It has been five centuries since the great junk sank off the shore of Borneo, but it only took a remotely-controlled underwater camera a few minutes for it to become a crucial part of our lives. On May 24 1997, a forest of ancient plates and jars - still
stacked on top of one another in their shroud of slime - amazingly came into view on a video screen 68 meters above the seabed and in doing so, opened a new dimension to our existing knowledge of Asian maritime trade.
When the over loaded junk went down, in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, the human loss could only have been enormous, but the half-millennium of silence that followed has miraculously transformed its cargo of pottery, fired in the kilns of
Men and women from countries as scattered as Brunei, France, Australia, New Zealand, India and Holland, for three gruelling months, pitted their energy and skills, their dedication and their courage, to bring the sunken cargo to the surface.
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