Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds

Excellent book in good condition

I saw an exhibit of the Belitung treasure years ago in Singapore and think of it often. This is a magnificent book. It is well-written with numerous pictures of the treasure. It provides excellent information about the time during which these goods were created. This book should be of interest to anyone interested in the history of China, ceramics and the trading of goods so long ago. It just needs to be read in good light.

The book contains so much important textual information but suffers from the use of extremely tiny font size. Maybe the designer of this book wanted to make it look cute and cuddly, giving more space to, well, empty spaces on each page by reducing/compressing the text. The result is a disaster. One will certainly need a magnifying lens in order to read the text in this book. Given its heavy weight and its size, it is a struggle to go through each page without straining the neck and the eyes.The book also suffers from scant information and dearth of photos of the actual excavation, conservation treatments, storage and other important aspects of the actual recovery that would have made justice to the title of the book. Worse, it has only a limited number of photographs of the items from the shipwreck making one conclude that this is no exhibition catalog at all.

At first, I thought I must have a different edition of this book from the reviewer who gave it only two stars, but there seems to be only one publisher so it must be the same volume. I therefore have to disagree and say that this is a magnificent volume, full of excellent information of immediate relevance to those studying the Tang, its ceramics, its trade goods, and the entire subject of maritime trade in Southeast Asia. Granted the text is too light and too small and the font is particularly irritating, but the content is so worth the struggle that I can only say get out the magnifying glass and take it in bite-size pieces; it is worth the effort. The pictures are magnificent--large, full colour, beautiful with lots of close-ups to reveal the details of significant pieces. Guy's chapter on "Rare and Strange Goods: International Trade in Ninth-Century Asia" is particularly rich, and Regina Krahl's concise, tight chapters on "Chinese Ceramics in the Late Tang Dynasty" and "White Wares of Northern China" with their beautiful photographs are worth the price of the book alone. This volume would have won five stars if not for the miserable font. It will be of more interest, however, to sinologists than those interested in maritime history or the history of disasters at sea.