The man who made Hong Kong a force in the global shipping industry

Vision, pragmatism and hard work were behind the phenomenal success of the late Pao Yue-kong (1918-1991), who put Hong Kong on the map in the international shipping industry.
But to go beyond simply becoming wealthy to hobnobbing with world leaders required considerable charisma and, in Pao's daughter's words, "a great sense of humour".
Nicknamed "King of the Sea" by Newsweek magazine on its front cover in 1976, Pao and his flagship World-Wide Shipping Company owned the world's biggest fleet, with a total tonnage of 13 million deadweight tonnes - more than that of Japanese shipper Sanko Kisen and Denmark's A.P. Moller - the second and third biggest - combined.
Pao started his shipping empire with the HK$20,000 he and his family took from Shanghai to Hong Kong in 1949, said his eldest daughter, Anna Pao Sohmen in her new book, Y.K. Pao: My Father, to be published next week.
When Pao purchased his first ship, an 8,200-tonne coal carrier, in 1955, he was a novice "banker-turned-shipper". That modest start would evolve into one of the world's most formidable fleets in just 15 years.
"Father was a visionary," Pao Sohmen said. "He talked about globalisation way before other people were thinking about it. So he was definitely ahead of a lot of people."
His pragmatism, she said, led him to do business with the Japanese, despite the war that forced the Pao family to flee to Chongqing in 1942.
"It was a little painful for him that he had to do all that [engaging the Japanese]. But he was very pragmatic, so he got on with things. It was his pragmatism which helped him go beyond what normal people see," she said.
As the eldest of four girls in the family, Pao Sohmen saw her father's work at close range, including the relentless way he ran his shipping empire.
"His style at the company was that he would drive everybody crazy sometimes in pushing forwards," she said. "He spared no one and there was no talk about face. If anyone made a mistake - to the decimal - he just told them all off in front of their colleagues. I was so embarrassed for them that I wanted to hide under the table.
"But he was so caring that when he passed by a messenger or a tea lady, he would say 'How's your daughter?' or 'How's your sick father?'. He remembered all these little details."
Nothing ran deeper than his affection for his home country, she said. Not even the most radical phase of the Cultural Revolution, when his close relatives were persecuted, took the shine off the mainland.
"It was in 1967 in a letter he wrote me that he said: 'One day, China will open up and become industrialised, and we will all go home.' I couldn't believe it would happen in his lifetime, or mine," she said.
She said her father had a theory behind his optimism about the Chinese. "'For China,' he said to me once, 'you have to think of the pace multiplying 10-fold when compared to any other countries.'
'Why 10-fold,' I asked. 'Well,' he said, 'just look at the sheer number of people and the labour force. More importantly, there is an inherent culture [among] the Chinese people, who want to do more to drive the economy in order to leave something better for the next generation, which other cultures may not be so strong on.'"
With the world's biggest cargo fleet and offices in London and New York, Pao was "truly a world citizen", Pao Sohmen said, but with a Chinese heart. These two sides to his character were best highlighted when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace in June 1978 and when he met China's paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing just four months later.
Over the next 13 years, up to his death in 1991, Pao served as what former British foreign minister Geoffrey Howe called an "unofficial ambassador", shuttling between Beijing, London and Washington for talks over the future of Hong Kong.
"He talked sense, and saw the big picture," said Pao Sohmen, who was with her father at most of his meetings with top leaders, including US president Ronald Reagan, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and Deng.
"But what really helped was his sense of humour, which often relieved an otherwise tense atmosphere. A skipping rope for Thatcher as a surprise Christmas gift is one example," she said.
Pao was an important go-between during the impasse over Hong Kong's future. Once he presented a roll of calligraphy to Thatcher through Reagan, with the message that China was unwavering over Hong Kong.
"Father knew it because Deng told him personally at a private meeting in Beijing. From that he knew there was no ground for negotiation and he duly conveyed it to Thatcher, and the rest is history," she said.
She recalled, some years after the 1997 handover, the former prime minister apologised to her, saying, "Oh Anna, I am so sorry for doing what I must do about Hong Kong."
"And I said to her, 'Please don't, Margaret. That was the greatest thing that could have happened to Hong Kong."
Source: South China Morning Post