Seriously, David
SUNDAY in Sai Kung, and but for the occasional rattle of minibuses ferrying teenage barbecuers to the country park, Tai Mong Tsai Road is a peaceful place to be. Off on a track leading to one of the many seafront homes, the silence is punctuated by the twitter of birds, the barking of unseen guard dogs and, then, a singularly human sound.
'Look, how on earth is he going to be able to eat if you put the chair there? No, no, no. Now he's going to freeze to death. Look, it's perfectly simple. Let me do it myself. There, that's the way. Common sense, you know. Common sense!' Welcome to David Tang Wing-cheung's Sunday retreat. The visitor is greeted by the sight of a terrace decorated with small tables, chairs and a barbecue brazier aimed at keeping out the February chill. David Tang, dressed in an olive green Chinese silk suit, trademark Havana in one hand, is dragging a chair into position midway between the fire and a table, while a house boy looks sheepishly on. No one is in the least put out by Tang's outburst. In fact, visitors to the humble villa with its landscaped lawn and private jetty rather look forward to seeing him berate Alex, his gentle giant of a driver, bark at his servants and - best of all - browbeat his guests.
Sunday lunch chez Tang is normally an expansive affair featuring, weather permitting, a marquee and a guest list which might contain an equal measure of nobility, tycoons and celebrities from both Hong Kong and overseas (cronies like Simon Murray might share a table with visiting upper-crust Brits or even Kevin Costner and Bryan Ferry). They all come to hear Tang speak - something he does effusively, spinning outrageous anecdotes, firing off opinions and peppering his monologues with highly erudite allusions and earthy Anglo-Saxon expletives.
Today, though, it's just the man himself, his children Victoria, 10, and Edward, eight, a family friend and my tape recorder. The boss of Tag Heuer was going to come but that has been postponed.
Today Tang is talking to the media. That is something he does with astonishing regularity (on average, he has featured in a story in the South China Morning Post alone every fortnight for the past year), but in the past week or so his profile has reached Leeson-esque proportions thanks to the expansion of his Shanghai Tang store in Central, his release of a guide book to Cuba and his appointment as Honorary Consul to said country.
One of his employees made the social pages this week with the observation: 'he's so OX (over exposed)', but the reaction of one of my friends to the news I was interviewing Tang was rather more pithy. 'Who the hell wants to read about him? I'm serious, quote me as saying that.' Consider it done. What more is there to say about the 40-year-old man whose China Club, Shanghai Tang and Cigar Divan ventures keep him in the news, and who was rather embarrassingly (for him) described in a Sunday Telegraph profile as the most important man in Hong Kong after Chris Patten, because of his perceived power in the courts of Whitehall and Zhongnanhai? Rather a lot in fact.