When senior Chinese leader Wang Qishan met Sir Henry Keswick in 2012, he acknowledged the British businessman’s enthusiasm for investing in China with a memorable turn of phrase.
“Mr Keswick, you were bitten by the snake. You waited, you watched, but you came back!” said Wang of the then-boss, or taipan, of Jardine Matheson.
Keswick, who died on Tuesday aged 86, steered his storied Asia-focused conglomerate through a tumultuous but ultimately profitable chapter in its long relationship with China, where it was founded by opium-selling Scottish traders in 1832.
Keswick helped bring Jardines back into the mainland Chinese market, from which it had retreated unceremoniously in the 1950s following the 1949 Communist takeover.
But his description in 1989 of China’s leadership as “thuggish” oppressors and his support for democratic reforms in Hong Kong before its return to Beijing rule helped stall Jardines’ mainland expansion for years.
One of the most successful British businessmen of recent decades, Keswick was a scion of the family that has controlled Jardines for generations. He became managing director of the group in 1970 and chair in 1972.
Jardines was then a sprawling group with interests in property, hotels, aviation, shipping and engineering, but its assets were worth just $70mn. When Keswick retired from a second period as chair in 2018, Jardines’ assets had swelled to around $27bn, the company said on Wednesday.
Anthony Nightingale, managing director from 2006-2012, said Jardines was still primarily a trading house when Keswick joined in 1961. “The group has grown and in many ways changed shape and become much bigger,” Nightingale said. “If one looks at the long period, a lot of that has been true due to the drive and leadership of Henry.”
Keswick was born in Shanghai in 1938, the son of William “Tony” Keswick, who was mayor of the city’s foreign concessions. In 1942, the family left Shanghai to escape Japanese occupation. After the 1949 Communist victory in China’s civil war, Jardines, like many foreign businesses, largely retreated to Hong Kong, where it embedded itself into the fabric of the British colony.
Educated at Eton College and Cambridge university, Keswick worked at Jardines as an executive in Singapore and Malaysia before moving to Hong Kong in 1965. His rapid rise in the company was no surprise: the Keswicks have controlled it for generations since Thomas Keswick married the niece of Scottish founder William Jardine.
In 1975, Keswick left Asia to head the group’s management office in the UK and pursue politics in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to become a Conservative member of parliament. The same year, he bought the Spectator for £75,000, becoming the first owner not to serve as its editor. He sold the conservative magazine in 1981.
Keswick broached the idea of Jardines rebuilding its business in mainland China during his honeymoon in Beijing in 1985, according to a memoir written by his wife Tessa Keswick, but was warned off the idea by the then-British ambassador. China would never forgive Jardines for its role in the 19th century Opium Wars, which the country views as part of a “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers, the ambassador said.
In the end, Beijing proved willing to put historical grievances aside. But Jardines’ return to the mainland market was hardly smooth.
In 1989, shortly before China’s brutal crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square, Keswick called the country’s leaders a “Marxist-Leninist thuggish, oppressive regime”. In the run-up to Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China, he moved Jardines’ listing from Hong Kong to Singapore and London and backed democratic reforms in the city. Beijing responded by issuing a countrywide ban on domestic companies doing new business with Jardines.
Keswick, described by the Financial Times in 2018 as “a tall, round-faced Old Etonian with a courtly air and a mischievous sense of humour”, was eventually able to repair relations.
Jardines tested the mainland waters with a series of property investments, and in 1997, Keswick was summoned to a meeting with Zhu Rongji, the then-vice premier, who told him Jardines’ money was now welcome.
Later that year, Hongkong Land, the group’s property arm, bought its first Chinese residential property project in more than 100 years, signalling a comeback in its home market just as it began a long boom fuelled by 2001 admission to the World Trade Organization.
The 2012 meeting with Wang, described in his wife’s memoir, was one of many encounters with powerful Asian figures over his long career and testament to the connections cultivated by Jardines taipans.
Today, as well as being the pre-eminent landlord in Hong Kong’s business district and one of the city’s biggest employers, Jardines has interests spanning hotels, property, engineering, automobiles and retail across mainland China.
“Henry devoted a great deal of personal attention as well as corporate effort into cultivating excellent relations on the mainland,” said Nightingale.
But it was Keswick’s diversification into other markets, notably Indonesia and South-east Asia, that marks Jardines apart from other Hong Kong conglomerates.
In 2000, it began building a stake in Astra, one of Indonesia’s most important businesses, as part of a series of investments across South-east Asia. Last year, Astra contributed 44 per cent of underlying profit at the listed company.
In his latter years Keswick lived with Tessa, who died in 2022, on his grand estate in Wiltshire, England. He had no children.
Keswick, who also owned a shooting estate in Scotland, was proud of his family’s Scottish roots. In 2014, he wrote to the FT to voice his opposition to Scotland becoming independent from the UK.
“I am a humble Scottish merchant trading in the China Seas. My family has followed this profession for almost 200 years,” he wrote. “When we are bearing the sticky heat of China’s Pearl River Delta or the tropical rainforests of equatorial Borneo, we dream about the cool, soft mist of the green Galloway hills where we were bred.”