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can unlock revelations about where and how people moved, what they ate, what kind of societies they lived in and how they related to others. As a result, modern archaeologists are fastidious about recording everything about their excavations: the layout of a ship's living space might hint at the culture and the hierarchy of the people on board and the arrangement of the cargo might reveal the order of its ports of call. Every scrap of evidence could be useful. Moreover, colleagues will only regard the interpretations as valid if the findings are accurately logged and made open to review and reinterpretation. These things did not happen at the Belitung wreck; at least not at first. There were other, more pressing priorities.
    After the trepang divers had extracted a few bowls and sold them in the market, word spread and a local company, Sulung Segara Jaya, obtained a licence to excavate the wreck from the Indonesian national committee for shipwreck salvage. It was quickly joined by Seabed Explorations, owned by a German construction engineer turned underwater explorer, Tilman Walterfang. The two companies worked fast. They knew from bitter experience the site would be swiftly looted by others if they did not. In August 1998 Indonesia was in meltdown. General Suharto had been deposed, over a thousand people had been killed in rioting, separatism was flaring up and expatriates and their wealth were fleeing the country. Walterfang stayed put: his future wealth still lay on the bottom of the sea. The teams keptworking, removing as much of the cargo as they could during September and October before the monsoon stopped their work. As they feared, local treasure hunters moved in almost immediately. Walterfang contracted a separate company, Maritime Explorations, owned by another former engineer, Michael Flecker, to excavate the remainder of the site in the new year and do a more scientific analysis of what remained. Flecker had excavated dozens of wrecks in the area and also had a PhD in marine archaeology.
    We now know that the pottery on board the Belitung wreck was mass-produced in at least five separate places across China, that it was tran-shipped around the Chinese coast to Guangzhou where it was loaded aboard a ship reminiscent of those still used in Oman, made from timber originally grown in Central Africa and India. The crew was probably a polyglot assemblage of Arabs, Persians and Malays and the end customers for the cargo were the upper and middle classes of the Abbasid Caliphate, centred on Baghdad. The ship sailed on the monsoon winds southwest from Guangzhou, probably stopping en route to refresh stocks of food and water before being wrecked on a reef within Srivijaya's sphere of influence. So to whom did the cargo rightfully belong? In Walterfang's view the answer was simple: him – and whoever was prepared to buy it from him. As the pottery was taken away for conservation and cleaning and the remains of the ship examined for clues about its origin, the haggling started.
    In the end only Singapore wanted the treasure enough to pay the sum that Walterfang sought. The driving force behind the acquisition of the cargo was Pamelia Lee, then head of the Singapore Tourist Board and a sister-in-law of Singapore's long-serving prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. ‘I thought it was time for Singapore to look for the finer things in life,’ she recalls. ‘Like every other nation that becomes wealthy you have to look at building your roots.’ 8 Lee hoped that the cargo would repay the purchase price by attracting visitors to the huge resort then being planned for Sentosa Island in Singapore. In April 2005 the state-owned Sentosa Corporation, part of the Singapore Ministry of Trade and Industry, announced an agreement to buy the hoard from Walterfang's company for $32 million. Half the cost was contributed by the estate of one of Southeast Asia's richest men: the banking and hotel magnate Tan Sri Khoo. The deal was described as a