The Tek Sing (Chinese, "True Star")[1] was a large three-masted Chinese ocean-going junk which sank on February 6, 1822[2] in an area of the South China Sea known as the Belvidere
Shoals.
The vessel was 50 meters in length, 10 meters wide and weighed about a thousand tons. Its tallest mast
was estimated to be 90 feet in height. The ship was manned by a crew of 200 and
had approx. 1600 passengers. The great loss of life associated with the sinking
has led to the Tek Sing being referred to in modern times as
the "Titanic of the East".
Sailing from the port of Amoy (now Xiamen in Fujian, People's
Republic of China), the Tek
Sing was bound for Batavia, Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia) laden with a large cargo of porcelain goods
and 1600 Chinese immigrants. After a month of sailing, the Tek Sing's captain, Io Tauko,
decided to attempt a shortcut through the Gaspar Strait between the Bangka-Belitung
Islands, and ran aground on a reef. The junk sank in about 30m (100
feet) of water.
The next morning,
February 7, an English East Indiaman captained by James Pearl sailing from
Indonesia to Borneo passed
through the Gaspar Strait. The ship encountered debris from the sunk Chinese
vessel and an enormous number of survivors. The English ship managed to rescue
about 190 of the survivors. Another 18 persons were saved by a wangkang, a small Chinese junk
captained by Jalang Lima. This Chinese vessel may have been sailing in tandem
with the Tek Sing, but had
avoided the reefs.
On May 12, 1999, British marine salvor Michael Hatcher discovered the wreck of the Tek Sing in an area of the South China Sea
north of Java,
east of Sumatra and
south of Singapore. His crew raised about 350,000
pieces of the ship's cargo in what is described as the largest sunken cache of
Chinese porcelain ever recovered.[4] Human remains were
also found, but they were not disturbed as most of Hatcher's crew, being Indonesian and Chinese, believed that bad luck
would befall any who disturbed the dead.
The Tek Sing's recovered cargo was auctioned in Stuttgart, Germany in
November 2000.