The images were broadcast and rebroadcast all Sunday across Hong Kong's television screens. There was Henry Fok Ying-tung, one of Hong Kong's most powerful and admired men, grinning and shaking hands with three generations of Chinese leaders - Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and finally, Hu Jintao.
Fok's passing Saturday evening was not unexpected, but was a reminder of how far Hong Kong had come in the more than 50 years since Fok, who was 83, began paving his way to the higher echelons of the Beijing elite.
Fok's rags-to-riches story was stunning enough on its own. He was born on a sampan fishing boat in 1923. By the time of his death, Fok was reported to have accumulated a fortune in the tens of billions.
But Fok's life, seen as a reflection of China's dramatic changes since the beginning of "reform and opening" in the late 1970s, seemed to take on yet another layer of significance.
His family never had much, and Fok did not receive a proper education. His studies, at Queen's College in Causeway Bay, were interrupted by the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in 1941, when Fok was still in junior high school. By then, his father had died in a boating accident, leaving the young Fok to juggle small-time laboring jobs while helping to run the family's small boat business.
Fok's industriousness rose to the surface, however, and by the end of the war he had begun laying the foundation of his business empire. Fok reportedly made his first fortune smuggling arms into the ma
inland during the Korean War in the early 1950s, circumventing a United Nations arms embargo.The story goes that Fok parlayed his expertise in small shipping into a major operation in which he personally oversaw the small fleet of boats shuttling arms and medicine to the mainland.
Fok vigorously denied the rumors of weapons trafficking, admitting only to smuggling iron plates, pipes, gasoline, car tires and other odds and ends.
Whatever his involvement in that war, however, the experience did far more than simply elevate Fok to the ranks of Hong Kong's wealthiest. It also helped him affirm his loyalty to Beijing and tighten his relations with mainland leaders.
In 1954, Fok set up a construction and real estate company that pioneered the practice of soliciting buyers for property even before the flats had been built, simultaneously revolutionizing and riding the wave of the decade's housing boom.
During the 1960s, Fok saw a potential winner in Macau, and teamed up with burgeoning casino mogul Stanley Ho Hung-sun to snap up a government- granted gambling monopoly in 1961. According to Forbes magazine, which listed Fok the 181st richest man in the world this year, most of Fok's fortune comes from his stake in Ho's company.
By the 1970s, however, Fok already had his sights set on a larger target: the mainland. Even before the launch of "reform and opening" by Deng in the late 1970s, Fok was already beginning to make inroads.
In 1980, Fok was made a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference - one of the highest-level organs in the mainland hierarchy.
A few years later, Fok helped open the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou, the country's first five-star hotel. The joint-venture project introduced the idea of luxury and extravagance to a population with fresh memories of Cultural Revolution-era shortages.
While blazing a trail through a half- century of ideology, Fok used his business prowess to launch a meteoric rise into Chinese national politics.
Fok developed a quite close relationship with Deng, who spent his southern vacations at the Zhongshan Hot Spring Resort, a Fok investment and the first foreign joint-venture hotel investment in China at the time.
Fok was reportedly among the first people in Hong Kong to learn about the principle of "one country, two systems" that would govern the reunited territory.
Just days after the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989, however, Fok and 19 other representatives from Hong Kong and Macau passed a resolution condemning Beijing's actions and remembering the dead students.
After that incident, one of Fok's closest friends left the Chinese Communist Party, but Fok did not break off ties with the friend, Ho Ming-sze, a former deputy director of the Xinhua News Agency in Hong Kong.
In 1993, Fok ascended to the vice presidency of the CPPCC National Committee, formally cementing his political status in Beijing.
During Hong Kong's first two post- handover elections for chief executive, Fok stood firmly behind Tung Chee- hwa, the man who would hold Hong Kong's top office for eight years.
Fok did not give up chasing his dreams even in the 1990s, continuing to invest millions of dollars in a high- technology business park in Nansha, deep in Guangdong province along the Pearl River. He is said to have visited the site more than 500 times, and last year pledged HK$800 million to the University of Science and Technology to support the initiative.
Fok, however, will not see the formal completion of its development.
In between all of this, Fok found time to indulge his passion for soccer, serving as president of the Hong Kong Football Association and finding time to kick the ball around even into his later years.
Almost everyone who commented to the press after news of his passing mentioned Fok's lifetime obsession with sport, and one of Fok's biggest smiles can be seen when he is standing next to Brazilian soccer legend Pele in a photograph from the 1970s.
His family members, meanwhile, found other ways of getting into the news. His eldest son, Timothy, married a former Miss Hong Kong (they are now divorced) and became a legislator. Through Timothy, two of Henry Fok's grandsons have been frequent staples in the local tabloids. One of them has dated Olympic diver Guo Jingjing; another movie star Zhang Ziyi.
