Her Mid-Levels penthouse once had a breathtaking view over the blue expanse of the Western Anchorage, studded with ships and lighters and criss-crossed by high-speed ferries. But within a few years, the scene was utterly transformed as Cissy Chu Fok Wing-yue looked on, helpless until one summer's day in 1994, she took her son Winston up to the roof garden to see what had happened.
'We saw a huge tract of land jutting out into the middle of the harbour like a sore thumb,' he recalls. 'My mother was so upset that she really gave me a very good dressing down.
'I was a member of the Town Planning Board and she said 'you people are messing up the harbour'. She accused the board of allowing this dreadful reclamation to happen.'
A successful solicitor with his own firm, Winston Chu Ka-sun was spurred on to do research into the legislation governing works such as the massive 340-hectare reclamation at West Kowloon.
He quickly found that under the Foreshore and Seabed (Reclamations) Ordinance then in force, reclamation of the harbour was entirely at the discretion of the governor, with no public consultation required and no criteria to be met.
The Town Planning Board had no power to protect the harbour because the Town Planning Ordinance only came into play once the reclamation was complete and decisions had to be made about how the land was used.