The South China Sea, a mysterious sea, countless histories are buried in the unfathomable seabed. It is difficult to find, it is even more difficult to salvage, and countless treasures can only be buried deep in the seabed for hundreds of years, deep in its glory.
With the take-off of China's economy in recent years, those priceless treasures hidden deep in the seabed have also been gradually salvaged and sent to the Maritime Silk Road Museum, and among these salvaged cultural relics, the most valuable of which is the "South China Sea No. 1".
It created two firsts, one is that the salvage cost is unprecedented, reaching 300 million yuan, and the other is the longest time from discovery to excavation, which is as long as 20 years.
Forced out of the "South China Sea No. 1"
What people don't know is that the discovery of "Nanhai No. 1" was actually forced out by foreign cultural relics pirates.
Modern China is poor and weak, and many cultural relics have also been lost overseas, the most famous of which is the Head of the Beast in the Yuanmingyuan, which was only lost from the land, and after the founding of New China, because the vast sea area was unable to maintain for a long time, the British Mike Hatcher stole millions of porcelain from shipwrecks in the South China Sea.
In order to "make things scarce more expensive", he destroyed more than 600,000 pieces of porcelain, leaving only 239,000 pieces for auction in the Netherlands. In order to redeem their national treasure, the Chinese experts who were not rich in finances at that time took the 30,000 US dollars they squeezed out and could not buy a piece of porcelain that should have belonged to them. This has become a shame and pain for the Chinese archaeological community, and in the vast South China Sea, we can't even protect our own national treasures.
I didn't expect this pain, but in the future, I was blessed by misfortune.
The British Salvage Company had always wanted to find the East India Company's shipwreck "Rhineburg", so in 1987 it joined forces with the Guangzhou salvage team to jointly explore in the South China Sea, and the result was that "there was a heart to plant flowers and flowers, and there was no heart to plant willows", people did not find the "Rhineburg", but found an older Southern Song Dynasty shipwreck from a gilded belt.
Experts were excited and excited, because of China's backwardness at that time, we still did not have the ability to salvage and protect, "Nanhai No. 1" from discovery to salvage, waited on the seabed for 20 years.
We have no way to salvage, but we can't let those cultural relics pirates steal our national treasures, so we can only send troops to guard, claiming that "there are bombs dropped by foreign invaders on the seabed" and have been guarding the national treasure for 20 years.
Although we are poor, we have a very long-term vision and are very bold in protecting historical relics. According to international practice, the wreck should be decomposed on the seabed, then salvaged and assembled. However, for the Shipwreck of the Southern Song Dynasty 800 years ago, after the division, it will undoubtedly greatly destroy the cultural relics value of the ship.
So the archaeological team proposed an unusual approach: salvage as a whole. The overall salvage is undoubtedly a great protection of the value of cultural relics, but this also increases the difficulty and funds several times, for the Chinese salvage team that lacked funds at that time, this method is tantamount to a fool's dream...
Difficult salvage
It is precisely because the overall salvage is easy to say, but the difficulty of implementation and the funding are a big problem, so we have been preparing for decades that we have the conditions to salvage.
The salvage process is even more complicated, in order to salvage as a whole, we must first make a huge iron box with an area larger than a basketball court, such a huge iron box is naturally conceivable weight, but how to transport the caisson to the salvage area, this is also a problem. Our plan was to use a huge crane ship to drag and drop iron boxes to the salvage area, so we used the 700 million Hua Tianlong crane ship, which was also the most valuable ship in China at that time.
What the researchers did not expect was that the 530-ton caisson could have cut into the sea mud by itself after entering the seabed according to the original plan, and completely wrapped the shipwreck in the caisson, but the opposite was that the surrounding sea mud was more compact and strong under the precipitation of seawater and time, so the heavy caisson could not go down.
The salvage team had no choice but to use the earth method to add cement to the caisson, all the way from 900 tons to 4,000 tons, at this time the caisson was close to the seabed, but it was still 2 meters. Because it is easy to crush the caisson with addition, people can only honestly dig the soil around the caisson to complete the last two meters of the challenge.
Visibility on the seabed is very low, and once the box is unevenly stressed, the entire "South China Sea One" will be crushed, and the team members are completely by their own sense of touch, cautious, and take huge risks, in the continuous adjustment, finally finished the last two meters.
What's even more difficult is how to insert 36 steel beams in the caisson and tow the wreck up. When the first one was inserted, the thick and hard sea mud inside lifted the steel beam up at once, and it could not be inserted into the hole on the other side.
Watching the thick steel beams bend directly under the squeeze, the scene is filled with the atmosphere of despair. But our intelligent engineers wisely made the opening of the cave smaller, and then changed the steel beam head to the tip, plus a water pump, and used high-pressure water spray to flush out the silt. It took a full 13 days to finally insert the hole in the opposite face. Today, the technology of piercing beams has become a state secret of the Guangzhou Salvage Bureau.
