Where the Long River Flows: Li Ka-shing and the House He Divided

“Tell him to swap with Richard.”

On the afternoon of May 25, 2012, after the annual meetings of Cheung Kong and Hutchison Whampoa, Li Ka-shing stayed on at Cheung Kong Center to meet the press, and the reporters wanted the sons. Under the division just announced, would the elder feel short-changed? The father, eighty-three, said the elder could always trade with Richard, his younger son’s English name.

Victor Li would take the family’s holdings in Cheung Kong, Hutchison Whampoa, and Husky Energy. Richard Li would build outside the group with money from his father, no figure given, only that it would be several times what Richard then owned. Victor, forty-seven, had worked in the group for twenty-seven years. Richard, forty-five, had gone to America at thirteen, come home at twenty-three to start a satellite television station, and bought Hong Kong’s telephone company at thirty-three. As boys they had sat on two small chairs in a corner of the boardroom while the adults discussed land, loans, and building.

Seven weeks later the registers of two family trust companies changed: Victor’s stake rose and Richard’s name came off, though he stayed a beneficiary. The father kept the chair six more years. All of it lay far ahead of the twelve-year-old who reached Hong Kong in 1940 with a family hoping only to wait out a war.

A Letter from a Sickbed

In 1943 Li Yun-jing, a schoolteacher from Chaozhou, wrote to his brothers at home. He had no more money for doctors and no longer expected to recover; he asked them to look after his wife and children. Japanese bombing had closed the schools of Chaoshan in 1939, and in 1940 the family had come to Hong Kong to lodge with his wife’s brother, a watch dealer. When the colony fell he sent his wife, his daughter, and two small sons back to Chaozhou and kept the eldest.

Then tuberculosis. Li Ka-shing left school to nurse him, read what he could find about the disease, and recognized the symptoms in himself. There was no money for a doctor; he thought of his mother and the younger children and decided he could not die yet. His father was buried in a paupers’ grave.

He swept floors in his uncle’s watch shop, and by the war’s end was a clerk in another at HK$25 a month, then a salesman for a factory making plastic belts and watch straps. Others worked eight hours, he said, and he worked sixteen. Before twenty he was general manager, sending money home and paying his siblings’ school fees.

In 1950, at twenty-two, with about HK$50,000 of savings and loans from relatives, a dozen or so workers, and a few machines, he opened Cheung Kong Industries to make plastic household goods. The name means Long River; he chose it, he said, to remind a young man who was polite on the surface and arrogant beneath that a great river takes in small streams. He slept in the factory loft, and slept better with the machines running below.

In 1957 he toured artificial-flower factories in Rome and Naples and came home to make hydrangeas. A New York importer sent a man to inspect the factory, and the man placed an order; by 1958 the trade called him the king of plastic flowers. Within a few years he judged the flowers a fashion American buyers would tire of, and put the money into land.

Three Dollars a Share

In 1958 he bought land on King’s Road in North Point and put up a twelve-storey industrial building, part for Cheung Kong and the rest let out. The bank run of 1965 and the riots of 1967 emptied the market; emigration advertisements appeared in the papers, owners in a hurry sold factories, shops, and flats cheap, and Cheung Kong, carrying little debt, stayed and bought.

In 1963 he married Chong Yuet-ming, his cousin, the watch dealer’s daughter, a graduate of the University of Hong Kong. She worked on the company’s finances and raised two sons at 79 Deep Water Bay Road.

Cheung Kong listed in 1972. The underwriters proposed HK$11 a share, then HK$8. Li held at HK$3: investors trusted British firms and were wary of Chinese ones, and if the price ran ahead of the results, the new shareholders would be the first to lose. The issue was heavily oversubscribed, and the year’s profit beat the forecast.

A Dinner Without Notes

On the afternoon of September 25, 1979, Bill Wyllie, chief executive of Hutchison Whampoa, took a call from Michael Sandberg, chairman of HSBC, who asked only whether he could be reached that evening. The second call told him: the bank had decided to sell its Hutchison shares to Li Ka-shing and would announce it that night.

Wyllie had spent four years saving the company; HSBC, which had put in the capital, had always said it would not hold the shares forever. Li wanted what a developer could not build from scratch: container terminals, ParknShop and Watsons, the Whampoa Dock land at Hung Hom. The bank’s 22 percent was the largest block. Sandberg refused him several times that year before agreeing, at the end of August, to talk.

Li told neither his directors nor his wife. Every ten cents on the share price would cost him another HK$9 million, and a leak might bring rivals. The bank used code names and destroyed its drafts; Li kept no notes and let no secretary near the papers. On the evening of September 19, Sandberg came to Li’s penthouse in China Building and the two men dined alone. For the first time the chairman said the bank agreed in principle. The price took the advisers two more days: HK$639 million, 20 percent down, the balance within two years. Even the deposit was an HSBC loan to Li, lent on to Cheung Kong; the seller financed the buyer.

