What really happened to Hong Kong’s Jumbo Floating Restaurant?

Hong Kong’s Jumbo Floating Restaurant began life as a symbol of prosperity and spectacle in the 1970s and ended with a mysterious capsizing in the South China Sea in 2022, while under tow to an undisclosed new home (rumoured to be Cambodia). For decades it was a near‑mandatory stop on Western visitors’ itineraries, a place to try Cantonese banquets, be handed chopsticks for the first time (with knives and forks quietly available), and soak up a fantasy of imperial China against the very real backdrop of Aberdeen’s fishing community.

From fishermen’s barges to a “floating palace”

Floating restaurants in Aberdeen grew out of fishermen’s barges from the Pearl River Delta, where people added simple stages and kitchens so fishing families could host banquets, sing, and socialise without going ashore. In the 1920s–30s, Hong Kong fishermen began operating similar boats, at first serving only the fishing community, then gradually opening to city dwellers and tourists as word spread about fresh seafood eaten right above the water where it was caught.

By 1952, the Tai Pak Floating Restaurant was operating at Aberdeen, eventually seating hundreds and helping establish the idea that eating afloat, among moored junks and sampans, was part of “real Hong Kong.” These restaurants offered both an accessible luxury for locals celebrating weddings and banquets and an exotic, lantern‑lit world that early Western visitors felt they “had” to experience when Asia was still a long-haul, once‑in‑a‑lifetime trip.

Building Jumbo – fire, rebirth, and VIP guests

In the early 1970s, herbal tea magnate Wong Lo‑kat decided to outdo Tai Pak with a vast new floating palace called Jumbo, built at Kowloon Chung Hwa shipyard for around HK$14 million and decorated like a Qing‑style imperial palace. Before it could open, a welding spark triggered a catastrophic four‑alarm fire on 30 October 1971, destroying the nearly finished structure and killing 34 people while injuring dozens more, a tragedy that forced a complete rebuild.

Macau casino tycoon Stanley Ho stepped in, bought the project in 1972, and poured roughly HK$30 million into a new Jumbo, which finally opened to the public on 19 October 1976 and would later be grouped with Tai Pak and Sea Palace under the “Jumbo Kingdom” banner. In its heyday, Jumbo hosted royalty and celebrities; among the most famous visitors was Queen Elizabeth II, who dined there during an official visit, helping cement its image as the place to go in Hong Kong for a showpiece Cantonese seafood banquet.

Tourists: Movies and Instagramable Moments!

From the late 1970s through the 1990s, Jumbo became a must‑do for Western visitors, especially when travel to mainland China was still restricted and Hong Kong acted as a “South Gate of China.” Tour groups would pile into sampans or tour boats, step onto the dragon‑guarded gangway, and be ushered into vast banquet halls where, for many guests, this was their very first encounter with live seafood tanks, dim sum trolleys, and the slightly daunting gift of chopsticks placed at each setting.

Jumbo’s theatrical interiors—golden dragons, carved wood, and bright neon—made it a natural film location. It appears (or is strongly associated) in:

• Bruce Lee’s “Enter the Dragon” (1973), which uses Aberdeen’s floating restaurants as part of its Hong Kong sequences.
• The James Bond film “The Man With the Golden Gun” (1974), widely cited as featuring Jumbo or its sister floating palace, reinforcing its bond with the 007 mythos.
• Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” (2011), in which modern Hong Kong stands in for a global outbreak’s origin, with Jumbo providing a visually iconic backdrop.

Decline, closure, and the South China Sea

Despite surviving the Asian financial crisis and later global downturns, Jumbo struggled in the 2000s as tastes shifted and operating costs rose, and by the late 2010s it was no longer the guaranteed money‑spinner it once had been. The 2019 protests and then the Covid‑19 pandemic dealt the final blow; Jumbo ceased operations on 3 March 2020 after posting years of losses, and its long‑time backer Stanley Ho passed away shortly afterwards in May 2020.

In June 2022, with no clear rescue plan in Hong Kong, the owners arranged for Jumbo to be towed out of Aberdeen Harbour to an undisclosed overseas yard, widely reported as somewhere in Southeast Asia. On 18 June, while passing near the Paracel (Xisha) Islands in the South China Sea, the vessel reportedly encountered “adverse conditions,” took on water, and capsized; the company initially said it had sunk in water over 1,000 metres deep, later clarifying that it had capsized and salvage would be extremely difficult, with subsequent reports indicating it ultimately sank and parts of the wreck lodged on a reef.

What’s left of Jumbo today?

Physically, the famous barge is gone from Aberdeen, but fragments of its story—and even pieces of its fabric—live on around Hong Kong.

For visitors today, the spirit of Jumbo survives in a few key ways you can point out on tour:

• Aberdeen itself, where guides can explain the old network of floating restaurants, the fishermen’s lifestyle, and show archival photos of Jumbo Kingdom in its neon prime. To explore more and taste some authentic fisherman cuisine, we do run a monthly immersive trip to Aberdeen. Link here for more information.
• The Central Harbourfront, near the Hong Kong Observation Wheel, where themed costume photo booths continue the tradition of “dressing up” in Chinese outfits—an echo of the old souvenir costume photos taken on Jumbo’s ornate staircases and throne chairs.
• Pop culture: screenings of “Enter the Dragon,” “The Man With the Golden Gun,” and “Contagion,” along with local films that used Jumbo as shorthand for “Hong Kong glamour,” allow visitors to time‑travel back to when a dinner at a floating restaurant was the highlight of a first Asia trip.