Then & Now | So long, Stanley Ho, and thanks for all the ferry tickets

The late casino magnate provided Jason Wordie with material help while the latter was researching a book on Macau

But more than that, after a chance meeting at the Mandarin Oriental, Ho offered profound insight into the lives of the rich

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Bodyguards surround Stanley Ho in 2005. Photo: SCMP

Jason Wordie

Published: 6:00pm, 27 May 2020Updated: 6:10pm, 27 May 2020

Much has already been written about Stanley Ho Hung-sun, the perennially newsworthy Hong Kong Eurasian businessman and Macau casino magnate, who has died aged 98. Colourful legends – true, apocryphal and anywhere in between – are legion; now he is safely dead, more tales will undoubtedly emerge. My own brief experience of the man was tangential, yet provided valuable insights for which I remain grateful.

In 1995, a lengthy unpublished manuscript written during the 1950s and 60s by then Hong Kong University vice-chancellor Sir Lindsay Ride, and which recounted historical stories about Macau through the medium of its Portuguese-era statues, plaques and memorial stones, was passed to me by his widow. The next few years were pleasurably spent pulling it together for publication.

The manuscript was privately nicknamed “The Stones”, to distinguish it from “The Bones”, an earlier work the couple had researched and written on the East India Company Cemetery in Macau, which former HKU registrar Bernard Mellor later completed and published as An East India Company Cemetery: Protestant Burials in Macao (1996).

Others had already had a go at “The Stones”. In 1996, when I mentioned to Austin Coates, the British author of popular historical works on Hong Kong, Macau and the Philippines, that these papers had come to me, he threw up his hands in theatrical mock horror: “Oh, my dear boy, don’t touch it! My advice!”

Macau casino magnate Stanley Ho dies aged 98

Only much later, going through the manuscript in detail, did I realise that – after being offered the papers himself in the late 70s – he had substantially used “the bones of the stones” for his own A Macao Narrative (1978). Coates’stricken shock suddenly made sense.