The Treasure Hunt of an Antique Dealer

I took a ruler and measured it. All the plates were of the same size, 18 cm in diameter, which belonged to the large plates.

Oh, or maybe it's a bowl, because the depth of these plates is between the plate and the bowl in modern concepts.

The bowl is basically intact. This is all thanks to the large urn with a mutilated urn: it is huge and looks very strong! How do you think it looks like the best container with a smaller package and a uniform specification of porcelain bowls.

"It is estimated that when such a big guy went abroad at that time, the packaging could be sold at a good price. The people of the Tang Dynasty copper official kiln burned such a big urn, talent!"

Xiang Weirong has time to study porcelain. If even the packaging can help customers figure out how to solve it, what is it if it is not a talent?

Nowadays, when buying porcelain, we pay attention to cardboard boxes and wooden boxes, but we can’t say whether there are cardboard boxes in ancient times. Crates can definitely not be sold for money.

The packaging is sold for money, talented!

Hearing what the brother-in-law said, Zhang Nan, who was checking the porcelain bowl, shook his head, and then took a closer look at the slightly broken urn, and said: "Brother-in-law, this big guy is not from the official copper kiln, but from the official ware of Guangdong province. This porcelain. Stack the bowls one by one, put them in a circle, and then stuff the tea leaves inside, plug the gaps between the plates and the large urn thoroughly, and then seal them with a lid.

The space can be used to the maximum, and the porcelain can be completely isolated from the moisture on the sea during transportation.

When it reaches the destination, everything in a ship is full of goods, and nothing is not valuable. "

Xiang Weirong didn't doubt his brother-in-law's judgment on the kiln mouth. At this point, he always believed that Zhang Nan was an expert among the experts!

In fact, Zhang Nan doesn't even know what the porcelain of the Guanchong kiln in Guangdong Province should look like, but this will be certain: the shipwreck not far from the seabed should be the famous "Black Rock"!

Can the name of the shipwreck in the Tang Dynasty be passed down?

Or is it recorded in history?

No, of course impossible!

Isn’t there a **** reef nearby, so it’s called the "Black Market", which is different from the "Taixing", which sank only 168 years ago: "Taixing" struck a reef and sank. The rescued British opium ship learned from more than 180 survivors. The name of the ship is also recorded in detail.

Guan Xingquan is a native of Jiaojiang, and he still knows the sea, and he also knows a little bit about shipping.

As soon as I opened the map in my mind, Changsha kiln, this porcelain plate was probably transported by water to Guangdong Province, and then I boarded the ocean-going ship.

"From a port near Yangcheng, it is the most convenient geographically to take the Southeast Asian route."

To Ge Guan, Zhang Nan nodded, "Whether it is going to Southeast Asia, or detouring from Malacca to West Asia and North Africa, the sailboats that were more than a thousand years ago will usually go to the coast of Guangdong Province for supplies.

According to records, the Tang Dynasty paid great attention to foreign trade. The route from Guangdong Province was the longest ocean route from China to India, Arabia and even the east coast of Africa at that time.

Especially after the Mid-Tang Dynasty, the Tang Dynasty lost control of the Western Regions, the northwestern land Silk Road was reimbursed, and shipping became more important.

In the Tang Dynasty, Yangcheng was the absolute largest port in the entire East.

Even if the shipwreck below was a porcelain received elsewhere, or if the navigator of the Tang Dynasty led directly up the river to the Tongguan kiln to load the goods, when it returned to the voyage, Guyangcheng Port was also the only stop it had to pass on its return journey. .

Yangcheng was originally one of the most important external ports in the Tang Dynasty. Except for the ships going to the Korean Peninsula and the little devil, other maritime trade ships generally regarded Yangcheng as the last supply port and packing place in China. Yangcheng is waiting for the winter monsoon.

In Yangcheng, in addition to supplementing some food and fresh water needed by the ocean, the sailing boat also has an important task to pack porcelain.

As for tea, it was estimated that Lingnan was also a major tea-producing area, plus these six-series large urns, everything is available. "

The big urn is good, loading, water and grain, everything is solved, why don't the kilns in Yangcheng burn this thing?

Vita Bruno and the others were still going to go into the water. Zhang Nan asked them to move another big urn up, and by the way, they would try to get all the porcelain that was exposed on the seabed.

Deliberately, the surface treatment is clean, so there is no need to rush to salvage, you can wait for the "Taixing" a few nautical miles away to clean up.

There is no need for transportation boats. Under the command of Captain Philip, the "Sunshine Star" slowly moved to a place to facilitate the salvage of the divers: directly put down a semi-rigid frame net bag, the divers put things in, the sailor above Just pull it up.

Xiang Weirong helped organize the porcelain bowls, washed them and dried them, and put them in a large storage box: the plates of the Tang Dynasty bronze official kiln are a bit old-fashioned from the perspective of modern people, but as long as the history of more than a thousand years is added , It's still very flavorful.

