Music

Why Was the Wu-Tang Clan’s Secret Album Once Locked in Morocco?

BYYassine Hariss

August 25, 2026

Of all the places you might expect one of hip-hop’s most mysterious albums to have spent years hidden away, Morocco probably wouldn’t be your first guess. And yet, for a couple of years, the only existing copy of a Wu-Tang Clan album that most of the world has never, and most likely will never, hear was sitting inside a vault somewhere in the North African Kingdom’s South.

The lore of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is already strange enough without the Moroccan chapter. Recorded in secret over several years, pressed into a single physical copy, and sold under conditions designed to turn it into something closer to a piece of fine art, the project has since passed through some rather unlikely hands, including those of disgraced pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli and, eventually, the US government.

The whole purpose of the project, according to its creators, was to challenge what music had become in the digital era: infinitely reproducible, instantly accessible, and increasingly stripped of its core value. By making just one copy, the American hip-hop group made up of RZA, GZA, Method Man, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, U-God, Masta Killa, and, until his death in 2004, Ol’ Dirty Bastard wanted to treat music the way the art world treats a painting or sculpture—as something scarce, physical, and valuable precisely because not everyone could own it, let alone listen to it.

Morocco wasn’t simply where the finished album happened to end up. Its connection to the project goes all the way back to its inception. For those who may not know, the album was largely masterminded by long-time Wu-Tang affiliate Cilvaringz, a Dutch-Moroccan producer credited with the conceptualizing and production of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Recorded over roughly six years, the operation was split between New York and Marrakech, where Cilvaringz had built a studio to mix much of the project.

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And Morocco’s role did not end once the music was finished. If anything, the country became part of the mythology surrounding the album itself. Its sole physical copy was housed inside an elaborate hand-carved silver-nickel box designed by Moroccan artist Yahya Rouach, before being kept in a vault near Marrakech, “in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains”, as Forbes then-reported, before being moved to the Royal Mansour for greater security.

As the project’s somewhat birthplace, and the place where much of it was developed and brought to life, it was only natural that it stayed there. And it did, for a while, until the album eventually left Morocco and began the rather strange journey that would turn it into one of the most talked-about, expensive, and controversial records in music history.

Put up for auction, the tape eventually found a buyer in 2015. After months of negotiations and plenty of secrecy around who was willing to pay such an absurd amount for a record they could not commercially release, the sole copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was sold for a reported $2 million to Martin Shkreli, the American pharmaceutical executive who would soon become one of the most hated men on the internet after increasing the price of a life-saving drug by more than 5,000% overnight for no apparent reason. With the sale, the album left its vault at the Royal Mansour and crossed the Atlantic to its new owner’s home in the United States.

One important detail in all of this: owning Once Upon a Time in Shaolin does not mean you can simply upload it to Spotify and call it a day. As part of the original sale, the album came with an 88-year restriction preventing its owner from commercially exploiting it until 2103. Private and public listening sessions are allowed, but a conventional commercial release is effectively off the table for another 77 years.

Fortunately, Shkreli’s ownership did not last particularly long. After he was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, a US federal court ordered him to forfeit millions of dollars in assets, with the Wu-Tang Clan album eventually surrendered to the US government as part of the process. In 2021, federal prosecutors announced that they had sold the record to an undisclosed buyer to help satisfy Shkreli’s forfeiture judgment. The album ultimately ended up with PleasrDAO, a collective of digital art collectors, in a deal reportedly worth up to $4 million.

Today, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is thousands of miles away from the Marrakech vault it once called home, but Morocco is still all over its story. It is where much of the project came together, where its one-of-one box was made, and where one of the rarest albums in modern music spent its first years hidden from pretty much everyone. And though a handful of listening sessions have taken place since the project left its North African cradle, hearing it remains a privilege afforded to very few. And for many of us out there, Morocco might just be the closest we ever get to a record deliberately designed to stay out of both touch and reach.

Why Was the Wu-Tang Clan’s Secret Album Once Locked in Morocco?

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Why Was the Wu-Tang Clan’s Secret Album Once Locked in Morocco?

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