from The Straits Times
Sentosa bid to buy ... sunken Tang treasures
go to article (PDF format)

This latest story of how Singapore's foremost tourist resort island sees the uses of heritage is a sobering counter-point to the idealism of heritage preservation and presentation as we know it. Increasingly, the larger issue (and very real problem) of sustainability of heritage preservation outside a mass-market paradigm cannot be simply ignored. It also points to the utter bankruptcy of ideas for funding heritage efforts, if not for the mass-market option.

Also, if anyone else had noticed that the story involves a Chinese cargo bound for the Near East, shipwrecked off the coast of present-day Indonesia, salvaged and sold by a German company, to be purchased by Sentosa Development Corporation of Singapore, which has an American as its CEO. Perhaps, the global underpinning of such a story is inevitable (or is it deliberate?) given the core (tourism) business of the potential buyer of the sunken cargo.