introduction
Zhao Heng, the true emperor of the Song Dynasty, was the third emperor of the Song Dynasty, and because he particularly liked literature, in order to encourage his subjects to read more, he once wrote a poem "Li Xue", one of which said: "There is a golden house in the book", which means that if you read well, you can obtain a steady stream of wealth. Of course, "the house of gold in the book" is just a rhetorical technique used by Zhao Heng, who had no idea that more than nine hundred years later, someone would actually find Chinese treasures from the books and steal cultural relics that experts believe were worth 4 billion yuan - this person is Mike Hatcher.
Born in England in 1940, Mike Hatcher grew up in an orphanage and founded a marine commercial salvage company in Australia at the age of 30.
Originally, the company was set up to salvage merchant ships and warships that had been sunk during World War II, but by chance, it salvaged a merchant ship from the Ming Dynasty on the mainland and profited millions of dollars from its Chinese!
Mike Hatcher's old photo
01
After tasting the sweetness, Mike Hatcher decided to change the direction of his company's business by searching for ancient shipwrecks and salvaging antiques. To this end, he began to search for ancient nautical books in various countries of the world to find marine areas where shipwrecks might be. He even paid a lot of money to hire college students to help him collect old nautical charts and shipping intelligence.
Mike Hatcher thus led his company to salvage more than eighty shipwrecks in the ocean, profiting from them and being called "the most successful treasure hunter of our time" and "the best ocean explorer of our time."
Of all the treasures he found, the most famous was the Chinese Qing Dynasty shipwreck called the Taixing.
Gold bars and porcelain on the Taixing
In the 1990s, an employee hired by Mike Hatcher found a clue to a treasure in an ancient book called the East Indies Navigation Guide.
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In 1822, the Chinese merchant ship Taixing, carrying more than a million pieces of porcelain, sank when it hit a reef while sailing near the Zhongsha Islands.
After Mike Hatcher's analysis, the location of the sinking of the "Taixing" is temporarily unknown, which means that the treasure that has been sunk to the bottom of the sea with the merchant ship has not yet been salvaged. With his extensive salvage experience and keen intuition, he quickly reduced the location to a very small extent. Mike Hatcher then took his "gang of crimes" and quietly sneaked into the South China Sea.
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The first month of the treasure hunt did not go well, and Mike Hatcher and the team even thought that the sunken Taixing had been washed away or disintegrated by the undercurrent at the bottom of the sea. However, soon after, the divers in the team suddenly found an item suspected of being parts of a large wooden boat, which strengthened their confidence in finding the treasure.
Two days later, under the continuous search of Mike Hatcher and others, they found a hill-like accumulation located more than 30 meters under the sea, and this "hill" of about 4 meters high was all made of cups, plates, vases and other porcelain.
Mike Hatcher immediately invited The most authoritative expert in the study of shipwrecks in The country, Nigor Pickford, to identify these porcelains, and they found that the more than one million pieces of porcelain were not only from the four most famous Chinese official kilns during the Kangxi Dynasty, but also almost every one of them was a masterpiece.
▲ Porcelain sleeping underwater
So they rushed to clean up the "hill", and although a small part of the porcelain in it had been damaged, most of the porcelain was intact. In total, Mike Hatcher's "gang" counted about 356,000 pieces of fine porcelain and smuggled them to Germany.
03
Mike Hatcher then held a nine-day auction to sell the antique porcelain stolen from China for more than $30 million (a total of more than 200 million yuan).
What is infuriating and disgusting is that before the auction, he smashed all the remaining porcelain on the "Taixing", so that these precious antiques can never be seen again.
▲ Mike Hatcher stole 356,000 pieces of porcelain
However, although Mike Hatcher's "glorious achievement" has become a myth in the treasure hunting community, his smashing of the remaining more than 600,000 pieces of antique porcelain has caused huge losses to the Chinese archaeological community and even to China as a whole. After evaluating the more than one million pieces of porcelain he found, relevant experts believe that its total value should be around four billion yuan!
To the question of why would you rather smash the remaining porcelain than return it to China, Mike Hatcher replied: "When there are more things, they become worthless!" ”
epilogue
Mike Hatcher's practice of destroying most of the antique treasures that originally belonged to the Chinese people and the entire human race for his own selfish purposes is simply the evaluation of the King of Shang in shangshu Wucheng: "Violent heavenly creatures"! How is what he does differently from that of a robber?
Resources:
"Inspiration"
Shang Shu Wucheng