Stanley Ho: the man who made Asia’s Las Vegas

Stanley Ho, who died last month, arrived in a dying fishing port as a young man with just ten dollars to his name. He transformed his new home into a global gambling colossus.

Stanley Ho © Hong Fan/China News Service via Getty Images
Stanley Ho © Getty
(Image credit: Stanley Ho © Hong Fan/China News Service via Getty Images)

Stanley Ho, the gambling patriarch who died last month of a stroke aged 98, had “a sharp wit, a hustler’s instinct” and “a knack for showmanship”, but he himself stayed away from casino floors, says Asia Tatler – a magazine whose pages he frequently graced. “I don’t gamble at all. I don’t have the patience,” he once said.

Ho much preferred making deals. His career as a betting tycoon began in 1961 when he won a monopoly to run casinos on Macau, then a dying fishing port off the coast of China, which he continued to hold for more than four decades at a time when casinos were banned on the mainland. Ho led the transformation of that territory into the world’s most lucrative gambling destination, eclipsing Las Vegas.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.