Inside Asian Gaming

March 2014 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 23 COVER STORY design. They value it. That’s rare with clients. They really want to see it through. We enjoy that.” The Home Team It may be good public relations to expound the fact, as SJM does, that it is the only operator with historical roots in south China. But there is history to back it up. Stanley Ho’s grandfather was a stepbrother of Sir Robert Ho Tung, the Hong Kong businessman and philanthropist who financed the Xinhai Revolution of Sun Yat Sen that established the Republic of China. Sir Robert was one of the few Chinese to live on colonial Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak and was twice knighted by British monarchs. He founded a library in Macau on the site of a mansion where he’d taken refuge when the Japanese invaded Hong Kong in the Second World War. Stanley Ho, was born in Hong Kong in 1921 and planned to attend the University of Hong Kong on a scholarship, but his education and his stay in his native city were similarly cut short by the invasion. He also fled to Macau, where it’s reputed he made his first fortune smuggling luxury goods to the mainland during the war. One of his early partners in Sociedade de Turismo e Diversões de Macau, the private company he founded in the early 1960s to run Macau’s last casino monopoly, was Hong Kong tycoon Henry Fok, a native of Guangzhou who had also fled the colony ahead of the Japanese and who ran guns, steel and rubber to Mao’s China during the Korean War. Renowned for his philanthropy, Mr Fok would serve as vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Prior to his death in Beijing in 2006 he was viewed by many as possibly the most powerful Hong Konger in China politics. Since the handover, only three Hong Kong citizens have had their caskets draped in the national flag. He was one of them. SJM will be wearing its patriotism on its sleeve on Cotai. This is what Perry Brown refers to when he talks about the intensity of SJM’s engagement with the look and feel of Lisboa Palace, whose faux Gallic classicismwill be informed by an aesthetic fancifully characterized as “Chinoiserie” but which will at some level, indeed on several levels, attempt to convey through its décor and via an attraction called “A Fantasy World of Sino-Western Cultural Interchange” a sense of Macau’s significance as the first and still one of the more profound encounters between China and the West. The company views itself as the guardian and promoter of a heritage, and it continues to devote a portion of its considerable resources to ensure the resorts it directly operates serve as repositories of it. Ambrose So is an active patron of education and the arts. He also is a noted practitioner of traditional Chinese calligraphy. His work has graced a set of stamps issued by the Macau Post Office and it’s been exhibited in collections in Hong Kong and as far away as Princeton University and the US Library of Congress. It’s an everyday thing in the lobby of the Grand Lisboa to see crowds of tourists from the mainland snapping photos of the many fine examples of the decorative arts displayed there, some of them genuine antiquities, like the bronze horse’s head that Stanley Ho—the only living person to have a street in Macau named after him—donated to the Chinese government, part of a set of two he bought at foreign auction (the other a pig’s head, now in Beijing) that formed a “water clock” of sculptures from the Chinese zodiac looted by Anglo-French forces when the Summer Palace of the Qing emperors in Beijing was razed in the Second OpiumWar. The groundbreaking ceremony was all about how China influenced Europe (and vice versa) through the stylistic ethos of chinoiserie. Macau’s Secretary of Finance and the Economy Francis Tam was in attendance. The horse’s head was brought up from the hotel lobby for the occasion. A scale model of the resort was displayed for the press in a room at the Grand Lisboa decorated floor to ceiling with paintings, reproductions and artifacts elaborating on the theme, some on loan from the Macau Museum. Samples were shown of the fabrics and treatmentsWATG andWimberly will employ. Guests were given an 18-page color brochure penned by historian and academic Fok Kai Cheong, dean of the faculty of arts of Macau Millennium College, where Mr So is an honorary professor and has served as a chancellor. Professor Fok wrote of the planned “Fantasy World” as something perceived by SJM—“the only indigenous corporation representing both local and national interests”—as a Macau Names Share Performance Since Jan 2013 Source: Bloomberg Melco MGM Galaxy MPEL Sands China Wynn Macau SJM HSI 0% 50% 100% 150% 200% VIP Revenue Contribution to GRR is Trending Down Source: DICJ, Morgan Stanley Research