Wealthy solicitor Lo Tak-shing, who died yesterday, set out in the mid-1980s to become the first chief executive of post-British Hong Kong. It was a position he thought he deserved. It was one he failed to achieve.
The man who sometimes described himself as 'a member of one of Hong Kong's most aristocratic families' was spurned by the public and abandoned by political forces he expected to support him.
Lo Tak-shing's claim to spring from a family that felt it had the right to rule was understandable in the context of his times. His personal and professional background placed him for many years at the core of the city's rich and powerful.
He failed to parley that position of influence into becoming the first chief executive. After losing badly in the 1996 race to head Hong Kong after the handover, Lo faded from the public scene in which he had shone for years. From 1997, he was largely absent.
Lo's prominence was based on membership of one of the most famous families of Hong Kong. His father, Sir Man-kam Lo, served as an executive councillor. An uncle who was widely popular in sporting and legal circles, Lo Man-wai, sat on Legco from 1950 to 1959.
The family were related to the vast and powerful Hotung clan.
Like a million other people, the Lo family left Hong Kong in early 1942 after the Japanese military government's grip on daily life began to tighten. Lo Tak-shing, then aged seven, went to Lingnan Primary School in Guangzhou and later, when the family returned to Hong Kong after the war, to Lingnan College.