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Row over ancient timber back in the news
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The dispute over ownership of ancient timber is back in the news again, this time from east China’s Jiangxi Province.
A local resident, Liang Cai, excavated a 24-meter-long and 80-ton trunk of timber from a river in Dongshan Village on September 3. As news of the excavation spread, self-proclaimed experts claimed on the Internet that it was a semi-fossilized timber worth hundreds of millions of yuan, China Central Television reported.
The 39-year-old Liang said he spent two days and spent 90,000 yuan digging out the timber, and hoped to make a fortune of it.
“I was very happy to discover such a treasure,” he told CCTV.
But the government of Xiushui County had other plans.
Zhang Linsen, the deputy director of the local forestry bureau, said the river, where the timber was found, belongs to the country and so does the timber. If the timber was confirmed to be precious, the government would give Liang a reward, he said. The government has denied allegations that the timber was valued at hundreds of millions of yuan.
Yuan Jian, an engineer with the forestry bureau, estimated the timber was at least 700 to 800 years old and was buried underground for as many as 500 years. The provincial wide plants experts said it is bischofia javanica, also known as bishop wood.
The timber is stored in a warehouse for better protection. A further test about its value was still under way, but Liang was already told that the country — and not he — owned the timber, CCTV reported.
In February 2012, Wu Gaoliang excavated pieces of rare, semi-fossilized timber worth an estimated 20 million yuan in his contracted farm in southwest China’s Sichuan Province.
The semi-fossilized timbers he found had been buried for millions of years and were identified as Phoebe zhennan, among the most prized in ancient China with only the royal families and temples having right to it. The local government seized the timbers and rewarded him 70,000 yuan.
Wu dragged the Pengzhou City state-owned assets supervision and administration commission to the court. He demanded that either he should be compensated millions of yuan or given the ownership of the timbers.
The Intermediate People’s Court of Chengdu, which administers Pengzhou, overruled his request on August 1, 2012. And the provincial higher court upheld the decision on June 15, Xinhua news agency reported.
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