Known as ‘Chinese Rockefeller’ of the Islands : Hawaii Multimillionaire Chinn Ho Dies

Chinn Ho, called the “Chinese Rockefeller of Hawaii” and the casual multimillionaire used as the prototype for the wily money changer in James Michener’s “Hawaii,” died Tuesday of kidney failure.

The one-time pencil salesman who breached the all-white power structure in the Hawaiian Islands to forge a business empire based on sugar plantations, Waikiki Beach high-rises and the heady power of newspaper publishing was 83.

Ho was admitted to Straub Hospital in Honolulu on May 3 for treatment of kidney failure and died of heart failure, according to a hospital spokeswoman.

Built Ilikai Hotel

Ho, with his ever-present cigar, presided over an empire that ranged from Oahu to China from his lavish penthouse on the 26th floor of the Ilikai Hotel, Waikiki’s first high-rise hostelry when he built it for $18 million in 1962.

Many predicted that it would never be fully occupied.

An hour away lay the lush Makaha Valley, 9,000acres of coconut palms and mangoes which Ho had been developing into hotels and condominiums.

All that and more was the climax to a lengthy and fruitful journey for the grandson of a rice farmer who grew up to be the first person of Chinese extraction to become president of the Honolulu Stock Exchange.

Ho was one of six children born to a store clerk who raised ducks to supplement the family income. Ho sold pencils and pennants in school, earning $150 and buying penny stocks with his savings.

He also learned early on not to be overly greedy.

‘That Was Good’

“If you bought something for 15 cents and it went up 10 cents, that was almost doubled. . . . That was good,” he said.

He went to work for a bank and then for a broker, and at 30 owned his first piece of property, a lot in Honolulu with three cottages on it. He bought it for $5,500 and sold it a year later for $16,500.

That was in the 1930s and the deal gave him the capital to expand his limited holdings. But the Hawaiian lending market was closed to nonwhites. Ho managed to bridge that gap by opening his own discount house and offering installment credit to Asians and other non-Caucasians.

“There was no reason,” he told The Times in a 1982 interview, “that they should not have had refrigerators.”

He soon was able to purchase property in Waikiki and downtown Honolulu and formed Capital Investments with $150,000. Last year, the firm declared assets of $17.4 million.

First Waikiki High-Rise

He leased some beachfront property over the objections of some of his fellow investors and in 1948 built the first commercial high-rise building on Waikiki.

“I sold the building for $850,000 and kept the land lease,” he recalled. “Now I pay $6,000 a year for the ground and collect $50,000 a year for the building.

The ensuing successes once caused author Jim Bishop to observe that Ho “looks Chinese, talks Hawaiian and thinks Wall Street.” That was also about the time Time magazine dubbed him the Chinese Rockefeller of Hawaii.

During World War II, Ho had purchased property that was vastly underpriced because the Caucasians who owned it wanted to get out of the then-threatened islands.

Unknown to Broker

He found out that the Honolulu Star-Bulletin was for sale and wrote a check to a New York newspaper broker who wanted to know, “Who the hell is Chinn Ho?”

By the time Ho had obtained control of the paper for $11 million, the broker knew. Ten years later, he sold it for three times that much to the Gannett Corp.

He lived simply, his one vice the cigar that accompanied his every move and a daily drink of Scotch.

“I can live comfortably on $250,000 a year,” he said in 1982, a grin framing his then-wrinkled face. “A man doesn’t need much more.”

He had the same wife for 53 years and became both a political and financial visionary; he was one of the first prominent Asians to urge recognition of mainland China. It probably was not accidental that at his death he was chairman of the American group that owns 49% of the 1,000-room Great Wall Hotel in Peking.

‘Look, No Condos’

And although he was accused by environmentalists of desecrating the pristine beauties of his native island, Ho also restored sacred temples and would take visitors to the isolated valleys in which they existed, gesturing and saying, “Look, no condos.”

It was to these mountains Ho would go when he had a few hours to spare in his six-day-a-week schedule.

“I am not a religious man,” he told a reporter in 1982 as he walked through a picturesque glade. “But sometimes I go to a mountaintop and ask, ‘Mr. Ho, how will they remember you?’ ”