On 16th August 1948, the Republic of China postal service issued a set of four commemorative postage stamps. The 30mm by 22.5mm stamps were printed by the Shanghai-based Dah Tung Book Company using the intaglio printing process, where ink is laid over an incised image [1]. The values ranged from 20,000 to 60,000 cents, reflecting the astonishing inflation rate prevalent at that time in the nation’s history. These stamps were issued to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, the country’s first domestically-owned shipping line. It had been set up on December 16, 1872, by then Minister of Beiyang (Northern Fleet) Li Hongzhang as part of the Qing Dynasty’s belated Self-Strengthening Movement. The name of the ship depicted on the 60,000 cent stamp can just be discerned. The pride of the shipping line, Kiang Ya was to prove an ill-fated vessel, her destruction and rebirth mirroring that of the Chinese nation.
The Kiang Ya was a coastal passenger ship of just over 2,000 tons, completed in 1939 by the Harima Shipbuilding & Engineering Company in Aioi, Japan. Launched as the Hsing Ya Maru, she’d been built for the Tokyo Kabushiki Kaisha shipping company, but had been sold before her completion to the government-controlled Toa Kaiun KK (East Asia Navigation), to serve routes between Japan and China. She seems to have been one of the few company ships to survive the war. In 1947, the US occupation administration dissolved the corporation and the ship was sold to the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company [2].
By the time of the Kiang Ya’s transfer to Chinese ownership, Nationalists and Communists were once more battling for military supremacy in the wake of the Japanese defeat. In 1948, the Mao’s Communists won a succession of hard-fought victories, making defeat for the Kuomintang (KMT) government of Chiang Kai-shek inevitable. During this period, KMT loyalists started withdrawing to areas still held by the Nationalists, including Guangdong Province and Taiwan. These consisted primarily of military and government personnel, and civilians who had most to fear from a Communist takeover; wealthy landlords and businessmen. Ships of the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company and other shipping companies were employed in this mass evacuation. By 1950 more than 600,000 troops and up to 1.5 million civilians had reached Taiwan, along with much of the country’s bullion and cultural treasures, and many more had taken temporary sanctuary in Hong Kong. Although Shanghai would not fall to the Communists until the end of May 1949, by the winter of the previous year, a fearful exodus from the city had already began.
The pulse of this besieged city during the last days of Kuomintang rule was memorably captured by western photo-journalists such as by Henri Cartier Bresson and his associate Sam Tata, and Life Magazine’s Jack Birns: scenes of boats and trains tightly packed with fleeing refugees; the river and waterfront clogged by countless rickety sampans; children queuing for rice handouts from the government; adults for 40oz handouts of gold; paper money having been rendered worthless by hyper-inflation; KMT soldiers dejectedly or resignedly awaiting evacuation; the homeless and destitute thieving saleable handfuls of cotton off the back of lorries, the corpses of those who’d died during the harsh winter nights from a combination of exposure and malnutrition.
The Kiang Ya’s journey had started inland at Nanjing, where an estimated 2,150 paying passengers had embarked. Even this initial number far exceeded the ship’s official capacity of 1,200. In early December 1948, she arrived at Shanghai’s Shiliupu Dock in the heart of the city, where further passengers fought their way on board, many of them stowaways or friends of the 190 or so crew. The Kiang Ya departed shortly after dark on December 4th heading for the port of Ningbo, which lies on the other side of Hangzhou Bay about 200 miles south of Shanghai. There, those aboard could hope to find temporary refuge with friends and relatives, or directly continue their journey further south.
In the late evening, while passing out of the mouth of the Yangtze about 50 miles northeast of the city, the ship was rocked by a large explosion towards the stern. The steamer settled quickly but owing to the shallowness of the surrounding waters did not sink entirely; the hull settled upright on the river bed, the uppermost decks, funnel, and masts remaining above the water. Unfortunately, the lower decks were quickly inundated and the radio-room was put out of action before a distress call could be made. It was more than three hours after the event that the ship’s distress flares were first spotted by a passing steamer, which then raised the alarm with local authorities.
Numerous smaller boats came to the rescue of the passengers who had managed to remain with the wreck, many being trapped waist-deep in water. An estimated 700 were eventually taken off, many others having either drowned during the initial sinking or succumbed to hypothermia while awaiting rescue in the chill waters of the East China Sea. A Pathé film crew shot footage of the partially submerged wreck and of the dead being brought ashore to the immense grief of the gathered relatives. Owing to the unrecorded boarding of so many unregistered passengers, the exact death toll from the Kiang Ya sinking has never been firmly established. Initial press estimates ranged from 400 to 4,000; the higher figure said by company officials to have been carried by the ship on previous voyages. More recently, the actual number of embarked passengers has been approximated to 3,250. Of those, more than 2,300 are believed to have drowned.
