Floating Hong Kong restaurant that hosted the Queen sinks in the South China Sea

‘Jumbo was a must for tourists. Everybody loved it, men and women, young and old’

A HONG KONG boat that is part of a restaurant complex that once hosted the Queen has capsized after being towed away from the city amid financial woes.

Jumbo Floating Restaurant was a celebrity hangout in its heyday and has been a tourist attraction since it opened in Aberdeen Harbour in south-west

Hong Kong in the mid-1970s. However, it has been closed since early 2020 because of Covid. A decline in tourism after the pandemic and the protests of 2019 were the final straws after a decade of financial woes.

Melco International Development, its operator, said last month that the business had not been profitable since 2013 and that cumulative losses exceeded

Hk$100million (£10.4million), with no one willing to take over the boat’s management.

It was being towed to a new home in an undisclosed location in south-east Asia when it encountered “adverse conditions” in the South China Sea and began to sink, the boat’s owner said in a statement.

“Despite the efforts of the towing company… unfortunately it capsized on Sunday,” said Aberdeen Restaurant Enterprises, adding it was “very saddened” by the incident. The water where Jumbo sank is more than 1km deep, “making it extremely difficult to carry out salvage works”, the company added. An investigation into what happened is under way.

The 76-metre-long floating restaurant was opened by Stanley Ho, the late Macau casino tycoon. Built in the style of a Ming dynasty imperial palace, it seated 2,300 diners over three storeys. In 1975, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited an adjacent boat restaurant that later became part of Jumbo Kingdom.

“Jumbo was a must for tourists. Everybody loved it, men and women, young and old,” Choi Pat-tai, president of Pak Shing Travel, told