On the night of December 4th,1948, the passenger steamship SS Kiangya exploded and sank just north of Shanghai, China. It was the world’s worst non-military maritime disaster at the time. The steamship blew up at the mouth of the Yangtze River, 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Shanghai and rapidly sank. The suspected cause – a mine left behind by either the Chinese, Japanese OR American Navies during World War II.
The SS Kiangya was packed with Nationalist refugees fleeing the advancing Communist army during the Chinese Civil War. While only 2,150 passengers were listed on the official manifest, it is believed that around 2,750 desperate refugees died, twice as many as the Titanic. Rescuers were unaware of the disaster for several hours, with only 700 survivors eventually rescued. What is her tragic story?
The SS Kiangya was a coastal passenger steamship completed in 1939 in Aioi, Japan. During World War II, she was owned by the government-controlled Toa Kaiun, serving routes between Japan and China. In 1947, the U.S. occupation dissolved the corporation and the ship was sold to the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company.
After World War II ended, Chinese Communists and Nationalists were battling for military supremacy in the wake of the Japan’s defeat. In 1948, Chairman Mao’s Communist army won a series of victories, ensuring the eventual defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. Nationalists started withdrawing to Chinese areas like Guangdong province and Taiwan. These consisted of wealthy civilians, businessmen, and government and military personnel – those who had most to fear from a Communist takeover. Ships of the China Merchants Company were used in the mass evacuation. Although Shanghai would not fall to the Communists until 1949, by the winter of the previous year, a mass exodus had already begun.
In the besieged city, boats and trains were tightly packed with fleeing refugees. Countless junks and sampans clogged the river and waterfront. Hungry children lined up for government rice handouts. Paper money was virtually worthless due to hyper-inflation. Dejected Nationalist soldiers awaited in the streets for evacuation. The poor and destitute stole handfuls of cotton off the back of trucks to sell. On the sidewalks lay the corpses of those who’d died from winter exposure or malnutrition.
The SS Kiangya’s fateful voyage started at Nanjing, where 2,150 paying passengers had come aboard for evacuation. This initial number far exceeded the ship’s official capacity of 1,186. In early December, she arrived at Shanghai’s Shiliupu Dock. There, even more passengers fought their way on board. On the clogged wharf, they strained to catch tickets thrown them portholes by friends already aboard. Boatmen struggled to push their junks close to the side of the SS Kiangya. From the packed decks of the bobbing boats, ticketless stowaways also clamored aboard the ship.
The SS Kiangya departed shortly after dark on Friday, December 4th.
It was heading for the port of Ningbo on the other side of Hangzhou Bay, about 200 miles south. By 6:30 PM, her decks and gangways were jampacked with blanketed Chinese refugees trying to sleep for the overnight journey. By the time the 2,100-ton ship edged out into the Huangpu River, she carried 2,250 paying passengers, plus about 1,200 stowaways.
In the late evening, the ship was passing out of the mouth of the river about 50 miles from the city. A 15-year-old boy, returning to his native Ningpo, had just fallen asleep wrapped in a thin blanket in a crowded passageway. Suddenly, the deck shot upward from under him, hurling him against a bulkhead. An ear shattering explosion roared through the ship. An intense pain flashed through the boy’s lower right leg. His first thought was ‘The Communists are attacking!’
The lights went out and screams erupted around him. The boy hid with his blanket over his head; but quickly felt cold water rushing in, saturating his clothes. Although his right shin was broken by the explosion, he somehow managed to fight through the crowds and blackness, to reach the top deck.
A large explosion near the stern had rocked the ship, ripping open the hull below the water line. All power was instantly lost. The lower decks were quickly inundated with cold East China Sea water. The steamer sank in a matter of minutes. Passengers on the lower decks had little chance for escape before drowning to death. But owing to the relative shallowness of the bay, the ship did not sink completely. The hull settled upright on the river bed in two pieces. The uppermost deck, funnel, and masts remained above the water line. Unfortunately, the radio-room was put out of action before any distress call could ever be made.
There would be no SOS for the SS Kiangya.
