Storm-Revealed Treasures: Vietnam’s Race to Save Sunken Silk Road Secrets

The morning after Typhoon Kalmaegi passed, Tan Thanh Beach looked like a battlefield. Palm trunks snapped clean through, fishing nets twisted into knots, the smell of wet timber drifting across the flattened dunes. The shoreline had shifted several meters inland. Locals picked through debris—broken boats, soaked mattresses, plastic crates—until someone noticed the curve of a ribbed wooden hull emerging where the sand had been carved away overnight.

Hội An World Cultural Heritage Conservation Centre on Monday reported on the preliminary information regarding an ancient shipwreck found on a beach following severe erosion caused by Typhoon Kalmaegi. Photo supplied/AMC

Within hours, the story spread along Hoi An’s waterfront: the storm had returned a ghost.

What lay exposed under the grey sky was the remains of a merchant ship believed to date back to the 14th–16th centuries, when the Cham Kingdom and later Vietnamese dynasties sent vessels across Asia loaded with porcelain, ivory, pepper, and silk. For archaeologists, it was the rarest of events—an intact wooden structure surfacing in a region where underwater heritage is usually left to fishermen’s tales and auction houses.

“This shipwreck was first discovered in 2023 when the beach was severely eroded,” said Le Dinh Phung, head of research at the Quang Nam Provincial Museum. “It resurfaced again on 8 November. Storms bury it, storms uncover it. We don’t know how long it will stay accessible.”

Kalmaegi’s 150-km/h winds and massive storm surge had torn open the coast, peeling off the sand that had swallowed the wreck two years earlier. Overnight, the beach became an open-air excavation site—one that could vanish with the next tide.

“We have proposed an emergency excavation because it could be buried again at any time,” warned Nguyen Chi Trung, director of the Hoi An Centre for Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation. Standing near the wreck, he gestured at the rising tide edging closer. “Every hour we wait, we risk losing something we cannot replace.”

A Window Into the Maritime Silk Road

Hoi An has long capitalised on its reputation as Southeast Asia’s most photogenic trading port, a place where Japanese merchant houses and Chinese guild halls line narrow alleys lit by lanterns. But its real history lies offshore. By the 1400s, the region was a major node on the Maritime Silk Road, linking the Cham Kingdom and later the Nguyen lords to traders in Fujian, Gujarat, Malacca, and Aden.

The newly exposed vessel—17.4 metres long, built with thick wooden ribs and joints typical of premodern Asian shipbuilding—likely carried ceramics or spices. “It fits the profile of merchant ships that used to travel between Dai Viet, Champa, and South China,” Phung explained.

Vietnam’s underwater heritage is deeper than most realise. More than 100 sites lie scattered along its 3,200-kilometre coastline. Some are ceramic dumps from sunken cargo ships; others are complete hulls resting in shallow bays. Their stories sketch the outline of centuries of global exchange—long before the term “globalisation” existed.

Yet only a handful have been properly excavated.

“Underwater cultural heritage in Vietnam offers opportunities for collaboration,” said maritime archaeologist Dr Dang Van Thang, “but it requires urgent protection from looting and environmental threats.”

Many wrecks discovered by fishermen never make it into museums. They enter black-market routes instead, moving quietly through private collectors’ circles in Singapore, Hong Kong, and beyond.

Climate Fury as an Excavator

The problem now is no longer only looters—it is the climate itself.

Vietnam faces six to eight typhoons every year. Several have become “once-in-a-generation” events, arriving back-to-back. The IPCC warns that sea-level rise and intensifying storms could erase half of Southeast Asia’s coastal heritage sites by 2050.

Kalmaegi is a case study in this paradox: a destructive force that unearths cultural treasure even as it erodes the ground beneath it.

“Over the years, Vietnam has shown a proactive approach to heritage preservation in flood-prone areas,” noted a recent report by the Vietnam Institute of Archaeology. “But climate change is outpacing current systems.”

On Tan Thanh Beach, that mismatch is visible in real time. Waves creep closer to the shipwreck each afternoon. Sand drifts into the cavities archaeologists cleared hours earlier. Temporary barriers do little against the sea’s constant reshaping.

Locals Become Guardians

As soon as word spread, dozens of residents arrived—some out of curiosity, others out of concern. But among them were people prepared to stand guard.

“This isn’t just wood and nails; it’s our history washing up on shore,” said Tran Thi Lan, a fisherwoman who has joined local monitoring teams.

The idea of community guardianship emerged after several coastal wrecks were looted before authorities arrived. In Hoi An, local NGOs and heritage centres trained fishermen and residents to report unusual underwater findings, watch beaches during storms, and document artifacts before they disappear.

For officials, this network bought crucial minutes—sometimes hours—before the tide, or scavengers, arrived.

Inside a makeshift tent overlooking the wreck, archaeologists worked with alarming speed. Some took measurements. Others operated drones or recorded 3D scans.

Vietnam is deploying a full toolkit: sonar mapping to detect submerged section, ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) to examine cavities too risky for divers, 3D photogrammetry to record the wreck in digital form, AI reconstruction models, trained on previous Cham and Dai Viet vessels, to simulate the ship’s original structure.

“Even if we cannot salvage all of it, digital preservation gives us a way to study the vessel for years,” Trung said.

Despite progress, Vietnam’s underwater heritage sector remains underfunded and overstretched. There is no dedicated national authority for underwater archaeology. Projects are handled ad hoc, depending on which provincial office happens to oversee the area.

“The coastline is long, and storms do not wait for budgets,” a Ministry of Culture official admitted. “We need a central agency. Without it, we will always be chasing emergencies.”

International support has accelerated this shift. Japanese, Australian, and French marine archaeology teams have collaborated with Vietnamese researchers since the early 2000s. UNESCO, which Vietnam joined under the 2001 Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage, insists on in-situ preservation where possible to avoid disturbing marine ecosystems.

“The ethical principles must guide everything,” a Vietnamese expert wrote in a UNESCO training manual. “We are not just preserving artifacts—we are preserving evidence of human mobility, exchange, and memory.”

Millions of people across the region have been affected by the storm.

-Asia Media Centre