It's believed to be the largest ever created.

Cast from nearly 600,000 pounds of silver, gold, copper, and tin, the great bell of Damazedi was created in

1484 for a Burmese king of the same name, before he gifted it to a pagoda in Myanmar.

And for over a century, that's where it stayed, which is no surprise. After all, as wildly valuable

as it was, you would think an insanely heavy, nearly 18-foot-tall bell would be safe from theft.

But, well, you'd be wrong.

In 1608, the region had been overtaken by the Portuguese,

who decided that they would like to steal that shiny bell

and transform it from an instrument of peace into a weapon of war.

The plan was to float the bell via raft across the river to Syriam, where the metal

could be melted down and turned into a cannon.

And so in what I can only imagine was a deeply unwieldy operation, Portuguese warlord Philippe

DeBrito and his men transported

the bell toward the water through a combination of elephant hauling and good old-fashioned

rolling down a hill. Finally, Debrito wrangled the bell onto a raft, tethered it to his own ship,

and started across the river. Unfortunately, 295 tons of solid metal wasn't exactly buoyant.

The raft sank, dragging Debrito's ship down with it, which is how the legendary

bell plummeted deep into the waters where the Bego and Yangon rivers met, and that's

exactly where it stayed.

Because the thing is, the great bell of Dama Zady was never

found again. That's right, despite countless attempts over multiple centuries, not to mention repeated

scans using high-tech sonar, the bell is still missing. Which certainly feels hard to believe.

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