"How much is such a plate worth?"

Xiang Weirong asked smoothly.

"China?"

"Virtue, abroad."

To my brother-in-law, Xiang Weirong is not too polite: How much domestic antique porcelain can be sold?

Even if you can only know a little bit about the antique porcelain Xiang Weirong, you can see that you can't sell these plates at the sky-high prices of Chenghua chicken cups like in Xiangjiang.

Zhang Nan smiled and said: "If there are only a few dozen of them, they will all be sold out within 5 years. It is no problem to bid 10,000 US dollars each, and at most a few will be shot together.

Speaking of this, he glanced at the sea outboard of the ship, and said: "If there are tens of thousands of ships below, three to five hundred dollars will be killed each."

There is no way, the price of copper official kilns is not low in the western market, but they have very few intact products unearthed in China. However, although Hailao porcelain generally does not appear top-quality goods, it is all export porcelain, but generally once it appears, the price of one type of porcelain will be suppressed once!

The amount is too big!

When Xiang Weirong heard this, he said, "Fuck enough!"

Zhang Nan nodded, "Well, it's **** enough."

At this time, the divers were preparing to go into the sea, and even Guan Xingquan also put on diving equipment: He was not sure about 30 meters of water depth, 15 meters, swimming in a large reservoir, he could dive so deep without diving equipment, and it was not that he had never done it.

As for water...

Boss Guan grew up by the sea and he is a cow.

As for Zhang Nan.

5 meters is okay, 10 meters are not daring to go down, 15 meters is that you can't even think about it, you can't go down to see the scenery.

"I'll just wait. When the time comes, let people connect to the underwater camera. I just need to look at it."

There are those equipment on the "Great Shark" not far away. The divers are equipped not only with thin recreational diving suits, but also with professional shallow water equipment for working under the sea.

The clothes are a bit bloated, they wear lead diving shoes, and they wear astronaut-like copper helmets with masks on their heads.

That thing is good. It doesn’t need an oxygen cylinder, and it breathes directly through a snorkel. It can work for a long time on the seabed, and it can also receive instructions and feedback from the work boat through the intercom.

However, it is necessary to use tools such as diving ropes to enter and exit the water, and it is best to have divers wearing other diving equipment nearby.

A basket or basket of porcelain was drained, and after an hour of busying, the surface of the seabed was emptied.

Guan Xingquan, who was out of the water, told Zhang Nan: All the "scars" left by the big urn were filled back with silt from the seabed that was dug away from a distance.

With that large piece of reef as a reference, Captain Philip and both have accurately determined the location of the shipwreck point to the unit of "meters". Next time, you can just drop the anchor directly.

The sun deck is stowed away, lest there will be Indonesian monkey fishing boats close to see something that shouldn't be seen.

There were three large urns piled on the deck, as well as nearly a hundred pieces of intact or broken porcelain. Some Zhang Nan took a good look at it, and he was not afraid of the heat.

Bare the stick and put on a pair of swimming trunks, Kunkka set up the awning on the sun deck to prevent the boss from peeling.

The two newly picked urns are intact, and the inside is the same as the previous one, and they are still plates from the Tongguan kiln.

After taking all out, it was found that although the kiln mouth was the same, only one of the urns contained a plate with a bird pattern painted on it.

The porcelain in the other large urn is a bit different. The diameter is only about 14 cm, and the shape is a little deeper. It can no longer be called a plate, but a bowl.

The pattern inside is no longer a single bird with dotted color, but beautiful flower patterns, mountain patterns, and romantic cloud patterns. There are only 5 bird patterns, and the choice of graphics seems to be one larger than the model. The plates are more casual.

Thousands of years under the sea have not ruined the porcelain from the Tang Dynasty, the color is still clear and moist, and among the hundreds of bowls, there are more than 30 stored in the bottom layer, and the decoration inside the bowl has a strange taste.

What's the blame?

Randy and Paul, who watched the excitement, watched the boss studying the bowls with weird lines. The more they watched, the more they became aware of where these lines seemed to have been seen.

In the end, Paul thought about it first and said to Zhang Nan: "Boss, this seems to be the style of Al-Bab. I seem to have seen it. They knocked similar patterns on the bronzes.

I have a handicraft brought back from the Middle East in my home, and the patterns on it are similar to these. "

At this point, Randy also had a "no wonder so familiar" expression on his face: this is also the master who has spent some time in the Arab world.

What is knowledgeable?

This is Paul who has run over half of the earth.

Zhang Nan heard his bodyguard say this and asked: "Know what the lines on your plate mean?"

Paul tilted his mouth and said in embarrassment: "I don't know, boss, at that time we didn't have the mind to figure this out, so we complained about not being able to drink."

Zhang Nan laughed.

After laughing, he said: "I haven't seen your plate, and I don't know what it means.

