When maritime disaster all but wiped out Hong Kong’s cricket team – the sinking of the SS Bokhara in 1892
- A disaster that shook the former colony nearly 130 years ago has been resurrected by researchers from City University’s Lighthouse Heritage Research Connections project
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”.
The Bokhara was a substantial ocean-going vessel used to carrying mail, cargo and passengers from China to the port of Colombo, in Sri Lanka, in all conditions. Built on the River Clyde, in Scotland, in 1873, it was a three-masted steamer of 2,900 tonnes and a length of 365 feet – about three times as long as a Star Ferry.
