Entrepreneur and socialite friend to the rich and famous
Sir David Tang, entrepreneur: b Hong Kong, August 2, 1954; m (1) Susanna Cheung Suk-yee, 1s 1d, (2) Lucy Wastnage; d London, August 29, 2017, aged 63.
Sir David Tang was a largerthan-life Hong Kong-born entrepreneur, style guru and bon viveur who embodied both the potentialities and the cultural contrasts of the interface between China and the West. Tang’s business brainwave was to sell upmarket Western consumers a conception of ‘‘modern Chinoiserie’’ that made the emergent eastern superpower more accessible by poking gentle fun at it.
In 1991, at a time of deep foreboding in Hong Kong over the looming handover of power to Beijing, he opened the China Club in the penthouse of the monumental former Bank of China building – from the balcony of which Maoist cadres had once incited the populace by megaphone to turn violently against British colonialist ‘‘devils’’.
The club’s decor mixed Cultural Revolution memorabilia with Qing Dynasty teahouse furnishings and the boldest of Chinese contemporary art. Staff in white Mao suits with red military flashes served cocktails to taipans and visiting celebrities – and, with the addition of China Clubs in Beijing and Singapore, the operation became a focal point for the kind of power-networking at which Tang himself excelled.
Quite simply, he knew everyone – from Fidel Castro, who made him Cuba’s honorary consul in Hong Kong, to the Duke of Marlborough, who invited him to Blenheim for shooting parties; from Margaret Thatcher to Tracey Emin and Kate Moss; and from the Prince of Wales to Deng Xiaoping.
Tang acknowledged no contradiction in being both a proud Chinese patriot and a passionate Anglophile, preferring to see himself as a ‘‘benign mediator’’. Though he claimed to own a T-shirt which said ‘‘F... Off, I’ve Got Enough Friends’’, he greeted new ones and old ones alike with his mischievous, discursive bonhomie: the last British governor of Hong Kong, Chris (now Lord) Patten, called him ‘‘one of those rare people who cheers the world up’’.
Meanwhile, the project of turning himself into a global brand took a second major step in 1994 with the opening of Shanghai Tang, a ready-to-wear clothing and accessories store in the Central district of Hong Kong. Its signature garment was a Chinese evening jacket in bright red or green velvet, and its range included Mao caps and Cultural Revolution T-shirts – all labelled ‘‘Made by Chinese’’ because Tang believed ‘‘Made in China’’ carried connotations of shoddiness.
The Tang persona was oblivious to any distinction between business and pleasure. A world-class cigarman and prolific consumer of fat Cohibas, he acquired the distribution rights for Cuba’s national product throughout Asia and Australasia.
David Wing-cheung Tang’s grandfather, Sir Shuikin Tang, founded the Kowloon bus company and became one of Hong Kong’s ‘‘great and good’’ before World War II as a member of its urban council and chairman of the Tung Wah public hospital.
Brought up a Roman Catholic, David Tang was educated first at La Salle College in Hong Kong and, from the age of 13, at the Perse School in Cambridge – because, he said later, his English was not good enough to gain entry to Eton or Harrow.
By the time he had gone on to study philosophy and law at London University, however, his command of the language was ornate – and for the rest of his life he alternated bizarrely between Wodehousian plumminess and the harsh tonalities of his native Cantonese. Likewise in sartorial style, he was sometimes the retro Savile Row dandy but more often, in loose-fitting tunics and pyjamalike trousers, he might have been an actor playing the part of a Confucian gentleman-scholar.
But there was indeed an intellectual – as well as an exponent of informal diplomacy and a very shrewd dealmaker – behind the life-and-soul facade of ‘‘Tango’’. He lectured in philosophy at Peking University and translated Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory into Chinese before entering the business world in 1985 as Asian representative for the oil and mining adventurer Algy Cluff.
It was for his tireless work in the charitable field that Tang was appointed OBE in 1997 and was knighted in 2008 – wearing a black silk Mandarin suit.
Though he travelled constantly he found time to write including a column for the Financial Times ,in which he offered magisterial answers to readers’ questions on issues of style and manners.
One FT reader asked him to describe his own ‘‘perfect day’’. The answer included a high partridge drive in Northumberland; lunch at the rooftop restaurant of the Danielli in Venice, followed by ‘‘a Punch Double Corona at the Cuban National Ballet school in Havana while watching an exercise class and drinking a double espresso’’; sunset on Malibu beach; a performance of Brahms piano pieces Op 118; ‘‘and so to bed’’. – Telegraph Group