The Hong Kong History Podcast · Stephen Davies, DJ Clark

Hardly cricket: the wreck of the Bokhara

·57 min·4 clips

A doctor restored a blind Penghu fisherman's sight after rescuers received a few hundred silver dollars.

1. The Hong Kong History Podcast examines the late-19th-century history and wreck of the SS Bokhara. 2. DJ Clark hosts from Hong Kong while Dr Stephen Davies contributes from Chester, using maritime history to interpret a colonial episode. 3. The episode asks how one ship can reveal the operations of the colonial world through names, sport, weather, and money. 4. Davies traces Bokhara Rocks near Cape Daggler, Tathong Point, and Waglan Island to the ship that struck them. 5. Hong Kong's early hydrographic surveys converted oral Chinese place-names into inconsistent Romanized chart names. 6. The late-1970s and early-1980s renaming process removed or Chinese-ified some colonial toponyms, including Bokhara Rocks. 7. The P&O steamship company named ships Bokhara and Malwa, both launched in Glasgow within three months of each other in 1873. 8. Commander Belcher's 1841 survey exposed errors in earlier charts, while Daniel Ross's chart of Aberdeen Harbor may have concealed a useful refuge. 9. Captain Sams took the Bokhara south from Shanghai in October 1892 as the northeast monsoon strengthened and a typhoon developed. 10. Hong Kong's cricket team had travelled to Shanghai for an interport match before boarding the Bokhara homeward. 11. The Hong Kong Observatory, founded in 1883, could not provide reliable multi-day typhoon forecasts in 1892. 12. The Bokhara struck Fisher Island near the Penghu Islands shortly before midnight on October 10 and sank within about three minutes. 13. Twenty-six people survived, all crew members, while the captain and many passengers died according to incomplete records. 14. Two cricket-team members, including surgeon Lawson and Lieutenant Downing, were among the survivors rescued by Penghu fishermen. 15. Davies describes a separate wreck, the Norwegian collier Norman, whose two survivors drifted 17 miles before fishermen found them. 16. Patrick Manson's brother treated a blind fisherman's ingrown eyelashes and restored his sight after about ten years of blindness. 17. Cricket's imperial symbolism made the Bokhara disaster unusually prominent because the ship carried representatives of colonial sport. 18. The wreck also carried bullion worth about 20 million Hong Kong dollars in present value, with HSBC holding 80 percent and Sassoon 20 percent. 19. Davies and Clark deliver the material as a conversational, research-led historical narrative with geographic and archival detours. 20. Hong Kong maritime-history listeners may enjoy it; listeners seeking modern cricket or weather forecasts may skip it.

As heard by us

A shipwreck story that widens into shipping, banking, sport, and colonial politics.

A single shipwreck drives the episode, but it keeps widening the frame to shipping, banking, sport, and the colonies' social and political order. That is where it works best.

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Why you'd press play

Start with a shipwreck, then drift into cricket, banking, and a typhoon.

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