The Hong Kong-built junk that was once Ripley’s, believe it or not

Hong Kong has an enviable reputation – mostly outside the city – for the wonderful quality of the small wooden boats its craftsmen built from, roughly, the 1880s to the 1980s.

The output ran the gamut from motor cruisers to racing yachts, from sailing dinghies to fine rowing boats and even to variously adapted junks for the export trade. They were the products of the drawing boards of almost every major small-craft designer of the 20th century, as well as of home-grown naval architects.

They were – and the many survivors still are – a testament to the skills of the territory’s boatbuilders, both in terms of the shipwright work on hulls and rigs, and the elaborately carved fancywork they often featured.

This part of Hong Kong’s history rarely, if ever, features in stories about the city’s heritage. Like the shipyards that built them, now buried beneath high-rises hundreds of metres from today’s shorelines, the number and variety of these elegant craft, the workers who built them and the boatyards from which they were launched are remembered by only a handful of enthusiasts, few of whom live in Hong Kong.

These craft went from the city all over the world. Most were carried as cargo, but many sailed away on their own bottoms, to use the approved nautical term. Many of the voyages have become epics in the literature of long-distance, short-handed sailing. Hong Kong-built small craft have featured in record-breaking voyages, spy stories, thrilling escapes under fire, mysteries of disappeared submarines, gripping tales of survival in extreme conditions, movies, drug running and much else besides.

The oldest examples I know of are more than 100 years old – a couple of motor boats in the Vancouver area of Canada, one in almost original condition. They have been there since they were loaded onto a ship after their completion by WS Bailey & Co, in To Kwa Wan, in 1912, and transported across the Pacific.