Chinese Shipwrecks Yield Treasures and a Dispute

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June 6, 2003

Chinese Shipwrecks Yield Treasures and a Dispute
By WILLIAM J. BROAD


Emory Kristof could not believe his eyes. Crammed into a nondescript
house in suburban Los Angeles were 10,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain
and pottery, some 2,000 years old, so densely packed that any movement
threatened to send them crashing to the floor. Some were encrusted with
coral, evidence of their hidden life for centuries under the sea.

"It blew my socks off," Mr. Kristof, an undersea explorer and
photographer, said. "It was absolutely incredible, the mother of all
treasure."

It is now also the subject of an emerging dispute between the
entrepreneur who assembled the trove, working quietly in the Philippines
while employing hundreds of locals to retrieve the old riches, and
archaeologists who say he is plundering the world's artistic patrimony
to line his own pockets.

The entrepreneur is Phil Greco, a former New Yorker who became
interested in Asian culture while serving in the Vietnam War. He lived
and worked in the Philippines for more than a decade salvaging old
Chinese shipwrecks.

From his home in the Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, Mr. Greco is
shipping his discoveries back East, where they are to be put up for
auction.

Some 7,000 of the artifacts have so far reached a warehouse in South
Kearny, N.J., across the Hudson River from New York City. Some 3,000 are
en route. They will be sold in September by Guernsey's, an auction house
on the East Side.

Art experts who have seen the collection call it impressive.

"It was mind boggling," said Arlan Ettinger, president of Guernsey's,
who visited Mr. Greco two months ago to assess the assembled pottery.

"If anybody has been witness to massive collections, it's probably me,
because that's become our specialty over the decades," he said.
"Nevertheless, you never cease to be amazed and overwhelmed when you're
introduced to a fabulous collection like this."

But Donny L. Hamilton, president of the Institute of Nautical
Archaeology at Texas A&M University, a top preserver of old shipwrecks
and their artifacts, said archaeologists worry when private salvors
excavate potentially important undersea sites. They "recover just what
has a market value," Dr. Hamilton said.

"The other material is ignored or left behind, so you only learn about
the ceramic trade but nothing about the people on board, what they were
eating, their armaments, the games they were playing," he added.

The ceramics are insured for $20 million, Mr. Greco said, though Mr.
Ettinger said the appraisals had not been finished.

Mr. Ettinger said the pieces were 500 to 2,000 years old, many from the
Ming and Song Dynasties. Many, he said, are in remarkable condition,
from the smallest powder jars to the largest vases. He said the
collection included blue and white Ming porcelain, and other pottery and
porcelain in earthen tones, browns and burnt oranges and a spectrum of
greens, from pale to intense. Photographs of some are posted on
Guernsey's Web site, www.guernseys.com.

Victoria Johnson-Campbell, chief of Aurora Galleries International, in
Bell Canyon, Calif., said she had seen the collection at Mr. Greco's
home and found it extraordinary. "It's a stunning array," she said.
"This collection by itself is going to expand our knowledge of Chinese
porcelain. Some of the pieces are very, very seldom seen, and are in a
form not viewed before."

Mrs. Johnson-Campbell noted that the collection included porcelains
painted in reds. "Only a few are known," she said.

But Dr. Hamilton, who viewed the collection on the Web site, said he was
disturbed by the excavation.

"Here we have only a small fraction of what we could have learned from
the sites if they had been properly excavated and documented," Dr.
Hamilton said.

"Along with all this porcelain, there's a lot of metal artifacts and
organic articles," he said. "These have to be conserved and that takes a
lot of time and expense."

Mr. Greco, a former marine who earned two purple hearts in Vietnam,
bristled at such criticism. He said archaeologists did not have the
money or skill to save such rich history from the ravages of the sea.

"They say it's outrageous that I'm pillaging all these national
treasures," Mr. Greco said. "But if you're archaeologically correct you
could never ever bring this kind of show to the world. It's impossible.
It's too much. It's a bridge of 2,000 years of Chinese art and history."

Mr. Greco says his story is one of hard work and penny pinching
entrepreneurism that succeeded because he developed close personal bonds
with Filipino living in remote villages near the islands of Panay,
Mindanao and Busuanga. "I stayed with the natives, the fishermen," he
said. "And they led us to the sites."

The shipwrecks, he said, are embedded in reefs off Philippine islands in
the South China Sea. "We have 16 sites we've been working in the last
six or seven years," Mr. Greco said. Three sites have been highly
productive, he added, including one his divers are still swimming down
to and recovering artifacts from.

The shipwrecks lie at depths as great as 280 feet, Mr. Greco said, which
is beyond the range of most sport divers. He said his team used no air
tanks but rather weights and lines and hoses that bring air down to men
working in the bottom gloom. Some of the divers swam with wooden paddles
strapped to their feet, rather than fins. "Tanks are for tourists," Mr.
Greco said.

Mr. Greco, whose company, Stallion Recoveries, is based in Hong Kong,
said the lost ships were either going to Chinese trading posts in the
Philippines or were on their way to Indonesia, to the south. Experts say
the South China Sea abounds in wrecks lost to storms, piracy and
ineptitude.

Mr. Greco said he always had his operation keep a low profile, even
while getting the proper permits from the National Museum of the
Philippines and other authorities. "We never told anybody what we were
doing," he said.

He was apprehensive, he said, about making his finds public. "In the
Philippines and Asia, depending on where you are, they think of them as
pots and pans," he said of the treasures. "Once they see it has value,
and somebody's interested, it's going to be a lot different working over
there."

Mr. Kristof, a staff photographer for National Geographic magazine for
more than three decades, said publications like his were reluctant to
feature projects like Mr. Greco's lest they appear to be endorsing
treasure hunting over archaeology.

David G. Concannon, a board member of the Explorer's Club of New York
City and a lawyer, said Mr. Greco had recently retained him to help
protect his interests. "When you get a collection this significant,
somebody usually pops up and wants part of it," he said.

Mr. Greco said he planned to plow some of his expected profits back to
his crew chiefs in the Philippines.

"I told them I would make each of them a millionaire in their own
currency," Mr. Greco said. "And I will honor that."

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