It is claimed that: "The first act of piracy for gain in the history of aviation" took place aboard a PBY Catalina flying boat named Miss Macao owned by Cathay Pacific Airways, which was hijacked during a flight between Macau and Hong Kong on 16 July, 1948.
Until this century, the Pearl River Delta had been a hotbed of piracy. Neither Imperial China nor its successor, the Kuomintang, was able to control it. Neither was the British Royal Navy. In 1948, there was still a civil war going on in China, and Canton (Guangzhou) was still in Nationalist hands.
Macau was technically a province of Portugal. That country had not joined the International Monetary Fund and was therefore not obliged to obey its rules on the import of gold. Macau became the headquarters of the world's biggest gold syndicate which stubbornly refused to reveal the names of its customers. The press had great fun writing stories on Macau's alleged smuggling industry.
Two years before the Cathay hijack, Fu Tak-yam, the boss of this syndicate, had been kidnapped while enjoying a pipe of opium in a Buddhist retreat, and his family had to pay an enormous ransom. Kidnapping has always been a national sport among the Chinese criminal community. Many of the Cathay seaplane's regular passengers were extremely wealthy. They were a tempting target. It was later reported that the luggage of one of the passengers, Wong Chung-ping, a millionaire Macau bullion dealer, contained 3,000 taels of gold.
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