Why a Working Junk Became the Symbol of Hong Kong Tourism in 2026?

Picture a red-sailed junk gliding across Victoria Harbour at sunset, the city’s glass towers blazing behind it. That single image has sold Hong Kong to the world for decades. But how did a working fishing boat become the face of an entire city’s tourism industry?

The answer sits at the intersection of history, branding, and nostalgia. A working junk became the symbol of Hong Kong tourism because the Hong Kong Tourism Board recognised that the vessel’s red sails, ancient lineage, and visual drama against a modern skyline captured everything the city wanted to project: a place where East met West, where centuries of maritime tradition stood shoulder to shoulder with twentieth-century ambition. The junk was not chosen because it represented modern Hong Kong. It was chosen because it represented the Hong Kong visitors wanted to see.

I have spent years writing about Hong Kong’s heritage and cultural identity, and few subjects capture the tension between image and reality quite like this one. The junk boat is everywhere in Hong Kong’s tourism branding, yet actual working junks vanished from the harbour decades ago. What remains is a symbol that has outlived the thing it once depicted, kept alive by marketing, museum curators, and a single stubbornly authentic vessel called the Dukling.

In this article, we will trace how that happened, from the shipyards of the Han dynasty to the boardrooms of the Hong Kong Tourism Board, and ask whether the symbol still earns its place on the city’s postcards.

What Is a Chinese Junk Boat?

A Chinese junk is a traditional wooden sailing vessel developed over thousands of years, characterised by a flat-bottomed hull, watertight bulkheads, a stern-mounted central rudder, and distinctive bamboo-batten sails reinforced with horizontal ribs. The design is one of the most successful and enduring in maritime history, predating comparable European innovations by centuries.

The word “junk” itself does not come from Chinese. Etymologists trace it to the Malay word “adjong,” filtered through either the Dutch “jonk” or the Portuguese and Spanish “junco.” European traders encountered these vessels across Asian waters and applied their own label to a ship type that had already been evolving in China since at least the Han dynasty, roughly two thousand years ago.

Several design features made junks extraordinarily capable for their era. The watertight bulkhead system, which divided the hull into separate sealed compartments, meant that a breach in one section would not sink the entire vessel. This innovation did not appear in European shipbuilding until the nineteenth century. The flat-bottomed hull allowed junks to navigate shallow coastal waters and river estuaries with ease, making them ideal for the Pearl River Delta region where Hong Kong sits.

The sails were the junk’s most visually arresting feature. Rather than the single large canvas sheets used on European ships, junk sails were built from bamboo battens that created a stiff, segmented surface. These sails could be raised and lowered in sections, allowing crews to adjust sail area with remarkable precision in changing winds. When dyed with the red-brown tannin common in South China, the sails took on the distinctive rust-red colour that would later become inseparable from Hong Kong’s visual identity.

Most traditional junks carried two or three masts, though larger vessels could carry up to five. The three-mast configuration became the most common in Hong Kong waters, and it is this arrangement that appears on the Hong Kong Tourism Board’s logo. A typical Hong Kong fishing junk measured around 18 metres in length and displaced approximately 50 tonnes, though trading vessels operating along the South China coast could be far larger.

Centuries on the Water: The History of Junks in Hong Kong

The story of the Chinese junk stretches back at least two millennia. Archaeological evidence and textual records from the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) describe ocean-going vessels plying the South China Sea. By the Tang dynasty (618 to 907 CE), junks were carrying goods between Canton, Southeast Asia, India, and the Arabian Peninsula along what would become known as the Maritime Silk Road.

The golden age of the junk arrived during the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644), and no figure looms larger in that era than Admiral Zheng He. Between 1405 and 1433, Zheng He commanded seven enormous maritime expeditions that reached as far as East Africa. His treasure ships, the largest junks ever built, dwarfed anything in European waters at the time. Zheng He’s fleet included vessels carrying hundreds of sailors, and his voyages demonstrated the junk’s extraordinary capacity for long-distance ocean travel.

