Cheoy Lee sailboats: a Hong Kong yard whose teak-built yachts reached America through independent dealers
Cheoy Lee is a Hong Kong shipyard whose sailboats reached American buyers largely through independent dealers rather than a factory sales network. The Lo family that founded the yard built cargo vessels and, later, teak pleasure craft in Hong Kong; it was San Francisco yacht broker David Toombs, discovering an unknown Hong Kong builder's all-teak sloop, who set the pattern of importing Cheoy Lee-built boats designed by outside architects such as Arthur Robb, Bill Luders, and, later, David Pedrick. That East-meets-West arrangement produced thousands of sailboats before the yard's ambitions shifted toward larger motoryachts and commercial vessels.
Origins and ownership
The Lo family's shipbuilding roots trace to a yard the family established on Shanghai's Pudong Peninsula in the late 1800s — 1870, by several accounts — founded by an earlier generation of the family together with two brothers. In 1936 the family relocated the business to the then-British colony of Hong Kong; war broke out soon after. Fifth-generation family member Hans Lo has said the Japanese seized the family's property in the occupation that followed, while the company's own history credits the Hong Kong yard with re-powering merchant sailing vessels to outrun the Japanese blockade. When the family's oldest son, Lo To, returned to the war-ravaged yard in 1946, he found nothing left and began building the first postwar boat with his own two hands.
From that rebuild, Cheoy Lee diversified by the mid-1950s into teak sailing and motor yachts built mostly for export to America, and by the 1960s pleasure craft accounted for 90 percent of the yard's output — reaching a high point in 1964, its most prolific year, when 252 vessels were entered into the order book, driven mainly by rocketing yacht sales into the US market. At the peak of its production, according to the Cheoy Lee Sailboat Association's history, the company became probably the world's largest builder of sailing yachts, with worldwide distribution.
That sailboat era wound down by around 1990, when, according to Lion Yachts' David Toombs, Cheoy Lee elected to expand its very large motoryacht business — then building yachts from 61 to 200 feet — and grow its commercial work in steel, aluminum, and fiberglass. The company concluded negotiations to sell its Penny's Bay site for the construction of Hong Kong Disney in the late 1990s and moved manufacturing across the border to the new Hin Lee Shipyard on the Pearl River delta in Zhuhai, mainland China, which opened in 1997. In 2018 the company rebranded its luxury production-yacht arm as CL Yachts, while larger custom builds continued under the Cheoy Lee name. The yard's output settled into a roughly 80/20 split between commercial vessels — including more than 140 Robert Allan-designed Z-Tech tugs — and custom superyachts, employing about 1,000 people.
The designers
Cheoy Lee's sailboats were largely the work of outside naval architects rather than an in-house design office. The relationship began with Arthur Robb, whose all-teak Lion 35 sloop became the yard's first production yacht in 1957; more than 70 were built in wood before 27 more were completed in fiberglass in later years. That boat is what led David Toombs, around 1960, to a then-unknown Hong Kong builder — an encounter that led him to found the Lion Yachts dealership and, by his account, to encourage Cheoy Lee toward fiberglass construction. Cheoy Lee's earliest custom pleasure yacht, the 1957 Sparkman & Stephens-designed Mah Jong, was commissioned by three Americans and sailed from Hong Kong to New York on her own bottom, a 15,000-mile shakedown delivery. As the Lion Yachts distributorship prospered, Toombs recalls the yard expanding into more modern designs across several new lines — from Robb and Bill Luders Jr. through Ray Richards and, eventually, David Pedrick. Across those collaborations with Luders, Robert Perry, Philip Rhodes, and Pedrick, Cheoy Lee built more than 4,500 yachts through the 1980s boom.
Construction through the eras
Cheoy Lee's construction history begins in wartime mechanization rather than yacht-building: the shipyard specialized in re-powering sail-driven cargo vessels during World War II before diversifying, by the mid-1950s, into teak sailing and motor yachts built mostly for export to America. In the early 1950s the yard's patriarch, Lo To, began experimenting with fiberglass, making Cheoy Lee one of the first yards anywhere to use the new material and, per Practical Sailor, one of the first molders of fiberglass boats in Asia. Encouraged in part by Lion Yachts, Cheoy Lee coordinated closely with Lloyd's Register surveyors through the early 1960s to establish a molding and materials specification, made steady progress through the decade, and had phased out wood construction entirely by the mid-1960s; the yard became a fully Lloyd's-approved shipyard, in all building materials, in 1962. Practical Sailor's retrospective credits the late 1960s and 1970s with an enviable reputation for classic design and workmanship, tempered by construction problems the magazine called endemic to boats built in Asia then — inappropriate plywood use and poor electrical wiring among them. The yard pushed its fiberglass technique further still, building the 130-foot motorsailer Shango II in 1977, the world's largest molded fiberglass yacht of its time, and bringing its first all-foam-cored, vacuum-bagged production yacht online by around 1979-80, developed with naval architect Tom Fexas.
Lines and generations
Several distinct lines emerged from those design partnerships. The Lion, Arthur Robb's original teak sloop, established the yard's reputation before fiberglass construction began. The Clipper series carried Luders' work from 33 feet up to 48 feet — the Clipper 36 was built from 1969 to about 1988, and the 42 followed a year later, in 1970 — before Pedrick's more contemporary designs eventually replaced both. Toombs' account also credits Luders with the Offshore 47 and much of the Midshipman line of early center-cockpit boats, alongside the Robb 35 and the 41-foot Reliant among the other lines the yard developed as the dealership grew. A later Pedrick series ran from 36 to 55 feet, and Robert Perry designed a Cheoy Lee 35 and 44.
Who Cheoy Lee is for
Cheoy Lee's sailboats suit buyers drawn to teak joinery and decks, Lloyd's-specification fiberglass construction, and a lineage of outside naval-architect designs rather than a single house style — boats that arrived in America through independent dealers rather than a factory-direct sales network. That same history means the make rewards buyers willing to research which architect, era, and dealer-driven variant they are actually looking at, since the yard's own production shifted decisively away from sailboats toward larger motoryachts and commercial vessels by around 1990.
