When Vietnamese fishermen discovered a historical shipwreck about 90 nautical miles south of Cap Ca Mau in southern Vietnam in 1998, they hauled up more than 30,000 artefacts and 2.4 tons of metal objects in their nets. Sub, a Vietnamese diving and excavation company, working in close collaboration with the Ca Mau Provincial Museum and other responsible agencies, began to salvage the ship.

In 1998 and 1999 more than 130,000 artefacts were recovered from this 450m site. Now, four years later, Nguyen Dinh Chien, chief curator at Vietnam's Museum of Vietnamese History and a leading specialist on ceramics, has published the results of this find in a lavishly illustrated book under the title Tau Co Ca Mau (The Ca Mau Shipwreck), 1723-1735.