When Sir David Tang died of liver cancer four years ago, aged 63, he was widely hailed as a business genius. The Hong Kong-born entrepreneur had made a fortune from selling ‘modern Chinoiserie’ to wealthy Western consumers, in 1991 opening the glamorous China Club in the penthouse of Beijing’s old Bank of China building, followed by the 1994 launch of Shanghai Tang, a hugely successful clothes and accessories store.
Next came Cigar Divan, selling the best cigars from Cuba across the world; a keen smoker of enormous Cohiba cigars, he lived high on the hog in a Belgravia house – with an English butler – as well as owning homes on Hong Kong island and at Sai Kung in the New Territories. He was one of the greatest social operators going, helped no end by opening the China Tang restaurant at the Dorchester Hotel; he befriended the great and the good, from Fidel Castro to the Duke of Marlborough, Princess Diana to Margaret Thatcher and Tracey Emin, Kate Moss, Sarah Ferguson and Deng Xiaoping. The last British Governor of Hong Kong, Lord Patten, called him “one of those rare people who cheers the world up”.
