The story of Hong Kong’s newest old junk, built by hand the traditional way in China
The scarlet-sailed Aqua Luna has gained a sister vessel, built at one of the last shipyards still with the skills to assemble a wooden junk by hand – skills Hong Kong itself has lost
A story on junks should probably begin in the 10th century, when China began using them for trading expeditions. It could then continue into the 15th century, when Admiral Zheng He, originally from landlocked Yunnan, voyaged in a fleet of junks round Southeast Asia. It might include 19th-century British traders in Hong Kong who, illegally, bought a junk from China in 1846, called it the Keying, and sailed it to New York and London. (Queen Victoria was impressed; Charles Dickens was not.) Those were the days when Hong Kong’s harbour creaked with the massed sound of batwing sails.
But this tale of a single junk starts in a shipyard near Zhuhai, in China’s Guangdong province, in October 2016. Weeks later, at about midday on Halloween, the newest exemplar of a dying tradition was about to take to the water. Its Chinese name would be Dai Cheung Po, its English one Aqua Luna II.
Many Hongkongers will be familiar with the first Aqua Luna; the scarlet-sailed junk has become almost as much of a symbol of Hong Kong as the green Star Ferries. The vessel is known in Chinese as Cheung Po Tsai, after the Qing dynasty pirate who, apparently, hid some of his booty on one of Hong Kong’s outlying islands, Cheung Chau; Dai Cheung Po would be its big (dai) brother.
The first Aqua Luna was launched in 2006.
“The idea came from Sars,” says Richard Ward, director and co-founder – with David Yeo – of Aqua Restaurant Group, referring to the 2003 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome, which killed 299 people in Hong Kong. Ward was headed to Zhuhai on an early-morning ferry from Hong Kong on November 5. “Remember how depressing that time was? We’d opened Aqua and Hutong in One Peking Road and lots of customers were coming from Hong Kong Island and we thought it would be a nice way to help them by having our own boat. It took on a life of its own. What was intended to be a simple boat became a traditional teak, red-sail junk.”
The entire process had taken two years. Every seagoing vessel in Hong Kong must be registered and licensed by the Marine Department. “And when we went they said, ‘We have no regulations for this,’” Ward recalls. “They said a new junk hadn’t been built for 50 years.”