NEW YORK: For the first time, pieces recovered from a shipwreck dating back to China’s ninth century Tang dynasty have left Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) and gone on display in the United States.
The works of art is on show at the Asia Society in New York as part of the Secrets of the Sea: A Tang Shipwreck and Early Trade exhibition until June.
The shipwreck was discovered in 1998 by fishermen diving off the coast of Indonesia. Onboard the wreck was cargo comprising more than 60,000 items, many of them perfectly preserved.
Upon inspection, it was realised that this was a trade vessel transporting works of art to sell in the Middle East. Among the cargo were thousands of precious ceramics, gold dishes, silver wine flasks and copper mirrors, all created by Chinese artists.
The find transformed the story of early global trade. Until then, historians had had no record of trade routes between the Far East and the Middle East existing in the mid-800s AD.
The discovery also showed the artists were making their products more desirable to their Middle Eastern buyers, incorporating styles and motifs that were popular thousands of miles away in Persia.
Among the pieces were three dishes with blue and white colouring, which helped revolutionise the understanding of Chinese ceramics.
“Traditional dating for ‘blue and white’ is 14th century but in this shipwreck we see that they were actually producing blue and white in the ninth century. The blue is from cobalt and cobalt was only available in the Middle East in this period,” said Mr Stephen Murphy, the museum’s curator.
“So we know the cobalt was being shipped to China, where they produced the plate. Then they shipped it back to the Middle East,” he added.
To transport the pieces to the United States, the exhibition team created specially moulded foam cases to exactly fit each project.
In many ways, the packing and transportation mirrored techniques the Chinese sailors had used 1,100 years ago. They used storage jars and packed the ceramic bowls tightly inside.
This space-saving packing technique helped preserve many of the bowls. They survived intact, even though over the centuries, the jars themselves were battered by the water and became encrusted with coral.
The exhibition was due to go on display in the US six years ago. However, Washington DC’s Smithsonian Museum pulled out amid ethical concerns over the way the cargo had been commercially salvaged and sold for profit, rather than excavated by underwater archaeological teams.
The exhibitors, though, argue the controversy should not outweigh the academic and artistic importance of this discovery.
Said museum director Kennie Ting: “There’s a certain kind of surprise that comes from realising that these global connections were in existence more than 1,000 years ago because people today think of globalisation as something that is very recent.”
