In February of 1822, a Chinese junk of extraordinary size set out from the port of Amoy, modern-day Xiamen, on a voyage that would end in catastrophe and obscurity. Its name was the Tek Sing, translated as “True Star,” and on board were nearly 2,000 souls, including sailors, merchants, families, and migrants seeking new lives in the Dutch East Indies. The vessel itself was vast, stretching more than 50 meters in length, with a towering mast that gave it presence on the South China Sea. It carried a crew of about 200 and somewhere between 1,500 and 1,600 passengers, mostly Chinese emigrants heading for Batavia, now Jakarta. Crammed into its holds alongside them was cargo worth fortunes: silk, tea, medicinal herbs, furniture, but most famously, a staggering quantity of porcelain, hundreds of thousands of pieces made for everyday use in Asia’s bustling markets.
The journey should have been routine, though difficult. The South China Sea was littered with hidden shoals and treacherous channels. However, on February 6, Captain Io Tauko chose to take a shortcut through the Gaspar Strait, a decision intended to shave time off the journey, but which proved disastrous. In the darkness, the Tek Sing ran aground on a reef known as the Belvidere Shoals. Within hours, one of the largest vessels in Asia had broken apart and slipped beneath the waves, taking with it almost everyone aboard. Only about 200 survived, plucked from the water the next day by a passing British East India Company ship and a small Chinese junk. The rest, more than 1,500 men, women, and children, vanished into the sea. For its scale, it has been called the “Titanic of the East,” although the name has never gained the same level of public consciousness as the Titanic.
For nearly 180 years, the Tek Sing lay undisturbed in thirty meters of water, its story reduced to a brief entry in maritime history, remembered by few outside academic circles. Then, in 1999, British treasure hunter Michael Hatcher located the wreck. What followed was not a careful archaeological excavation but a commercial salvage operation that ripped into the wreck and pulled out its treasures by the hundreds of thousands. Over 350,000 porcelain items were recovered, including cups, bowls, plates, jars, and figurines. This nearly unimaginable quantity made the Tek Sing one of the largest hauls of Chinese ceramics ever discovered. The collection was shipped to Europe and, in 2000, auctioned off in Stuttgart, scattered across private hands and collectors’ cabinets around the world.
The operation was a windfall for dealers but a disaster for heritage. The wreck itself was destroyed in the process, its timbers broken apart, its stratigraphy, the layers of history that archaeologists rely on, obliterated. Indonesia, within whose waters the wreck lay, was never given a say in how its heritage should be managed. To this day, porcelain from the Tek Sing is still found on auction sites and in private sales, treated as collectibles rather than as fragments of a national and human tragedy. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has described the site as “destroyed” by salvage, lamenting the lost opportunity to learn not just what the Tek Sing carried, but how it was built, how it sank, how its passengers lived and died. The human dimension of the wreck, the lives of migrants who boarded with the hope of a new beginning, was erased in favor of commerce.
Efforts at restitution have begun, albeit haltingly. In 2001, Australia returned more than 70,000 pieces of porcelain that had been imported illegally. In 2022, an additional 333 pieces were seized in Perth after they appeared for sale online and were formally returned to Indonesia. But these are only fragments of a larger problem. Hundreds of thousands of items remain dispersed, their context lost, their stories muted. What might have been an unparalleled archaeological record of early 19th-century migration and trade has been reduced to curios and collectors’ trophies.
Why should we care? Because the Tek Sing is not just a wreck. It is a mass grave, a cultural time capsule, and a symbol of how easily history can be lost when profit is allowed to eclipse preservation. Nearly two thousand people died on that ship. Their lives, their belongings, the very vessel that carried them, have been stripped and scattered. Unlike the Titanic, which has been memorialized in film, museums, and monuments, the Tek Sing barely registers in the global imagination. Yet its story is every bit as dramatic, every bit as tragic, and arguably even more revealing about the nature of human migration, trade, and risk in the age of sail.
The Tek Sing forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about who owns the past. Should artefacts from the wreck be in private collections in Europe, or in museums in Indonesia and China, where the ship began and ended its voyage? What obligations do salvors have when they disturb wrecks that are both heritage sites and graves? And what does it say about our global priorities that we can name every detail of the Titanic’s sinking but know almost nothing of the True Star?
Two centuries later, the wreck of the Tek Sing is a plea from the seabed. It asks us to remember the people who perished, to protect what remains, and to rethink how we treat underwater heritage. If its story has been forgotten, it is not because it is unworthy, but because we have chosen to ignore it. That choice can still be reversed by telling its story, by demanding accountability, and by returning what was taken. Only then can the True Star shine again, not as a sunken prize, but as a reminder of the cost of neglecting history and the lives it contains.
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