Early reports by the ship owners accused the Communists of having sunk the ship. According to witnesses, the ship had just been passed by a pair of junks, and it was claimed by some that these had either loosed a mine or thrown bombs aboard. The US naval authorities initially supported the company, stating that ‘sabotage was quite likely’. Another early suspicion was that the ship had been sunk by a boiler explosion or hidden explosives. An inspection of the wreck undertaken by Chinese and American divers shortly after the sinking attributed the cause to a mine [3]. However, the provenance of that mine has never been firmly established.
Popular sources give the origin of the mine that sank the Kiang Ya as Japanese [4; 5], but while there is documentary evidence of Japanese minelayers being present in Shanghai during their occupation of the city, it is not clear to what extent they were ever used in a mine-laying capacity. Japanese warships certainly had cause to sweep the Yangtze River of mines. In June 1938, KMT troops had laid an estimated 1,600 such weapons at Matang, downstream from their headquarters in Nanjing, in an effort to stall the Japanese navy’s western advance [6]. Therefore, the possibility cannot be entirely ruled out that the Kiang Ya fell victim to a ‘friendly’ mine. However, it is also possible that the mine was of American origin. In October 1944, and again in the spring of 1945, a large number of aerial mines had been dropped in the area by American B-24 Liberators in an effort to disrupt Japanese supply lines. These were among 13,000 mines laid by the United States Air Force in Japanese or Japanese-controlled waters as part of ‘Operation Starvation’, a pre-atomic attempt to force the nation’s surrender. It is known that several Japanese warships were sunk by USAAF mines along the Yangtze during this period, including, on 19th March 1945, the Japanese gunboat Suma, formerly the Royal Navy vessel HMS Moth [7].
The Kiang Ya tragedy was one of an unfortunate string of maritime mishaps to befall the Nationalist side in the months preceding its collapse. Less than two month earlier, a fire had broken out aboard the steamer MV Hsuan Huai while docked at the north-eastern port of Yingkou. An estimated 6,000 soldiers were aboard her at the time, being hastily withdrawn from north-eastern China to avoid capture by besieging Communist forces. Trapped in the overcrowded lower decks as the smoke and flames rapidly spread, at least a third of these men are believed to have been burned to death or asphyxiated. And within weeks of the Kiang Ya’s sinking, a second refugee ship would be lost. On 27th January 1949, the Taiping, travelling from Shanghai to Keelung in Taiwan, collided with the steamer Chien Yuan as both ships passed through the Zhoushan Archipelago off the southern tip of Hangzhou Bay. The Taiping was carrying an estimated 1,500 passengers, as many as three times its official limit, nearly all of whom perished as both ships foundered in less than 20 minutes. Around 40 survivors were later picked up by the Australian destroyer HMAS Warramunga, whose captain reported seeing ‘dozens of babies floating face down in the water’. The exact cause of this disaster remains unclear but both vessels were sailing at night without lights in reduced visibility owing to a government edict, and it seems likely the Taiping was over-burdened with cargo. This allegedly included trunk-loads of bullion, banknotes, and government bonds as well as around 600 tons of hastily loaded steel girders.
Despite having split in two, the Kiang Ya was eventually salvaged in 1959 and operated along the Yangtze under the name of Dong Fang Hong for many years, finally being disposed of in the early 90s. It’s not hard to understand why her initial sinking has been so forgotten. At the time, western media attention was focused on the final stages of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Domestically, neither the exiled Kuomintang nor the resurgent Communists had any interest in memorialising the ship’s loss; the former keen to forget its humiliating retreat, the latter disdainful of the deaths of thousands of Nationalists fleeing its rule.
References
| [1] | “Commemorative 30 75th Anniversary of China Merchants Steam Navigation Company Commemorative Issue (1948),” Chunghwa Post , 2013. [Online]. Available: http://www.post.gov.tw/post/internet/W_stamphouse/index.jsp?ID=2807&file_name=B030. |
| [2] | J. Mertens, “House flags of Japanese shipping companies,” 27th May 2008. [Online]. Available: http://www.fotw.us/flags/jp~hf8.html. |
| [3] | D. L. Williams, In the Shadow of the Titanic: Merchant Ships Lost With Greater Fatalities, The History Press, 2012. |
| [4] | J. Lettens, “SS Kiangya (or Kiang Ya) (+1948),” Maritime Connector, 5th April 2010. [Online]. Available: http://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?59617. |
| [5] | D. Blackmore, Blunders & Disasters at Sea, Pen and Sword, 2004. |
| [6] | B. Hackett, S. Kingsepp and A. Tully, “RISING STORM – THE IMPERIAL JAPANESE NAVY AND CHINA,” 2012. [Online]. Available: http://www.combinedfleet.com/Yangtze_t.htm. |
| [7] | B. Murray, “Today in the History of the Pacific Theater,” 18th March 2005. [Online]. Available: http://www.ww2f.com/topic/4496-today-in-the-history-of-the-pacific-theater/page-7. |
Bow Creek to Anatahan 