Lee Shau Kee

Lee Shau Kee (1928–2025) was a Hong Kong entrepreneur and the founder of Henderson Land Development. Early in his career he co-founded Sun Hung Kai Enterprises with Kwok Tak-seng and Fung King-hey, and in 1976 he founded Henderson Land. In 2019 he stepped down as chairman of Henderson Land Development and was succeeded by his sons Peter Lee Ka-kit and Martin Lee Ka-shing as joint chairmen. In March 2025, Lee Shau Kee died in Hong Kong.

Together with entrepreneurs of the same generation such as Li Ka-shing, Chan Tseng-hsi and Henry Fok Ying-tung, Lee Shau Kee helped create Hong Kong’s post-war commercial prosperity. When Chan Tseng-hsi, founder of the Hang Lung Group, died in 1986, his fortune ranked ninth among Hong Kong’s ten largest consortia that year, behind Lee Shau Kee.

The Hong Kong property sector has long spoken of the “four great families”: the Li Ka-shing family of Cheung Kong Holdings, the Lee Shau Kee family of Henderson Land, the Kwok Tak-seng family of SHKP, and the Cheng Yu-tung family of New World Development. According to Caixin, by around 2019, although these four families had entered the second or even third generation of management, they still controlled the lifeblood of Hong Kong’s property market; taking land reserves as an example, the four families held more than 100 million square feet (about 9.2903 million square metres) of farmland reserves, an area equivalent to one quarter of the total land area of all public and private housing in Hong Kong at the time.