Lost Treasures

Awa Maru Gold Treasure: The Safe-Passage Ship the U.S. Sank

By The Unsolved Report Editorial Team · Last reviewed 2026-06-19

The Awa Maru carried a U.S. safe-passage promise when a submarine sank it in 1945. Did 40 tons of gold and Peking Man go down with it? Facts vs. legend.

On the night of April 1, 1945, a Japanese liner moved through the Taiwan Strait lit up like a floating festival—electric lights blazing, enormous white crosses painted across her hull and decks. She was supposed to be the safest ship on the ocean. The United States had promised, in writing and over the radio, not to touch her. A few minutes after a submarine's torpedoes struck, more than two thousand people were dead, and a rumor was born that has outlived almost everyone connected to it: that somewhere on the seabed off China lies a fortune in gold, diamonds, and the lost bones of an early human ancestor.

This is the story of the Awa Maru—and of the line between what we can prove and what we only wish we knew.

The Documented Facts

The Awa Maru was a modern passenger-cargo liner of 11,249 gross tons, built by Mitsubishi at Nagasaki and completed in March 1943 (Wikipedia, "MV Awa Maru"). By early 1945 she had been pressed into a special role: carrying Red Cross relief supplies to Allied prisoners of war held across Japanese-occupied Asia. In exchange for that humanitarian errand, the United States granted her formal safe passage.

That guarantee was real and specific. On March 28, 1945, Vice Admiral Charles Lockwood broadcast an order to his submarines: "LET PASS SAFELY THE AWA MARU CARRYING PRISONER OF WAR SUPPLIES. SHE WILL BE PASSING THROUGH YOUR AREA BETWEEN MARCH 30 AND APRIL 4. SHE IS LIGHTED AT NIGHT AND PLASTERED WITH WHITE CROSSES" (U.S. Naval Institute, Proceedings, "Let Pass Safely the Awa Maru," 1974). Messages detailing her exact route and schedule were transmitted repeatedly in plain language.

The system failed. The submarine USS Queenfish (SS-393), commanded by Commander Charles Elliott Loughlin, picked up a fast surface contact in heavy fog and, by radar, took it for a destroyer. Loughlin had not been personally briefed on the Awa Maru, and copies of the safe-conduct broadcasts had reportedly never been put in front of him (Proceedings, 1974). The Queenfish fired. The liner went down in minutes.

The human cost is not in dispute. Of the 2,004 people aboard, exactly one survived: a crewman named Kantora Shimoda, the captain's personal steward, who was pulled from the water afterward (Wikipedia). Remarkably, accounts state it was the third time Shimoda had been the sole or near-sole survivor of a sunken ship.

The aftermath was a reckoning. The U.S. Navy court-martialed Loughlin. The board dismissed the gravest charges but found him guilty of negligence, handing down only a letter of admonition. The lightness of the sentence so angered Admiral Chester Nimitz, the convening authority, that he formally rebuked members of the court for the inadequacy of the punishment (Proceedings, "The Treasure of the Awa Maru," 1982; UPI Archives, 1982). Japan demanded indemnification; on August 14, 1945—its surrender day—Tokyo's claim cited damages of roughly 227 million yen, about $52.5 million. The bill was never paid, and the matter was officially closed in 1949 (Wikipedia).

The Genuine Open Question

Here is the mystery that refuses to settle: what was actually in the Awa Maru's holds when she sank?

The official picture is mundane. More credible sources describe her return cargo as raw industrial materials—tin, rubber, lead, sugar, nickel—along with roughly 1,700 merchant seamen and around 80 first-class passengers being evacuated from Singapore to Japan (Wikipedia). One telling detail cuts against the legend: when Japan filed its formal damage claim, it itemized many losses but made no mention of gold bullion (Wikipedia; Proceedings, 1982). A government demanding compensation would have little reason to hide tons of gold it wanted reimbursed.

And yet the rumors were specific, persistent, and circulated across Asia for decades: that the desperate Japanese had loaded the "safe" ship with plundered wealth—commonly cited as 40 tons of gold, a quantity of platinum, and roughly 150,000 carats of diamonds, a hoard valued in some retellings at five billion dollars or more (Wikipedia; Proceedings, 1982). The rumors were taken seriously enough that in 1976 an American salvage syndicate—reportedly including former Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter and Jon Lindbergh—sought rights to the wreck.

Then came the most striking development. Rather than grant those rights, the People's Republic of China quietly located the wreck (reportedly in 1977) and launched its own massive recovery effort. Over roughly five years and at a reported cost near $100 million, China deployed scores of divers and hundreds of support personnel to comb the hull (Wikipedia; UPI Archives, 1982). The result, by the public accounting: human remains returned to Japan, some personal artifacts—and no treasure. If 40 tons of gold had been aboard, one of the most determined salvage operations of the era did not announce finding it. That silence is the heart of the open question.

Theories and Interpretations (Labeled as Speculation)

The "no gold ever existed" reading (best supported). The simplest explanation fits the documented record: the Awa Maru carried industrial raw materials, the gold rumor grew from wartime hearsay about looted Asian wealth, Japan's own claim listed no bullion, and China's exhaustive salvage came up empty. By this view, the "phantom gold" was always a phantom. This is speculation only in that it requires trusting the official inventories—but it is the interpretation the surviving evidence most comfortably supports.

The "gold went the other way" theory (unverified). Some accounts attribute to declassified U.S. signals intelligence a twist: that gold was indeed involved, but was being shipped from Japan to Southeast Asia earlier in the voyage and successfully delivered before the ship was reloaded with tin and rubber for the doomed return leg (Wikipedia, citing NSA analysis). We were unable to independently read the underlying declassified study, so we present this as a reported claim rather than established fact. If true, it would elegantly explain both the gold rumors and the empty wreck.

The Peking Man theory (intriguing but unproven). The most haunting legend ties the wreck to science. The fossil bones of "Peking Man"—Homo erectus pekinensis—vanished in December 1941 while being evacuated from China, and have never been found (NUMA, "Divers Seek Bones of Peking Man," 2012). Investigator Christopher Janus chased tips suggesting the bones ended up aboard the Awa Maru, and a surviving steward reportedly described trunk-like containers on the ship. But that testimony falls well short of proof, and the documented trail of the fossils points elsewhere. The Peking Man link remains an evocative possibility, not a finding.

What is certain is the tragedy itself: a ship sailing under a promise of safety, lost with all but one soul aboard. The gold may be a ghost. The loss never was.

Sources & Further Reading

Wikipedia, "MV Awa Maru"
U.S. Naval Institute, Proceedings, "Let Pass Safely the Awa Maru" (1974)
U.S. Naval Institute, Proceedings, "The Treasure of the Awa Maru" (1982)
UPI Archives, "Full story told of WWII sinking of the Awa Maru" (1982)
National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), "Divers Seek Bones of Peking Man" (2012)

Sources & further reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Awa_Maru
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1974/april/let-pass-safely-awa-maru
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1982/august/treasure-awa-maru
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/09/19/Full-story-told-of-WWIINEWLNsinking-of-the-Ava-MaruNEWLNMistakenly-torpedoed-by-US-sub-Mistakenly-sought-by-treasure-hunter/4980401256000/
https://numa.net/2012/09/divers-seek-bones-of-peking-man/