100 years of solicitude

Many countries in Asia, including China and Japan, honour elderly people who have made extraordinary contributions to society. They call them Living Treasures. In Hong Kong, we've several people who qualify for this title. But none of them ranks with that tiny, chirpy man whose family today is celebrating his 100th birthday.

Sir Run Run Shaw has won so many honours in so many spheres over so many years that he is a veritable breathing treasure chest. The diminutive man with the beaming smile has given so much to so many.

When he was born a century ago in the port city of Ningbo , south of Shanghai, there were few written records. There are at least a half-dozen confusing dates for his birth, to the point that even the boy born as Shao Yi-fu isn't certain.

One thing is sure, however. In that century the remarkable, softly spoken knight has built memorials that have enriched the lives of millions. He has done it with humility, and many acts of quiet philanthropy have been carried out with the insistence that nobody knows he is involved.

In about 1984, for example, I returned from a trip to the remote Yunnan borderlands. I was interviewing Sir Run Run about his programme of funding new schools and medical universities on the mainland. I happened to mention I had been to an inspiring movement in Yunnan where Ma Haide, the doctor behind the successful programme to wipe out venereal disease on the mainland, was making great strides in eliminating the ancient scourge of leprosy.

The flesh-rotting disease had eaten the bodies of Chinese for 3,000 years. Dr Ma had led the barefoot doctors who spread news that it was curable and not easily passed on. But these teams of medical pioneers could not reach the villages in sorry isolated pockets of the distant hills where leprosy was still an active plague.