Tale of three cities

In the second installment of her series on Greater Bay Area museums reinterpreting the history of the Silk Road for a new audience, Chitralekha Basu finds out how Guangzhou, Macao and Hong Kong were key ports on the ancient Maritime Silk Road, resulting in a shared ethos that continues to this day.

Amid the bustle and din of Tsim Sha Tsui, in a leafy oasis of repose called Kowloon Park, the Hong Kong Heritage Discovery Centre is hosting without much fanfare an important exhibition on the origins of maritime trade in what is today's Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Nanhai I Shipwreck and the Maritime Silk Road is built primarily around the archaeological relics excavated from a merchant ship that by all indications had set sail from Guangzhou but sank 19 kilometers southwest of Xiachuan Island, off the coast of Guangdong province, in 1183, or shortly afterward. Packed to capacity with export goods, the vessel was likely heading toward the Middle East, as the Islamic pear-shaped ewers with narrow curved spouts and jewelry with pomegranate motifs recovered from it seem to suggest. Remarkably intact even after a millennium under water, the ship was dredged up in 2007, christened Nanhai I, and installed in the Maritime Silk Road Museum of Guangdong in Yangjiang. An astounding 180,000 sets of artifacts, including 160,000 pieces of high-quality ceramic, have been retrieved from its cavernous cargo holds.

Lee Hiu-wai, assistant curator (archaeological preservation) of the Antiquities and Monuments Office, explains that the exhibition is the result of "a treasure hunt". Taking the massive assortment of Kwangtung jars — traditional ceramic storage vessels, typically with two or more lugs around the neck — found in Nanhai I's cargo holds, numbered 9 and 10, as the starting point, a team of researchers and archaeologists tried backtracking their way to the source. "A lot of similar jar fragments have been recovered from an erstwhile winery discovered around the back of the palace courtyard of the Nanyue Kingdom in Guangzhou. Those jars and the wine residue found inside them match the ones found in Nanhai I," Lee says.

"The Kwangtung jars located in Nanhai I look very likely sourced from Guangzhou kilns," she continues. "After they had dated their finds and conducted material analyses, the team zeroed in on three locations." These were the Qishi and Wentouling kilns in Nanhai (district in Foshan), where the jars were made, the site of the palace of the Nanyue Kingdom, where the jars were stacked together for shipment, and Nanhai I itself. "And it is these Kwangtung jars that link them up."