For maritime historian Professor Howard Dick and co-author Stephen Kentwell, however, the story of legendary Hong Kong shipowner C. Y. Tung became a lifelong project stretching from an encounter with one of his early containerships in 1970 to the launch of their biography in Hong Kong this month.   The finished work, C. Y. Tung (1912–1982) and the Rise of Modern Chinese Shipping, is more than the life of one tycoon. It charts the emergence of Chinese deepsea shipping from a marginal position beneath the established European, American and Japanese lines to a force capable of competing across every major maritime sector.

Tung’s career spans an extraordinary period: Republican China, the Japanese invasion, World War II, civil war, the emergence of Hong Kong as an industrial and shipping centre, the arrival of containerisation and the relentless decline of many of the western lines that once dominated Asian trade. Tung began his working life as a junior shipping executive in the early 1930s, when Chinese shipowners operated at a considerable disadvantage in their own country.   As secretary of the Tientsin Shipowners Association, the young Tung proposed a new national shipping policy designed to address the treaty privileges enjoyed by foreign operators and the absence of effective cabotage protection for Chinese companies.      Dick argues that Tung was already thinking like a revolutionary.      His ambition was not simply to accumulate ships. It was to create a Chinese merchant fleet capable of trading internationally on equal terms with the great western shipping companies.   The destruction and upheaval of the following decade made that goal considerably harder. War devastated Chinese shipping, while the political and commercial map of the country was transformed.       Tung nevertheless emerged from the conflict determined to establish a deepsea presence. Through China Union Lines, he sought to build a Chinese liner capability, while developing his own private tramp fleet alongside it.   In 1947, one of his ships, operated with an all-Chinese crew, reached the Atlantic coasts of the US and Europe. The voyage was an important symbolic achievement for a man who believed Chinese-owned and Chinese-operated ships should be visible in every major trading region.

After the communist victory in 1949, Hong Kong became the base from which Tung built his international empire.

The colony offered access to finance, cargo, professional services and the trading networks connecting China, Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe and North America.

Tung was well positioned to benefit. As Hong Kong and East Asia industrialised, the region generated the cargo volumes needed to support increasingly frequent and sophisticated shipping services. In 1957, he became the first Hong Kong or Chinese owner to order a new bulk carrier. Tankers followed, along with liner ships, passenger vessels and eventually the largest ship ever built.      His businesses expanded beyond ships into terminals, dockyards, banks and property. By the end of his life, the Tung fleet comprised more than 150 vessels totalling around 11m dwt.   Dick nevertheless presents Tung not merely as an asset collector, but as an owner willing to enter new sectors before their commercial potential is fully understood.

“Though Y K Pao owned the larger fleet, over the period 1948 to 1982 C. Y. did more across the several sectors to place Chinese deepsea shipping on parity with US and European shipping,” he says.

That willingness to make audacious bets is perhaps best captured by Tung’s purchase of Cunard’s former flagship Queen Elizabeth.

Tung planned to convert what had been the world’s largest passenger liner into Seawise University, a floating campus that would carry students around the world.      The ship caught fire during conversion in Hong Kong in 1972 and sank in Victoria Harbour. The project became one of the most visible setbacks of Tung’s career, but also illustrated the scale of his imagination and his enthusiasm for education.   He later supported another shipboard education programme rather than abandoning the concept entirely.

At the opposite end of the shipping spectrum comes the 564,763 dwt Seawise Giant. The ultra-large crude carrier was the biggest ship ever constructed, its name playing on Tung’s initials.

Yet Dick argues Tung’s most enduring maritime achievement is not his ownership of record-breaking ships. It is his early embrace of containerisation...His success, Dick says, rests on careful attention to costs, guaranteed frequency and reliability, intensive international networking and the cultivation of corporate culture and morale.   Tung operated across political divides during the Cold War, maintaining the relationships needed to secure finance, ships and cargo in a world where Chinese commerce remained deeply entangled with the rivalry between Beijing and Taipei.   “He was able to learn, innovate and network,” Dick says. “He understood that shipping was not just about owning vessels. It was about having cargo, relationships and dependable services...For Dick and Kentwell, the route to documenting this career began with ships rather than biography. Their early fleet research led to correspondence with C. H. Tung’s office and later with Tung’s daughter Alice King, who spent years collating and editing her father’s diaries and papers.      Kentwell met King in Shanghai in 2002. Both authors met her again in Hong Kong in 2010, when she invited them to write a scholarly biography of her father for a western readership as part of celebrations marking the centenary of his birth in 2012. The manuscript was completed, but health issues prevented its publication at the time.

More than a decade later, the third generation of the Tung family rediscovered the work and pushed for the project to be revived. Hong Kong University Press took it on, leading to further revision, updating, peer review and editing before its launch this month at the Hong Kong Book Fair and Hong Kong Maritime Museum. The business inherited by that third generation is now very different.    Following the sale of OOCL, the Tung group is considerably smaller and entirely private and family-owned.     Through Island Navigation, it remains a significant niche participant in the product tanker market, pursuing what Dick describes as a conservative investment strategy focused on long-term sustainability. “The circumstances for relentless accumulation no longer exist,” he says.

The group may no longer possess the scale or public profile it enjoyed under C. Y. Tung. Its influence, however, can still be seen in the global standing of Chinese shipping.