"Oriental Titanic" 's emergence from the sea

  "Tsksing", a merchant ship of Qing Dynasty which sank into the sea after hitting a submerged rock in 1822, was refloated not long ago. To people's surprise, their findings on the ship include not only the skeleton of the victims, but more than 300,000 Chinese porcelain. Without question, the number of the porcelain means that this is one of the most important discovery in the history of ceramics. Most of the porcelain are from a famous Chinese ceramics base-Dehua in Fujian
province. Once these porcelain were auctioned in Germany, the quantum for exchange is 22,400,000 marks.
  On May, 1999, an experienced English treasure-explorer Mike Hatcher began his exploration at the submerged rock by all means with thirty sailors in order to find "Tsksing" but in vain. Their expenses added up to 10,000 dollars per day which made them hard to continue. However, things changed on May 12th, they found a pile of unidentified objects consist of the wreckage of a ship and some Chinese porcelain. So they decided to pull them out. After researching several materials, an English expert Nigelpickford believes the ship to be "Tsksing". Then he told us a soul-stirring tragic story:
In 19th century, "Tsksing" was really a giant ship. On January, 1882, she left for Indonesia from Xiamen port. There were all together 2,000 passengers and sailors on the ship which includes merchants, students and workers. In order to sail placidly, some ceramic products were put on the ship to be the ballast. But during her sailing period, the line was changed so as to evade the pirates.
Because of some reasons related to climate, the ship hit the rock and began to sink. At that time, only 18 passengers were rescued by another small ship, others all in the water. Two days later, captain James rescued more than 180 survivals. The death of 1800 people made her fate somewhat the same as Titanic.
  To sum up, the finding of 350,000 Chinese porcelain surprised the world. They are mainly blue and white porcelain produced in Dehua in 18th and 19th century. The shapes of the porcelain are plate, bowl, cup, spoon and so on. They well manifest the living conditions of the people who lived near the sea.