Blasts bandits and boats on the Pearl River Delta: when 100 people died in a bombing
- On a sailing from Canton to Hong Kong, the Miss Orient was targeted by gangs seeking extortion money
- The culprits were later arrested and executed in front of a big, cheering crowd
“I was sitting near the rear of the ballroom when the explosion occurred,” Lo Wing-keng, a survivor of a riverboat disaster, told the South China Morning Post on March 26, 1949.
Lo was a passenger on the Miss Orient, sailing from Canton to Hong Kong on March 24, when it “was rocked by a mine off her port bow [...] and sunk within three minutes, with 381 people aboard”. About 100 were later reported to have died in the incident.
Another survivor told the paper: “Many of the passengers were in the Ballroom of the ship where Miss Yuet Er was rendering songs. At about 11pm an explosion was heard [...] Within less than five minutes from the time of the explosion, the ship took on a heavy list.”
News reached Hong Kong via a cable from a nearby ship, which read: “Miss Orient complete wreck on her side. Blocking channel. Requires immediate assistance.”
According to Lo, survivors huddled on the exposed side of the ship with “no protection from the wind and rain” until morning, when the Chinese navy arrived. “Over ten persons died that night through exposure and injuries,” he said, adding, “very few in the steerage class managed to escape”.
“At least 50 bodies are still trapped inside the Miss Orient,” reported the Post on March 27. “The ill-fated vessel was the third blown up by river bandits [...] They were dynamited because of their refusal to pay extortion money.” Agents for the Miss Orient said they had never received extortion letters.
On May 12, the Post reported that all the principal culprits in the bombing had been arrested following “two months of painstaking investigation with Garrison agents often posing among the culprits in schemes to extort money”.
The two ringleaders were publicly executed on June 11. “The Gods showed their wrath on the bandits and sent down rain as the two condemned were put aboard an open lorry to the execution ground [...] There were cheers as soon as the two bandits were shot dead, as a big crowd witnessed the execution.”
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