Few shipping books take more than half a century to reach publication.

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 that stretched from an encounter with one of his early containerships in 1970 to the launch of their biography in Hong Kong this month.

The completed work, C. Y. Tung (1912–1982) and the Rise of Modern Chinese Shipping, is more than the biography of one tycoon. It traces 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 era: Republican China, the Japanese invasion, World War II, civil war, the rise of Hong Kong as an industrial and shipping centre, the advent of containerisation and the steady decline of many western lines that once dominated Asian trade.

He began his working life as a junior shipping executive in the early 1930s, when Chinese shipowners operated at a substantial disadvantage in their own country.

As secretary of the Tientsin Shipowners Association, the young Tung proposed a new national shipping policy aimed at addressing the treaty privileges enjoyed by foreign operators and the lack of effective cabotage protection for Chinese companies.

Dick argues that Tung was already thinking like a revolutionary.

His goal was not simply to accumulate ships. It was to build a Chinese merchant fleet capable of trading internationally on equal terms with the great western shipping companies.

The upheaval of the following decade made that ambition far more difficult. War devastated Chinese shipping, while the political and commercial map of the country was transformed.

Even so, Tung emerged from the conflict determined to establish a deepsea presence. Through China Union Lines, he sought to build a Chinese liner capability while also developing his own private tramp fleet.

In 1947, one of his ships, operated with an all-Chinese crew, reached the Atlantic coasts of the US and Europe. The voyage was a significant 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 linking China, Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe and North America.

Tung was well placed to benefit. As Hong Kong and East Asia industrialised, the region generated the cargo volumes needed to support increasingly frequent and sophisticated shipping services, and it also became a proving ground for new logistics models as trade patterns shifted.

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 portrays Tung not as a mere asset collector, but as an owner willing to enter new sectors before their commercial potential was 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 illustrated 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 it also showed 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 stands the 564,763 dwt Seawise Giant. The ultra-large crude carrier was the biggest ship ever constructed, and its name played on Tung’s initials.

Yet Dick says Tung’s most enduring maritime achievement was not his ownership of record-breaking ships, but his early embrace of containerisation.

Kentwell’s own interest in the Tung fleet began when he boarded the converted Victory-type Geh Yung, a 350 teu vessel, during its first call at Kobe on its maiden transpacific voyage in 1970.

Three years later, he published an overview and fleet list of the Tung group in Far Eastern Fleets, a joint publication with Dick. That research was later expanded into Beancaker to Boxboat, published in 1988.

“His greatest claim is as the pioneer of container shipping from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan,” Dick says.

Tung entered the container trades before Overseas Containers Limited launched its Europe–Far East service in 1972, recognising that standardised boxes would reshape liner shipping, ports and global manufacturing.

The company eventually became Orient Overseas Container Line, establishing the Tung name in the transpacific and other major east-west trades.

Tung’s acquisition of the entire Furness Withy group in 1980 further demonstrated his appetite for international expansion. A Chinese shipowner was no longer merely competing with the old British liner establishment; he was buying part of it.

His success, Dick says, rested 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.”

The scale and speed of Tung’s expansion also created vulnerabilities. He died in 1982 as shipping entered a prolonged downturn, leaving his sons C. H. Tung — who would become Hong Kong’s first leader after reunification with China in 1997 — and C. C. Tung to steer the group through a severe financial crisis and restructuring.

The company survived, and OOCL developed into one of the container sector’s most highly regarded operators before its multi-billion dollar sale to COSCO in 2017.

For Dick and Kentwell, the path 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. The two 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 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 have the scale or public profile it enjoyed under C. Y. Tung, but its influence can still be seen in the global standing of Chinese shipping.