Princess Taiping (sailing vessel)

[1] The ship sank approximately 42 nautical miles (78 km) from its final destination on Saturday, 25 April 2009.

[3]) The ship was commissioned by 61-year-old Liu Ningsheng ("Nelson Liu"), possibly the first Taiwanese person to ever circle the earth in a yacht, to demonstrate the plausibility of the theory that the Chinese explored the American West Coast decades before the voyages of Christopher Columbus.

Thirty craftsmen from Fuzhou, Quanzhou and Zhangzhou spent six years building the ship, without nuts and bolts, using traditional Chinese shipbuilding techniques.

[7] It made 17,000 miles (27,000 km) of its trip, stopping in California, Hawaii, and Japan, among other places, before it was rammed by the Champion Express,[4] a 650-foot (200 m) Liberian-flagged Norwegian chemical tanker,[8] near the Su Ao Harbor in northeastern Taiwan, 20–30 miles from the end of its voyage back in Keelung.

Although the Champion Express did not stop to give assistance, Liu sent a distress signal by radio beacon.