We were staying at the Beijing Hotel, which is on Tiananmen Square. It was a beautiful old hotel where all the foreign correspondent used to stay. But it was still in the communist, very communist era when everybody’s wearing Mao jackets. And you go up to our floor and there… Read More
Initially, a very draconian character. A huge stickler for writing reports, grammar, spelling, punctuation. We’d have this thing called dispatch where we had a dispatch boy who would typed stuff and send it down to him and he would kind of go through it and send it back. The dispatch… Read More
And why is this statement so bold?… Read More
And so it’s just dealing with him was quite painful. But there was obviously a good side to him, and I really found that out when I used to travel with him. Like one day, he said, “Okay, come, we’re going to visit Zoo Negara.” Zoo Negara is the zoo… Read More
But he hated that idea of that because he was anti-colonialist, brought up under the British, detested the British, detested the fact that I actually asked half British, but accepted the fact that has half Chinese as well, and told me when I joined, don’t ever bully the director. And… Read More
How did he shape your life, your career?… Read More
What would you say your relationship was with him?… Read More
He’d seen a lot of horrible Asian zoos. And he had a very strict policy of not dressing up animals. Technically, he hated the concept of animal shows, but definitely if there were kind of chimpanzee tea parties, he had known of the chimpanzee tea parties in London and thought… Read More
Got through all these directors, really, because he just felt that they were not up to the mark. They weren’t doing what he wanted them to do, which was run the zoo efficiently and effectively. To be honest, I mean, they probably weren’t because they were kind of de facto… Read More
So even though you didn’t do breakfast, tour agents started saying, “Oh, okay, maybe we should do the zoo.” Because it was in Monday, which is right at the north part of the island, before the expressways came in, it was 20 kilometers drive. And so we set up a… Read More
Series of questions. Tell us about him and his management style. Dr. Ong was a autocratic, He was a GP, a general practitioner, so he was doctor of medicine. I was gonna say he had his medical practice, but he was far more interested in public service. And so he… Read More
So it’s like his whole life was love. He’d wanted to set up a zoo. And so he saw this opportunity of doing it and he said, “We’re gonna build it on this promontory.” He went about the world on a study tour when he went to do World Bank… Read More
And it got quite popular. And we got a lot of journalists come in, a lot of TV crews because it was unique. You sat down and had breakfast. And then about halfway during breakfast, an orangutan would come out, it would was Ah Meng, she’d sit down at her… Read More
And so we looked at the cost effectiveness after the first year of operations, and I presented it to the board. And it had a very lukewarm reception from the board because actually it wasn’t really making a lot of money. And they said, “Well, do you really wanna continue… Read More
Ah Meng became just instead of breakfast with Ah Meng, it became breakfast with an orangutan at zoo. We had a Japanese breakfast going on. We had a Japanese tea. So we had two concurrent breakfasts and teas going on. We would get 120 people at each breakfast session and… Read More
I said, it’s the most beautiful zoo setting in the world, it’s great. But there’s nothing else about it. And so, eventually, I lamented with a guy called Dennis Pyle, who was the director of the Singapore Tourist Board for Australia. And Dennis said, “I was sitting down lamenting over… Read More
And it was running, it was called Breakfast with Ah Meng because Ah Meng was one of our famous orangutans. It was twice a week. And we used to get like 20 people in a breakfast. Just okay, it’s not bad. And tour operators always got the wrong date because… Read More
So as I say, go on this round of tour operators and everybody said the same thing. Well, there’s nothing unique. Read More
What’s unique about the zoo?… Read More
On the board. There was about 10, various walks of life. Some business people, civil servants. As I said, it was a public limited company wholly owned, but it was set up to be floated on the stock market as one does if you set up public limited companies. But… Read More