By Wang Shanshan (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-12-25 07:48

Telecom satellites above the darkening sky are likely to have picked up something weird because nearly 100 mobile phones are busy in a 10-sq-m area about 40 km off shore on South China Sea. The callers are busy explaining just one thing: a steel box emerging from the depths of the sea. There's excitement in everyone's voice. In fact, the whole nation is excited because people had prepared for the moment for two years after celebrating the great achievements of Ming Dynasty (AD 1368-1644) adventurer Zheng He.

But what's in the box? Nobody has seen the full content. Even people who dived 20 meters on the sunniest of days to remove silt from the seabed could only see bits and pieces of the "sea giant". Some of the exquisite porcelain, gold and silver artifacts have been lifted from around the site though, and helped archaeologists determine the wreckage was that of an 800-year-old merchant ship.

Now called Nanhai-I, or South China Sea No 1, it's the largest Song Dynasty (AD 960-1279) merchant ship to be discovered in China. Some people also love to call it the "Titanic of China", despite the fear of playing around with time.

The cell phone users on Friday were reporters crowding the deck of a lone ship near the site. Television channels had spent millions of dollars to broadcast the process live and impart diving training to journalists. Newspapers had hired helicopters for photographers to take bird's eye-view shots. The box was lifted completely on Saturday, with China Central Television broadcasting live the final two-hour process.

Like all sunken ships, Nanhai-I is also expected to be a treasure trove. Actually, it is. More than 4,000 gold, silver and porcelain artifacts, and 6,000 copper coins from the Song Dynasty have been collected from the wreckage site. And experts believe Nanhai-I could have more than 80,000 cultural relics.

The wealth of the wreckage can be gauged from the way it was discovered in 1987. When a ship lowered a steel clasp, it came up with broken pieces of delicate blue-and-white ceramic and a 2-m-long gold chain that weighed more than 1 kg.

The Ministry of Communications' Guangdong salvage bureau, which made the find with the help of a British underwater salvage company, reported the matter to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage. Entry to the area was restricted immediately.

But it was not until 2001 that China's first generation underwater archaeologists explored the site and found the exact location of the shipwreck. Visibility for the National Museum of China experts was limited to just one meter even on the sunniest of days, so most of the time they had to rely on their hands to look for artifacts, says Zhang Wei, who led the archaeological work.

"We couldn't see anything. It was dark, cold and eerily quiet. It was like dropping from a hot sauna to a cold storage. The ship's wooden frame was well preserved, giving a clear sound when hit with an object. That sound made me respect the people on the ship and what they had left behind. Maybe because of that I cannot really describe my feelings. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I see all their beautiful things."

Zhang needed a lot of time for his underwater research, but Ministry of Communications engineer Yao Chunqing proposed at a meeting in 2005 that the entire ship could be lifted out of water before experts began work on it. The idea was accepted.

Modern equipment could salvage the Song Dynasty heritage at one go, but China had not attempted anything like it before. Engineers began working a design that seemed simple. A 35.7-m-long, 14.4-m-wide and 12-m-high bottomless box would be lowered to the seabed to cover the 30-m-long, 10-m-wide and 4.5-m-high Nanhai-I. The steel panels of the box would be 1.2-m thick to protect the shipwreck while it was being lifted.

About 4,000 tons of weight was to be added to the top of the steel box to ensure that its lower end penetrated the silt and rested on the seabed. After that, 36 smaller panels, each 14.8-m long and less than 1 m wide, were to be added to make up the bottom of the box to enclose Nanhai-I.

As is obvious, the most difficult part of the job was to construct the bottom of the box. No wonder, engineers and experts almost said "no" to the design and the plan. Their hopes suffered further after divers failed to put the first of the 36 smaller panels into position despite spending 12 days and nights on the seabed, says Wu Jiancheng, Guangdong salvage bureau engineer who managed the steel-box project.

But ultimately they did succeed. It took professionals on board Huatianlong, Asia's largest salvage ship, eight months to "wrap" Nanhai-I. Only then was the spectacular scene on Saturday made possible: the 109-m-long arm of Huatianlong, with 32 steel ropes, hoisting the box with Nanhai-I. "The marvelous success demonstrates China's strength in professional salvage," says Vice-Minster of Communications Xu Zuyuan.

The shipwreck is now berthed at a temporary port. It will be towed into a 150-million-yuan ($20 million) museum in Yangjiang city on Wednesday. The museum, to be opened next year, comprises a glasshouse called Crystal Palace which will have the same water temperature and pressure that the wreckage was lying in for 800 years.

It will take archeologists years to excavate the relics, and at least two years to display the whole ship in the Crystal Palace. So we have to wait to know how the "Titanic of China" sunk.

"It's strange (to find Nanhai-I 40 km away from the shore because) ships during those times only followed routes along the coasts. They rarely ventured into the open sea," says Dong Qi, deputy curator of the National Museum of China. "Maybe the crew tried to escape a tornado and sailed further and further away from the coast, and failed in the end against nature."

But can't we at least guess what could have happened to the crew? Zhang says a ship of the size of Nanhai-I should have had at least 20 crewmembers. But no human skeletons have been found near the wreckage. We have to wait till the cabins buried in silt are opened, Yao says. "In the seas only silt preserves memories."

The gold chain and other jewelry with Persian designs, however, are believed to belong to some Persian merchants on the ship. Documents suggest merchants in those times traveled with their goods till they were sold in foreign lands, says Chinese Academy of Social Sciences historian Chen Gaohua. "The merchants usually slept on top of their goods, piled up mostly in the cabins."

Sea trips in those days could be unbearably long, Chen says. Sometimes, it took two years to reach from Guangzhou or Quanzhou, Fujian Province, to the west coast of India or back, and a couple of more years to the Gulf or the Red Sea. Nanahi I is very important because it can give clues to life in China's "golden era" of international trade from the 10th to the 16th centuries, Dong says.

(China Daily 12/25/2007 page12)