Closer to home, the waters around Hong Kong have always been junk territory. Long before the British arrived in 1841, the Pearl River Estuary teemed with fishing junks, trading boats, and passenger vessels. The sheltered harbours and rich fishing grounds of the region made it a natural home for communities whose entire lives revolved around these boats.

Among the most important of these communities were the Tanka people, sometimes called the boat people of southern China. The Tanka lived, worked, married, and raised families on junks moored in the typhoon shelters and shallow waters of Hong Kong’s coastline. For centuries, they were the people who actually built, sailed, and maintained the junks that later became a tourist symbol. Their culture was inseparable from the vessel. Fishing, pearling, and small-scale trade were their livelihoods, and the junk was both their workplace and their home.

During the colonial period, British administrators in Hong Kong observed a harbour dense with traditional sailing junks. Photographs and paintings from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century show hundreds of red-sailed vessels crowding the waterfront. To British and European eyes, these boats represented something exotic and ancient, a living fragment of old China framed against the new colonial city rising on the shore.

One extraordinary episode from this period deserves mention. In 1848, a Chinese junk named the Keying sailed from Hong Kong to New York, becoming the first Chinese vessel to reach the United States. It then continued to London, drawing enormous crowds at every port. The Keying voyage introduced Western audiences to Chinese shipbuilding and may have planted the first seeds of the association between the junk and Chinese maritime identity in the global imagination.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, junks remained a common sight in Hong Kong. Working fishing boats sailed daily from typhoon shelters in Causeway Bay, Aberdeen, and Yau Ma Tei. The vessels were practical, not decorative. They fed a city that was still, in many neighbourhoods, a fishing town at heart.

How the Hong Kong Tourism Board Made the Junk Its Logo

This is where the story shifts from maritime history to marketing strategy. The Hong Kong Tourism Board, formerly the Hong Kong Tourist Association, faced a branding challenge in the late twentieth century. Hong Kong was a booming financial centre, a city of skyscrapers and stock exchanges. But cold modernity does not sell tourism. Visitors wanted colour, history, and a sense of place they could not find at home.

The junk provided the perfect solution. Its silhouette was instantly recognisable, its red sails photographically dramatic, and its centuries of history gave Hong Kong a depth of heritage that glass towers could not. The image of a junk under full sail, framed against Victoria Harbour and the rising skyline, became the centrepiece of Hong Kong’s tourism marketing.

The Hong Kong Tourism Board adopted the red-sailed junk as a central element of its visual identity, using the vessel’s distinctive form on brochures, posters, and eventually digital campaigns seen around the world. The junk appeared on official tourism materials, airline promotions, and hotel advertisements. It became shorthand for Hong Kong itself, a single image that communicated “Asia’s world city” with its maritime roots still visible.

What made the junk so effective as a logo was its visual contrast. Red sails against blue water. Ancient timber against steel and glass. A vessel that moved with wind and tide against a skyline that represented speed and commerce. This tension was the entire point. The junk symbol told visitors that Hong Kong was not just another modern metropolis. It was a place where deep history and rapid modernity existed side by side, sometimes uneasily, always spectacularly.

No competing image could do the same work. The Star Ferry was too modest, the skyline too generic without a foreground, and the colonial architecture too politically complicated. The junk was culturally specific, visually powerful, and emotionally resonant. It worked because it felt authentic, even as the actual working junks it depicted were already disappearing from the harbour.

That is the paradox at the heart of this story. The junk became the symbol of Hong Kong tourism at precisely the moment when it stopped being a working reality.

The Dukling: Hong Kong’s Last Authentic Junk

Amid the replicas and tourist boats, one genuine survivor remains. The Dukling, built in 1955 in Macau, is widely recognised as Hong Kong’s last authentic working junk. Originally a fishing vessel operated by a Tanka family, the Dukling spent its early decades hauling nets and catch across the waters of the Pearl River Estuary.

