In the 18th and 19th centuries, Westerners were particularly eager to understand China, especially Chinese porcelain and silk, which were very popular with Westerners, and these products once became a symbol of the high status and status of western aristocrats.
With the prosperity of China's foreign economic and cultural exchanges, the imperial court specially opened up two Silk Roads, sea and land, and since then, a large number of Chinese and foreign merchants have come and gone on these two trade routes, making outstanding contributions to Sino-foreign exchanges and trade prosperity.
Although foreign trade in ancient times was generally prosperous and smooth, the road to business could not always be smooth, and there were always some accidents in the middle.
In the early nineteenth century,
A ship full of treasures
China
The merchant ship "Taixing" was once at sea
middle
Unfortunately sunk, more than a hundred years later
，
Billions of dollars worth of money on board
treasure
Looted, what the hell is going on
this
？
Image: Stills of a ship full of treasures sailing at sea
First, the "Taixing" sank
cause
The Taixing was a massive merchant ship that carried 1,802 passengers and hundreds of thousands of treasures on its last voyage. The volume and carrying capacity are completely comparable to the Titanic. At that time, China's foreign trade was very prosperous, and it was already on the verge of becoming a world trade center.
Maritime trade not only promoted economic and cultural exchanges with Southeast Asian countries, but also brought a lot of wealth to China, the Taixing sailed smoothly many times, almost no special situation, and an accidental accident caused it a fatal blow, resulting in a large number of passengers on board and hundreds of thousands of treasures sunk to the bottom of the sea.
So why did the ship sink?
？ Before the shipwreck
result
Happened
What the?
Image: Stills of a ship sinking
According to historical sources and logbooks, in January 1822, the ship set out from the port of Xiamen with nearly 2,000 passengers and countless treasures to Indonesia, and at first the sea was calm and calm, the ship sailed according to the established trajectory, but the sea trade was more dangerous than the land trade, and the brief calm may also indicate that the storm is coming.
Southeast Asia is often patronized by typhoons, mainly because Southeast Asia is closer to the source of typhoons than the mainland, these areas are more likely to face the attack of typhoons directly, and most of them are small island countries or peninsulas, this terrain is not as good as the huge inland area, so once there is a typhoon, the sea is often huge waves.
At that time, the Taixing encountered this situation, and the sudden hurricane pushed the ship into the reef, when the hull was greatly damaged, a large amount of seawater began to pour, and in just an hour or so, the huge merchant ship disappeared at sea. Image from the Internet: Hurricane at sea
Nearly 2,000 passengers, most of them buried at the bottom of the sea, only 198 were rescued by a British freighter, and countless treasures on board sank into the sea along with the broken hull.
Without specialized diving equipment such as oxygen cylinders, there is nothing that can be done to salvage these treasures. Not only that, but because there was no GPS global positioning system at the time, many experts around the world could not even determine the specific sinking site of the ship.
This time, the number of shipwrecks exceeded that of the later Titanic, so the ship was also called the "Titanic of the East" by later generations. For the next 100 years, the sunken Titanic of the East became a mystery along with its countless treasures. Image from the Internet: Titanic Oriental
2. A hundred years later, "Taixing"
Reproduce
A hundred years later, a very famous international treasure thief appeared in the world: Mike Hatcher, who searched all over the world for shipwrecks and salvaged treasures. Don't underestimate Hatcher, he can be said to be the top talent at that time in terms of stealing treasures under the sea.
In order to catch treasures, he not only collected and learned a lot of secret history and salvage knowledge, but also very willing to spend money on it, he relied on endless greed and professional means to salvage many precious treasures from all over the world, in exchange for countless wealth, which also provided sufficient financial support for his subsequent salvage.
In 1998, Hatcher happened to see a copy of the Indian Navigation Guide in a London bookstore, which contained a record of the shipwreck of the Taixing. The book also mentions a key point, after the shipwreck of the Taixing, the British freighter Indiana was the first to arrive at the rescue.
Hatcher, as a professional treasure thief, instantly found the direction of the Taixing, and he realized that as long as he could find the relevant information of the Indiana freighter, he would be able to determine the approximate location of the sinking of the Taixing. It's only an approximate location, but it's good enough for Hatcher, who has a high-end detection instrument.
Hatcher immediately set out to search for information about the Indiana freighter by all means, and for this reason he even spent a lot of money to go to the museum to borrow the Indiana cargo ship's logbook. In the end, Hatcher actually found the approximate location of the sinking of the Taixing from the logbook, and Hatcher could not wait to take his professional salvage team to the relevant waters of the South China Sea to explore. Image from the Internet: Mike Hatcher Old Photo
III. "Taixing"
above
A large number of artifacts were stolen
The equipment carried by Hatcher was very high-end, including a variety of professional diving, detection and salvage equipment. His salvage team continued to carpet search the seabed with sonic locators and magnetometers, lest they miss a spot.
Such a large-scale search is very expensive and energy-consuming, costing tens of thousands of dollars a day, and Hatcher and his team have thought about giving up when Hatcher and his team searched the sea for more than ten days without any results. However, on the twelfth day, the detector found an unusual place on the seabed, and Hatcher, who could not hide his excitement, immediately asked the divers to go down to observe.
When the divers descended to the bottom of the sea and found a shipwreck, Hatcher immediately determined that it was the previously sunken Taixing, and Hatcher was so excited that he immediately began a large-scale salvage. In the end, Hatcher and his salvage team found more than 600,000 pieces of fine Qing Dynasty porcelain, a large amount of gold and gold coins from the ship. The image comes from the Internet: fine porcelain salvaged
It should be known that the porcelain-making technology of the Ming and Qing dynasties has reached its peak, and the porcelain fired is not only exquisite in shape but also of high quality. Nowadays, any piece of porcelain from the Ming and Qing dynasties will be sought after by later collectors, and a fine porcelain alone is worth as little as hundreds of thousands of yuan to hundreds of millions of yuan. Hatcher salvaged more than 600,000 pieces of fine Qing dynasty porcelain from the ship, and it is conceivable how rich he would become after salvaging.
Due to the large number of treasures, he could not take them all at once, so after picking out more than 300,000 fine pieces of porcelain from these hundreds of thousands of pieces of porcelain, he directly broke the remaining more than 200,000 pieces of porcelain and threw them into the sea. Every piece of porcelain here has a deep cultural and historical heritage, and It is heart-wrenching that Hatcher's brutal destruction is heartbreaking.
Hatcher's frenzied behavior was not only strongly criticized by the international community, but the Chinese side also quickly responded, when China sent its navy to strengthen patrols in the South China Sea to protect seabed treasures, while mobilizing experts and equipment to personally salvage seabed cultural relics. Although China has also salvaged many cultural relics from the seabed, the exodus of a large number of treasures stolen by Hatcher is still painful and regrettable.
The entire graphic was produced by the team of the Big Cafe Say History Studio!