The Sunrise Orient, travelling from Nansha, in Guangdong province, to Indonesia, continued to circle before the engine cut out about a kilometre east of Cheung Chau and the vessel drifted onto the rocky beach at Tung Wan Tsai.

Floating booms were soon deployed by the Marine Department's pollution control unit, to contain a small oil slick.

"There was only a light sheen of oil which escaped when she first came to rest on the rocks, so it was rapidly dealt with," says Alan Loynd, managing director of Branscombe Marine Consultants, and an international salvage expert.

Fortunately, the Sunrise Orient was wrecked in a relatively quiet area, away from the busy ferry lanes to Macau. Nevertheless, the authorities wanted the Sunrise Orient removed as fast as possible, not least because of possible environmental damage. Furthermore, typhoon season was approaching.

By February 24, Clive Beesley, director of legal and claims consultants C Solutions (Hong Kong), had been engaged by the ship's Vietnamese owner, Hai Phong Sea Product. Beesley enlisted Loynd to assist with technical matters.

Normally, it takes several weeks to select wreck-removal contractors. But the fact that most of the key insurance and advisory players in this case were based in Hong Kong sped up the process. Potential contractors weren't given long to inspect the casualty and prepare their bids, says Beesley.

The time taken on this job, from start to finish, would be about three months, says Beesley, who helped collate and compare bids from salvage contractors in Hong Kong, the mainland, Singapore and the Netherlands.

"Granted, it's a two-hold cargo ship, not the Costa Concordia, but by any standards it was done and dusted pretty quickly."

Fortunately, "the ship didn't go upside down and sink under the waves; she was just having a sleep".

The cargo was 2,800 tonnes of "soil stabiliser", a cement-like substance used to build cheap roads through jungle, says Loynd. "Basically, it's quick-setting road." This presented a problem. Water in the hold had made it set rock hard inside 40kg paper bags. Solidified, it was also worthless. The ship was 4,244 tonnes of deadweight.

As salvage companies began flying in to do on-site inspections before placing bids, the owner, perhaps mindful of the guerilla film crew, placed guards at the site to protect it, says Beesley. A bobbing boat would provide a home for the round-the-clock security detail for the rest of the salvage operation.

Progress was rapid and by March 14, Loynd had evaluated five shortlisted bidders.

"We knew they could do the job," he says. "They had all produced their plan, so we could gauge if they were serious and if their method would be accepted in Hong Kong."

Bidders had to submit safety plans and spell out how they would protect the environment and what they would do if a typhoon struck.

Loynd says there was little danger of the ship breaking up: "She was resting on the seabed and in a relatively sheltered location. The danger initially would have been from pollution, so the first thing was to block up all the outlets and make sure that couldn't happen."

The joint-venture salvage contractors awarded the job were local firm Yew Kee Hong and mainland operator Zhoushan Donghai Underwater Engineering Company, which led the project, with Hu Zhihui as salvage master. Contracts were signed on March 26 and by mid-April the salvage had begun.

When Hu arrived with barges, his first jobs were to put in place his team's own oil booms and send down divers to do a thorough survey of the seabed, taking care to avoid a submarine cable about 400 metres away.

Mooring the ship securely was critical. Onshore, mooring wires were fastened around big rocks while, offshore, 50-tonne concrete sinkers on the seabed were chained to mooring buoys.

The next job was to remove the hatch covers, to inspect the cargo. The inside of submerged holds is fascinating, says Loynd. "It's cathedral like, the colour of the water is like a stained-glass window."

The cargo had become a mess of cement chunks and shards of wooden pallet. The 25-strong salvage crew's biggest challenge was to break it up and get it out of the ship. Grabs were used to lift the cargo from the hold and onto waiting barges. Disposing of the worthless cargo was an operation in itself; dumping it into the sea was not an option.

"It went to a disposal company in China that issued proper certificates that the Marine Department found acceptable," Loynd says.

Next the lugs had to be welded in place for the parbuckling - the process of slinging wires under a ship for support while she is rotated upright by cranes - and for the rigging up of discharge hoses and submersible pumps inside the wreck.

"Everyone was focused on the fact that if we didn't get it out of the way before typhoon season we could be in deep trouble," says Loynd. "As long as she was lying firmly on the seabed, I don't think even a typhoon would have done too much damage. The danger time was when they started to remove the cargo and she started to float.

"We wouldn't even have started the refloating and parbuckling if there had been any sort of adverse weather forecast."

The salvage escaped the typhoons, but it rained nearly every day from mid-March to tow-away day, May 31, which didn't help working conditions.

At one point, a stinking red tide washed into the bay and stayed for more than a week.

"At first, I thought somebody had been washing their cargo tanks out at sea: the smell was fetid," says Loynd. He says he felt particularly sorry for the divers having to work amid the foul algal bloom. "It just smelled and looked vile, but there was nothing we could do. It was particularly thick by Cheung Chau."

Welding closed the openings in the hull and preparing to pump out the water was a key part of the work, with divers sealing the gaps between the hatch pontoons.

Once all the water had been pumped out, the parbuckling could begin. The salvage team intended to bring the ship upright, then support it with cranes while they finished pumping out the water and patching up the holes that became visible as the ship was rolled over.

"The cranes were kept in place until they were absolutely sure she was safely afloat," says Loynd.

He says he was fascinated to see the amount of marine growth and the number of hard-shelled molluscs that had attached themselves to the ship in the three months she had been underwater. Normally, the decks of sunken ships are covered in mud and slime when they emerge, but this one had a crisp surface coating of shells.

"These made an absolutely brilliant non-skid surface [for the salvage team when they had to move about the decks]. I'm thinking of patenting the idea."

The next stage was the removal of all vestiges of cargo. Afloat again on May 23, it was important to find any remaining leaks and patch them up to ensure the vessel was fit for towing.

The Sunrise Orient was then moved, so that she was no longer hard up against the rocks. This enabled Hu's team to start clearing the site and removing all traces of their presence.

Taikoo, a local ocean-going tug, turned up on what Loynd remembers as "the only fine day we had". The ship was towed out to sea and up the Pearl River to a shipyard. From there, the Sunrise Orient's fate "is unknown", says Loynd.

Hu had managed to "pull it together; he was quite impressive", says Beesley.

"Granted, we had to point out a few things to him; like, 'No, you can't build a platform to the rocks from the site for your mechanical digger because the government won't like it'," Loynd laughs. "We had to explain that, no, they couldn't drive piles into the rocks - that would have involved so many government departments that none of us would have lived long enough to see the end of the job."

As it was, says Loynd, "The site as we left it was pristine. You'd never know there had been a wreck there. It was tidied up … and handed back to nature.