mike? Hatcher grew up in an orphanage and dreamed of getting rich.
In 1970, at the age of 30, he set up a marine commercial salvage company in Australia, and during a seabed survey near the South China Sea, he stumbled upon an ancient Chinese merchant ship carrying more than 20,000 pieces of porcelain. He salvaged many porcelains and tentatively sold them to collectors, earning millions of dollars from them.
Since then, the search for ancient shipwrecks in the South China Sea has become his lifelong goal.
In 1986, Mike? Hatcher found the sunken God malsen in the South China Sea, which had more than 230,000 pieces of porcelain, more than 600 pieces of lacquerware, more than 5,000 horses of silk, and countless wood and tea leaves. He quietly spent ten weeks salvaging all the goods ashore, and then obtained auction permission on the grounds of "unclaimed shipwreck" and commissioned Christie's Auction House in the Netherlands to conduct a public auction.
The China Administration of Cultural Heritage had no choice but to send two cultural relics appraisal experts to the auction house of Christie's in the Netherlands with $30,000 allocated by the government. The two of them have a layer of relationships, and they have asked for a number plate from the auction house, but the starting price of each treasure has far exceeded thirty thousand US dollars. They had to stare dryly, and they didn't hold up a card once the whole time.
This made the Chinese government bitterly determined, vowing not to let cultural relics pirates take advantage of China in the future. The government immediately convened a symposium on various departments such as cultural relics, justice and maritime affairs, and began to establish an underwater archaeological team.
In 1987, the Chinese Guangzhou Salvage Team and the British Rescue and Salvage Company inadvertently discovered an extremely old Southern Song Dynasty shipwreck, "Nanhai One", in the waters of the South China Sea. Due to the backwardness of salvage technology, the Chinese government had to send troops to guard the waters of the shipwreck, declaring that "there are bombs dropped by foreign invaders on the seabed."
Salvage of "Nanhai No.1"
China sent many young people to the Netherlands to learn advanced diving and salvage techniques. In just 20 years, the Chinese underwater archaeology team has grown from scratch to a team that can independently carry out overall salvage.
After 26 years of guarding the national treasure, China finally has the technology to independently salvage the South China Sea One. At that time, according to foreign salvage methods, it was necessary to decompose the wrecks on the seabed and salvage them one by one, but this method was bound to cause inevitable damage to many cultural relics.
After much deliberation, the Chinese underwater archaeology team proposed an alternative method – salvage as a whole. It should be known that although the overall salvage can maximize the value of protecting cultural relics, it is only suitable for some small ships, and there is no doubt that it is equivalent to a fool's dream for a giant ship weighing 100 tons such as the "South China Sea No. 1".
But the strong and intelligent archaeologists and experts are confident that they will turn their dreams into reality. They raised a lot of money and did a lot of preparation.
The salvage team immediately brought in countless cement blocks and added them to the caisson, turning the 900-ton caisson into a 4,000-ton tank. The caisson did cut into the sea mud smoothly and slowly descended, but when it was two meters away from the seabed, it stopped because of insufficient weight. At this moment, it has reached the limit of the load-bearing of the caisson, and it is impossible to add cement blocks, so the salvage team has to go to the sea to dig the mud manually.
After many days, the sea mud was dug up, the caisson was dropped to the bottom of the sea, and the salvage team began its next job , passing 36 steel beams through the bottom of the caisson. However, the sea mud in the box was still strong, and it was actually bent by the steel beam. The salvage experts racked their brains, and finally changed the hole in the bottom of the box to smaller, sharpened the top of the steel beam, and found a high-power pump to wash away the sea mud in the box, and finally successfully penetrated the beam.
At 10:00 a.m. on December 22, 2007, after nine months of salvage work, the huge iron box containing the "Nanhai No. 1" was successfully discharged from the water and transported by crane ship to the coast of the South China Sea.
After landing, the transportation of hundreds of tons of heavy goods has become a big problem. The staff finally borrowed the "rolling wood method" of ancient Egypt to transport pyramid stone bricks, put several cylindrical air cushions under the iron box, and moved them to the "Maritime Silk Road Museum" built in advance.
Clean-up after salvage
After the "Nanhai No. 1" was transported to the museum, archaeologists finally did not have to dive into the depths of the seabed in order to salvage the treasure, but on the shore, in the daytime, carefully cleaned the silt around the treasure with their hands.
The wreck is built on top of the glass floor, and visitors to the museum can not only see the treasures displayed in the cabinets, but also face the clean-up process of these treasures.
After spending 13 years, the archaeologists finally cleaned up all the cultural relics of the "Nanhai No. 1", a total of more than 180,000 pieces, most of which are porcelain from the Southern Song Dynasty, as well as many gold and silverware, bronze, jade, lacquerware and silk products, with a total value of immeasurable.
The emergence of "Nanhai No. 1" is not only a miracle in history, but also the most beautiful response of China to cultural relics pirates.
Over the past five thousand years, China has experienced countless foreign enemies' forcible seizures, but it still guards its own civilization in its own way. A truly powerful nation is one that has experienced a great catastrophe and can "surface" again!
So "history" has another name, called "heritage".
Text/Pillow Cat