Days before his arrest on corruption charges in January 2003, Wang Xuebing and I met over lunch. It turned out that I was the last outsider to see him before the axe fell.

Over tea and spiced beef noodles, he talked to me of talent and rewards and other people's pay packets, giving a rare glimpse into the psyche of a man unable to resist the overwhelming temptations that beset all too many Chinese bankers on overseas assignments.

It was almost Christmas. I had been lobbying Wang for months to see me. I was then working as a financial journalist and he would be a prize catch.

Not only was he one of China's best-known bankers in the west and had been on the fast track for promotion to the top echelons of power but his name was being linked at the time to an unprecedented investigation by the American authorities into a mainland bank in New York in what promised to be a scandal.

After much importuning and lengthy correspondence, Wang finally agreed to see me. He invited me to lunch at the Beijing headquarters of China Construction Bank, his newest turf.

He was then chairman of China Construction Bank and head of the Morgan Stanley joint venture CICC. We were to have a private lunch with only two of his aides as chaperones.

Wang did not disappoint.

He had the air of a man in command and the demeanour - a sort of lean and hungry look - that fits the stereotype successful Chinese politician and banker. His deep-set eyes were penetrating and one had the feeling that not much escaped them.

Wang was surprisingly articulate. He spoke of acquiring a bank in Hong Kong, quoted Chinese poetry and the sayings of Deng Xiaoping and talked of the need in post-WTO China to link pay to performance. 'It's the only way to attract and retain top talent,' he said.

Money. That was exactly where I wanted to conversation to go.

Speculation had been rife that he was being investigated over what had been delicately described as 'irregularities' involving the Bank of China in New York during his watch.

Wang had been asked almost routinely by the Hong Kong press every time he passed through Hong Kong about those investigations. He had always brushed off the subject and one time had even threatened legal action against some newspapers.

But during that lunch in late December, Wang was feeling contemplative rather than combative. I asked him what he thought of the mind-boggling remuneration packages of top financial executives such as that of Citibank chief Sandy Weill who is reputed to have been paid some US$800 million over a five-year period.

'Yes, I am paid less than that,' Wang said. 'Much, much less.'

He then volunteered the additional information that he was in fact paid 'many times less' than the managers working in the bank's Hong Kong office. He added that if I were to put the 'many times less' at about HK$3,000 a month, it would not be a bad guess.

Was that it then?

Were the fabled nine-digit US dollar salaries of other bankers the siren call that had led to his eventual destruction?

Did the man from poverty-stricken Hubei province find the temptations of New York, with its plush living and high-flying chief executives, too much to resist?

Did he feel injustice that his talents and huge responsibilities were given a lower rating, in monetary terms, than some minion following orders in some menial job at the bank he heads?

That Wang was an extraordinarily accomplished banker in a China undergoing the turbulence of transition is often acknowledged. The facts speak for themselves: At 35, he was given charge of the important New York operations of arguably the country's most successful and outward-looking financial institution, the Bank of China. At 40, in 1993, he became the bank's president.

At 41, he won the coveted 1994 Distinguished Leadership Award in gold trading from the New York Commodity Exchange.

At 47, as the world entered the new millennium, he made it to the Chinese central bank's powerful Monetary Policy Committee.

Right to the end, the accolades came. Just days before official confirmation of his arrest, he was being described by the Wall Street Journal as 'one of the shrewdest faces of corporate China'.

The Bank of China would later announce that it would pay US$20 million to both Chinese and US regulators for 'misconduct' by its New York branch during the 1990s.

In early 2004, Wang was formally sentenced to jail. He was also stripped of party membership which in China is the passport to making any sort of comeback.

Through it all, Wang had never hesitated saying his piece. To this day I remember his pithy observations at what turned out to be his farewell to the outside world.

On China's banking industry:

'The dinosaur is extinct. Why? Because it took the animal's brain a full five minutes to receive the signal from its body that its tail had been bitten off by its enemy and another full five minutes for it to co-ordinate an action in response.'

On talent:

'There's more chance of success with first-class talent managing a second-class company than second-class talent managing a first-class company.'

And then, it was time to say goodbye.