The ship had been loaded at the kilns of the Red River Delta — workshops around Chu Dau and nearby centers that supplied the export trade during Vietnam's Lê dynasty. Vietnamese ceramics from this period were among the finest produced anywhere in Asia, competing with Chinese wares on the same trade routes. But because the kilns exported nearly everything they made, keeping only defective pieces, intact examples were extraordinarily rare. Archaeologists excavating the kiln sites had found only broken and flawed goods. When the Hội An wreck surfaced — literally and figuratively — it offered something that had not existed before: an undisturbed cargo of Vietnamese ceramics en masse, a cross-section of what the workshops actually produced rather than what happened to survive onshore. The excitement in the scholarly community was immediate.

The looters who found the wreck before the archaeologists used crude but effective methods. Weighted hooks dragged across the seabed with nets behind them dislodged artifacts and swept them up. The pieces that emerged — bowls, jars, ewers with intricate openwork panels — began appearing in antique markets from Hanoi to Europe to San Francisco. The Vietnamese government knew it had to act. The wreck lay below the depth limits of standard scuba diving, making a quick salvage impossible without specialist equipment. In 1996, businessman Ong Soo Hin partnered with Oxford University marine archaeologist Mensun Bound, and together they brought in Vietnam's National History Museum and the York Archaeological Trust. The project would run four years and cost an estimated US$14 million.

Over three field seasons, the team recovered nearly 300,000 artifacts — or, in the project's own accounting, a third of a million pieces of pottery. Most were everyday tableware: repetitive forms with practical rather than artistic intent, the mass production of a 15th-century export industry. But among the ordinary were pieces of real distinction — elaborate stoneware vessels with openwork panels, blue-and-white wares of delicate execution, pieces decorated with traced enamel and gilding. A committee of Vietnamese archaeologists and art historians selected the finest for the National Collection in Hanoi. Six museums across Vietnam received additional material. The remaining 90 percent — the bulk of the cargo — was auctioned by Butterfields in San Francisco in 2000, with proceeds divided among the salvage partners and used partly to fund the curation and study of the national holdings.

The Hội An wreck is known formally as the Cu Lao Cham wreck, a name that anchors it to the islands that Hội An's maritime culture had always depended on. It is dated to the mid-to-late 1400s — a period when Vietnamese ceramic production was at or near its peak, and when Hội An was already established as a major regional port. The cargo tells a story of trade at scale: not exotic luxury goods for a handful of wealthy buyers, but hundreds of thousands of pieces destined for markets across Southeast Asia and beyond. The looters who dragged the site, the dealers caught with suitcases at Da Nang airport, the four-year international salvage effort — all of it reflects how much was at stake when a piece of that history surfaced from the seabed.