End of road for the Ngans

Memorabilia and framed photographs of the ancient chairman and managing director of China Motor Bus, Ngan Shing-kwan, still decorate his modest Chai Wan boardroom.

In times of change or trouble, times like now, the patriarch's billionaire children - joint managing director Irene Ngan Kit-ling, a solicitor, assistant managing director Horace Ngan Kit-keung and non-executive director Henry Ngan - hold court around an oblong white-clothed table.

Their 92-year-old father is too ill to take part. The former rickshaw operator from Chaoyang city was resting in the Hong Kong Sanatorium in Happy Valley, a five-minute ride from the family house at Kennedy Road, when the Executive Council of which he was once a proud member stripped his 65-year-old company last week of its original reason for being.

A grinding decline in service over many years, ongoing industrial problems with many of the 2,400 staff and a lack of progress in negotiations with the Transport Department were among the reasons for the demise of a franchise that Mr Ngan had made his life's work. From his hospital bed, Mr CMB presides in name only over a dying bus company with dying transport services.

'It's been a long saga. I should think that he would be feeling rather sad that it's the end of an era for him and his company,' said Sir David Akers-Jones, former chief secretary and a long-time acquaintance of Mr Ngan.

'I'm sure he feels rather upset that a long struggle with his company has come to this end,' said Sir David, a pallbearer at the funeral of Mr Ngan's wife, Mamie Wong Yick-mui, in 1989.

In some ways the story of Mr Ngan, his family and their company is like a chapter in the story of the development of Hong Kong and its people. A man of ideas and boundless energy, he incorporated his company in 1933 to operate and maintain public bus services around Hong Kong Island under an exclusive franchise granted by the Government.