Ho Tung reigned for decades as one of Hong Kong's most prominent citizens - forging an unlikely network of relationships that included Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, the British royal family and Winston Churchill. He owned mansions on The Peak and was the first Chinese to live there. In 1908, he was threatened with deportation from the United States 'on the ground of his belief in and practice of polygamy' after arriving in San Francisco as a tourist and seeking medical treatment; he was allowed onshore but his two wives had to stay on the ship. When Ho Tung died, in 1956, at the age of 93, the entire board of directors of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp stood in the rain and bowed three times as his funeral procession passed by its headquarters. His death led to a multi-year wrangle among his descendants over control of his massive estate.

Ho Tung himself was buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery, in Happy Valley, and the ownership of the Chiu Yuen Cemetery was transferred to a membership company in 1958. Among the seven founding directors of that firm was a Eurasian who, despite being only 34 years old, had amassed a fortune through a growing network of businesses in Hong Kong and Macau. The grandson of Ho Fook and great nephew of Ho Tung - his name was Stanley Ho Hung-sun.

STANLEY HO USED TO say he wanted to retire at 55. He is now a frail 89-year-old, having suffered from a fall at home in July 2009 that required surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain, and remains the chairman of both SJM Holdings and Shun Tak Holdings. Local companies' registry filings list him as a director of more than 150 firms.

Ho's life has come to resemble those of the legendary Eurasian tycoons who precede him on his illustrious family tree. He has long been one of Hong Kong's richest people - a billionaire who presides over a multicontinental corporate empire, with mansions spread around the world and with a fleet of private jets to ferry him between them. And his outsized family, too, mirrors those of his polygamous forebears. Ho has had the energy and resources to become the father of 17 children, borne by four women he calls wives. (Two of the 'marriages' are legal: Hong Kong out- lawed polygamy only in the early 1970s.)

However, unlike his renowned ancestors, whose estates were fought over once they had died, Ho is being forced to watch - and take part in - the struggle for control of his fortune. The ailing paterfamilias - to 16 surviving children (eight are university student aged or younger), three surviving wives and at least 10 grandchildren and great-grandchildren - today finds himself locked in perhaps the biggest fight of his life.

Ho last month sued some of his family members, accusing them of 'something like robbery' after they seized control of one of his main holding companies - Lanceford.

Lanceford owns Ho's entire interest in his Macanese casino business and has indirect investments spanning the world. Ho's stake in Lanceford was slashed from 100 per cent to 0.02 per cent in December following a share transaction - the 'robbery' - among members of his second and third wives' families.

Ho's January 26 lawsuit against his second wife, their five children, his third wife and his long-time banker was part of a bizarre sequence of events: hours before the suit was filed, Ho had appeared on television with many of the soon-to-be defendants at his side and said he had no intention of suing them.

A series of backroom negotiations between warring family members followed and Ho withdrew his suit three days after it was filed. In a video filmed the next day, January 30, and posted on YouTube by lawyer Gordon Oldham, the tycoon implies he dropped the lawsuit in exchange for the return of his shares - but that deal failed to materialise.

'I feel a little bit disappointed, because when they said they are willing to surrender all the shares back to me and asked me not to sue them, I agreed,' Ho tells Oldham in the clip. 'I said, 'All right, I will give everyone a chance. We'll call it a misunderstanding, so we can start afresh.''

HO IS GOOD AT FRESH starts. His father, Ho Sai-kwong (also known as Ho Kwong), worked as a comprador to the Sassoon family and served as chairman of the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals. Stanley Ho's mother, Flora, was one of 17 offspring of prominent Eurasian Sin Tak-fan, also known as Stephen Hall, a high-ranking legal clerk and translator who served as president of the prestigious Chinese Club and also chaired the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals. Ho has not often spoken of his Eurasian heritage, saying flatly he was 'a Chinese in the eyes of foreigners but a 'gweilo' in Chinese society', according to a 1972 article in the South China Morning Post.

The world may have handed Ho a divided identity but he turned it into an asset. Like other Asian tycoons born in the 20s, Ho was adaptable enough to survive and thrive in the turbulent times to come.

Ho's opportunistic pliability has been evident throughout his career: starting almost from scratch in Macau, he traded with the Japanese in occupied Canton (Guangzhou) during the second world war; he traded with the mainland during the Korean war, in violation of a US embargo, and was, for a time in the late 50s, banned from dealing in American exports; he curried enough favour among the Portuguese in Macau and Lisbon to win Macau's gaming monopoly in 1962; he condemned Beijing's bloody crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989; he spoke out against the murderous triad battles for control of the high-stakes gambling rooms inside his casinos before the Macau handover; and he won appointment to the standing committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), in 1998.

As the sum of his contradictions, Ho is a difficult man to tally.

Born on November 25, 1921, the ninth of 13 children, Ho's childhood home was a luxurious two-house residence on MacDonnell Road. The family also had a summer mansion on Tai Tam Road, called Stanley Lodge, named after the nearby beachfront village and from which Ho took his English name.