However, the lines in these bowls are not lines and paintings in a simple sense. They are in fact a variant of the ancient Arabic script. The meaning is very classic. The general meaning of the text is "True-Lord-Great".

If nothing happens, this ship is a cargo ship that does the Arab business and runs to the Middle East.

Perhaps the shipwreck below is the Arab-Bull ship. During the Tang Dynasty, there were long-distance voyages on the Huaxia Sea, but there were not many. In the housing market, you can make a lot of money without risking going out to the ocean. "

As he said, he tapped the wall of the bowl with his finger, and said, “It’s very interesting. More than 1,000 years ago, there was Al-Arab on the porcelain of an inland kiln in the Tang Dynasty of China. I thought it should have been ordered at that time. Based on the production process, the Middle East merchants put forward requirements on the shape and style while placing orders at Datang.

I looked a bit awkward at the shape of those large plates, saying that the plates were too deep, and the bowls were a little shallow. I thought it was the ordering party's request. At that time, the Arabs liked this.

There is also a very interesting one. I remember statistics from the statistics. In the past, blue-yellow glazed porcelain bowls from bronze official kilns were unearthed in many countries in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and East Africa.

However, in China, apart from Chang-sha where the kiln site is located and Yangzhou, the main trading port where products are sold overseas, a relatively large number of celadon colored porcelain bowls from the bronze kiln were unearthed. There are almost no such porcelains in other places.

I guess that the blue-yellow glazed porcelain bowl of the bronze official kiln is a product exclusively for export. "

He patted Paul on the shoulder, "Just like the Dehua kiln blue and white in the Taixing number next to it, it is exported for foreign exchange earning and sold exclusively to you guys who don't know how to make porcelain!"

For this, all the American guys present had no opinion: not only because Zhang Nan is the boss, but also a very good boss, but also because what Zhang Nan said was a fact that many Europeans and Americans knew.

Arab nobles could use porcelain imported from China more than a thousand years ago, but Europeans...

Even the kings, that would have to wait for hundreds of years!

They still have to be imported from China, because they are far away and dangerous. After they are shipped back to Europe, they are not to mention extremely expensive!

Let alone, in Europe three hundred years ago, there was no decent tableware at all on the dining table of the general public, and most of them used pottery bowls of unqualified sanitary quality.

At that time, various epidemics and diseases in Europe were rampant, and many people believed that tableware was one of the reasons.

Although those nobles can use silver tableware, silver tableware is easy to oxidize and turn black, which seriously affects people's normal three meals a day: it is unappetizing, and servants have to spend a lot of time wiping the tableware.

At that time, Huaxia's ice-clean, extremely hygienic white porcelain tableware was introduced to Europe, and the whole of Europe was overwhelmed by it and regarded it as "white gold".

From the emperor to the common people, they are all pursuing porcelain from China.

At the beginning of the 18th century, Europe imported a large number of Chinese porcelain from China for export, which even led to financial constraints in many countries. Many countries also called for a boycott of Chinese products, and privately, they tried their best to "copy" Chinese porcelain.

In fact, the imitation of Chinese porcelain has existed much earlier, and Marco Polo’s diary records the existence of porcelain ~www.wuxiaspot.com~ after returning to Europe, he also greatly promoted the benefits of porcelain and boosted Europeans. Among them, the Medici family in Italy is the craziest. It was copied in the 16th century, but it soon stopped because of the high cost of funds. Only more than 60 pieces have been handed down to the world.

Later, the Netherlands, Britain, France, Prussia and other countries followed suit, opened kilns and built factories, and continued to imitate.

In order to obtain the secrets of China's porcelain production, European countries have also sent out spies to spy on China's porcelain production.

After two to three hundred years, European talents succeeded.

At the time of China Datang, the Arab world civilization is not bad, and Europe is suffering in the early Middle Ages in the dark age. The boss said that, the American guys have to recognize it.

But there is a problem. It is the objection raised by Captain Philip, who is free, or a question about a situation that is obviously unreasonable: "Boss, if the next one is the Arab cargo ship, how did it get here?"

Yes, this is a problem!

This is the sea area of ​​Belitung Island. If this ship is going to the Middle East after departing from China, it shouldn't be here!

It is far away from the Singapore Strait and the Strait of Malacca. According to the usual route of the Maritime Silk Road, merchant ships should bypass what is now Singapore and then cross the Strait of Malacca.

But the ship under the sea yaw more than 300 nautical miles to the southeast, which is not in line with common sense.

Did it lose its way, or was it blown off course by the wind and waves, or was it going to a port in the Java Sea?

Regarding Mr. Captain’s question, Zhang Nan gave a “consensual” explanation, and pointed to a cargo ship a few nautical miles away. “The Taixing sank to hide from the pirates. The ship below may have been hijacked by the pirates.

Pirates, they have existed since ancient times. These porcelains are more expensive than gold. If I replace them with me, I will grab them too! "