Bottles and jars sprawl across three shelving units. Few are intact. Most are cracked, missing a piece, or nothing more than a pile of shards. Their simple, somewhat haphazard arrangement contrasts sharply with the National Palace Museum's display of pieces of ancient pottery in airtight glass boxes.

Seeing it, you can't help but wonder: Is this treasure that's being mistreated, or junk that's being coddled?

"It was only some broken tiles and bricks, stuff that looked worthless," wrote blogger blfox, expressing the astonishment he felt on first seeing the objects aboard the ship. Blfox worked for the National Museum of History in 1998 and on the General No. 1 dig.

It's the "Qianlong Currency" that gives the sunken vessel its archaeological value. The one coin found is a classic round coin 2.6 centimeters in diameter with a square hole 0.6 centimeters on a side. The museum's files state that the coin has "Qianlong Currency" written on one side, and two lines of text on the other. The line on the left consists of the character bao (treasure or currency); that on the right gives the name of the organization that cast the coin, is marked Year 5 of Qianlong's reign, and states that the coin was cast in Fujian Province.

These coins were an extraordinarily significant find. How were they discovered?

A single copper coin marked "Qianlong Currency" definitively dates the General No. 1 to the middle of the Qing Dynasty. The background photo shows the wreck site.

An ancient coin buried in the seafloor

In 1998 the museum hired a Singaporean named Ye Mingde to oversee the salvage operation and recruited Zheng Qingwen to head the dive team. The two are underwater professionals who had worked together off the coast of Hsinchu in 1987 on a China Petroleum Corporation drilling platform.

Each dive on the General No. 1 was carried out by a team of three-one person each handling salvage, measurements, and photography-that remained in constant communication with the mother ship on the surface.

On the afternoon of June 19, with most of the divers already back ashore, Zheng himself led a team down to check on and wrap up the day's work.

"I'd been down about 10 minutes when I found a coin," recalls Zheng. He was 15 to 18 meters beneath the surface "pumping sand" at the time. As the layer of sediment covering the vessel became thinner, it slowly revealed a coin about the size of a modern NT$10 coin.

"At first glance, I thought it was an ordinary copper coin," says Zheng. "But when I rubbed at the slime on its surface, I could feel a hole in the center."

Keeping his excitement in check, he clasped the coin in one hand and waved the photographer over with the other. They sent an image to the mother ship and awaited further instructions.

The museum experts on board told Zheng, "Send it up!" Once he finished mapping the coin's original position, he carried it up himself. He had to depressurize before leaving the water, so it was about 25 minutes before the old coin was once again exposed to the light of day.

"It was pretty exciting. The stuff we'd found prior to this mostly looked like garbage that had been chucked into the sea," says Zheng. "It hadn't felt like we'd been doing 'archaeology.'" Zheng was already an old hand at undersea work and had taken part in the 1986 salvage of the China Airlines Penghu crash, but this was his first experience with undersea archaeology. That made the coin's discovery especially meaningful to him.

Significance vs. sale value

The work done on the General No. 1 pales in comparison to the mainland's fully excavated Nanhai No. 1. After all, most of the General No. 1 remains beneath the sea, and broken ceramics and a single Qing-Dynasty coin are unlikely to yield much of anything at auction.

"The General No. 1's importance lies in the nature of the site and of the handicrafts discovered," says Huang Yung-chuan, director of the National Museum of History. Huang says that wrecks are like sunken time capsules-they offer insight into how people used to live. The General No. 1, for example, plied the seas between Taiwan and Penghu, and the ceramic jars raised from its wreckage reveal details about everyday life in the days when it sailed, information about what people ate and wore, the homes they lived in, and what they traded. As the Changhua County gazetteer on local customs put it: "Ships from Penghu arrive with salted seafood, and depart with rice, oil, and sweet potatoes."

Huang explains that Penghu's people sought to develop unique local products for trade, just as people do today with local specialties. The General No. 1 expedition raised so many ceramic jars because Penghu imported jars in which to ship their distinctive salted fish to Taiwan and the southeast coast of the mainland.

The neat rows of tiles aboard the ship also tell us something about homes on the island.

"While we were salvaging items from the ship, we were also doing a survey of items on the land," says Huang. "We noted that Penghu's old homes were built with flat tiles, while the newer ones used brick. When we compared the tiles retrieved from the General No. 1 to those on Penghu's old homes, we found they were the same. That is, early local construction materials were imported rather than locally produced."

Huang stresses that the General No. 1 expedition was even more important for its symbolic significance: it was Taiwan's first undersea archaeological expedition.

The Penghu Cultural Affairs Bureau, which stores and maintains the items from the General No. 1, would like to keep them on the island, but needs funding from the central government to do so properly.

As things stand at the bureau, the General No. 1 artifacts are part of the secondary responsibilities of a single employee in human resources. The employee checks on them about once a month.

"Locked up" for a decade and lacking any immediate commercial value or viewing interest, the General items may yet see the light of day. Cultural Affairs Bureau deputy director Chi Li-mei says that the Life on Penghu Museum could be completed as early as the end of this year. When it is finished, all the cultural properties in the bureau's custody, including those from the General No. 1, will be transferred to it.