For Hong Kong the seventies dawned promisingly with the arrival in its waters of the giant ocean liner Queen Elizabeth, formerly the proud flagship of the Cunard line. She had been purchased at auction in 1970 by Taiwanese shipping tycoon C.Y. Tung, father of the man who would later become the first head of state of post-colonial Hong Kong. Surviving the disastrous Typhoon Rose of 16th August 1971, when more than 30 other ocean-going vessels ran aground, the liner was set alight by arsonists in the last stages of her conversion into C.Y. Tung's dream of a floating university, to be renamed the Seawise. The 83,000 tonne leviathan, which had cost some $30 million to refurbish, was utterly destroyed within two days of raging fire, sinking alongside the present Kwai Chung container terminal, where the last of her unsalvaged wreckage still presents a shipping hazard.