Dragon Sea: A True Tale of Treasure, Archeology, and Greed off the Coast of Vietnam



Treasure hunters are seemingly necessary for archaeologists. The new
"treasure", vintage Chinese porcelain, is giving a financial backing
to the recovery of details of ships sunk in the South China Sea during
the period from roughly 700 AD to the 19th Century. The book
demonstrates the interaction between the financial backers, the
archaeologists (often added to give cover to the main aim of loot),
the marine operators with ships and equipment to be paid for and the
pure looters.



Dragon Sea: A True Tale of Treasure, Archeology, and Greed off the
Coast of Vietnam (Hardcover)
by Frank Pope (Author)


Editorial Review
From Publishers Weekly
This intense look at the fierce competition in what first-time author
Pope slyly calls "the extraordinary underworld of shipwrecks" focuses
on the effort in the late 1990s to recover a hoard of precious 15th-
century porcelain from the sunken Hoi An ship in the Dragon Sea, a
stretch of "typhoon-torn" water off the coast of Vietnam. Pope is
equally adept at illuminating "the peculiarly powerful allure of
shipwrecks" that drives the Hoi An team as he is in explaining the
larger and more difficult context of modern excavation efforts, where
"maritime archeologists who were regularly leading excavations around
the world could be counted on the fingers of one hand, but the number
of looters, souvenir-seekers, and well-equipped treasure-hunters was
in the high hundreds." But Pope's strength in detailing the Hoi An
story comes from his fascinating in-depth portraits of the main
players in what became an unprecedented and expensive recovery effort:
Ong Soo Hin, a Malaysian businessman who helped launch the project;
Mensun Bound, the director of Oxford's Maritime Archaeological unit;
and Dilip Tan, the operations manager under "nightmarish pressure" to
finish the project. Pope expertly shows how the same ocean that can
terrify and enrich can also "lay bare the very nature of man." (Jan.)
.

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