How one company survived two world wars and a changing China to make roots in Hong Kong

Michael Green does not have time to pause and reflect on the past. The 78-year-old chairman of Arnhold & Co may have handed most of the decision-making at the building materials and engineering equipment business to his son Daniel, 44, but he is still closely involved in the 152-year-old company, which his father, followed by Green himself, salvaged after the second world war.

He must also juggle the demands of various charitable commitments: he is chairman of the Incorporated Trustees of the Jewish Community of Hong Kong, responsible for the historic Ohel Leah Synagogue, in Mid-Levels, and the Jewish Cemetery, in Happy Valley, for example. He complains that Judith, his wife of 50 years, is insisting on a holiday to the Galapagos Islands because he may miss important emails due to patchy phone coverage.

Nevertheless, there are some memories a busy schedule will never erase, and for Green, one of those involves Spanish floor tiles and tinned fish.

For three horrific years (1942-45), he, alongside his mother, Louisa, was held in Japanese internment camps in the Philippines. They had been evacuees sailing from Shanghai to Australia when seized. All the while in captivity, his mother was unsure whether her Hong Kong-born husband, Maurice, had survived the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, where he had stayed on as a senior manager at the company.