A merchant ship sank 800 years ago raised from the sea

A merchant ship that sank 800 years ago loaded with thousands of pieces of porcelain was raised from the bottom of the South China Sea with its relics yesterday morning in a salvage project unprecedented in international underwater archaeology.

The Nanhai No1, 30.4 metres long and 9.8 metres wide, which dates to the early Southern Song dynasty, was sealed in a huge steel basket before being lifted. It will be placed in a glass-walled pool at a specially built museum in nearby Yangjiang, Guangdong.

"We have packed the Nanhai No1 into the basket to test the operations every day for several months," said Feng Shaowen, head of the Yangjiang Municipal Cultural Bureau, who heads the project.

The barge carrying the ship will take 24 hours to reach the 130,000 square metre China's Silk Road on the Sea Museum, where water temperature, pressure and other environmental conditions inside the huge glass pool are the same as those where the ship has lain on the sea bed.

Qiu Licheng, deputy director of Guangdong's Institute of Archaeology, said: "We need to provide exactly the same conditions as the seabed to protect the wreck and its porcelain from damage. The wreck weighs more than 3,000 tonnes, including its load of relics and the surrounding silt."

Mr Qiu said it was unprecedented and risky to move an entire wreck to another place to continue archaeological research.

"The wreck is the biggest and most complete ancient vessel found so far," Mr Qiu said. "It will also provide plenty of first-hand information about China's navigation history, porcelain technologies and other useful materials."

Archaeologists estimated that at least 60,000 to 80,000 porcelain items were on board when the vessel sank.

The wreck was discovered by the Guangzhou Salvage Bureau when it was helping a British ocean exploration company search for wrecks off Yangjiang in 1987. China's first underwater archaeological training base was established in Yangjiang in 2003.