| IMO | 6708109 |
|---|---|
| Length | 150.27 m |
| Builder | Chantiers de l'Atlantique |
| Hull number | No. 23 |
| Launched | 1966 |
| Maiden voyage | 1967 |
| Status | Preserved |
| Preserved at | Tianjin, China |
| All names | Orient Princess; Yaohua |
Overview
Yaohua holds a place in maritime history out of proportion to her size. She was the first purpose-built passenger ship for the People's Republic of China and that country's first flagship — a modern liner ordered from a French yard at a time when China had no tradition of building or operating deep-sea passenger tonnage of its own. Her name, rendered Yao Hua in some sources, means "to glorify China".
Renamed Orient Princess in 1987, she ended her sea-going career in 2003 and survives as a floating tourist attraction at Tianjin — one of very few 1960s passenger ships still afloat. She was originally catalogued here under her first name; the name she has carried since 1987, and under which she is preserved, is Orient Princess.
Key specifications
The dataset is deliberately sparse for this hull: IMO 6708109, hull number No. 23 at Chantiers de l'Atlantique, a length of 150.27 m, and launch and maiden voyage both dated 1967. Tonnage, beam, capacity, crew and speed are blank in the dataset and are therefore left blank in the spec box above.
Her own article gives a fuller, liner-era set of figures: 10,151 GRT, a beam of 21.0 m, a speed of 19–20 knots, accommodation as built for 318 passengers — 100 in first class, 100 in second and 118 in third — and a maximum crew of 177. Those are gross register tons, the older volumetric measure, not modern gross tonnage, and they should be read as such. The article also gives a length of about 149 m, slightly less than the dataset's 150.27 m, and a launch date of 10 December 1966 rather than 1967.
Design and construction
Yaohua was built by Chantiers de l'Atlantique at Saint-Nazaire, France, as yard number 23, and delivered on 20 August 1967. She was a passenger liner with a real cargo element: contemporary descriptions note three cargo holds, two forward and one aft, alongside her passenger accommodation. For a ship of about 10,000 tons she carried an unusually large swimming pool, a feature remarked on by several observers.
Her three-class layout attracted comment at the time: a flagship for a communist state might have been expected to be one-class, yet she was arranged in first, second and third class in the conventional liner manner. She was powered by two Sulzer diesel engines on twin screws. In silhouette she was a handsome late-classical ship — shapely bow, high forward superstructure stepping back, single funnel — from the last generation of liner styling before the boxy cruise-ship profile took over.
Naming, launch and maiden voyage
The dataset dates both launch and maiden voyage to 1967; her article dates the launch to 10 December 1966, with delivery the following August. On either dating she was a 1967 ship in service. Her maiden employment was not a cruise but a liner service: China to East Africa, the route on which she worked for her first years. She later moved to Far East services in the 1970s.
She kept the name Yaohua for twenty years, until her sale in 1987 brought the name Orient Princess, in Chinese Dongfang Gongzhu. It is under that second name that she spent the rest of her career and that she survives today.
Career by operator
The dataset leaves operator history blank for this hull. The chain below is taken from the ship's own article, which is why the operators differ in style from dataset-only entries elsewhere in this directory.
| Period | Name | Operator / owner |
|---|---|---|
| 1967–1982 | Yaohua | People's Republic of China (China Ocean Shipping Company) |
| 1982–1987 | Yaohua | Salén Lindblad Cruises (charter) |
| 1987–1994 | Orient Princess | Republic of China Maritime Corporation |
| 1994–unknown | Orient Princess | Asphonel Services |
| unknown–c. 2003 | Orient Princess | Pallister Group Ltd |
| 2003–present | Orient Princess | Unknown — preserved at Tianjin |
The Lindblad chapter is the one that made her known to Western passengers. Chartered from 1982 to Salén Lindblad Cruises — the organisation that became better known through Lindblad's expedition cruising — she began cruising in March 1983 under a China Cruises programme, sailing the Yangtze River and the Chinese coast on voyages starting from Beijing or Hong Kong. It was an early opening of China to international cruise passengers, in a Chinese flagship.
Onboard character
As built, Yaohua's character was that of a small, well-appointed liner rather than a cruise ship: three classes, a high standard of public rooms for her size, spacious cabins, ample deck space, and that oversized pool — a ship specified in the full liner tradition, with class separation and cargo holds, delivered in 1967 when most Western owners were abandoning exactly that model. Her later cruising career softened the pattern without rebuilding her: under Lindblad she was sold on intimacy and access rather than on entertainment or resort facilities.
Major refits and incidents
The defining incident of her later life came at the end of her sea-going career. In April 2003 she was seized by the authorities because her crew were unpaid, and she was taken out of service — her article gives 11 April 2003 as her out-of-service date. She then passed to another Chinese company, which moored her at Tianjin as a floating attraction.
Her conversion to that static role involved building two large restaurants on board, one aft of the boat-deck superstructure and the other on her promenade deck. Those additions, visible in photographs of the preserved ship, are the main structural change recorded for her after her cruising years. During the 1990s, as Orient Princess, she changed ownership and role several times and at one point operated as a casino ship.
Sister ships and class
Yaohua had no sister ships. She was a one-off design built to a Chinese order at Saint-Nazaire, and the dataset accordingly records no ship class for her. Her contemporaries are a matter of era rather than of design: the last generation of purpose-built passenger liners delivered in the mid-1960s by European yards for non-European flag owners, just before air travel and then purpose-built cruising redrew the market she had been built for.
Fate and where she is now
The dataset records her as preserved, with the fate "Floating tourist attraction in Binhai, Tianjin, China". That matches her article's account of her being moored in Tianjin after 2003. She is not a museum ship in the curated sense: she is a statically moored former liner adapted with restaurants, surviving because a static commercial use was found for the hull. Reporting on her condition and on what remains open has been thin since about 2010, so she is best described as extant and preserved at Tianjin on the evidence available, with the detail of her present state unverified.
Visit her today
Yaohua — as Orient Princess — lies at Binhai, Tianjin, China, where she has been moored since 2003 as a floating tourist attraction. Two large restaurants were built aboard her as part of that conversion, one aft of the boat-deck superstructure and one on the promenade deck, and those, rather than restored liner interiors, are the core of what a visitor encounters.
No official website for the attraction was found in the sources used for this guide, and opening arrangements, access to the ship's original passenger spaces, and her current condition could not be confirmed from a primary source. Anyone planning a visit should treat the Tianjin mooring as the confirmed fact and everything about access as to be checked locally.
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ocean_liners, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Orient_Princess