Edward Szczepanik may have been best known internationally as the last prime minister of a Polish government in exile, but in Hong Kong he will be remembered as the first economist to chart the city's transformation from fishing village to industrial powerhouse.
He is also credited with being the first to estimate the size of the population - apparently by totting up rubbish disposal figures.
Szczepanik, who died on October 11, aged 90, was a senior lecturer at the University of Hong Kong from 1953 until his departure in 1961.
'One of his biggest contributions to Hong Kong was that he was the one who suggested forming the Trade Development Council and Productivity Council in an article in the Far Eastern Economic Review,' recalled one of his students, Chan Sui-jeung, now a fellow at the Centre of Asian Studies.
Mr Chan remembered his lecturer as short and stocky with a jolly countenance, who began to comprehensively analyse Hong Kong's economy from its beginnings as a fishing village to its status as an industrialised city by the 1950s and a textile manufacturing capital.
'In those days, very few people took Hong Kong's economy seriously,' said Mr Chan. 'One of the reasons Szczepanik said Hong Kong's economy was unique was because the spindles in the factories in Hong Kong were working in three shifts whereas those [of textile competitors] in Lancashire [England] only worked one.'
Szczepanik was also involved in fisheries work at the University of Hong Kong.
