China successfully salvaged “Yangtze River Estuary No.2”, the largest ancient wooden shipwreck in the history of domestic underwater archeology in the early hours of Monday.
The Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Cultural Relics launched a mass survey of the cultural heritage buried under the Yangtze River in 2011.
Four years later, in 2015, archaeologists discovered an ancient wooden ship through sonar scanning, when carrying out an underwater investigation in the waters of the Yangtze River Estuary. The shipwreck was numbered “Yangtze River Estuary No. 2.”
After more than seven years of underwater survey and exploration, Chinese archaeologists have confirmed Yangtze River Estuary No.2 as a wooden sailing ship during the reign of the Tongzhi Emperor (1861-1875) of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). The shipwreck is about 38.1 meters long and 9.9 meters wide, with 31 cabins.
Buried in silt at a depth of 5.5 meters, the shipwreck is located in waters eight to ten meters deep. It is preliminarily speculated to be a flat-bottomed junk widely used in water transportation during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and Qing Dynasty.
China started the salvage project of the shipwreck in March this year. Archaeologists have dived into the water and cleaned four of the 31 cabins, finding a large amount of exquisite cultural relics in different varieties, including some neatly stacked porcelain made in Jingdezhen, also known as the “porcelain capital” in east China’s Jiangxi Province.
Among them, the inscription “made in the years of the Tongzhi Emperor” on the bottom of a green-glazed cup provided an important basis for the dating of the shipwreck.
The water in the Yangtze River Estuary is murky with low visibility at the bottom, so it’s really a difficult task for the archaeologists to salvage the shipwreck.
In order to overcome the influence of the muddy water and protect the precious cultural relics buried under water to the greatest extent, the archaeologists adopted an original salvage plan. They wrapped the shipwreck up with a giant semi-cylindrical caisson form by 22 curved beams, and then lifted it up.
“As it was made of wood, the ancient shipwreck is very fragile. [With this salvage plan,] we wrap the shipwreck up and then lift mud and water together with the ship body as a whole, which is an effective way to protect the wreck,” said Jiang Yan, deputy director of Shanghai branch the China Rescue and Salvage Bureau of the Ministry of Transport.
