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Museum to shocase marine history
By Zheng Caixiong (China Daily)
Updated: 2004-03-11 01:23

A 180-million-yuan (US$21.7 million) museum will soon be built to showcase the history of the so-called Marine Silk Road -- ancient China's southern outlet to outside world -- in Yangjiang, a coastal city in the western part of South China's Guangdong Province.

Located on Hailing Island, the China Marine Silk Road Museum -- expected to be completed in 18 months -- will cover an area of 8,000 hectares; and mainly exhibit ancient vessels to be salvaged from the South China Sea and the cultural relics from the ships.

More than 1,000 old vessels are believed to have been submerged in the waters around Guangdong; and Nanhai No 1, from the Song Dynasty (960-1279), set to be salvaged from Yangjiang waters later this year, is just one of many that sank centuries ago.

A special task force consisting of archaeologists and relic experts from the province and Beijing was set up late last year to take charge of the project.

Cao Chunliang, director-general of the Guangdong Provincial Bureau of Culture, said Wednesday that the salvaging of Nanhai No 1 would be a significant archaeological feat; experts have said that its impact would be similar to the discovery of the terracotta warriors in Xi'an of Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, he added.

The wooden vessel, which is still in good condition after sinking more than 1,000 years ago en route to the Middle East, is 30 metres long and 10 metres wide; and is estimated to contain between 60,000 and 80,000 valuable cultural relics.

Nanhai No 1 was discovered and named in the 1980s and archaeologists have removed 4,000 historical relics from only one small hold of the ship since March 2002 -- most of them ceramics and porcelain produced in East China's Fujian, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces during the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

 
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