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Gary Cheung

They tell of the late patriarch poring over HK map as he weighed its future

Deng Xiaoping's daughters yesterday expressed gratitude to Hongkongers whose affection for their late father  moved the  siblings to tears during their trip to the city.

Deng Rong,  the late patriarch's youngest daughter, said her father always had a map of Hong Kong on his  desk and would study it while deliberating  how to resolve the sovereignty question in the early 1980s.

Ms Deng, her elder sisters Deng Lin  and Deng Nan,  launched an exhibition on Thursday as part of national celebrations to mark  the 100th anniversary of her father's birth last Sunday.

Addressing 400 guests  at a  luncheon yesterday, ending their four-day visit to the city, Deng Rong said she and her sisters had been moved to tears by a picture in the exhibition, which showed a Hong Kong resident putting a map of the city in the mourning hall after Deng's  death in 1997.

'Our eyes were filled with tears when we recalled this moving sight,' she said.

Ms Deng  disclosed that her father had asked the late shipping tycoon Sir  Yue-kong  Pao to help her eldest brother, Deng Pufang,  to travel to Canada for an operation in the 1970s.

Deng Pufang was paralysed from the waist down after being pushed by Red Guards from the fourth floor of a building in 1968 during the Cultural Revolution.

Ms Deng said Sir Yue-kong,  father-in-law of Wharf Holdings chairman Peter Woo Kwong-ching,  offered US$20,000 to buy return tickets and to meet her brother's  expenses in Canada.

She said the Deng and Pao  families  also held  get-togethers before her father's death.

Ms Deng, who wrote  the biography Deng Xiaoping: My Father, said tycoon Robert Kuok Hock-nien  was the last friend her father met before he died.

She added that there was long and deep friendship between the two families.

Mr Kuok's Kerry Group is the largest shareholder in the SCMP Group,  which publishes the South China Morning Post.

A $1 million gold and diamond bust of Deng was presented  at the luncheon. Almost 10,000 people viewed the exhibition on Deng's life at the Hong Kong Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai yesterday, the first day it was open to the public.

Liu Tong-mui, a  paraplegic  who came to the exhibition hall with her parents, said: 'Deng was the greatest person in China and he helped the Chinese prosper.'



Daughters moved by city's love for Deng