All the Tea in China: Meet Asia's New Megarich – China Business

The three of us look up and squint into the tropical sun. The hotel's huge; six storeys high, half the length of a football pitch and all baby pink. There's me, my wife Joanna Tinhat, and our business partner, Nuhi Bunyak. We're all foreigners and we want to open our own guesthouse in Jinghong, Xishuangbanna. It's a serious project, much bigger than anything Jo and I have tackled before.

With four wives and 17 children, choosing a successor to take over the sprawling empire and considerable wealth of Chinese billionaire Stanley Ho Hung Sun was always gong to be a dicey proposition.

Despite regulatory directives aimed at preventing banks from removing loans off their balance sheets to dodge credit restrictions, China's banks did not slow down their pace in packaging loans as wealth management products.

Here is your typical day in Hong Kong: after buying your groceries from Li Ka-shing, you hop on to one of Cheng Yu-tung's buses to take you back to your Kwok brothers' apartment to cook your food with, you guessed it, gas supplied by Lee Shau-kee. The regulatory regimes covering utilities like gas, electricity, buses and ferries offer their owners plenty of pricing power.