Abroad, there is a profession called explorer, and most of these explorers are aimed at treasure hunting. In the long river of history, there are countless treasures hidden somewhere, waiting for people to discover. Compared with domestic tomb robbers who like to "find the dragon point", foreign treasure hunters prefer the vast ocean. One of them, an Englishman named Mike Hatcher, made his fortune by searching for Chinese artifacts, which also caused immeasurable damage to them.
Mike Hatcher grew up in an orphanage, and the poverty of his childhood left an indelible mark on him, so when he grew up, his desire for wealth was crazy. In 1970, Hatcher opened his own marine salvage company, which was mainly salvaged warships and merchant ships that were sunk during World War II, and the materials such as rubber, tin and scrap metal that were salvaged were barely able to survive and did not make a lot of money. A fortuitous chance changed his life, when he salvaged a Shipwreck from the Ming Dynasty of China and obtained more than 20,000 pieces of porcelain. He tentatively returned the porcelain to China for auction, and easily made a profit of millions of dollars, much more than his income combined in previous years.
It turns out that Chinese antiques are so valuable! Hatcher seemed to have opened the door to a new world, and since then he has become "diligent and studious", going to libraries around the world, hiring university students to help him collect materials, consulting a large number of ancient books, trying to find traces of treasure in these materials. In the process of consulting, Hatcher found a very important clue to the entry point, that is, in the Qing Dynasty Chinese porcelain sold well all over the world, and the Dutch East India Company, which traded with China, was the largest trader among them. So Hatcher painstakingly went into the archives of the Dutch East India Company and found the long-hidden logbook, specifically looking for which Chinese merchant ships had sunk that year. It worked quite well, and it really allowed him to find a treasure.
In 1984, based on the clues provided in the logbook, Hatcher came to the waters of the South China Sea and found a "Goethe Malsen" that sank in the seventeenth year of Qianlong (1752), also known as the "Nanjing" merchant ship. The crew was thrilled by the mountains of porcelain on the ocean floor, which is estimated to be at least 1 million pieces. However, Hatcher ordered the crew to smash most of the porcelain into pieces, because he knew that the rarity of things is precious, and the same porcelain is more, and the price will not be sold. It is sad to destroy so many cultural relics for one's own benefit. In the end, Hatcher only brought back more than 200,000 pieces of Qing Dynasty porcelain and 45 kilograms of gold ingots, and through the Western media hyped up, he became the world's "most successful explorer".
Two years later, Christie's Auctions held a grand auction for these Chinese treasures. Collectors from all over the world came to the Netherlands and even lined up outside the door to collect their favorite Chinese porcelain. At that time, China also heard the news, so it asked two famous ceramic experts in the Forbidden City, Geng Baochang and Feng Xianming, to rush to the Netherlands with 30,000 US dollars, thinking that they could rescue a little bit. Unexpectedly, this $30,000 became a pain in the hearts of the two experts! Because China, which was not rich at that time, was limited by poverty and its imagination. 30,000 US dollars did not even have the opportunity to raise the card, all kinds of collectors increased the price again and again, each piece of porcelain was far higher than the psychological expectations of Chinese experts, and the last one was not bought back! After deducting commissions and taxes, Hatcher got more than $20 million in net profits, which was converted into renminbi in 1986, and it had to be hundreds of millions, which was an overnight rich.
However, Hatcher's madness is not over, and after tasting the huge sweetness, Hatcher also paid a huge amount of money to hire Western archaeologists to help them find clues to the shipwreck. These archaeologists received qian with great vigor, rummaged through the information day and night, and finally found another clue in the "East India Navigation Guide": the "Taixing" that set off from Xiamen in 1822 and sank in the Zhongsha Islands. By 1999, Hatcher, who was already rich at this time, led the team to quietly sneak into the South China Sea again, rented all the salvage companies of small countries nearby, used a lot of manpower and material resources, and spent several months to find the "Taixing". More than 1 million pieces of Dehua blue and white porcelain during the Kangxi Dynasty have been excavated, as well as cultural relics such as artillery, coins, pocket watches, and sextants. Hatcher destroyed more than 600,000 pieces of porcelain and brought back more than 300,000 pieces.
With these Chinese treasures, Hatcher made a profit of $30 million, or hundreds of millions of yuan. Added up several times before and after, Hatcher earned more than a billion yuan in property, which attracted the attention of treasure hunters around the world, who poured into the South China Sea and wanted to get rich overnight like Hatcher. These people only have money in their eyes, and as for the protection of cultural relics, there is no such thing. Therefore, many cultural relics have been lost or destroyed, causing irreparable losses. In China at that time, not to mention underwater archaeology, many people didn't even know what diving was. But in the face of more and more treasure thieves, it had to change immediately, and China set up an underwater archaeology team after this, and it must not let foreigners steal Chinese cultural relics again.
In 2002, the state allocated 300 million yuan for the excavation and archaeology of "Nanhai No. 1", and a total of more than 160,000 cultural relics were excavated, and its value was immeasurable. Most importantly, China's underwater archaeology has developed by leaps and bounds from ignorance to underwater, and now its underwater salvage capabilities have surpassed that of South Korea and Japan. By 2007, Hatcher had declared that he would once again enter the South China Sea to hunt for treasure, attracting 15,000 investors from all over the world, including Japan, Singapore, and Australia, raising a total of $40 million, but at this time, China was already strong, how could Hatcher succeed. Hatcher's idea ultimately failed, so he was saddled with a lot of debt, and in order to pay it off, he had to turn his attention to a Spanish shipwreck, and did not dare to covet China's treasures anymore. In the future, our cultural relics will be excavated by ourselves, and we will never let foreigners touch them again.