Pottery yarn: Local art dealer acquires ancient Vietnamese treasures from shipwreck
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As the floor heaved and John Fairman clung to a table at his Asian art gallery the morning of Feb. 28, a terrible thought raced through his mind. He'd recently bought some 15th-century ceramics retrieved from an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Vietnam. The irony of all that beautiful pottery lying unharmed at the bottom of the ocean for 500 years and then being destroyed in a Seattle earthquake made him feel sick. "This collection is special to me," Fairman said. "It was terrifying."
The owner of Honeychurch Antiques on First Hill, Fairman is one of two Asian-art dealers in Seattle who scooped up a selection of rare objects from the Hoi An cargo, a huge cache of Vietnamese ceramics retrieved from a sunken Chinese-style junk. The find was so extensive that its recovery, completed in 1999 under the direction of an Oxford archaeologist, altered the scholarship - and the prices - for 15th-century pottery from Southeast Asia. The Seattle Asian Art Museum acquired 36 pieces from the auction last November. Fortunately, no one lost any of the precious pottery during the quake - neither Fairman, nor Cheney Cowles, owner of the Crane Gallery on lower Queen Anne, nor the Seattle Asian Art Museum. A selection of the work is on display at the Volunteer Park museum.
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The recovery of the pottery is nearly as amazing as the pieces: first drawing in fishermen, then black-market dealers and finally the Vietnamese government, which fended off typhoons and pirates to recover it. Vietnam's cultural heritage had been diminished over the centuries, but the contents of this wreck have helped reestablish it. The Hoi An collection is so large that, in addition to what the Vietnamese government kept, thousands of pieces were auctioned, with some now available in Seattle. Prices at the Crane Gallery, for example, range from $50 to $6,500 per object, with many under $200.
The sunken ship, a teakwood junk, probably built in Thailand, contained an enormous number of artifacts. As many as a quarter of a million vessels, jars, plates, bowls, boxes and other objects were packed into the hold. Many of them survived intact. A small portion of the cargo was of extraordinary quality, destined for royal courts in far-off lands. The rest was production ware, meant for everyday use. It was all made by hand in the country's characteristic fine, white clay and painted with blue designs. The work is sometimes mistaken for porcelain but is fired at lower temperatures, Cowles said.
Deepest dig on record
The wreck was discovered in the early 1990s by fishermen from the village of Hoi An, who dragged up some of the valuable ceramics in their nets. For a while, the villagers kept their find secret and engaged in a little extracurricular trading in antique pottery. But when a businessman was caught at the airport, smuggling out a suitcase of the rare objects, the Vietnamese government stepped in. With help from an Oxford specialist and Saga Horizon, a Malaysian marine-engineering firm, government officials turned the illicit recovery operation into a carefully controlled archaeological site. The Discovery Channel filmed a documentary of the operation.
At 250 feet below the sea, it was the deepest archaeological dig on record and took place in a realm of utter darkness. Nine men, working out of a dive bell, rotated in six-hour shifts on the ocean floor. The rest of the time, they decompressed in a tiny chamber on the rescue ship, breathing a mix of helium and oxygen, completely sealed off from the normal environment. It took 69 days to recover all the artifacts as well as a section of heavy teak carved from the junk's cargo bay. Besides the danger of mishap with the deep-diving apparatus, which could instantly kill the divers, the crew was on constant alert for the typhoons that plague the South China Sea - probably responsible for the wreck they were excavating. They were also on the lookout for lurking marauders. According to the documentary, half of the world's piracy centers in this region, known as the Dragon Sea.
Down below, fastened on a grid over the ocean floor, a robotic camera documented the location of each piece of pottery before it was brought to the surface. The ceramics survived because they had been cunningly loaded in the junk, layer on layer, with no sign of packing material. The pottery was stacked so densely between wooden dividers in the hull that it couldn't move. Much of it was found lying in graceful stacks in the shifting sand, just as it had been packed centuries ago, around the time of Columbus. The divers also found a single human skull, lying in the ruins of the ship. The Vietnamese crew, convinced the spirit of the dead man was guarding the wreck, performed a ship-deck ceremony to placate the ghost.
Auction on eBay
Once all the pottery had been brought up - after being desalted, catalogued and numbered - the finest work was retained by the Vietnamese government to ensure the cultural heritage of its own museums, said Cowles. About 125,000 pieces, in varying degrees of preservation, were sent to Butterfields auction house in San Francisco, where dealers and collectors from around the world bid on the exotic stuff in person and via the Internet on eBay. The auction, last November, went on for three 10-hour days, with auctioneers droning on nonstop. "There's never been a huge body of (this) work, so it's been kind of a forgotten field. I've been happily collecting this stuff for 25 years," Fairman says. "Then suddenly they find a shipwreck... It knocked our socks off. It redefined old beliefs about Vietnamese pottery."
It also gave rise to an odd and unexpected problem. Both Fairman and Cowles admit that with so much of this pottery now available, no one is quite sure how to price the stuff. "This find was so unusual and rare that the cargo kind of set the market," Cowles said. Both dealers said they priced the work based on what they paid at auction - at least until a better determination can be made.
But that's a minor concern compared to the scare Fairman got on Feb. 28.
"I couldn't bring myself to walk downstairs," he recalls. "I imagined the whole room in shards. I sat there for four or five minutes just breathing deeply."