Person
Chan Tseng-hsi
Founder of Hang Lung Group, which he established in 1960 as a property development business. He died in 1986, and his will directed that his estate be placed in a trust establishing the Chan Tseng-hsi Foundation.
Background
Chan Tseng-hsi was the founder of Hong Kong’s Hang Lung Group; his ancestral home was Shunde, Guangdong, and his family were wealthy merchants who did business on the eastern coast during the Republican era. In 1960 he founded Hang Lung Group, mainly engaged in property development, and thereafter, together with a generation of new tycoons including Li Ka-shing, Lee Shau Kee and Henry Fok Ying-tung, created the commercial prosperity of post-war Hong Kong. According to an article in the magazine China Philanthropist, Chan Tseng-hsi kept almost completely out of sight, never gave interviews to journalists and rarely even attended property industry events, making him a rather extreme example among the entrepreneurs of his generation; by comparison, Ronnie C. Chan, who inherited the Hang Lung business, is much more open.
In 1986, Chan Tseng-hsi, chairman and founder of Hang Lung Group, died at the age of 63, just 26 years after founding Hang Lung Group. By then his fortune had reached more than HK$4 billion, ranking ninth among Hong Kong’s ten largest consortia that year, behind Lee Shau Kee and ahead of Run Run Shaw. He did not distribute his huge fortune to his wife, nor to his three sons including Ronnie C. Chan and Gerald Chan; instead, in his will he instructed his family to place his assets in a trust to establish the Chan Tseng-hsi Foundation, and the trustee was not a family member but Yin Shangxian, a subordinate who had followed him for many years. According to China Philanthropist magazine, Chan Tseng-hsi’s donation of his estate to establish a foundation put him at the forefront of the Chinese community.
The Chan family is low-key and enthusiastic about philanthropy. Chan Tseng-hsi’s younger brother Chen Zengtao and his wife Xu Qiming donated funds to establish the Si Yuan Foundation in Hong Kong in 1997 to support education and healthcare on the mainland; Chan Tseng-hsi’s sons, the brothers Ronnie C. Chan and Gerald Chan, jointly founded the Morningside Foundation in the United States in 1997, donating to a number of well-known American universities, and in China donated the Morningside Mathematics Building to the Chinese Academy of Sciences and funded the construction of Morningside College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Last updated 18 October 2026