800-year- old sunken ship raised

SHANGAI: An 800-year-old merchant ship was raised from the bottom of the South China Sea on Saturday, loaded with artefacts that might confirm the existence of an ancient maritime trade route linking China and the West.

The 30-meter wooden vessel, containing thousands of gold, silver and porcelain trading goods, was hoisted onto a barge in a steel cage as high as a three-storey building.

Named the Nanhai No 1 or “South China Sea No 1” by archaeologists, the ship was discovered in 1987 off the coast of Guangdong province, buried in two meters of silt at a depth of 30 meters.

The Nanhai will be towed to a $20 million museum built to house it in Guangdong, where it will be placed in a tank dubbed the “crystal palace” with the same water temperature and pressure that it experienced on the seabed. The museum is expected to open by the end of next year and visitors will be able to watch excavation of the ship
from the silt encrusting it through windows in the sides of the tank.

More than 4,000 gold, silver and porcelain containers have been found on the Nanhai, one of the biggest and oldest merchant ships ever recovered in China.