Hong Kong’s Ocean Giant, Part II: Sea of Fire

This is the second story in a three-part series about the Seawise Giant, an ill-fated vessel that was once the world’s largest ship — a ship with a distinct connection to Hong Kong. 

On May 15, 1988, Iraq’s official press agency quoted a military spokesperson as saying that the country’s air force had attacked a “large naval target” overnight. That would turn out to be an understatement: they had dropped two thousand-kilogram bombs on the largest manmade object in the world, the Seawise Giant.

The Iran–Iraq War was already in its eighth and final year. Hostilities had first erupted when Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran in 1980. Officially, the conflict was about preventing Iran from exporting radical Islamic revolution to its western neighbour. Actually, it was more about Baghdad pouncing upon this moment of political instability to supplant Tehran as the dominant power in the oil-rich Persian Gulf region.

Oil refineries and terminals became prime targets and crucial redoubts in the ensuing resource war. Fighting spilled into Persian Gulf lanes in 1984, and more than 500 ships were damaged in hostilities. Maritime agencies estimated that hundreds of seamen were killed in the fighting, which also became known as the ”tanker war.” It was only a matter of time before the biggest tanker afloat fell in the crosshairs. For a little under two years, Seawise Giant had been moored off Iran’s Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz – a critical maritime choke point for petroleum products. (In 2025, it is once again the focus of international concern as Iran threatens to block the Strait in response to Israeli and US attacks targeting the country’s military and nuclear infrastructure.)

Redesigned as a floating storage-and-off-loading facility, or FSO, Seawise Giant served as the terminus of a pipeline that began at Iran’s oil fields and stretched across the seafloor. Lesser tankers could pull up alongside the steel leviathan like pilot fish, siphon off a portion of the black tar in its belly, and take that anywhere in the world. By doing so off Larak, they also steered clear of waters nearer the war zone with Iraq at the headwaters of the Persian Gulf.

Initial reports on the Iraqi bombing claimed that Seawise Giant now lay at the bottom of the sea. Despite being charred by flames down to its waterline and being declared a constructive total loss, the Giant was, miraculously, still afloat. Cargo that had not burned away was discharged to other tankers – a merciful reprieve for local marine life, since the ship carried four times as much oil as the Exxon Valdez spewed into Prince William Sound the following year.

This is where Seawise Giant’s relationship with Hong Kong comes to an end. Indeed, this is where she ceases to be the Seawise Giant at all. A Norwegian investment firm bought the vessel and renamed her Happy Giant. After repairs in Singapore, she was sold again to Norwegian shipowner Jørgen Jahre, who christened her Jahre Viking. In 2004, she returned to the Persian Gulf under yet another new name, when the tanker was purchased by First Olsen Tankers, renamed Knock Nevis, and reverted to a floating storage tanker.

It was a predictable return to form for the ocean titan. It had not taken long for Seawise Giant’s owners to realise she was more useful as a floating island than a moving ship. Even before her ill-fated service in Iran, she had been used as a storage tanker for several years in the Gulf of Mexico. By the time her fate was sealed, CY Tung had long since passed. In his 1982 obituary, United Press International name-checked two vessels among his fleet of more than 150.

One, of course, was Seawise Giant. The other was the Cunard Line’s RMS Queen Elizabeth, which Tung purchased in 1970 and renamed Seawise University – “seawise” being a homophone for “CY’s”. Tung intended to convert the legendary liner, which served as a troopship in the Second World War, into a floating college for the World Campus Afloat programme, now known as Semester at Sea. His plans were quite literally scuppered, however, when a fire ripped through the ship during its refitting in Victoria Harbour’s western anchorage in 1972. The vessel was capsized by the water used to fight the fire, and the following year, the wreck was deemed an obstruction to navigation and partially scrapped on site. Today, the final remains of Seawise University lie buried under the reclaimed land that forms Kwai Tsing Container Terminal 9.

After Seawise Giant was renamed Happy Giant, it became Jahre Viking and finally Knock Nevis. Illustration via Wikimedia Commons.

Since that day, the Queen Elizabeth blaze has been the stuff of mystery, and has fuelled salacious political rumours surrounding CY Tung and the trajectory of his maritime empire. Some suggest Tung himself instigated the fire to cash in on insurance claims – a theory that, like the suggestion that the Titanic was sunk as an insurance scam, holds little water. Others speculated the inferno was caused by conflicts between Tung, a Chinese Nationalist closely associated with Taiwan, and Communist-dominated ship construction unions. There is scant evidence to shore up this seamen’s yarn, but the outcome did work out in Beijing’s favour. After the losses incurred by the Seawise University and Seawise Giant fires, Tung’s Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL) declared bankruptcy in the mid-1980s. His eldest son and successor, Tung Chee-hwa, accepted a bailout from the state-owned Bank of China and China Merchants, the local arm of China’s transport ministry. The deal was orchestrated by Henry Fok, a local pro-Beijing entrepreneur born on the water to a family of Tanka boat dwellers. He allegedly made his fortune gun-running into mainland China during the Korean War in the early 1950s, circumventing a United Nations arms embargo.

Tung Chee-hwa continued to run OOCL until Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997, when he was appointed the first Chief Executive of the Special Administrative Region. Despite resigning halfway through his second term, after historic protests forced him to shelve attempts to introduce national security legislation and step down from office, Tung continued to enjoy Beijing’s favour. After leaving Government House, he served as a vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference for nearly two decades. CY’s second son, Tung Chee-chen, took the helm as the chairman and CEO of OOCL’s parent company and soon became one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest people. Today, he is a member of the pro-Beijing One Country Two Systems Research Institute and an independent non-executive director for major state-owned enterprises.

Tung’s Giant gambit had not paid off, and now the waves were closing over his legacy. What had once been an armada of the Republic of China in Hong Kong, run by a KMT loyalist, was now part of the PRC’s rapidly growing national fleet – and its promising scions were now strident Communist Party supporters.