Before the shipwreck, Jumbo Seafood Boat was looking for a home, including donating to Ocean Park.
Jumbo Seafood Boat.
Reporter/Gong Yijie
In 2018, the fifth season of South Korea's TVN travel variety show "New Journey to the West" was filmed in Hong Kong. This variety show is based on characters from Journey to the West and introduces the beauty, cuisine and customs of various cities. When the film crew came to the maritime restaurant "Jumbo Seafood Boat" located in the typhoon shelter of Aberdeen, the huge painting boat built in front of the imitation lighting palace looked golden and magnificent in the dark night, and everyone exclaimed and picked up their mobile phones to take pictures.
It is like a pearl of night that will never sink. But at that time, this treasure kingdom was no longer as prosperous as it seemed on the outside. Opened in 1976, this restaurant has witnessed the changing times in Hong Kong and was once one of the iconic places to explore the flavors of Hong Kong.
In March 2020, due to the impact of the new crown epidemic, Jumbo Seafood Restaurant announced its closure and spent two years at sea.
This treasure of the sea has once again attracted the attention of the world, which is the bad news that it was encountered by wind and waves on the way to Cambodia for repairs, and sank near the Paracel Islands - this magnificent and splendid building ended up with a "shipwreck", which is embarrassing and lamentable.
Memories and imaginations of the Golden Age
Not every Hong Konger loves Jumbo Seafood. But it's hard to deny that even as a commercial attraction, it already has a place in The Silhouette of Hong Kong.
The form of a floating restaurant in Hong Kong dates back to the 1920s. At that time, in the Pearl River Delta, the boat-based fishermen were called "yanmin", and they first began to cook on the boat to provide the freshest seafood dishes for the local people.
In the 1950s, there were already many small seafood dishes. In 1952, Hong Kong businessman Wang Laoji acquired the then-famous "Taibai Seafood Boat" and converted it into a two-story painting boat, and later built a larger treasure seafood boat. But unfortunately, before the opening, there was a fire on the painting boat, and finally the original owner withdrew, and The Macau "gambler" Ho Hung-sun took over the industry in 1962 and integrated several ships into the "Treasure Kingdom".
Seafood restaurant in Aberdeen, 1969.
This renovation has taken the sense of luxury imagined in the old times to the extreme. The newly built Jumbo Seafood Boat is 76 meters long, three stories high, with carved beams and paintings, red walls and green tiles, and can accommodate more than 2,300 people, which can only be reached by ferry boat. The total cost of the renovation was HK$32 million (about 27.27 million yuan), and the "dragon chair" placed in the ship took two years to build. The restaurant's signature dishes are fresh seafood served directly by the surrounding fishermen, such as lobster and yellow foot wax, and Cantonese refreshments such as roasted pork, shrimp dumplings and bamboo noodles are also the main features of the menu.
It seems to concretize the imaginary magnificent Pearl of the Orient, Hong Kong, in a slightly pompous way. The huge investment has also made it a hot filming location: it has witnessed Bruce Lee's "Dragon Fight tiger fight", Chow Sing Chi's "God Eater" in the classic scene of eclipsed rice cooking, and in 1974 "007 The Golden Gun Man" also appeared in the jumbo seafood boat. In the nearly half century of anchoring in the harbor, the restaurant has witnessed countless Hong Kong families entertaining guests here, receiving celebrities such as Queen Elizabeth II, Tom Cruise, Chow Yun Fat, and Ho Himself has hosted birthday banquets on the ship.
As a popular sightseeing spot, some Hong Kong people believe that treasure gimmicks outweigh quality. YouTube video blogger "Delicious Food" once made a short documentary series "Taste of Old Hong Kong", one of which was featured in Jumbo Seafood Restaurant. Char siu buns, roast selling, fried spring rolls, roast goose are all tried, and the blogger gives an evaluation of "decent, but there are countless better than it".
In the view of some cultural scholars, Jumbo Seafood Is not a self-consistent product, but is related to Hong Kong's colonial history and the West's stereotypical imagination of the East. Hong Kong historian Zhao Shanxuan commented that it "witnessed an era — an era in which Hong Kong's Chinese and Western cultures converged." Its architecture, the murals, tea sets, and dragon chair seats inside are all traditional Chinese cultural features, but many of its meals and designs cater to the impression of Western tourists on the curiosity of the East. In terms of decoration, Jumbo Seafood Boat is extremely gorgeous, and the golden dragon carving and highly saturated paint have also made many bloggers give "earthy" and "customary" evaluations. Kong Yufeng, a professor of sociology at Hopkins University in the United States, bluntly said on Twitter that the ship is "self-orientalized" and is not worth remembering. "It's designed for ignorant tourists who seek embarrassing exoticism and offers subprime food, disappear, and don't come back."
