MBT 10.20.012 passenger ship ss "Queen Elizabeth" (1938) - Cunard

RMS Queen Elizabeth is a ship built in the mid 1930s by John Brown & Company in Clydebank, Scotland.

The Queen Elizabeth is the sister ship of the Queen Mary.

After being converted into a floating university for £5 million, the ship caught fire on 9 January 1972. There is some suspicion that the fire was deliberately started, as it broke out in several places simultaneously.^[1] The fact that Chinese shipping magnate C.Y. Tung had insured the ship for a significantly higher amount than he had paid for it led some to suspect that the fire was set to collect the insurance money. Others believed the fire might have been a result of disagreements between Tung, a Chinese nationalist, and communist shipbuilders.^[2]

The ship was completely destroyed by fire, and the water from the fireboats caused the ship to capsizeand sink in Hong Kong harbour.^[3] Ultimately, the ship was dismantled for scrap between 1974 and 1975 because it posed a danger to shipping. Parts of the hull that were not salvaged remained on the seabed of the bay. Nautical charts warned against anchoring in that spot. It was estimated that 40 to 50% of the wreck still lay on the bottom.^[4] In the late 1990s, the last remnants of the ship disappeared underground due to land reclamation for a container terminal.^[5] The Queen Elizabeth was long considered the largest wreck of a passenger ship, until the accident with the Costa Concordia in 2012.

The charred wreck served as MI6's secret headquarters in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun from 1974.

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