The one upside of the 1967 riots was that they gave a temporary boost to the flagging fortunes of the South China Morning Post company's afternoon newspaper, which had been struggling in the shadow of its younger sibling.
On June 1, 1967, at the tender age of 122, the China Mail was transformed into a tabloid. It had come under pressure from a rival started up two years earlier, the Star, by Graham Jenkins, who went on to become the general manager of the Straits Times and then the Hongkong Standard.
The Mail's cover price was halved, a brash young editor named Murray Weppler was brought in, and circulation nearly doubled within a month of the relaunch. But the riots soon subsided and without them, it was hard to keep churning out the kind of sensational stories needed to keep the paper relevant. Its effect on the company's bottom line was noticeable; advertisers generally preferred the more respectable image - and larger circulation - of the Post.
Though the board was generally tolerant of Weppler's style, its patience ran out when the paper published a picture of Mao Zedong swimming the Yangtze, with the head of the governor, Sir David Trench, superimposed next to him. The headline read: 'He who swims wins hearts.' Former editor Robin Hutcheon later wrote that the board was in for an even ruder shock, however, in Weppler's replacement. Peter Rowland, who had been chief sub-editor, felt that Weppler had not been aggressive enough. He began publishing pin-up pictures.
It made no difference to advertising revenue, and by 1972 the paper was clearly a financial burden for the company, which was also experiencing strong morning competition from the Hongkong Standard. It sold a 60 per cent stake to a subsidiary of Television Broadcasts (TVB), which turned the paper back into a broadsheet. But the Mail's costs continued to mount, and two years later, in 1974, the 130th of its existence, TVB decided to close it down.