On Monday, as a shipwreck was slowly pulled out of the water from the bottom of a riverbed where it had been laying for more than a century and a half, Chinese archaeology witnessed a new breakthrough in the field of underwater archaeology. The salvage operation took nearly three hours to remove the shipwreck along with a large caisson, a watertight chamber that had been built specially for the wreck s removal.
More than 600 artifacts had been revealed by Tuesday during the salvage of the Yangtze River Estuary No.2, China s largest and best-preserved ancient underwater wooden shipwreck.