COVID turned the Jumbo into a floating duck, but its fortunes, along with the replica Tai Pan in Sydney Harbour, were sealed before that.
. In the 1996 film, Stephen Chow judges a fictional cooking competition that captivates audiences across China. The finale was held inside Jumbo Floating Restaurant – an epic scene of decadence befitting Jumbo’s iconic status., as do many of Hong Kong’s hopes of returning to its halcyon days.
Jumbo closed at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, then floundered under the mountain of maintenance required to keep it afloat. Last week it set sail from Hong Kong to a destination unknown. A spokesperson for the company told thethe vessel was being towed to somewhere in Southeast Asia. But it never made it.
The Queen ate there, so did Jimmy Carter and Tom Cruise. But they have all long since disappeared from Jumbo and Hong Kong, which severed its ties to Britain in 1997, wiped out the pro-democracy movement in 2020, and shut its borders to the world that same year. A decade later it faced its own reckoning in Hong Kong. For the first time in more than 20 years, Jumbo operated at a loss in 1998. The Asian financial crisis had taken its toll, the Japanese economic downturn was in full swing, and tourism was struggling. But Hong Kong had also changed.