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The funeral of shipping magnate Sir Yue-kong Pao, in 1991. Photo: SCMP

The ‘Hong Kong story’ of Sir Yue Kong-Pao, son of a shoe seller who became one of the world’s richest men

  • Yue-kong Pao, who died in 1991, left banking in Shanghai in 1949 ‘with the Red Army on its doorstep’
  • The shipping magnate built an immense personal fortune and helped draft Hong Kong’s mini-constitution

“Hongkong mourns loss of Sir Yue-kong Pao,” ran a South China Morning Post headline on September 24, 1991.

The Ningbo-born shipping magnate, who helped draft Hong Kong’s Basic Law mini-constitution and whose personal wealth was “estimated by Fortune magazine at $10 billion”, had died peacefully from a respiratory illness at his Deep Water Bay home the previous day, aged 72.

“This is a Hongkong story: the son of a Hankow shoe merchant rises to become one of the world’s richest men,” declared another story. Pao started “at the bottom”, in his father’s shoe shop, before entering banking in his teens. He rose to a senior role at the Municipal Bank in Shanghai, but left “with the Red Army on its doorstep”, joining his family in Hong Kong, in 1949.

“He launched into trading in the basic commodities of Chinese life – tung oil, ducks’ feathers, animal feeds, beancurd and soybean cake. You could not get much lower.” But when the United Nations placed an embargo on trade with China because of its involvement in the Korean war, Pao “decided to make one heap of all his earnings and sink them into a ship”.

Li Ka-shing, Run Run Shaw and Denis Thatcher were among Pao Yue-kong’s pall-bearers. Photo: SCMP

“As shipping prices rose, Sir Y.K. bought and sold bigger and better ships”, later chartering tankers to major oil companies and “building tankers when the world needed them”. “His amazing instinct for business trends not only helped him rise to the top of the tanker business, but to anticipate its collapse.”

By the time the bottom fell out of the market, he had “quietly” reduced the size of his fleet, enabling World-Wide Shipping to “survive as a force in the shipping of oil”. He followed this success with a knighthood and a “sensational takeover of Hongkong and Kowloon Wharf & Godown Ltd”.

Pao counted Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew and Ferdinand Marcos among his friends, and was renowned for his charitable donations.

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