Sir Robert Ho Tung, man and money: how a Hong Kong Eurasian built a myth and a fortune, and became the richest person in the territory
- Known as ‘the first Chinese to be allowed to live on The Peak’, Sir Robert Ho Tung was in fact half-Chinese and half-British, with blue eyes and reddish hair
- From modest beginnings he became the wealthiest person in Hong Kong and, as biographer May Holdsworth explains, enjoyed the markers of his success
Sir Robert Ho Tung: Public Figure, Private Man by May Holdsworth, pub. Hong Kong University Press
Decades after his death, Sir Robert Ho Tung remains a perennially recalled Hong Kong figure. Anyone with even rudimentary local-history knowledge will have heard something about him, even if only that he was “the first Chinese to be allowed to live on The Peak”.
But what else is definitively known about this legendarily wealthy, twice-knighted local grandee, one-time comprador [commercial middleman] of Jardine, Matheson and Co, and chairman of the Tung Wah Hospital Committee?
As might be expected from an authorised biography (commissioned in 1997 by Eric Hotung, Sir Robert’s grandson) the narrative that unfolds is polite, yet surprisingly objective, compared to other “family history” books that have appeared in Hong Kong in recent years. Fair and measured, this tone lends authority, and further validates the detailed scholarship the author has brought to bear throughout.