The vessel measures 18 metres in length and weighs approximately 50 tonnes. It carries three masts, and its hull was traditionally built using the same techniques that Chinese shipwrights had employed for centuries. The name “Dukling” comes from the Cantonese for “little duck,” because the rounded hull was said to resemble a duck floating on the water.

In the 1980s, as the fishing industry declined and motorised vessels replaced sailing junks across Hong Kong, the Dukling was purchased and refitted for harbour tours. The transition from working boat to tourist attraction was gradual, but it reflected a broader truth about Hong Kong’s maritime economy. The era of the working junk was ending, and the era of the symbolic junk was beginning.

Hazen Tang, the Dukling’s owner, has spoken about the vessel in terms that go far beyond business. “The Dukling is the icon of Hong Kong,” Tang told the BBC. “I am not only running a business on it, I am trying to maintain this treasurable piece of antique for Hong Kong.” Charlotte Li, a director involved with the vessel’s operations, described it to Reuters in similar terms: “Every piece of wood and every bit of furniture here has its history. This boat really represents Hong Kong.”

The Dukling’s most dramatic chapter came in 2020. When COVID-19 closed borders and foreign tourists vanished, the vessel’s ridership collapsed by an estimated 96 to 99 percent. Rather than mothball the boat, the operators pivoted. They launched Cantonese-language tours aimed at local Hong Kong residents, people who had seen the Dukling in postcards and on the HKTB logo but had never actually set foot on it.

The pivot worked. Locals who had spent years overlooking the tourist boats in their own harbour suddenly discovered what overseas visitors had known all along. A ride on the Dukling offers a perspective on Victoria Harbour that no waterfront promenade can match. The harbour’s scale, the skyline’s drama, and the water’s restless energy all unfold differently from the deck of a wooden junk moving at sailing pace.

Reddit users who have taken the tour describe it in glowing terms. One commenter called it “probably the most relaxing boat trip I have ever taken,” praising the smooth journey and the view of the Symphony of Lights display from the water. Review platforms reflect similar satisfaction. The Dukling holds a 4.5-star rating from over 1,300 reviews on GetYourGuide and a 4.4-star rating from nearly 300 reviews on TripAdvisor.

The Dukling survives, but it does so as a single vessel carrying the weight of an entire cultural identity on its wooden hull. That is an enormous burden for one boat to bear.

From Working Vessel to Tourist Icon: The Transition

The shift from working junk to tourist symbol did not happen overnight, but it was remarkably swift once it began. Motorisation was the first blow. Diesel engines replaced sails across Hong Kong’s fishing fleet during the 1960s and 1970s, as they did in fishing communities worldwide. An engine was simply more reliable than wind, and a motorised junk could work longer hours in more conditions than a sailing vessel ever could.

The second blow was the collapse of inshore fishing. As Hong Kong’s population swelled and its waters became more heavily trafficked and polluted, fish stocks declined. The typhoon shelters that once sheltered hundreds of working junks became parking lots for idle boats. Fishing families left the water for jobs onshore, and the Tanka community gradually dispersed into the city’s housing estates.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the working junk was functionally extinct in Hong Kong. The vessels that remained were either motorised fishing boats with masts removed or a small number of boats repurposed for sightseeing. Into this vacuum stepped tourism. If the working junk was gone, the symbolic junk could take its place.

Several operators entered the market. The Aqua Luna, a purpose-built replica junk designed for harbour cruises and private charters, became a popular alternative to the Dukling. The Aqua Luna and similar vessels replicate the junk’s appearance, complete with red sails, but they were built as tourist boats from the start rather than converted from working vessels. For many visitors, the distinction does not matter. For purists, it means everything.

The difference between an authentic junk like the Dukling and a replica like the Aqua Luna matters because authenticity is the entire premise of the symbol. The Hong Kong Tourism Board’s logo promises a connection to real maritime heritage. If the boats visitors ride are modern fibreglass replicas with cosmetic sails, the symbol becomes hollow. It transforms from heritage into theme park.

