In 1931, Britain’s most advanced submarine collided with a cargo ship off the coast of China and sank. Three hours later, six sailors surfaced, barely conscious. They were the first men ever to escape from a sunken submarine using a proto-scuba device. Their story hit headlines and went on to inspire a feature film. The miraculous escape changed marine safety forever. But their names, and their submarine, gradually sank into obscurity. Beijing-based scuba instructor Steven Schwankert was looking for nearby wrecks to dive when he found HMS Poseidon on a list of unexplored sites. His six-year search for the submarine started as a private obsession, but went on to challenge official accounts of the escape, and bring together the lost pieces of a story that touches on the history of Britain and China in the 1930s, the 1970s and the present day.

Steven Schwankert is an award-winning writer and editor with 17 years of experience in Greater China, focusing on exploration, technology, media and culture. His book, "Poseidon: China's Secret Salvage of Britain's Lost Submarine" is out now from Hong Kong University Press. "Beijing & Shanghai," a guidebook he co-wrote for Hong Kong's Odyssey Publications, is now in its third edition.

Steven is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, the Asia Chapter Chair of The Explorers Club and founder of SinoScuba, Beijing's first professional scuba diving operator. In 2007, he led the first-ever scientific expedition to dive Mongolia's Lake Khovsgol, where he and his team found two wooden shipwrecks from the early 20th century.

Steven's work has been published in world-renowned and regionally-recognized publications including The Asian Wall Street Journal, The South China Morning Post, Billboard, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. It has also appeared on the Web sites of The New York Times, The Washington Post, PC World, CIO, and MacWorld. He is a former deputy Asia editor for The Hollywood Reporter, former editor of Computerworld Hong Kong and a former managing editor of asia.internet.com.

He is an alumni of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's Asian Languages department, and received his Masters in journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1995. Steven is a native of New Jersey and now resides in Beijing, China.

It was great speaking to Steven, he made everything sound so alive and vibrant - I just wanted to suit up and take a look for myself!

You can find out more about the Poseidon and SinoScuba at:

http://www.hmsposeidon.com/

http://www.poseidonprojectfilm.com/

http://www.sinoscuba.com/