After nine months of salvage preparations, at 10:00 a.m. on December 22, 2007, CCTV broadcast the "Nanhai No. 1" water discharge ceremony live. More than 1 hour later, the "Nanhai No. 1" that had been sleeping for 800 years reappeared, and the moment it came out of the water, everyone at the scene was in tears, and at that moment, everyone felt that their hard work in the past few months was worth it.
The problem after the water also bothered the staff.
How to drag such a heavy box on land is undoubtedly a problem. In order to drag the caisson, the engineers borrowed the ancient Egyptian method of building pyramids, cleverly placed the cylindrical air cushion under the box, and dragged the caisson directly into its past life home, the "Maritime Silk Road Museum".
The precious wealth of "Nanhai No.1"
"Nanhai No. 1" was found to be in danger, difficult to protect, difficult to salvage, and difficult to clean up, until this year. In order to avoid the destruction of the cultural relics themselves, the archaeologists can only use their hands to clean up and sort out more than 180,000 cultural relics, most of which are Southern Song Dynasty porcelain, as well as countless exotic gold and silverware, bronzes, lacquerware, jade, etc. Quite cold and humorous, they also found several cans of intact salted duck eggs, as well as the most precious condiment - peppercorn grains, it is estimated that the crew's food is also quite secure.
In the international market, similar to a porcelain bowl unearthed by "Nanhai No. 1", the price has reached a surprising hundreds of thousands of dollars, if calculated according to this price, "Nanhai No. 1" is worth 300 billion US dollars in porcelain alone, equivalent to 2 trillion yuan.
Many foreigners will think: the salvage cost so much money, this time can finally get back the money.
But they were wrong, these 180,000 cultural relics are the priceless treasures of the Chinese nation, will not be sold to the outside world, and will bear the pain of the loss of national treasures again. The reason why "Nanhai No. 1" is the world's most valuable shipwreck treasure is not only in its own cultural relics value, but also represents that the era of foreign cultural relics pirates in our seas has passed, it is a symbol of our sea power, and our goal is also the stars and the sea.
Where can this value be measured in terms of money?
And the most valuable thing about the South China Sea No. 1 is not the cultural relics that dazzle us, "Nanhai No. 1" has experienced 800 years on the seabed, without decay, which is a miracle. In fact, this oldest, largest and best preserved ancient ship is itself a most valuable cultural relic. It is priceless in itself, because the legend cannot be copied.
Speaking of the value of salvage itself, this salvage not only set a precedent for salvage shipwrecks as a whole, but also has a number of huge innovations in technology. This in itself is the most powerful protection of ancient Chinese cultural relics, and it proves to us that China has the strength and ability to protect our cultural relics alone, and avoids the coveting of the "cultural relics pirates" again.
We don't know about the Southern Song Dynasty
"Nanhai No. 1" is an ancient shipwreck of the Southern Song Dynasty. When we think of the Southern Song Dynasty, what do we think of?
Is it a stubborn emperor, or a defeated army?
In fact, these are all, but what we can't ignore is that the Southern Song Dynasty was also a rich and enlightened dynasty. In this era, the status of merchants did not have to be as hidden and invisible as later generations; in this era, China's fleet, shuttling across the Indian Ocean, in this era, the era of commodification, made the traditional agricultural tax no longer the pillar of the empire.
Judging from the Nanhai One itself, China can say without exaggeration that at that time, these technologies were definitely much ahead of the world. Until many years after Zheng He's voyage to the West, China's ocean technology was greatly superior to that of the West. The application of the technology of the watertight compartment is the first move, even if it is a reef tragedy, it also allows the ship to have a certain degree of self-protection. You know, when Columbus discovered the New World, his ship was just a flat boat.
What is the Maritime Silk Road? Replacing war with peaceful trade is the natural disposition of our nation.
Extrapolating from the large number of Arab-style glassware and gold and silver on the "Nanhai No. 1", the "Nanhai No. 1" is undoubtedly very close to today's Middle East trade relations. Looking at our local porcelain, it is undoubtedly possible to identify that this is produced in Fujian, so it is very likely that this ship departed from Quanzhou and went to the ocean. Westerners took the Bible hundreds of years later to those places to conquer, and we replaced plunder with trade hundreds of years ago, where we erected a monument of peace.
The ship also excavated 120 tons of iron bars and iron products, and at that time the Southern Song Dynasty was forbidden to trade in iron products, there is no doubt that this must be the smelting, processing and smuggling of iron products by the people at that time, and this also shows to a certain extent, which shows that our advanced steel smelting technology at that time, just like now we pursue foreign goods, our goods at that time were undoubtedly sold hot.
Southern Song Dynasty merchants also carefully marked many porcelain with various ink books, fine-tuning our products for the local style in order to adapt to the local cultural atmosphere and historical traditions.
Foreigners say that we do not have the tradition of going out, we believed it at first, as if the ocean has always been the same as us, but in fact, it is not like this, "Nanhai No. 1" is the ancestors of the sea for a living, the history of prosperity, but also our "Belt and Road" historical tradition, this shipwreck confirms the impact of our nation on the entire world civilization.
Text/Pillow Cat