Sir David Tang, entrepreneur, fashion brand founder and bon viveur

While promoting Chinese culture to the wider world, he was also a generous supporter of British values

Tang in 1997: he tried to rehabilitate ‘made in China’ as a sign of chic (Rex)

David Tang, who has died aged 63, was the businessman and bon viveur who founded the Shanghai Tang fashion brand and numerous other businesses. Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, for which Tang wrote a column, said he “was a remarkable man of many talents whose charm, erudition and wit were ever present”.

Tang was born in Hong Kong in 1954. His grandfather, Sir Shiu-kin Tang, was the philanthropist who had founded the Kowloon Motor Bus Company. David Tang arrived in England aged 13 with his parents, speaking barely any English. He attended the Perse School, Cambridge, read philosophy at Kings College, London, and law at Cambridge.

He began his business career in 1980, working with the oil and mining entrepreneur John Gordon “Algy” Cluff, who became a role model for the young Tang. Algy’s penchant for cigars would later inspire Tang to set up one of his first businesses, the Pacific Cigar Company, in 1992.

In 1994 he founded the Shanghai Tang fashion chain, using retro Chinese symbolism in designs for clothing, porcelain and home decoration, in an attempt to rehabilitate “made in China” as a sign of chic, rather than a sign of cheap. With 24 stores worldwide at its peak, he sold the brand just four years later to the Richemont luxury goods empire. More recently he established Tang Tang Tang Tang, a houseware brand whose name he said should be sung to the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth.

Sir David Tang with Dame Shirley Bassey, Kate Moss, Julia Peyton-Jones and Tommy Hilfiger at the Serpentine Gallery summer party in London last year (Rex)

Interviewed for The Independent 20 years ago, Tang suggested that his taste in fashion was derived from a wide variety of sources, saying it “might come from a concatenation of genes, from having caught a glimpse of this or that accidentally, from having been somewhere, or having greater imagination than other people”.

Tang penned an irregular “agony uncle” column for the Financial Times, with his tongue firmly in his cheek. (A recent question, for example, was “Are stuffed animals acceptable in the home?”) His book, Rules for Modern Life: A Connoisseur’s Survival Guide, published last year, continued in a similar vein, taking a satirical view on contemporary etiquette.

Tang kept homes in both London and Hong Kong. He remained critical of China’s management of the former British colony and spoke in support of the country’s umbrella movement which emerged amidst the colourful protests of 2014. In a speech titled “Hong Kong’s Future”, given at the Foreign Correspondents Club last year, he said that it had “clearly demonstrated the resolution of many ordinary people taking real democratic power seriously”.

He was an enthusiastic collector of Chinese art and was a trustee of the Royal Academy of Arts and a patron of the London Symphony Orchestra. He was awarded a KBE in 2008 for charitable services.

Tang learned recently that he had terminal liver cancer. An enthusiastic supporter of the NHS, he wrote in one of his last columns: “My mother always told me that the UK provided the best education in the world, to which I now add the best hospital care in the world.“

He had planned a “farewell to life” party at the China Tang restaurant in the Dorchester Hotel for this Wednesday, inviting 500 of his friends. He died at the Royal Marsden Hospital just a week before the party.

Sir David Tang, entrepreneur, born 2 August 1954, died 29 August 2017