Hailing Island (海陵岛)

Why Go

The Ship in the Tank

1. They lifted the whole seabed

A merchant ship went down off this coast in the Southern Song, loaded for a voyage into the Indian Ocean trade, and settled into the mud. Mud is the reason it survives: it sealed the hull from oxygen and from the organisms that eat timber, and it held the cargo in place. When the wreck was found, the usual method would have been to dive it season by season, bringing objects up one at a time and leaving the hull to the sea.

What was done instead is the interesting part. A steel caisson was built around the entire wreck, driven down into the seabed, closed underneath, and lifted with everything inside it: ship, cargo, and the silt they were sitting in. The whole box was moved ashore and into a purpose-built museum, where it sits in a tank of water at the chemistry the wreck has been used to for eight hundred years, and archaeologists excavate it indoors while visitors watch through glass.

Very few wrecks anywhere have been treated this way, because it is expensive and because the engineering is not trivial. The result is a site where the excavation itself is the exhibit and where the context of every object is recorded rather than lost. For a visitor interested in how China traded with the world, this is a stronger piece of evidence than any museum case: a ship loaded for a specific voyage, with its cargo still stowed.

It also connects to the other end of the same trade. The page for Mount Qingyuan covers Quanzhou, the port those ships sailed from and the city that UNESCO inscribed for exactly this commerce. The mosque, the Hindu carvings and the Daoist rock there are what the trade brought back. This is what it looked like on the way out.

2. The half of the island in these photographs

Nothing above is in the pictures on this page, and it is worth being plain about what is. The island has a resort beach with hotels behind it, and it has a working fishing side, and these photographs are the second one. A jetty of unsquared poles runs out over sand that is dry at low tide. A wooden boat with a red flag and a deck full of gear lies against it. Behind, a line of small boats is moored right across the horizon, which is what a fishing anchorage looks like when the fleet is in.

The flats are worked as well as the water. One of the pictures below shows rows of thin stakes set out in lines across a tidal flat with the channels between them, which is cultivation rather than scenery. Along this coast the sea is farmed as much as it is fished, and at low tide the structure of that is visible from the shore.

The eight photographs supplied for this entry are all sunrise or sunset and all worked hard in processing, and five of them are the same jetty. That is a fair description of how this island is marketed, and it is worth knowing that the middle of the day here looks like an ordinary busy coast in a hot province.

Orientation

Beach, Port, Museum

The island has three things on it that matter and they are in different places. Dajiao Bay, the resort beach, is on the south side with the hotels behind it. The fishing harbour and the flats in these photographs are elsewhere on the coast. The Maritime Silk Road museum is a separate building with its own entrance, close to the shore where the wreck was brought in.

Because the museum is the reason to make the journey, the sensible plan inverts the usual one: museum first and unhurried, then the coast, then the beach if there is time and appetite. Most itineraries do the opposite and give the ship forty minutes.

Context

What a Wrecked Cargo Tells You

From the Song onwards, Chinese ships carried ceramics, iron, lacquer and silk south and west through the straits to the Indian Ocean, and brought back spices, timber, incense and silver. The written record of that trade is thin and one-sided: officials wrote about customs revenue and about foreigners, and rarely about what was in the holds. A loaded ship that went down on the way out is therefore a document of a kind that no archive contains.

The cargo recovered here is dominated by ceramics from several different kiln regions, packed for export, along with metalwork and the personal possessions of the people aboard. That mixture answers questions that had been argued about for decades: which kilns were producing for which markets, how goods were packed and stowed, what a merchant ship of this period was actually built like below the waterline.

The museum around it belongs to a particular moment in Chinese archaeology, when the money and the confidence existed to attempt something technically difficult rather than straightforward. Whether the tank preserves the hull as intended is a question that will take decades to answer, and the people working on it say so. It is worth seeing while the work is still going on, because a finished exhibit will be a different and smaller thing than an excavation in progress.

Where to Base

Yangjiang (阳江)

Yangjiang is a mid-sized coastal city known within China for making kitchen knives, and it is the gateway rather than the destination. High-speed trains run along the coast from Guangzhou, and the island is a short drive from the station.

There is no strong reason to sleep in the city rather than on the island unless the island is full, which in July and August it will be. Anyone travelling with an interest in the wreck should treat Yangjiang as a two-night stop rather than a day trip from Guangzhou, because the journey eats the day at both ends.