Tycoon whose gambling empire turned Macau into a global financial centre
Stanley Ho, who has died in Hong Kong aged 98, was the billionaire casino king of Macau and the dominant figure in the development of the former Portuguese colonial enclave on the South China coast.
The entrepreneur headed one of the world’s most lucrative gaming businesses through his flagship firm, SJM Holdings, valued at about US$6 billion.
But despite being one of Asia’s richest men he avoided the gambling floor, preferring ballroom dancing. ‘‘I don’t gamble at all. I don’t have the patience,’’ Ho said in a rare interview in 2001. ‘‘Don’t expect to make money in gambling. It’s a house game. It’s for the house.’’
A scion of a prominent Hong
Kong Eurasian dynasty, Ho fled to neutral Macau, 65km across the mouth of the Pearl River Delta, after the Japanese invasion in 1941.
A Portuguese possession since the 16th century, the run-down trading-post was a hive of vice, espionage and smuggling in and out of mainland China. Ho claimed to have made his first million there by the end of the war, dealing in machinery, rice, kerosene and luxury goods.
In contrast to Hong Kong’s postwar emergence as an international business centre, Macau remained a louche backwater until its fortunes were transformed by Ho’s entrepreneurial thrust, which encompassed property development and ferry services as well as casinos and hotels.
In 1961, with the backing of the Hong Kong tycoon Henry Fok, Ho’s company, Sociedade de Turismo e Diverso˜ es de Macau secured a monopoly gambling concession which endured for four decades before competitors were allowed in to take slices of the lucrative pie.
‘‘Macau treated me so well. I went there with 10 dollars in my pocket and became a millionaire before the age of 20,’’ Ho said.
His string of casinos – there were eventually more than 20 of them, with 1700 gaming tables and 2400 slot machines – accounted at one time for half of the Macau government’s total tax revenues, while his businesses employed a quarter of the local workforce.
After a return to Chinese rule in 1999, an influx of mainland high rollers redoubled takings and enabled Macau to overtake Las Vegas as the world’s top gambling destination.
Though he never shook off rumours of ‘‘triad’’ criminal gang connections that prompted regulators to block the extension of his gaming interests to North America and Australia, he was esteemed in his home territories as a philanthropist, with a dozen hospitals, museums and sports facilities named after him.
He was also a long-established friend of Beijing, where the state broadcaster announced his death as that of a ‘‘patriotic entrepreneur’’.
Stanley Ho Hung-sun was born in Hong Kong in 1921 into one of the territory’s four ‘‘big families’’ – the Li, Hui and Lo business dynasties being the other three.
His paternal great-grandfather Charles Bosman was a Dutch-Jewish merchant, consul and co-owner of Hong Kong’s first hotel; his grandfather Ho Fook and greatuncle Sir Robert Hotung, Bosman’s sons by a Chinese mistress, achieved wealth and influence as compradores (local agents) for the trading house of Jardine Matheson and leaders of civic life.
Stanley – who took that name from the fishing village of Stanley on Hong Kong’s south coast, where the Hos had a summer home – was the ninth of 13 children of Ho Sai-Kwong, who temporarily reduced his branch of the family to poverty during Stanley’s teenage years after losing heavily in share speculation.
Ho’s studies at Hong Kong University were interrupted by World War II. Fluent in English and Chinese, he was working as a telephone operator for British forces when the colony fell to Japan. He boarded a boat for neutral Macau, joining refugees from mainland China in the dying fishing port.
‘‘I had to throw away my uniform and run to Macau as a refugee,’’ he said in the 2001 interview.
During the war, Ho said he ran night-time smuggling and trading trips up the Pearl River Delta, on one occasion surviving a pirate attack.
His good standing with Beijing dated from the Korean War, when his trading activities circumvented a UN blockade on communist China. He was a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an ‘‘advisory body’’ to the ruling regime, and in 2007 he acquired and returned two bronze horses’ heads looted from the Summer Palace by the Anglo-French expeditionary force during the Second Opium War in 1860.
He was also persona grata in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, where in 1999, with a Hong Kong business partner, he opened a casino next to the Communist Party headquarters. When the then leader Kim Jong Il offered asylum to Saddam Hussein shortly before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the message was conveyed via Ho’s office.
Relations were not always so harmonious within the Ho household itself. In 2005 Stanley fought a public battle with his sister Winnie (he declared that ‘‘I no longer regard her as a sister’’) over investment matters. And in 2011, after he had been incapacitated by a fall that necessitated brain surgery, a tussle emerged between the families of his second and third wives on one side, and his fourth wife on the other, for control of SJM.
Amicable agreement was reached, however, and several of Ho’s progeny have emerged as business leaders in the next generation. Pansy Ho – named in 2018 as Hong Kong’s richest woman – chairs Shun Tak, her father’s shipping and property group, and MGM China, a casino joint venture with Las Vegas partners. Daisy Ho chairs SJM, while their brother Lawrence Ho runs Melco, another international casino venture.
The family’s combined wealth has been estimated at US$15 billion. Their affairs were complicated by Stanley’s adherence to his forebears’ tradition of polygamy and concubinage, which remained legal in Hong Kong until 1971. He fathered at least 17 children by four mothers.
‘‘Don’t expect to make money in gambling. It’s a house game. It’s for the house.’’