His was a privileged childhood but it wasn't long before crisis descended on the family. Ho's father suffered devastating financial losses during the Great Depression of the 30s and fled to Saigon, Vietnam, along with several of Stanley's brothers. Two uncles committed suicide. Ho was left in Hong Kong with his mother and sisters and the family had to sell both the Mid-Levels residence and Stanley Lodge. They moved into an old rented house on Conduit Road.

'I got to know the meaning of real poverty and what it meant to lose face in Chinese society in the harshest possible way,' Ho recalled years later. His family's financial downfall came shortly after the death of his grandfather, Ho Fook, and prompted the branch of the family descended from Ho Tung to change their surname to Hotung, in order to differentiate themselves. 'They turned their backs on us,' Ho said in 1972.

Ho vowed to reclaim his family's wealth. He threw himself into his studies and won an academic scholarship to the University of Hong Kong.

'In the university, I was so poor that sometimes when girls asked me to buy them a cup of coffee I had to run away as I did not have the necessary money,' he once said.

His studies, however, were cut short by the Japanese invasion.

Ho fled to Macau, landing in 1941, at the age of 19, with HK$10 in his pocket, which he had earned from a brief stint as an air-raid warden.

Wars present many opportunities to make money and Ho did just that. He landed a job as a clerk in the Macau Co-operative Company, owned by a consortium of Japanese and Chinese investors and Macanese tycoon Pedro Lobo. The company supplied machinery and other goods to the Japanese in Canton in exchange for basic necessities such as rice, flour, beans and clothing, which it imported to Macau and Hong Kong. By 1944, Ho had struck out on his own in the fuel business and quickly became the main supplier of kerosene to ships in the harbour as well as to the Macau Electric Lighting Company, or Melco, which decades later he would acquire (his son Lawrence runs it as a holding company today).

In 1949, on the eve of the Korean war, Ho incorporated a firm in Hong Kong to oversee his various import and export trades, Agencia Comercial Progresso (ACP). In August 1959, the US Commerce Department banned Ho and ACP from dealing in American exports, saying he illegally shipped chemicals from the US to the mainland via a broker in West Germany, in violation of a trade embargo. Ho is still a director of ACP.

In the mid 40s, Ho married Clementina De Mello Leitao, the stunningly beautiful daughter of a prominent Portuguese lawyer and businessman based in Macau. The standing of Leitao and her father in the community and their contacts in Portugal gave Ho the social status he lacked as a Hongkonger in Macau. He and Leitao had three daughters and one son, Robert Ho Yau-kwong, who would become Stanley's heir apparent before dying in a car accident in Portugal with his wife, English model Melanie Susan 'Suki' Potier, in 1981, at the age of 33.

Stanley Ho also took a romantic interest in Lucina Laam King-ying, the daughter of a Chinese soldier who fought against Japan. They were married in 1962 in Hong Kong. Ho and Laam had five children between 1962 and 1976. Daughters Pansy, Daisy and Maisy are directors of Shun Tak and other Ho companies while Josie is a singer and film actress. Lawrence is in a Macau casino joint venture with Australian billionaire James Packer, Melco Crown Entertainment. Ho made several investments in Canada in the 80s and Laam emigrated there, where she brought up several of the children.

Leitao suffered partial memory loss following a car accident in 1973 and required round-the-clock medical attention (she died in 2004). One of the nurses hired to care for her was Ina Chan Un-chan, a graduate of Macau's Sacred Heart Canossian College. Ho developed a romantic relationship with Chan and her status as third 'wife' was consolidated in 1985, when he bought her two apartments in Repulse Bay. They had three children, Florinda, Laurinda and Orlando, with the oldest born around 1990. None were involved in the family businesses prior to the deal in December, which gave Chan a 50.5 per cent stake in Lanceford.

In the late 80s, at a private ball, Ho met Angela Leong On-kei, a Guangzhou-born dance instructor who would go on to become his fourth 'wife'. Leong and Ho had five children from around 1990 to 2000 - Sabrina, Arnaldo, Mario, Alice and Ho Yau-kai. Leong is a sitting Macau legislator and the director of several of Ho's key companies, including the one that holds his gaming licence, of which she is also managing director.

HE WAS RICH ALREADY, made so by various trading, manufacturing and real-estate investments, but it was the Macau gaming monopoly that propelled Ho into the ranks of the wealthiest men in Asia and earned him the nickname douwong, or 'king of gambling'.

Together with Las Vegas and Macau high-roller Yip Hon, racing-car aficionado Teddy Yip and Beijing loyalist tycoon Henry Fok Ying-tung, Ho established Sociedade de Turismo e Diversoes de Macau (STDM) and, levying on his connections among the Portuguese, won Macau's gaming monopoly on January 1, 1962. STDM's iconic flagship casino, the 12-storey circular hotel tower that anchors the Casino Lisboa complex, opened its doors at 11am on June 11, 1970.

