Hong Kong shipping scion Hing Chao champions Chinese culture

From helping save nomadic culture in China's northeast to preserving Hong Kong's tangible and intangible heritage, Chao, a martial arts fanatic, is fighting on multiple fronts

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Published: 7:51am, 9 Oct 2015

Ironically, it was Hing Chao's time studying in the West that played a hand in his many projects aimed at preserving and promoting traditional Chinese culture. "I was born in Hong Kong, but went to the UK to study, spending my teenage and university years in England. However, my mother thought that my personality had become thoroughly anglicised, which she saw as a problem, so I was sent to Beijing," says Chao, organiser of the ongoing Hong Kong Culture Festival.

Sitting at a giant conference table in his Wan Chai office - he works for his family-run shipping firm, the Wah Kwong Group - Chao says that after graduating in philosophy from the University of Durham he spent a year in Beijing, including travels to Inner Mongolia that planted the seeds of a love affair with the cultures of ethnic minorities in the far northeast of China - "the indigenous marginalised peoples in Manchuria … the hunters and gatherers".

In 2004, he established the Orochen Foundation, a non-profit charity aimed at preserving the culture, language and identity of minority groups in northeast China, focusing mainly on intangible cultural heritage, aspects that include song, music, dance, drama and festivals, aspects that can be recorded but cannot be touched or stored in physical form.

A member of the Orochen (or Reindeer People) tribe at a settlement in Inner Mongolia. Hing Chao has led efforts to preserve what remains of the culture of the formerly nomadic ethnic minority. Photo: Courtesy of Tang Ming Tung for the Orochen Foundation

And his passion for cultural preservation also extends to Hong Kong, where Chao is a major supporter of heritage conservation and martial arts. "Hong Kong didn't pay much attention to historical buildings until 1997, when the change of sovereignty was a marker for how Hong Kong people looked at ourselves and our past."

Chao says the turning point came after the demolition of Queen's Pier in 2008, which created an uproar among conservationists, and sparked protests in the city that included then-legislator Law Chi-kwong swimming in Victoria Harbour and a hunger strike by three students at the pier. Other protestors camped at the site.