In 1984, British professional sea hunter Mike Hatcher discovered a "hill" 30 meters deep under the sea in the South China Sea, which occasionally flashed a magical luster.
Mike Hatcher was overjoyed, he knew that only Chinese porcelain could shine with such a dazzling luster, and that the "hill" was a merchant ship from the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, and in the dusty archives of the Dutch East India Company, the name of the ship was "God malsen".
The merchant ship, which was 50 meters long, 10 meters wide and weighed more than 1,000 tons, departed from Guangzhou on January 14, 1822, to the Netherlands. There were more than 2,000 people and millions of pieces of Fujian Dehua porcelain on board, but when they reached the Zhongsha Islands, they sank on the reef and only 198 survived.
Mike Hatcher's trip to the South China Sea was to find the shipwreck of a hundred years ago, and the result was not as good as he expected, millions of pieces of porcelain fired from the kiln of the Qing Dynasty fell into his hands, and the eyes of the crew involved in the salvage at that time were straight, except for the broken, the complete porcelain was 900,000 pieces.
Mike Hatcher, however, made a criminal decision: smash them!
Mike Hatcher is essentially a cultural relics dealer, he believes that in the antiquities collection market, it is always rare to be expensive, and the fewer things are, the higher the price, so he ordered people to carefully select 239,000 pieces of blue and white porcelain and smash all the other more than 600,000 pieces of porcelain.
So Mike Hatcher returned to Europe for auction with 239,000 pieces of blue and white porcelain, 125 gold ingots weighing 45 kilograms, and two bronze cannons.
In April 1986, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the Carlsk Chinese cultural relics auction opened, Mike Hatcher auctioned off all the "booty", exquisite porcelain piled up on two floors. This is the largest auction of Chinese cultural relics ever held, and the entire cultural relics collection market is sensational.
After the Chinese Embassy in the Netherlands learned of the news, it immediately sent a report to the country, in order to save this batch of cultural relics, Yang Lin, then the Cultural Relics Department of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, and his staff went through the international maritime conventions and the laws of the sea of various countries in the world overnight, hoping to legally block the transaction, but could not find an applicable law and regulation, even if the country is a blank.
Yang Lin had to send two ceramic experts, Geng Baochang and Feng Xianming, to the auction site with 30,000 US dollars, and how much they could buy back was how much.
The auction house gave the two Chinese experts a No. 1 card, giving the two experts priority to run. However, in the whole 3 days of the auction, the two experts did not raise a card once, and could only watch the things of the ancestors being taken away by collectors one by one.
The price of 239,000 pieces of blue and white porcelain is far more than 10 times higher than previously estimated by Chinese experts, and 30,000 US dollars at the auction site is no different from 3 yuan.
After the auction, Mike Hatcher made a wild $20 million, becoming a well-known figure in the international treasure hunting community, and also making the South China Sea and the East China Sea an "adventure paradise" for treasure hunters at sea, causing a total loss of about 4 billion yuan.
After the incident of Mike Hatcher, China was determined to develop the wreck salvage business. At that time, China had no money, no technology, no equipment, and even did not know what diving was, but 20 years later, the Chinese underwater archaeology team became one of the most professional archaeological teams in the world.
In 2007, the Chinese underwater archaeology team fished the "Nanhai No. 1", a Song Dynasty merchant ship, which made the ship 800 years later see the light of day, setting a precedent for the overall salvage of shipwrecks in human history.
When the "Nanhai No. 1" was fished, the underwater archaeology team crew members were all in tears, leaving a very sad and indignant sentence: "China's underwater archaeology can have today, it is Hatcher 'forced' out." ”