The inside of the Jumbo Seafood Boat imitates the ancient court design.
A painting boat that cannot be donated
Such a behemoth requires very high maintenance costs. Aberdeen Catering Group revealed that the annual hull inspection, maintenance, maintenance and licensing costs cost millions of Hong Kong dollars.
From the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis in 1998 to the SARS epidemic in 2003, Jumbo Seafood Mills has been hit several times, with monthly losses reaching tens of millions of Hong Kong dollars. Despite the continued presence of tourists, the number of visitors has not been as good as before, and in 2013, the decline of tourism and high pricing in the store reduced the number of restaurants, and the company announced that Jumbo Seafood Boat has begun to make ends meet.
The more direct blow is the new crown epidemic in 2020, Hong Kong's tourism industry has been hit hard, restaurants have to close under the epidemic prevention policy, and Jumbo Seafood Restaurant also announced its closure on March 3 of that year.
The government once thought of saving seafood by means of public welfare. On 25 November 2020, carrie Lam, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, delivered her annual Policy Address, which mentioned the "Leap Hong Kong Island South Plan", which aims to renovate the Hong Kong Island South District Plan and make it a leisure and entertainment hub to attract more tourists, including upgrading the construction of cultural and recreational facilities in the area, expanding the berthing area for boats, and accelerating the transformation and reconstruction of industrial parks, including Aberdeen, where Jumbo Seafood Farm is moored.
Located in the Southern District, Hong Kong's Ocean Park plans to "develop a plan for the rebirth of Ocean Park" to expand its scope of operations and enhance the attractiveness of Ocean Park by using the Jumbo Seafood Restaurant, a landmark building.
The report states that the owners of Jumbo Seafood Boat have agreed to donate the boat to Ocean Park and that the Hong Kong Government "will promote Ocean Park and non-governmental organisations to assist in making Jumbo Seafood Boat a historical and cultural tourist attraction in the Southern District in a non-profit-making manner." ”
After the report was released, Ocean Park Chairman Liu Mingwei also posted on Instagram, saying that the new initiatives, including the donation of Jumbo Seafood, are a win-win situation for all parties.
Each chair of the Jumbo Seafood Boat is engraved with the word "Jumbo".
However, Jumbo Seafood Boat did not end up as an ocean park property. According to media reports, Ocean Park has not been able to find a suitable third-party operating company. In the year that followed, Aberdeen Food & Beverage Group struggled to find a successor and wanted to donate the restaurant to any organization interested in taking over the operation, but all parties said that the operating costs were too high. The government ultimately said it would not invest taxpayers' money in a restaurant that has lost more than HK$100 million in the past decade if it cannot find an operator.
The awkward situation continued until May, when the Jumbo Seafood Vessel license expired and the company announced it could only pull it out of port to find a new stop outside Hong Kong.
On 14 June, barges that had been stuck in place for nearly half a century set sail for the first time, but it became the last. According to a statement issued by the Aberdeen Company, the Jumbo Seafood Boat began to completely "capsize" when it passed through the Paracel Islands on the 19th, and only 6 of the 8 buoyancy cabins on the ship are still in operation. The water depth of the place where the accident occurred exceeded 1,000 meters, and it is expected that the salvage project will be very difficult.
A Hong Kong naval architect Szeto Ka-shing said in an interview with the media that it may take more than 3 cranes of more than 500 tons to mobilize and spend more than 20 million Hong Kong dollars to achieve salvage, which is almost impossible, which means that the sinking of The Jumbo Seafood Ship may eventually be a foregone conclusion.
On June 14, The Treasure Seafood Boat, a tourist landmark in Hong Kong, a film filming destination and a haven in Aberdeen for nearly 46 years, was officially dragged out of Hong Kong.
Some commentators have said that if the treasure seafood boat can be pulled into the deep water, it may be able to "make it a habitat for underwater fish people, and also a treasure place for divers to explore." On social media, someone also sent out an illustration: the painting ship sank into the deep blue water, chiseled into the bottom of the sea to become an underwater palace. Surrounded by aquatic weeds, bubbles and colorful fish with smiling faces.
"Imagine how happy the fish will be." Written on the screen. Perhaps, in the face of the sinking of a ship and the passing of an era, this is the most romantic and appropriate way of sending off people can choose.
Image source: IC, Visual China, Hong Kong Heritage
Photo editor: Zhang Xu
Duty Editor: Wan Xiaojun