Ta Shing sailboats: the Tainan yard behind Taiwan's best-known cruising boats
Ta Shing is not a brand most sailors see on a transom. It is the Tainan, Taiwan yard behind the Baba, Panda, Tashiba, Mason, and Taswell badges, among others, turning out more than 1,000 sailing vessels between the mid-1970s and 2001 by marine consultant Steve D'Antonio's count. One review flatly calls it the top Taiwanese boatbuilder and one of the best quality yards in the world, and the boats it built for American importers carry the yard's name as a mark of provenance.
Origins and ownership
The company began long before its first yacht. C.M. Juan founded it in 1957 as Shing Sheng - "New Life" - building wooden fishing boats, and the shop later progressed to fiberglass; D'Antonio's Taiwan Log Book credits Shing Sheng as the first builder in Taiwan to use the material for commercial boat construction. The move into yachts came with a new name in the mid-1970s: Ta Shing, meaning "Big-New." Pacific Asian Enterprises' company history dates the founding of Ta Shing to 1976, noting the firm was just completing a state-of-the-art factory when the Mason 43 project was brought to it, while D'Antonio places the formal name change in 1977 - either way, a twenty-year-old fishing-boat builder reinventing itself for yacht work.
It stayed a family company with unusual continuity. PAE describes Juan, the founder and first president, as running the yard on a simple mission statement: to be the best. His son Tim Juan later took over leadership, and when D'Antonio toured the facility, the chairman had been with the company for forty-six years - a longevity of personnel that few production boatbuilders anywhere can match.
The designers
Ta Shing's sailboat story is inseparable from a Seattle yacht broker named Bob Berg. In the mid-1970s Berg formed Flying Dutchman International Ltd. with two business associates to import traditionally styled cruising boats from Taiwan, and he commissioned Bob Perry to design them. Ta Shing became the prime builder for the boats Berg was developing for the American market, starting with the Baba 30 - a model named, in one of yacht building's better anecdotes, for the Taiwanese workers' pronunciation of Bob Berg's name. From there the yard produced an expanded line of Perry cruising boats; the Tashiba name itself is a play on words combining Ta Shing and Baba.
The second thread came through Pacific Asian Enterprises, which chose Al Mason as the naval architect for its first project - PAE's history calls his designs beautiful, rugged, and seaworthy. Ta Shing produced 132 of the "3"-series PAE/Mason sailboats between 1978 and 1985, and the Mason program at the yard ultimately ran to 212 boats - a line whose full story lives on its own page. The third was British naval architect Bill Dixon, who drew the Taswell 43 of the late 1980s, a fin-keeled departure from the Perry double-enders.
Construction through the eras
What set Ta Shing apart from its neighbors was vertical control of the things that mattered. D'Antonio notes it is one of the few Taiwanese builders to operate its own onsite log yard, where complete teak and other hardwood logs are milled exclusively for its own use. Vintage distributor literature from the Panda era describes the operation as a 9,500-square-meter plant with its own log curing shed, its own sawmill for processing whole teak logs, and climate-controlled fiberglass and gel-coat application shops, staffed by more than 200 skilled builders spanning lay-up crews, finish carpenters, and ship's mechanics. Notably, the yard had no equipment-manufacturing interests of its own - rather than fit house-brand gear, it sourced American, European, and Australian components.
The boats themselves bear this out. Practical Sailor's review of the Baba 30 records hulls of uncored, hand-laid fiberglass in alternating layers of mat and woven roving - six layers in most places and ten to twelve in the keel area, per Berg himself. Interior treatments evolved from gelcoat and quilted vinyl on early boats to sprayed foam insulation and, later, teak-batten ceilings. By the Tashiba era the yard was encapsulating the ballast casting inside the keel - no keel bolts to corrode - and on the Tashiba 36 of 1986 it laid up exterior hull skins in osmosis-resistant vinylester resin over hand-laminated glass, with balsa-cored decks reinforced by marine-plywood coring and stainless backing plates at through-deck fittings. Surveyors quoted by Practical Sailor singled out the electrical work - high-quality wire, tagged and bundled - as evidence of the yard's habits.
Lines and generations
The Perry double-enders form the heart of the range. The Baba 30 ran from 1978 to 1985 with more than 230 built, and the Baba 35 - dubbed the Flying Dutchman when it first splashed in 1979 - added roughly 72 boats through 1986. The Baba 40, a full-keeled descendant of the fin-keeled Valiant 40, was reworked twice: first as the Panda 40, then as the Tashiba 40, the factory-branded version produced from 1984 into the 1990s after Ta Shing took over the marketing itself. The Tashiba 36 of 1986 and the Tashiba 31 - described in one review as the last full-keel production double-ender Perry drew - rounded out the family, and the yard's output also included the Tatoosh 42 and, per D'Antonio, the Orion line. The Mason and Taswell lines ran alongside them under separate programs.
The sailboat era wound down through 2001, but the yard did not. After declining PAE's first powerboat - the design that became the Nordhavn 46, built instead by South Coast Marine - Ta Shing accepted the Nordhavn 62 in 1991, rolled out the first boat in 1992, and delivered hull number one to Singapore on her own bottom in 1993. The N57 followed in 1996, then the N72 and N76 in 2001 alongside a new 50,000-square-foot factory; the MS56 motorsailor of 2006 was built by many of the same workers who had built the Mason sailboats. The hands that finished the sailboats, in other words, kept building.
Who Ta Shing is for
Ta Shing suits the buyer who cares more about how a boat was put together than whose name is on the hull. Its sailboats are traditional, heavily built cruisers - hand-laid glass, deep teak joinery from the yard's own sawmill - wearing half a dozen badges that all trace to the same shop floor. For anyone comparing Taiwan-built boats of the era, the builder is the meaningful variable, and Ta Shing's name on the build is what the Baba, Panda, Tashiba, Mason, and Taswell owner communities are organized around.