When maritime disaster all but wiped out Hong Kong’s cricket team – the sinking of the SS Bokhara in 1892

On October 8, 1892, Hong Kong’s cricket team was returning home from an annual inter-port match in Shanghai when their ship foundered in a typhoon.

Of the 148 passengers and crew on board the P&O steam­ship SS Bokhara, only two team members were among the 23 survivors. The China Mail reported at the time that “the wreck seems to have been one of the most appalling that has ever taken place on the China coast”.

One-hundred-and-twenty-seven years later, researchers from City University’s Lighthouse Heritage Research Connections (LHRC) project, led by Dr Steve Ching Hsianghoo, have returned from the Penghu Islands, in the Taiwan Strait, where their explora­tion of the Yuwengdao (Fisher Island) Lighthouse took a drift of its own, enabling the reconstruction of a 19th century maritime tragedy that shocked colonial Hong Kong.

“Lighthouses on the China coast were more than navi­gational aids,” says Ching, “they were engineering master­pieces which signified national prestige and they hold the key to many stories about Asia’s maritime past.”

Almost as an aside to their lighthouse research, the team of architecture and multimedia specialists have resurrected the Bokhara disaster, which Ching believes is much more than an obscure anecdote from the dusty annals of Hong Kong’ s colonial past. For him, the story remains an impor­tant example of “connecting the Eastern and Western worlds”.