David Tang fondly remembered as aristocratic philanthropist

Sir David Tang Wing-cheung was regarded as Hong Kong’s last British aristocrat. We met more than 30 years ago because we shared a common vision for philanthropy. In fact, I first met David’s grandfather Sir Tang Shiu-kin in October 1982 at a welcoming reception hosted by the United States consul general for project Orbis, the charitable international flying eye hospital. The founder of Orbis Dr David Paton and I visited Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland for the first time on our mission to treat the underprivileged and visually impaired.

I saw David many times between 1988 and 1993, when I was invited by Nobel laureates professors Yang Chen-ning and Charles Kao Kuen to return to Hong Kong and establish the Hong Kong Institute of Biotechnology. David had just founded the China Club. At one of these meetings in 1993, David told me he was supporting the newly established Youth Outreach (YO), a charitable organization started in Hong Kong in 1991 by the Reverend Peter Newberry of the Salesian Society. YO’s mission was to help at-risk youths grow into responsible members of our community. David told me YO was holding its first charity gala at the Grand Hyatt Hotel on March 18, 1994. He invited me to participate and donate a few of my paintings for auction at this fundraising event. He also promised he would be the auctioneer that evening. I agreed immediately not only because I was honored to receive this famous collector’s appreciation of my art, but was also grateful to be able to use my paintings to raise money for such a compassionate mission.

This charity party was attended by many celebrities, including Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, Alex To and others. Some of David’s international friends, such as British royal family member Sarah, Duchess of York, also provided enthusiastic support. Under the strong leadership of Newberry and David, the gala event raised more than HK$2 million for YO.

YO has matured to become one of most important youth charities in Hong Kong. YO believes every young person has unique talents. Unfortunately not all at-risk youths could have the opportunity to be appreciated in our conventional education system or accepted by mainstream society. For them, YO actively develops a “unique youth culture base”, a culture platform to encourage at-risk youth to cultivate their “non-mainstream” gifts, such as hip-hop dance, skateboarding, rock music, Thai boxing, adventure-based sports, and eSports. YO hopes to substitute the triad behavior of at-risk youth with these attractive cultures.

After all these years, David and I continued to enthusiastically support this public service. In fact, several years ago, I began to collaborate with Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group to design artistic and jewelry products using my calligraphy and painting with all my royalties donated to YO. One reason for this collaboration is that some of the leaders at Chow Tai Fook and I have been good friends for decades; a few were even my schoolmates at Salesian School.

In July this year I had lunch with one of David’s best friends who said David had terminal liver cancer. He had a liver transplant and other Western medical treatment but his condition continued to deteriorate. He even went to the United Kingdom for treatment but the advanced stage of the disease meant doctors there could not help and estimated his life expectancy to be one or two months. It so happened that, for more than 20 years, I have been working on the prevention or treatment of infectious diseases and cancer using oral vaccines and traditional Chinese medicine. I therefore proposed to send him some of these TCMs that are relatively safe and have been used to treat cancer, in the hope his life could be extended. David did not accept my offer. He was very brave even in the face of death, to the extent of planning a farewell party in the UK for his global friends on Sept 6, but unfortunately he passed away on Aug 30.

TCM treatments usually do not involve a single chemical compound and lack the clinical validation of Western medicine and so are still not widely accepted in the West. I fully understand this viewpoint. However, it is also noteworthy that thousands of well-established Western drugs were originally extracted from plants. Besides, the safety and efficacy of many TCMs are the result of hundreds of years of accumulated experience from Chinese medicine practitioners. Thus, in the absence of other medical treatments, especially for fatal diseases, one may wish to try the appropriate TCM as a last resort. In this regard, it is of interest that when I was an ophthalmology professor at the Texas Medical Center in the 1980s, my colleagues and I had successfully treated a paralyzed and comatic patient with a TCM and even subsequently received two US patents on this product and process.

Furthermore, in 2015 the famous Chinese scientist Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for her study of Chinese artemisinin to treat malaria, strongly affirming the therapeutic importance of TCM. Moreover, the use of TCM against end-stage cancer may be particularly worth a try when Western medicine has been unable to help.

Taken together, Sir David Tang is an amazingly compassionate and unique intellectual whom Hong Kong is proud and grateful to call its own.