About 1,000 cultural relics, including porcelain, pottery, copper coins and deer antlers, have been recovered from the shipwreck, which dates back to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), China’s National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA) said in a statement on Thursday.
Underwater excavation of the shipwreck began last year and shows that people of the Ming dynasty used the South China Sea, known as the ancient Maritime Silk Road, as a key trade route, said Guan Qiang, deputy director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage.
The sunken ship was first discovered in 2022, about 5,000 feet below the surface near the northwest continental shelf in the South China Sea.
A total of 890 artifacts, including coins, pottery and porcelain, were found in the first shipwreck, while 38 artifacts, including pottery, porcelain, turban shells and wood, were excavated from the second shipwreck.
Excavators used a manned submersible called the Deep Sea Warrior to recover items from the wreck.
The first ship appears to have mainly exported porcelain, the second imported timber.
According to FOX Weather, the two ships were spotted 10 nautical miles apart.
“The well-preserved artifacts are of high historical, scientific and artistic value and could be a world-class deep-sea archaeological discovery,” Yang Yalin, director of the archaeology bureau of China’s State Administration of Cultural Heritage, said after the ship was found.
Preliminary identification of cultural artefacts found underwater after the ship’s discovery suggests they date to the Zhengde period of the Ming Dynasty, from 1506 to 1521.
The other ship contained many similarly sized logs neatly stacked together, some of whose items likely date back to the reign of Emperor Hongzhi (1488-1505).
According to the agency, this is the first time that an ancient ship has been discovered in Japan sailing through the same waters and returning.
The unearthing of the sunken ship is linked to China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea under its “nine-dash line” policy, which is being challenged in international courts.
FOX Weather’s Chris Oberholtz contributed to this report.