Ho said in an interview with the Post a month after the Lisboa opened, 'Macau fascinates me because of its challenge. I'm doing something which I couldn't do in Hong Kong - and just watching the place develop, and make its name known is a very satisfying project.'

In the same interview, he offered a rare glimpse into his thoughts on the business that would go on to make him billions: 'I have always regarded gambling as a form of entertainment - and that's strictly it. As far as I see it, it's mainly for middle-aged people to get a thrill out of, because most of them are too old to enjoy a physical sport, but they can enjoy a mental one - gambling. For myself, I don't need it ... I have an interesting life, which doesn't require that I should get 'kicks' out of gambling. It's fun for others, and that's fine - it's just that it's not for me.'

Ho's few forays into the political arena suggest a moderate streak. He publicly voiced concern over the pending handovers of Hong Kong and Macau after the killings in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. He wrote an opinion article in the Post in July 1989 advocating a novel solution to the problem. To restore 'shattered local confidence', he reasoned, Beijing should lease Hong Kong to the United Nations for 100 years in 1997, after the British departed, and should do the same with Macau, after the 1999 handover. Ho said the proposal originated from a dream he had had while napping and listening to Schumann's Fantasie.

'When 1997 arrives I will go to Macau, where I have a home and can enjoy the same lifestyle I have here. I will watch over Hong Kong from Macau and if I like what I see, I will go back,' Ho told an interviewer in 1990.

In 1998, as Macau's handover approached, Ho was appointed to the standing committee of the CPPCC - an acknowledgement of his influence in the enclave, but also a tacit signal that his previous stance over the Tiananmen incident would not colour his relationship with Beijing.

A five-decade run in the casino industry is not for the faint of heart, and Ho has been no stranger to controversy over the years. He once recalled how in the early 60s, he had a run in with a group of American gangsters he caught cheating in one of his casinos. Ho had them tracked down and arrested. 'I knew someone in the police,' he recounted years later. 'They didn't like the Macau jails very much. The rats are bigger than cats. The rats bit their ears and toes off. There was no trouble after that.'

Indeed, the trouble that would eventually have the biggest impact on Ho's gaming business was of a home-grown nature. In the run-up to Macau's handover, the city was rocked by triad violence. Scores of gangsters and colonial government officials were killed, in some cases gunned down along the enclave's leafy boulevards in broad daylight. Tourism arrivals and casino revenue plunged and police blamed the violence on triad factions battling for control of the VIP gaming rooms, where bets on a single hand of baccarat can exceed HK$1 million, inside Ho's casinos. Ho appeared relatively undaunted at first, telling reporters in August 1997 that the local government and police were up to the task. But the warfare raged on and by the spring of 1998 even Ho appeared exasperated.

'Almost 30 people have died within these eight months and not one case has been solved,' he said in April of that year.

The next month, the chief of police arrested perhaps the territory's highest profile gangster, 'Broken Tooth' Wan Kuok-koi, in a restaurant in Ho's Lisboa hotel. The street fights gradually subsided over the months that followed Wan's arrest, and were all but a memory by the time the People's Liberation Army established its garrison in Macau, in December 1999.

But the damage had been done. Within months of the handover, Macau announced its intention to open up the casino market to foreign operators. Industry observers read the move as being partly designed to limit the influence of organised crime in VIP gaming halls. Indeed, that was the conclusion reached by gaming regulators in the US state of New Jersey, who last year published the results of a four-year probe into MGM Resorts International's links to Ho via his daughter Pansy. The 74-page report described Ho as an associate of known and suspected triads who permitted 'organised crime to operate and thrive within his casinos'. It said the private VIP gambling rooms Ho introduced in the 80s 'provided organised crime the entry into the Macau gaming market that it had previously lacked'.

Ho has repeatedly denied links to organised crime and has never been arrested or convicted.

THE INTRA-FAMILY BATTLE being waged over Ho's billions carries more than a hint of irony. Ho's children never tasted the poverty that he did in Hong Kong in the 30s - an experience he credits with motivating him throughout his life.

'I am sure that if it hadn't been for the challenge and the awfulness of our situation then, I wouldn't be half as successful as I am now,' Ho was quoted by the Post as saying in 1989.

Recent years have seen Ho handing over the reins of his flagship companies to family members. Fourth wife Leong is heavily involved in the gaming business while daughters Pansy and Daisy oversee Shun Tak's shipping and property operations. Ho has even stepped down as a director of the Chiu Yuen Cemetery in favour of Daisy; 120 members are entitled to be buried there but the member list is not public.

The deeper irony is that, following the disputed share transfers of recent months, the business empire Ho built over the past five decades no longer appears to be his.

Twenty years ago, at a dinner banquet in Hong Kong, Ho said in his characteristic, only-half-joking way: 'If I claim to be No 2 in Macau, nobody dares to claim to be No 1.'

How times have changed.