Tang Dynasty

David Tang is not wearing Chinese clothes. It is a detail that would not be worth mentioning in the case of almost every other Chinese person in China in the year 2001. But in the past decade this Hong Kong-based entrepreneur, art connoisseur, cigar distributor and man-about-several-towns has scarcely been seen in public wearing anything but mandarin collars and matching loose trousers.

Tang sometimes explains the clothes by saying how wearing them is "a small but significant manifestation of my desire to be Chinese," sometimes he says they are in honor of his grandfather Tang Shiu-kin, who made his fortune in buses and silver, and always wore traditional clothes. And sometimes he just laughs them away as a promo for his own brand of chic chinoiserie, Shanghai Tang – the store that dresses mandarins in lime green and fuchsia pink. But whatever the reason, he almost always wears them, especially for publicity photographs.

Yet there he is, cool as a silk fan, wearing a slightly crumpled Western suit and looking rather pleased with himself for doing so. "Sometimes I’m bored of wearing Chinese clothes," he shrugs. "I just go back to stuff that I wore before – I still have most of the suits somewhere."

This suit and tie were, he said, "just on the bed this morning, so I put them on." I imagine a silent helper padding around in lime green slippers carefully putting clothes-from-the-past on his counterpane. Or perhaps, I speculate, it is his long-time fiancée Lucy Wastnage who chooses his wardrobe, but he laughs and says it isn’t like that at all. "Far from it."

He is at least smoking one of his trademark cigars – a Cohiba of course. It, or rather the Pacific Rim franchise for its brand, is the way that Tang made most of his early money – money that he later invested in clubs and stores and art and numerous other plots and plans that have helped make him one of Hong Kong’s most internationally recognizable businessmen.

Our meeting is in the China Club – Tang’s club in the sense that he created it rather than that he is simply a member of it. The Club, at the top of Hong Kong’s Old Bank of China building, is a wonderful place – wooden floors, a dining room bathed in sunlight, a central staircase curling up two floors, walls hung with Chinese contemporary art and probably the best library – in terms of aesthetics, although the books aren’t bad either – in Hong Kong. Tang is probably the person who enjoys it most: few members use it as a library at all, which he says is "a terrible waste."

The place aches with a nostalgia for something that it never actually was – a 1920s Shanghai with contemporary touches and ironic references to revolutionary China – and is already so much part of Hong Kong’s social skyline that it feels as if it should be celebrating its 80th birthday this year, and not just its 10th.

Tang shows me the invitation card for the 10th anniversary party in a few weeks time: it is full of pictures of the 1991 opening – "Michael Heseltine... Lord Heseltine now... came to the opening, and he said he’d come back for the 10th birthday," he says, pointing to a much younger-looking British politician looking cheerful at a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

He is one of Hong Kong’s best-known business people – and before the handover one Sunday Telegraph correspondent, almost certainly mistakenly, but very enthusiastically, called him the most influential man in Hong Kong, next of course to the last Governor Chris Patten.

He opened the Beijing China Club in an old "Raise the Red Lanterns" mansion in 1996 with a suitably glittering guest list of film stars and duchesses, politicians and multimillionaires. He has seen his children – from a marriage with actress Susanna Cheung – grow up into almost-adulthood, and he has faithfully supported his own pet charities. In the past few years he has opened three community English learning centers in the poorer parts of Hong Kong – opened by the Prince of Wales and Margaret Thatcher and inspired perhaps by Tang’s first bewildering visit to England when he was 13, and trying to get into a public school when all he could say was "My name is David Tang."

But when he measures it out – and 10-year anniversaries are always a good time to do that – is his life better now than it was in 1991? "I suppose so. There are more China Clubs, more Shanghai Tangs, more cigar divans. You learn what to avoid, I can now open a shop with my eyes closed."

That sounds clever and efficient and rather relaxed. Though actually it is not quite true. His eyes might be relaxed when he opens that shop, but nothing else is.

Within one month earlier this year for example Tang opened up one China Club – his third, in Singapore – and his Shanghai Tang store in London. The effort to do it all with his usual perfectionism was intense and temporarily disastrous.

"I was hospitalized for a week," Tang groans. "I even had to miss the opening of the Singapore Club."

And then, he says, he broke the habit of a lifetime and checked himself into a spa. "I was booked for a fortnight but I sabotaged it before I even arrived," says Tang. "I cut it down to one week but now I wish I’d stayed for the two."

He spent hours floating in various chambers, further hours being massaged and manipulated, and an astonishing – for him – amount of time just sleeping.