This tension between authentic and replica is one that forum users and travel writers return to again and again. Visitors want the real experience. They want to feel that the boat beneath them has history in its timbers, that the harbour looks the same from its deck as it did fifty years ago. The Dukling delivers that. A replica cannot, no matter how well built.

The Symbol That Outlived Its Reality

Here is the uncomfortable truth that sits at the centre of this story. The junk became the symbol of Hong Kong tourism only after it stopped being a part of everyday Hong Kong life. The image represents a city that no longer exists in the form the image depicts.

I wrote about this tension in an article for the South China Morning Post, arguing that Chinese junk fleets left Hong Kong decades ago, their sails made redundant by engines and their purpose gone with the demise of inshore fishing. The Hong Kong Tourism Board successfully used its red junk symbol to promote the city, but the symbol long ago ceased representing reality. It represents a memory of a city, or perhaps more accurately, a version of the city that tourists expect to see.

There is a question worth asking directly. Should the junk symbol be retired? Some argue that clinging to an image of red-sailed junks is an exercise in nostalgia that obscures what Hong Kong actually is today. The city is a financial hub, a technology centre, a culinary capital, and a densely urban environment where fishing boats are about as common as rice paddies. Promoting the junk as the primary visual identity risks setting up expectations that the harbour cannot meet.

But symbols do not need to be literal to be powerful. The junk represents continuity. It connects the glass-and-steel metropolis of today with the fishing village and trading port that preceded it. In a city that has reinvented itself more dramatically and more rapidly than almost any other place on earth, the junk offers an anchor to something older and more enduring than a stock exchange.

For local Hong Kongers, the emotional connection is complicated. Many grew up seeing working junks in the typhoon shelters, or had grandparents who lived on the water. The junk symbol triggers memories of a Hong Kong that felt smaller, slower, and more human. When the Dukling pivoted to Cantonese-language tours during the pandemic, locals responded not just as tourists but as people reconnecting with a piece of their own heritage that had been marketed to foreigners for so long it had become invisible to them.

The junk also resonates differently depending on who is looking. Overseas visitors see romance, exoticism, and photographic opportunity. Local residents see history, loss, and occasionally mild irritation at the gap between the marketed image and the lived reality. Both reactions are valid, and the symbol’s power lies partly in its ability to hold both meanings at once.

Tourism chiefs have occasionally floated the idea of updating Hong Kong’s visual identity, of finding a symbol that reflects the city as it is rather than as it was. These efforts have never gained traction. The junk persists because it works. It is recognisable, it is distinctive, and it carries an emotional weight that no skyline photograph or subway map can match. Until someone finds an image that does all of those things better, the red-sailed junk will remain the face of Hong Kong tourism.

FAQs

Conclusion: A Symbol That Endures

The journey from working vessel to tourism icon is, in the end, a story about how cities choose to represent themselves. A working junk became the symbol of Hong Kong tourism not because it reflected what Hong Kong had become, but because it captured what Hong Kong wanted the world to see: a city where ancient maritime tradition and relentless modernity coexist in a single spectacular frame.

The junk persists because no one has found a better image. It persists because the Dukling still floats, still carries passengers, and still slips across Victoria Harbour with its red sails catching the afternoon light. And it persists because, for all the arguments about authenticity and anachronism, the sight of a junk under sail against the Hong Kong skyline still stops people in their tracks.

Whether the symbol deserves to survive is a question only Hong Kong can answer. For now, the junk remains the face of the city, a ghost of the working harbour that once was, preserved in marketing materials and in the timbers of one stubbornly authentic boat. Understanding why a working junk became the symbol of Hong Kong tourism means understanding that the best symbols are rarely the most accurate ones. They are the ones that make us feel something true, even when the facts have moved on.