An old wooden Chinese-style sailboat said to have great cultural heritage value is ready to be shipped back to Taiwan after sailing to the US in 1955, where it has stayed for more than half a century, a government official said yesterday.
Chiu Wen-yen (邱文彥), deputy minister of the Environmental Protection Administration, said the boat, built in 1890, still has its navigation logs and that some of the crew of its last Pacific journey are still alive.
“The boat could be the only and the oldest existing Chinese sailing boat built entirely according to ancient methods and could possibly be the only existing Chinese wooden sailing boat to have made the passage across the Pacific,” Chiu said.
The boat was originally named the Keelung because it was commissioned in the northern Taiwanese port. Its name was later changed to Free China and it set sail from Keelung Harbor in April 1955 to take part in an international sailing competition in the US, gaining prominent news coverage because it was the first ancient Chinese-style boat to sail across the Pacific in modern times, Chiu said.
After many twists and turns, the boat finally arrived in San Francisco in August of that year, although it had missed the competition. The six crewmembers included Calvin Mehlert, then-US vice consul to Taiwan.
The boat was then donated to a museum before later being abandoned at a private shipyard.
Then-premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) learned about the boat about two years ago and instructed the Council for Cultural Affairs to dispatch officials, one of whom was Chiu, to San Francisco to inspect the cultural heritage value of the boat.
Liu wanted to ship the vessel back to Taiwan, an undertaking with an initial estimated cost of more than NT$7 million (US$232,000), but a lack of funding put his plan in jeopardy until President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and various enterprises contributed the required money.
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