Mike hatch can't buy back the treasure.

The auction after the "Oriental Titanic" was smashed can't help reminding people of the special auction of China cultural relics held in Christie's in the Netherlands many years ago. That is the most painful memory of underwater archaeologists in China.

From 65438 to 0984, Mike Hatcher devoted himself to studying the former "sea coachman"-Holland. In the dusty archives of the Dutch East India Company, Goth Malsen attracted Hatcher's attention. /kloc-in the winter of 0/752, the merchant ship "Gode Malsen" loaded with porcelain and gold sailed from Guangzhou, China to Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. After sailing 16 days, the ship hit the rocks and sank.

Hatch tried his best to detect sunken ships in the South China Sea. There are 239,000 pieces of blue and white porcelain, 25 pieces of gold ingot 125 pieces, weighing 45 kilograms in total, and two bronze casting guns engraved with VOC of East India Company for short ... The cultural relics salvaged from the water dazzled Hatch. Hatch quietly pulled them to the high seas, hid them for a year, took out the international convention that "unclaimed sunken ships are allowed to be auctioned" and handed the "Declaration" to Christie's auction house in the Netherlands. This move earned him more than $20 million in return, making him a famous "richest treasure hunter".

In April, 1986, Christie's China cultural relics auction started.

There are as many as 239,000 pieces of China cultural relics in an auction, which is unprecedented in the history of European collections. There was an uproar in the Netherlands, and the Embassy of China in the Netherlands sent an urgent telegram for instructions.

Yang Lin of National Cultural Heritage Administration Cultural Relics Department received an urgent order. He checked the international maritime convention and the laws of all countries in the world, but he couldn't find any legal basis to stop it. At that time, the protection of marine cultural heritage by Chinese laws was still blank.

Helpless, National Cultural Heritage Administration had to send ceramic experts Geng and Feng Xianming to Amsterdam to find out. Although there is no example to follow, everyone thinks of one thing: buy it back. So they brought 30 thousand dollars.

At this time, the second floor of the Hilton Amsterdam Hotel and the auction hall of Christie's are like a big theater. The aisles, carpets and even the gates are crowded with experts from all over the world. 239,000 exquisite blue and white porcelain wares filled two floors.

The auction house gave priority to Zhongmin-1 number plate. However, during the whole three-day auction, Chinese people didn't even have a chance to raise a sign-the starting price of each porcelain was more than 10 times the estimated price, and the asking price went up all the way, with $30,000 as waste paper and more than 200,000 precious China cultural relics left behind. ...

If we don't start salvaging the sunken ship, China will suffer even greater losses.

Today, 20 years later, in China, where the national strength has increased, archaeologists have gone all out to salvage Nanhai No.1, which, to some extent, was "forced" by the hatcher.