On the 25th Li asked his lawyer to come after the market closed, without saying why, and recited the terms from memory. Around six the bank’s board approved, and Li went to sign. Back in his office he found Wyllie asking to meet. The phone rang while they talked: reporters had the price and the instalment terms. At half past eleven, with London closed, the announcement went out. A company that had begun as a plastics factory held the biggest piece of a British hong.

Li took the chair in 1981 and kept the last word on any large commitment; by 1984 the chief executive, his deputy, and the finance director had all gone. Simon Murray ran the company for nearly ten years and put the arrangement plainly: he drove the truck, and Li sat behind and said where to go.

In 1985 Hongkong Land, in debt after the property crash, sold its stake in Hongkong Electric, and Li, through Hutchison, was the buyer. The HK$2.9 billion purchase, by his own count, took seventeen hours, nine once he subtracted the sleep.

Two Small Chairs

At Stanford the sons began on bicycles. One evening, waiting for them at dinner, Li watched a son ride home through the rain, soaked, under a heavy load. The next day both were sent for driving licenses, and he bought a solid new car, last year’s model, to be shared. Tuition and living expenses sat in separate accounts: the tuition fully funded and untouchable, the living money released only after a letter explaining what it was for, which the father promised to answer within twenty-four hours. When coursework made letters a burden the boys asked to telephone instead. He agreed. The explanation was still required.

Victor, born in 1964, studied civil engineering, came home in 1985, and joined Cheung Kong. In April 1987 Hutchison bought 43 percent of Husky Energy for C$484 million, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce took 5 percent, and Victor, personally, 9. The money was his father’s; the votes were his.

Richard, born in 1966, was sent at thirteen to a preparatory school in California and a rented apartment with no servants. He called the first months “like hell”: his English was poor, it was a week before he learned to fry an egg, and what he knew best were the brands of frozen dinners. He left Stanford without a degree for an investment bank in Toronto, where in three years he was a partner. On New Year’s Day 1990 their mother died, not yet sixty.

Expo Lands

In 1988 a consortium of Li, Cheng Yu-tung, Lee Shau-kee, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce bought the 204-acre Expo lands in Vancouver, C$50 million down, and made Victor president of the development company. That December two of his other Vancouver projects sold out in Hong Kong in hours while local buyers waited for a call that never came, and the anger spread to the Expo lands. Victor admitted insensitivity to local feeling and a misjudged market. In January 1989 Premier Bill Vander Zalm proposed reopening the signed contract, wanting the family to pay for the lead and arsenic in the soil. One Monday morning Victor drove to the premier’s Fantasy Gardens: the company would carry its responsibilities, and the province should honor its contract. The premier said he had never meant to renegotiate. By 1996, 2,100 homes had sold; Victor would count it among his proudest projects.

New York needed the father. In October 1991 Hutchison, with Victor leading, bought 49 percent of 60 Broad Street, a thirty-nine-storey tower a third let, with Olympia & York, the Reichmanns’ company, already stretched by Canary Wharf. Within a year its American subsidiary missed a month’s interest, and two executives flew to Hong Kong to explain to Li Ka-shing books worse than he had known. Rather than sue and risk the building, a company he controlled took the rest of the stake for about US$20 million set against the debt.

A Yacht and a Ransom

In July 1993 Richard Li, twenty-six, boarded Rupert Murdoch’s yacht off Corsica to sell a television station his father had handed him three years earlier, when the satellite was up and the station did not exist. He had put the start-up at about US$100 million, half from his father personally and half from Hutchison. The license, in December 1990, allowed no subscription fees, so Canning Fok had advertisers pay HK$2 million each in advance for two years of airtime before anything had aired. STAR TV opened on August 26, 1991, with the U.S. Open tennis, and within a year had five channels, Coca-Cola and Nike on the air, and losses. Murdoch had offered US$425 million for control and been refused. On the yacht it became US$525 million from News Corp for 63.6 percent. Richard brought the agreement home; his father read it and telephoned at dawn to say the deal could be done.

On May 23, 1996, at about six in the evening, Cheung Tze-keung and his men took Victor from his car on Deep Water Bay Road, and the driver with him. Then Cheung came to the house himself and asked for HK$2 billion. Li agreed at once: he could raise HK$1 billion in cash, and would go to the bank if more was needed.

Cheung asked why he was so calm.

“Because this time I was wrong,” Li said. A family as well known as his, and he still drove alone at dawn to golf in the New Territories; a few cars around him and there would be nothing to be done. He had been careless.

