DATELINE: 6th November 2000
PORCELAIN AUCTIONS
Asian porcelain galore as two hauls come to auction
Two enormous hauls of historic Chinese and Vietnamese porcelain, raised from different wrecks by different project teams, are being auctioned within a month of each other in Europe and the United States.
On 10/11 October, some 150,000 pieces of 15th century Vietnamese porcelain were due to be auctioned by Butterfields in San Francisco. The items represent about half the cargo raised from a South China Sea wreck lying 22km off Hoi An in Vietnam. Proceeds will be divided between the Viet-namese government and the project's Malaysian salvage company.
Meanwhile, a massive collection of Chinese porcelain, dating from the 15th to 19th centuries, is to be auctioned at Nagel in Stuttgart on 17 November. Raised by commercial salvor Mike Hatcher from a Chinese junk, the Tek Sing, sunk in Indonesia's Gelasa Straits, about 300,000 items will go in 16,800 lots. At the time of going to press, questions over rights to the cargo still had to be settled between Hatcher and the Indonesian government.
The stakes are high for all concerned. A pre-auction estimate was not quoted for the Hoi An auction but, for the Tek Sing, a minimum take of £15 million is expected.
The diving projects represented differing challenges. Guided by information from historian and researcher Nigel Pickford detailing a large ocean-going Chinese trading junk sunk around the Belvidere Shoals in the Gelasa Straits, Hatcher had to search 155sq km area for the Tek Sing.
His divers found all sorts of vessels - a 1900 steamer, a Macassar schooner, a private American yacht and some old wooden ships - before locating, in 30m of water, steel rings that turned out to be hoops that would have supported a very tall junk mast. A 45m-long, 9m-wide mound also tied in with the researched dimensions of the large ocean-going Tek Sing.
Porcelain pots, plates and bowls were raised and soon a 55m-long salvage barge, chartered from Singapore, was over the site with large crane, onboard recompression chambers and extensive accommodation for the team of commercial divers who, using surface-supplied air, proceeded to dig out 300,000 pieces of porcelain by hand.
Meanwhile the Hoi An salvage is a story of remarkable archaeological achievement, representing what is thought to be the deepest archaeo-logical excavation ever and using saturation divers on an archaeological project for the first time.
Top British marine archaeologist Mensun Bound was contracted as Excavation Director to oversee the careful recording and excavation of a trading junk lying in more than 80m of water, working from a massive 67m vessel tended by three ocean-going tugs.
The wreck was found by fishermen in 1993 when their nets dragged on the bottom and porcelain pots were brought up. More porcelain was illegally raised and traded by criminals before the Vietnamese government succeeded in making arrests and decided to mount an archaeologically run excavation of the site.
The project ran through three summers, from 1997 to 1999, on a scale described by Bound as "the most costly since the recovery of the Mary Rose". Dangers included the threat of piracy, crew often sleeping with guns under their heads.
Asked whether the two auctions could affect each other's value, Frank Pope, Operations Manager for the Hoi An salvage, told Diver: "Maybe, but really it's difficult to tell until we've all come to the market."
"I don't expect the existence of the two auctions to affect each other's value," said Nigel Pickford of the Tek sing group, who is on a percentage for the San Francisco auction. "The cargoes are from different countries and different ages."
Both auctions are covered on the web but the Tek Sing sale went one further with live web auction bidding.
For details of the Hoi An auction, see www.hoianhorde. com. For the Tek Sing sale, go to www.Teksing.com.
Pickford and Hatcher wrote a lavishly illustrated book - The Legacy of the Tek Sing, published by Granta Editions - which served as an attractive auction catalogue.