Tek-Sing bowl

This particular bowl was one of many treasure finds from the Tek Sing shipwreck that was discovered in 1999 on the 12th of May by Michael Hatcher, a marine salvor.

Sailing from the port of Amoy, now known as Xiamen in Fujian, the Tek Sing was bound for Batavia,

Dutch East Indies, now known as Jakarta, Indonesia. It sank on February the 6th of 1822 in an area of the South China Sea known as the Belvidere Shoals.

The Tek Sing, meaning "True Star", also known as the Titanic of the east, was one of the last key witnesses of the prosperity of the maritime Silk Road.

The three-masted ship was 60 meters long, 10 meters high, weighed about 1000 tonnes and had a crew of about 200 men. Its cargo at the time of the disaster

contained porcelain, silk, spices, medicine and approximately 1600 passengers, mostly consisting of Chinese immigrants looking for work in the sugar cane fields

in Dutch Batavia, now known as Indonesia.

The remaining passengers were merchants travelling with their goods for the export market. The porcelains were from the famous Dehua kilns located in the Fujian Province.

These kilns produced masses of export porcelain. With its distinctive white and blue patterns, it became a signature for Chinese porcelain inside of Europe.

In total, about 350.000 pieces of porcelain were pulled from the bottom of the ocean, making it the largest find of this sort.

The impurities found along the surface of the bowl show that it was meant as an export product. China would keep the porcelain of the highest quality in China and shipped

the lesser quality abroad for export. This piece was part of a lot of 12 bowls that have been officially recorded and auctioned at Nagel Auctions in Stuttgart, Germany.

The original Tek Sing inventory numbers can be found at the bottom. The bowl has been restored by its previous owner due to small fractures on the upper side of the rim.

This shows a small glossy shine overlaying the fractures.