The family paid HK$1.038 billion. Victor and the driver came home, and no report was made to the Hong Kong police. The business went on: in 1999 Hutchison sold Orange, its British mobile network, to Mannesmann for a profit of about HK$118 billion.

A Thousand Shares Each

In August 2000 Richard, thirty-three, bought Hongkong Telecom from Cable & Wireless, ahead of Singapore Telecom and Murdoch’s money, with new shares and bank debt, and renamed it PCCW. The boom ended that year; the shares fell, about US$12 billion of short-term loans had to be refinanced, and 16,000 employees became 12,000 by early 2003.

In 2006 Richard tried to sell his stake, more than a fifth of PCCW held through a Singapore-listed vehicle, to the banker Francis Leung for about HK$9.2 billion. Leung’s HK$500 million deposit was paid with money borrowed from Li Ka-shing. The loan predated the deal, Leung said; the Singapore exchange nonetheless ruled that Richard, who controlled three-quarters of the vehicle, could not vote. When Leung’s fund faltered, by November two of Li Ka-shing’s foundations were to take 12 percent. Richard wrote to the Legislative Council that he had asked Leung before signing whether his father was involved and been told no; he would be glad, he said, if the minority voted the deal down. On November 30 in Singapore, three-quarters of them did. The foundations bought nothing. Richard stayed.

Two years later he proposed to take PCCW private at HK$4.50 a share. Tipped off anonymously, the investor David Webb inspected the register on January 29, 2009, and found several hundred new names entered on a single day, a thousand shares each, many of them insurance agents at Fortis. The scheme needed a majority of shareholders by number as well as by value, then a court’s sanction. At the meeting on February 4 a shareholder named Chan said she would rather throw her money into the sea than sell to Richard Li. The vote passed; the Securities and Futures Commission took the ballots. A Fortis manager had bought 500,000 shares, split them into lots of a thousand, and handed them out with proxy forms as bonuses to agents and their relatives; 494 of them voted yes, and without the questioned votes the headcount failed. On April 22 three judges of the Court of Appeal unanimously overturned the lower court’s approval; a process like this could not persuade them the vote was fair. The ruling touched the scheme, not Richard’s personal liability, and PCCW stayed listed. In 2013 his group bought ING’s insurance business in Hong Kong, Macau, and Thailand and called it FWD; it listed in July 2025, when he was fifty-eight.

The Third Son

In 1979 Li went back to Chaozhou for the first time in nearly forty years and offered to fund a university. He gave the first HK$30 million the next year; Shantou University was approved in 1981 and took its first undergraduates in 1983, the campus still being built. When the hall went up in 1986 someone proposed calling it Ka Shing Hall; he declined, and it is the Great Hall still.

One evening at dinner he told the family he had another child. They did not follow. He meant the foundation, founded in 1980. He had lain awake the night before asking how the giving would go on without him, and had decided to provide for the foundation as for a son; this son’s property, he told them, was not for the family to divide. He put it at roughly a third of what he owned, and said the two sons had not objected. To keep it growing, the foundation invested in young technology companies through Horizons Ventures, founded in 2002 by Solina Chau, a director of the foundation. In June 2018, at his last Shantou graduation as honorary chairman of the university council, he handed the work of the university to Richard and the foundation’s staff.

An Adviser Who No Longer Votes

On March 16, 2018, Li announced he would retire after the annual meeting and become a senior adviser; Victor would chair CK Hutchison and CK Asset, the two companies into which Cheung Kong and Hutchison had been reorganized in 2015. Would the adviser still decide? If everything still had to come to him, he asked back, why would he resign? On May 10 Victor took the chair, thirty-three years after joining. His father could come to the office and give a view on large matters, but no longer voted as a director.

On February 23, 2026, Panamanian officials walked into the ports of Balboa and Cristóbal and took over their operation. A year earlier Victor had been preparing to sell them, with most of the group’s overseas ports, to a consortium led by BlackRock, until the sale became a quarrel between Washington and Beijing over the canal. In January Panama’s Supreme Court found the law approving the port contract unconstitutional; the ruling took effect on the 23rd. The company called it an unlawful seizure and in August began investment treaty arbitration. As of September 7, 2026, there was neither award nor settlement, and the sale had not closed. In May the group sold UK Power Networks to ENGIE: bought under the father, held sixteen years, sold under the son.

Victor’s daughter Michelle Li joined the group in 2016, while her grandfather was still chairman; she handles business management and investor relations and sits on the foundation’s board. Whether she will run the group is not decided.

The two boys who sat on small chairs in the corner of the boardroom have gray hair now. The father no longer sits at the head of the table. New documents are placed in front of them, and they are the ones who sign.