Sunday, February 22, 2015

Emmanuelle 2 - Sylvia Kristel (1975) - Hong Kong and Yaumatei Ferry

More commonly recognised as HYF, this company provided cross harbour services for many years alongside the Star Ferry. The cross harbour tunnel(s) put paid to much of the company's business and as such it has since diversified into the usual property development sidelines, but it does still run some ferry services, notably the dangerous goods vehicle ferry (vehicles carrying potentially hazardous or explosive loads still must get a vehicular ferry service from Kwun Tong <> North Point) and what better way to reuse the now defunct general vehicular ferries than turn them into the Bauhinia Cruise boats. Okay, not a ferry service as such, but good enough.

Anyway, here we see Emmanuelle crossing the harbour in one of the old HYF double-decked double-headed passenger ferries (or 雙層雙頭渡輪). Similar in style to the famous Star Ferry.


Sadly, I can't tell which specific ferry this was. The film was shot in 1975 and at that time the company had quite a few of these boats in service. According to this rather excellent Chinese Wikipedia article there were 15 ferries, of this style, in service during 1975 (take your pick).

These days the ferry licences have been taken over by New World First Ferry (owned by Henderson Land) but even then the routes in operation are few by comparison, though that's not surprising given the number of cross-harbour and cross-island road routes there are now.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Phil,

Referring to the wiki list and according to the shape of the Chinese character of the name of the boat, it is likely the Man Ka (民家).

T

Phil said...

Thanks T, you've got better eyes than me!

Unknown said...

Hi Phil,

Although the HYF is currently owned by Henderson Land (they redeveloped the original HYF shipyards and staff housing in Tai Kok Tusi into private flats), the current operator of HYF's many original ferry services is New World First, which is under New World Development group.

I suspect that HYF still operates the Victoria harbour cruise and the vehicle only ferry service.

Phil said...

Thanks Arthur.

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