Lawrence Kadoorie

Origins and early life

Lawrence Kadoorie, Baron Kadoorie (1899-1993), elder son of Elly Kadoorie, was born in Hong Kong into a Baghdadi Jewish family and educated at Clifton College in England.

Work and career

With his brother Horace Kadoorie he worked for Victor Sassoon in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s and managed his hotel, then for their father; after the family lost almost everything in China in 1949, the two rebuilt the business in Hong Kong around China Light & Power, which the family had come to control. He was appointed CBE in 1970 and knighted in 1974, and in 1981 he became the first person born in Hong Kong to be raised to the peerage and to sit in the House of Lords.

He and Horace shared the Ramon Magsaysay Award for public service in 1962 and were made Chevaliers of the Légion d'honneur. He gave the money that completed the Kadoorie Synagogue in Porto, built for the descendants of the Portuguese anusim. He was also a serious amateur photographer: his pictures of ordinary Hong Kong in the 1950s - ferry passengers, hawkers, dockers, farmers - are kept by the Hong Kong Heritage Project and were shown in 2017. He is buried in the Jewish cemetery at Happy Valley.