Bond was quite familiar with China’s tortured twentieth-century history, but he allowed Li to tell it in his own words.
“It was a period of great turmoil. During a skirmish in Guangzhou, my great-grandfather was killed, leaving his son Li Pei Wu, my grandfather, to look after the family fortune. Unfortunately, the republican government was extremely unstable; between 1912 and 1949 there were times when it didn’t exist at all and the country was a …” again he searched for the right word, and finally said in English “… a free-for-all!” Li smiled at his choice of phrase.
Bond continued the history lesson. “As for Sun Yat-sen, he formed the Kuomintang party in an attempt to limit the republicans’ power. The government outlawed the Kuomintang and Sun Yat-sen was forced into exile.”
“You are well informed, Mr. Bond,” Li said. “Ambitious warlords vied for leadership for more than a decade. In 1921, the Communists organized in Shanghai, with Mao Zedong among their original members. They made bids for power in the turbulent country, and in 1923, Sun Yat-sen agreed to admit them to Kuomintang membership. But after Sun’s death in 1925, the young general Chiang Kai-shek took over the leadership of the Kuomintang and set about reunifying China under its rule, ridding the country of imperialists and warlords, and exercising a bloody purge of the party’s Communist membership.”
Bond wondered what all this had to do with Li’s family. In answer to his thought, Li said, “My grandfather’s family got caught up in the maelstrom that ravaged China during this period of unrest. The family fortune was lost to the Communists in 1926, and my grandfather was murdered for having “secret society” connections. My grandmother and her two young children became refugees and fled across the border into Kowloon. The eldest of the children was a boy of seven, named Li Chen Tam.”
“Your father?”
Li nodded. “The Communists had seized all of my family’s property, amongst which was the ancient document signed by James Thackeray and my great-great-grandfather, Li Wei Tam. The document was considered lost for all time. I’ve already told you a little about my father. Li Chen Tam fell into the hard life in which many Hong Kong Chinese refugees found themselves during the years between the two World Wars. He supported his mother and baby sister by selling food on the street. When he became a teenager, he made the acquaintance of several other young Chinese boys who belonged to a fraternal organization. They offered to help him financially and protect his family. In exchange, he had to pledge allegiance, as well as secrecy, to their organization. This organization was the San Yee On, which you know as one of the largest and most powerful Triads in Southeast Asia.
“My father rose rapidly through the ranks, especially after entering the lucrative entertainment business in the 1950s. Along the way, like so many of the Triad leaders at the time, he made a few enemies even within his own organization. In the early 1960s, when he was approaching fifty, my father broke off from the San Yee On and formed his own Triad, the Dragon Wing Society.
“He was quite aware of his great-grandfather’s agreement with EurAsia Enterprises but was unable to do anything about it. So, my father concocted an underhanded scheme to get his own back. By putting the squeeze on EurAsia’s shipping department heads, the Dragon Wing Society infiltrated the company’s inner workings. Nothing was shipped out of Hong Kong without the Triad’s intervention. Things came to a head, and eventually news of the squeeze went all the way to the top of the company.”
“Who must have been, let’s see … James Thackeray’s greatgrandson?” Bond asked.
“Correct. Thomas Thackeray, then the current taipan of EurAsia Enterprises, and Guy Thackeray’s father. While being a shrewd businessman, Thomas Thackeray had inherited his great-grandfather’s trait of greediness. If there was an opportunity to add to his fortune, then he would brush ethics aside and encourage the money-making to continue. It was with this attitude that Thomas Thackeray justified entering into a business alliance with my father. The two men met in person only once, and secretly, at one of my father’s nightclubs. It was agreed that EurAsia Enterprises would provide the means, the Dragon Wing Society would provide the goods and muscle, and together they would share in the profits. Thus, EurAsia Enterprises began distributing heroin all over the world as couriers for the Dragon Wing Society.”
Bond noted, “It seems the story has come full circle, practically a reversal of the partnership that existed in the mid-nineteenth century.”
“Ironically, that is true,” Li said. “There was, however, another piece of the alliance. The smuggled heroin had to come from somewhere, and that was the Golden Triangle. A certain young Chinese official in Guangzhou had influence over the operations of the poppy fields there. His name was Wong Tsu Kam. Extremely militaristic and a staunch Communist, Colonel Wong also happened to be even greedier than Thomas Thackeray! He was the unseen, silent partner of Thackeray and my father. He maintained the poppy fields. He refined the opium into heroin in his own laboratories located on site in the Golden Triangle. He cleared the way for the heroin to be safely smuggled into Hong Kong so that the Dragon Wing Society could get it onto EurAsia’s ships. For his efforts, Wong received a tremendous kickback. A man with those kinds of assets in China wielded great power, and he used it to advance within the Communist party until he became a fully fledged general in 1978.
“A year before Wong Tsu Kam became a general, Guy Thackeray took over EurAsia Enterprises. I had succeeded my father as Cho Ku of the Dragon Wing Society. Our uneasy partnership continued through the eighties and into the nineties. All along, my father knew of the ancient agreement that would have given us control of EurAsia Enterprises should the Hong Kong colony ever be handed back to China. In 1984, the speculation came to an end when the treaty was signed to do that very thing in 1997. The rage that my father felt at the Thackeray family, and at the Communists who had stolen his father’s assets, eventually killed him. He died of heart failure shortly after the news was made public. I carried on, but now a bitter rift existed between me and Guy Thackeray. Our partnership continued, but it was purely a business transaction. It had ceased being personal long ago.
“It was in 1985 that General Wong made his move. One afternoon, his people made an appointment to see Guy Thackeray at EurAsia Enterprises’ corporate headquarters in Central. With a Chinese lawyer in tow, General Wong met Thackeray in the company’s luxurious boardroom and pulled out a tattered document written in both English and Chinese. General Wong was in possession of the original agreement made between James Thackeray and my great-greatgrandfather! According to Chinese law, the state now owned the document and what it represented. Li Wei Tam’s heirs had fled China and their assets were seized by the Communist government. Therefore, as the representative of that Chinese government, General Wong informed Guy Thackeray that the 59 per cent of stock owned by Thackeray would automatically transfer to China at midnight on 30 June, 1997, just as the colony itself would be handed over after a hundred and fifty years of British rule. General Wong had been given full authority to execute the transition and implement whatever new management system he desired. Whatever he decided to do, Guy Thackeray was out. In essence, not only would General Wong gain control of a multi-billion dollar corporation, but he would also increase his profit margin in the drug smuggling operation by onethird. He would have the upper hand over me and the Society, too! General Wong would be able to call all the shots. As for Thackeray, he would be left high and dry. It made no difference that 41 per cent of the stock was owned by other British citizens. Wong implicitly made it clear that they would be persuaded to sell their shares and leave Hong Kong forever.”