Mr. Zhou Fenghua recalled being thrust into darkness and chaos. “The ship trembled violently then I heard a loud bang. Flames erupted instantly. People were screaming everywhere. Mothers lost their children. Men jumped overboard trying to save their loved ones. I grabbed my younger sister’s hand and pulled her along. We managed to reach some floating wreckage, while hearing cries for help all around us.”
Some 700 plus who managed to reach the safety of the top deck in time now stood in the dark night air in cold, waist-high water, screaming for help. Many were pushed off the edge and into the bay in the struggle for higher standing room.
It was more than three hours after the explosion that the ship’s distress flares were finally spotted by a passing steamer, the SS Hwafoo, who discovered the stricken ship. It was another hour before the Hwafoo’s SOS brought more rescue vessels. When the SS Mouli pulled alongside, a Kiangya officer quieted the terrified survivors by warning them, “Don’t shout. They will think there’s too many of us to take!”
They rescued the passengers who had managed to remain standing in the cold water on the top deck of wreck. An estimated 700 were eventually taken off. The others had either drowned during the sinking or succumbed to hypothermia while awaiting rescue.
Early Saturday morning, Shanghai woke to the sirens of ambulances carrying the injured to hospitals. Along the waterfront, hearses bearing soaked bodies picked their way through a stream of coolies. The men pushed carts piled high with the suitcases of still more refugees frantically trying to evacuated the city. A British Pathé film crew shot footage of the partially submerged wreck and of the dead being brought ashore.
Due to the last minute boarding of so many unticketed passengers, the exact death toll has never been firmly established. Initial estimates ranged anywhere from 400 to 4,000! More recently, the actual number of passengers has been approximated to around 3,450. Of those, more than 2,750 are believed to have drowned.
The probable cause of the explosion: an old Japanese mine from World War II.
The ship owners, however, accused the Communists of sinking the ship. According to survivors, the ship had just been passed by a pair of junks. So it was claimed by some that they had thrown a bomb aboard the Kiangya. U.S. naval authorities supported the company, stating that ‘sabotage was likely.’ Another early suspicion was that the ship had been sunk by a boiler explosion. An inspection of the wreck by Chinese and American divers attributed the cause to a mine explosion. However, the exact source of the mine has never been established.
The popular theory gives the origin as Japanese, left over from World War II. There was documentary evidence of Japanese minelayers in Shanghai during Japan’s occupation. However in 1938, Chinese troops had laid mines in the river in an effort to stall the Japanese Navy’s advance. It’s also possible that the mine was American. In early 1945, a large number of aerial mines had been dropped by U.S. B-24s. It was an effort to disrupt Japanese supply lines as part of ‘Operation Starvation,’ an attempt to force Japan’s surrender.
The SS Kiangya tragedy was but one of a string of unfortunate maritime disasters during the Chinese Civil War. Within weeks of the SS Kiangya’s sinking, a second refugee ship would be lost. In 1949, the Taiping, travelling from Shanghai to Taiwan, collided with the steamer Chien Yuan as both ships passed 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 perished as both ships sank in less than 20 minutes.
Despite having split in two, the SS Kiangya was eventually salvaged in 1959 and repaired. It operated along the Chinese Yangtze River under the name of Dong Fang Hong for decades. Its owners finally scraped the ship in the early 1990’s.
It’s easy to understand why her tragic sinking has been lost in history. At the time, western media’s attention was focused on the Arab-Israeli War caused by the creation of a new Israeli state. In China, neither the retreating Nationalists nor the disdainful Communists had any interest in memorializing the tragic ship or its refugee passengers.
By 1950, more than 600,000 Nationalist troops and up to 1.5 million Chinese civilians had reached the island of Taiwan, along with much of the country’s gold bullion and cultural treasures. Many more had taken sanctuary in British-controlled Hong Kong. It wasn’t until some four decades later that the world would witness a worse maritime tragedy. In December 1987, the passenger ferry Doña Paz, bound for Manila, collided with an oil tanker off the Philippine coast. The resulting fire and sinking of both ships left an estimated 4,341 passengers and crew dead.