Creator of Hang Seng Index dies at age 86
Stanley Kwan spied for U.S. after the war
Not many people can claim such a legacy: architect of a stock exchange index and author of two memoirs. Torontonian Stanley Kwan could.
But the Hong Kong immigrant was so humble and modest that even his family did not know he created the influential Hang Seng Index until years later, when he wrote his memoirs in the late1990s. Kwan, who came to Canada in 1984 after a stellar career with the Hang Seng Bank, died of heart failure at his home Saturday. He was 86.
“My uncle was a man of few words, very unassuming,” said his nephew Cheuk Kwan. “He didn’t like to brag about things, but we urged him to put all these fantastic stories in his books.”
Born in 1925 to an established family that ran a Yinhao (gold and silver trading company), Kwan was among a small group of elite Chinese who received an English education at the prestigious King’s College in colonial Hong Kong.
But he was always torn between his patriotism for China, the motherland that was then under the sway of foreign countries, and his appreciation for the rule of law afforded by Western colonial powers.
In 1941, upon his high school graduation, he and some of his family fled the Japanese occupation in Hong Kong to Yunnan in southwest China. He was recruited by the Nationalist Chinese and served as an interpreter for American forces.