A strange shipwreck with valuables that had been submerged in the Yangtze river for 150 years has been found by archaeologists. Nice, right?
Hooray for History!
A portion of the cargo that had been hidden inside the 125-foot ship has now been made public after it was removed from its resting place on the bottom of Asia’s longest river.
The crew behind it must be really enthusiastic.
It has been dubbed “Yangtze Estuary No. 2” and described as one of the largest and best-preserved shipwrecks ever discovered in China.
The researchers discovered numerous beautifully constructed artifacts and a ton of Chinese-made tableware on the ship, including pots and bowls.
You wouldn’t believe it, but there were wooden artifacts, clay shards, and even one or two Vietnamese hookah tanks.
For those interested in the history of shipbuilding, Chinese ceramics, and the maritime business, the ship’s condition as well as the objects they’ve discovered on it are of great importance.
The shipwreck was really found back in 2015, but it took years of meticulous investigation and exploration to find it.
Finally, on November 21, they managed to pull it from the water.
22 enormous arched steel beams were used in the three-hour-long salvage operation to raise the ship and a watertight chamber to the surface.
The entire thing reportedly weighed 8,000 tonnes, per local media.
According to the sonar scanning done earlier, the ship is mainly intact and is 33 feet wide with 31 cabins.
As of now, they have been able to identify that the wooden ship dates from the Tongzhi period of the Qing Dynasty, which runs from about 1862 to 1875.
The strange boat has been submerged in the Yangtze River for only 5.5 meters on the tip of Hengsha Island, which is located close to Shanghai’s Chongming neighborhood.
They will be conducting a ton more research now. This time, they will also benefit from the ship not being on a busy river’s muddy bottom.
The ship will be brought to a dock at an old shipyard in Shanghai so that scientists and archaeologists may properly examine it and learn more about what happened to the ship.
In the end, as part of a cultural heritage proposal put out by the city of Shanghai, it might even be converted into a shipwreck museum.