STUTTGART, October 2000. Nunus Supardi, Director for Antiquities at the Department of Culture still remembers how enthusiastically Stuttgart residents greeted the auction of Indonesian underwater treasures. Thousands of antique porcelain pieces from a Ching dynasty ship, the Tek Sing which ran aground in the Gelasa Strait between the islands of Bangka and Belitung in 1822, were to be sold to the general public.

For months before the actual au