A survey in the early 1990s showed one group of professionals in Hong Kong were considered to have a high sex appeal: accountants. It cannot be, I hear you say. Besuited, bespectacled and beyond consideration in the 'macho job' stakes, these toilers in the fields of ledger books have always been a byword for boring. When questioned further, the women in the street being surveyed confessed that they considered accountants marriageable because they were likely to be reasonably rich and they all knew how to get foreign passports.
The Hong Kong Society of Accountants, that group of sexy studs, has been busy celebrating its 25th year of existence. Let us turn the clock way, way back and see how their game got started. Some of the world's earliest documents are a set of stone tablets found in Mesopotamia, dated to about 4000 BC. Praise to the creator gods? No, income records from temples - in other words, 6,000-year-old accountancy filings.
A few years later, at the dawn of recorded history, people in China developed an automatic number-cruncher. If you bought 13 sheep from your cousin and 17 sheep from your uncle, a financial services professional would move 13 beans from your cousin's tray and 17 beans from your uncle's tray into your tray, and then count all the beans you had. He would then tell you the total and keep some beans as his commission (and quite possibly his lunch). The nickname 'beancounter' derives from this. Really.
In 876 BC, an Indian came up with the concept of zero. This might not seem like a big idea today, but it was important, because it made multiplication possible.
Chinese mathematicians regained the initiative in 100 BC, when they did the first sums using negative numbers, and maintained their lead with the computation, in AD 190, of pi to five decimal places; 3.14159. In AD 1170, the Chinese invented paper money, finally having something decent to calculate with all their formulae.
So much for the development of calculation and paper money. But the defining step in the history of accountancy was a book written by a monk from Italy in the middle ages. In Summa de Arithmetic by Luca Pacioli was published in Venice in 1494, and was the first textbook of modern accountancy. This caused widespread excitement - well, at least to business people who discovered that it was a really good tool to identify which companies were profitable.
When Hong Kong started to become a place of business in the 1840s, there were two schools of accountancy in use. The Chinese used the abacus, the foreign traders used formal double-entry bookkeeping methods originally developed in Italy.