Great Bell of Dhammazedi - Current Status

Current Status

Numerous individuals have tried to save the bell, thus far without success. Professional deep sea diver, James Blunt, has made 115 dives to find the bell, using sonar images of objects in the area for guidance. Making it even harder to find is the fact that there are also 3 shipwrecks in the area. The water is muddy and visibility is extremely poor under the surface. The Dhammazedi Bell is thought to be buried in 25 feet (7.6 m) of mud. The great Bell rests between the wrecks of two Dutch East Indiaman ships: Komine and Koning David, along with small pieces of De Brito's galleon.

In 2000, the Burmese government asked an English marine scientist named Mike Hatcher and his team to raise the bell; they wanted to see it restored to the Pagoda. Hatcher agreed to undertake the project, which has involvement from Japanese, Australian and American companies. Richard Gere is involved in raising funds.

The project is not without its opponents: Some pro-democracy campaigners say the salvage operation might be misconstrued as an endorsement by the international community of Myanmar's military dictatorship, and should wait until talks with the regime have progressed or until such time as a democratic government is in place.

One of seven salvage projects forecast for Mike Hatcher and his team in 2001, Mike's team was slated to begin the search for the precise location of the Dhammazedi Bell in March that year. After a flurry of excitement stirred up by BBC's announcement of the project, however, it apparently did not get off the ground, perhaps due to complications involved in his discovery in June 2000 of a huge sunken wreck in Indonesian waters, with the largest collection of porcelain ever found.

If the project ever does go forward, divers will use some combination of sub-bottom profilers, personal mounted sonar, night vision devices, and copper sulphate detectors to locate the bell (since the mud around all that bronze would be expected to have a high concentration of copper sulphate). About nine months after the survey they expect to lift the bell from the river. To do this, they will have to build a small version of a North Sea oil platform in the muddy rapids of the confluence of two rivers, and assemble a large crane to lift the bell out of the water. Once it is lifted, they will construct a railway to transport it uphill about half a mile to the Shwedagon Pagoda. This final operation will take about four months.

In July 2010, the Myanmar Times reported an Australian documentary filmmaker and explorer Damien Lay to be another foreigner who had decided to take it up as his new project. Lay and his team, conducted extensive side scan sonar surveys and diving operations, covering approximately four square kilometers of river floor in the area where it was believed the bell may be located. Lay and his team, identified and confirmed the presence of fourteen shipwrecks in the area where the bell is believed to be located. Lay and his team identified two significant targets and acquired sonar imagery of both the bell and the galleon ship. Both targets are visible to sonar and resting on the sea floor. The location of these targets has not been released. Both targets are well outside the area where the bell was previously thought to be. Lay had stated that the location of the bell was not where most people thought, that the myths and legends surrounding the location of the bell was not supported by evidence and that the location of the bell had been significantly overlooked by the misinterpretation of the history. "the location of the bell was quite surprising" Lay said.

Lay had conducted the bell search as part of the Lady Southern Cross Search Expedition, an ongoing operation privately funded operation conducted over the past eight years by Lay. The bell search was conducted as return to gesture to people and Government of Myanmar for their assistance and support in allowing Lay to search for and recover the wreckage of the Lady Southern Cross and remains of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith and John Thompson "Tommy" Pethybridge, who disappeared off the coast of Myanmar on November 8, 1935.

Previous attempts to locate the bell, by both domestic and foreign teams since 1987, either failed or did not materialize. Some treasures from the Shwedagon, part of the loot, are also believed to be there guarded by nat spirits, and some locals have claimed to have sighted the bell surfacing on a full moon night.

At the end of June 2012, the Historical Research Department of the Ministry of Culture and SD Mark International LLP Co of Singapore held a workshop in Yangon for a renewed attempt with the Singaporean firm pledging USD 10 million for the non-profit project.