"For the first time I was able to sleep soundly; I used to be an insomniac," he says.

It is his curse, and his gift. Tang has the kind of energy that is remorselessly capable of driving him to the heights of business success and to the depths of exhaustion – sometimes both at the same time.

But returning to his desk relaxed and health-converted, one of his first moves was to take out membership of the Mandarin Spa, he says, waving the half-completed form which he has – by coincidence rather than for the benefit of this MO interview – in his breast pocket.

"Not the cheapest," he concedes, but adds he is determined now to take advantage of the massages and scented sauna experiences that the hotel group is now famous for, and that he has found out – at the age of 46 – that he likes.

He will not be seen very much in their restaurants this summer however – or anybody else’s restaurants either. "I have to lose 19 kilograms in 19 weeks," he says gloomily. But three weeks into the program he is on target and exercising an hour a day – which is an hour more than he is accustomed.

And he has also managed to make that visit to the new Singapore China Club, whose brochure suggests its tremendous ambition. After summarizing the city’s origins (an Indonesian ruler lands on the island in a storm, sees a lion-like creature, names the place Lion City, and starts work on the city) it suggests that "In the 21st century, Singapore could perhaps become to be known by the China Club."

Whatever its grand future, it is certainly different from the other two. No art-deco buildings or 17th-century courtyard townhouses here, the Singapore Club is all skyscraper. It is on the 52nd floor of an immensely tall building that is so flashily new that it has Internet in the lifts. Toughest of all it has a 30-meter-high glass roof – a challenge for any designer, but a particular challenge for anyone wanting to create the intimate wooden atmosphere of the pre-Communist wealthy bits of China.

Tang shows me a magazine that features the club, then pulls it away again and tells me I can’t see it. "They are terrible pictures, I keep avoiding showing them." His original plan was to have huge curtains controlled with a button – "very James Bondish" – but eventually he has solved the problem by swathing the place in huge lengths of yellows and oranges, which he reluctantly shows me in an illustration from the hated magazine feature.

Like in Ju Dou, I comment, remembering the spectacular waves of newly-colored silk in Zhang Yi-mou’s award-winning movie. Tang looked up. "No," he said firmly, "there are no love affairs, no freaks and the atmosphere is slightly happier."

"And I hate the word dyes," he says in a wonderful non sequitur.

Actually, he adds later, " I wouldn’t have minded if Gong Li had done the dyeing."

"Now that’s a Titian woman," he says approvingly. "She’s voluptuous, not a wafer thin supermodel, but she has this sumptuous beauty." He doesn’t mention that he counts Gong Li among his friends, and that she has opened several of his stores.

He uses the same word – sumptuous – to describe his new London shop, a further move into international retailing following his New York and Singapore stores. "There’s a strong chinoiserie feel, and it is covered with the most expensive wallpaper in the world," he says happily. "Our CEO was horrified when I was placing the order."

"It is made in China and England, and every panel is hand-printed with different dyes," he continues.

I thought he hated the word "dyes." I remind him. "Oh, this is bespoke dyes. That’s all right," he said. Tang observes his own little snobberies with a characteristic wry amusement that makes them not only forgivable but entertaining.

Who makes the wallpaper, I ask, thinking readers might like to know. "That’s a secret," he says strictly. "You don’t want everyone buying our wallpaper... then it would be so common."

He is an inveterate traveler – always packs tiger balm and the Daily Telegraph crossword in his luggage – and often stays at the Mandarin, of which he has been a fan for many years. "They charge like the Light Brigade, but the service is excellent," he says.

"I once had a pair of plimsolls which I left out to be cleaned. And they came back cleaned beautifully but without their laces. I called room service and asked what had happened. And they said, yes Mr. Tang, we are awaiting your instructions on whether you want the shoelaces ironed round or flat."

His favorite story about the Mandarin is told by his friend, writer Simon Winchester, who was in the Mandarin when a close friend phoned to tell him she had just had a son... whom she was going to call Egmont. Winchester reacted encouragingly to the curious decision, and decided to send the boy a copy of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture.

He called room service to ask them to pick up a copy at a nearby music store. It’s Beethoven, Winchester said helpfully – and too quickly. "How do you spell that?" "B-E-E-T-..." "Is he a guest," came the next question. "No, he’s dead," Winchester said. "Better call security," came the alarmed answer.

"Now THAT is what I call efficient service," says Tang, and cigar still in hand, he rushes out to his next meeting. – From MO Magazine of Mandarin Oriental