Stone slabs found near the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) might be from a ship from the early Ming Dynasty that sank while carrying them as cargo, and they look to be of significant archeological value, experts said.
Academia Sinica biodiversity research center member Cheng Ming-hsiu (鄭明修) said he discovered the wreckage while researching coral biodiversity in the South China Sea last month.
Cheng said the hull of the ship had mostly rotted away and he at first assumed that the stone materials were part of the ship, adding that he used the site as a waypoint to anchor and undertake research dives.
Photo: courtesy of Cheng Ming-hsiu
Driven by curiosity, the research team visited the site at low tide and discovered that what they had thought for the past decade were remnants of the ship are actually carefully cut stone slabs and columns, Cheng said.
Some of the stone slabs are more than 1.8 meters long, Cheng said, adding that the exquisite work — evenly cut with mortise joints chiseled into the sides — suggests that they might have been intended for the construction of a palace or temple.
Cheng surmised that because of the lack of metal found at the site, the ship might have been damaged by typhoons or the northeasterly monsoon winds and drifted to the northern side of the Pratas Islands.
Cheng said he had also seen a boiler in a shipwreck on the west side of the Pratas Islands approximately 6m underwater, adding that he did not know how much material has been removed by foreign ships and divers.
The nation needs to devote more funding to underwater archeology, especially as Taiwan is an island, Cheng said.
Academia Sinica underwater expert Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) said that to his knowledge, there are at least four shipwreck sites to the east of the Pratas Islands, although it was the first time he had heard of the stone materials Cheng found.
It might belong to ships from the Ming or Qing dynasties that were transporting the stone materials to Southeast Asia, Tsang said.
A draft act on the conservation of underwater cultural assets was recently reviewed by the Executive Yuan, Tsang said, adding that if the draft act passes its third reading in the Legislative Yuan it would be the nation’s first law protecting culturally significant material found underwater.
While some people might confuse underwater archeology with treasure hunting, according to the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, underwater cultural heritages are defined as “all traces of human existence having a cultural, historical or archeological character which have been partially or totally under water, periodically or continuously, for at least 100 years.”
The definition of underwater cultural heritages does not, however, include underwater cables or other devices currently in use and on the ocean floor.
The convention was adopted in 2001, but has only come into effect as of 2009.
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