What the Harilela Family Means to Hong Kong

For many Hongkongers, the residential compound at the corner of Waterloo Road and Durham Road is a curiosity: an entire block dominated by a green mid-century mansion with arched canopies, a white dome and a decorative metal panel depicting the Taj Mahal on the perimeter wall. Between the main house and its annex, the property contains 90 rooms, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, a prayer hall, bar, a 75-seat cinema and a carpark with room for 70 vehicles. At its peak, it was home to 110 people, most of them related by blood or marriage.

But for Aron Harilela, the 50,000-square-foot complex is home. “It was absolutely wonderful growing up there,” he says. “Everyone has an open door policy. Seven families, open doors. When my parents were not around I would just go to my auntie and uncle’s apartment and have a meal with them.”

Even if you’ve never noticed the mansion on Waterloo Road, the name Harilela might ring a bell. This vast clan is the most prominent Indian family in Hong Kong, with a long history of philanthropy and a hotel company that owns 14 properties around the world. Founded by patriarch Hari Harilela, who died in 2014 at the age of 92, the business is still a family affair, with Aron now serving as chairman and CEO of Harilela Hotels.

“Family business is family business, be it Indian, Chinese, British or other,” notes historian Vaudine England, whose biography Hari Harilela: Made in Hong Kong was published in 2020. “Where the Harilelas stand out, perhaps, is in their genuine generosity — both to those welcomed into the family circle, and to those beyond it. Early on in my interviews, a family member said, ‘It’s all about love,’ which I thought little of at the time but later realised was what was truly believed.”

The family’s story begins in Sindh, a region along the Indus River that, in England’s words, “was always being walked over,” having been ruled through the centuries by “Persians, Turks, Greeks, Syrians, Mughals and the British.” (It has been a state of Pakistan since Britain partitioned the Indian subcontinent in 1947.) Hari Harilela was born in Hyderabad, the region’s trading hub, in 1922. The instability of its rule over the years led many Sindhi men to seek their fortunes abroad, and Hari was no exception. His father had left for Singapore, then Shanghai and finally Canton — now Guangzhou — which is where he moved his family in 1929. 

They enjoyed a comfortable life in the foreign trading colony of Shamian Island, but it soon came crashing down as the family’s business, which involved selling Chinese products like jade and camphor to the United States, was battered by the Great Depression. They family moved to Hong Kong, where they had an office, only to discover that Hari’s uncle — his father’s younger brother — had stolen all their money and disappeared. “We became the poorest family. All our rich friends abandoned us,” recalled Hari in his memoirs, which are quoted extensively in England’s book. 

The family moved into a flat on Portland Street in Mongkok. Hari joined his father and older brother George to help earn a living by hawking goods in front of the British army barracks in Sham Shui Po. “We got some goods such as singlets, shorts, socks and other items of daily use such as soaps, tooth-brushes etc. on consignment from nearby factories and put them in two large suitcases and took a bus with our father to the barracks,” he wrote. 

Hari’s father took the unusual step of setting a fixed price for his goods; no bartering. That put off some potential customers at first, but eventually they came to appreciate the transparency of fixed pricing. There were eventually enough loyal clients that the family was able to move off the street and into a shop. Many soldiers from the barracks remained patrons, which put Hari in touch with a Punjabi tailor who worked in the Whitfield Barracks, which were located on the site of present-day Kowloon Park. He only worked for him for nine months before returning to help the family business, but it foreshadowed the career that would eventually earn the family its prominence.

After surviving the Japanese occupation by tapping into the network of Sindhi traders to supply essential goods to Hongkongers, the Harilelas resumed supplying goods to the British army. They earned a reputation for being honest, which landed them a lucrative contract to supply army uniforms. “This was a turning point for the Harilela brothers,” wrote Hari. “We became one of the best clothing houses in Hong Kong. The shop gained popularity with the US and British military stationed in Hong Kong, not to mention the local people and tourists.”

The family’s tailoring business was successful enough that, in 1952, Hari was able to purchase a plot of land in Kowloon Tong, which had been planned in the 1920s as a low-density garden suburb, but which had been slow to fully develop. “It was a beautiful site but at that time it was a long way out of town, so far away that no one in their right mind would move from the city to an area which was so under-developed,” wrote Hari. But the family needed the space. They had stuck together through years of hardship and were committed to staying together in the same household. “We were together in poverty so we must stay together in wealth,” Hari’s mother had always said, according to England.

By then, Hari and his wife Padma had three children, and his brothers’ families were expanding at an equally rapid pace. They were all crammed into a flat on Peking Road with only one bathroom, so Hari devised a plan for an 18-bedroom house with 18 bathrooms. “The house I built was the talk of the town,” wrote Hari. But the family continued to expand. In 1962, Padma gave birth to the family’s fifth child and it gradually became clear that even the fabulous mansion Hari had devised would not be big enough for such a sprawling clan. That’s when Hari committed to building the enormous mansion that exists today. 

“I was the first kid born there,” recalls Aron, Hari and Padma’s sixth and final child. Though he was 21 years younger than his oldest sister and nine years younger than the youngest before him, he grew up with many cousins around the same age. “There were so many of us we bought a minibus to take us all to school,” he says. “It was like growing up with a lot of friends.” That familiarity has helped keep the family harmonious and prosperous through the decades. “You’re very open so all the issues are out there. I would say it’s a way of diffusing conflict.” 

Today, only Aron and his uncle Gary are involved in the day-to-day operations of the family business. “It’s run by professionals,” says Aron. “But the board of directors is all family members.” Of the seven branches of the family, six are represented on the board. There are natural disagreements — some members are more conservative in their approach to business than others — but Aron says “we generally due things by consensus based on being a family instead of majorities and supermajorities and things like that. Because we’ve lived together in the house for so long – when you know people so intimately you understand where they’ll be coming from.”

The Harilelas’ dedication to Hong Kong matches their commitment to each other. As he built up the family’s fortune in the 1960s, Hari dedicated much of his time to philanthropy, paying for scholarships and becoming involved in civic-minded organisations that helped Hong Kong become the city it is today. When the city was roiled by the 1967 riots, Hari “doubled down, hunkered down, stayed and invested,” says Aron. He had been working with some business partners to develop a new hotel on Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui, where the family’s tailoring business had become a success. “All his external shareholders said we’re out of Hong Kong and we’d like to sell our shares.” But Hari pushed on and the hotel finally opened as the Holiday Inn Golden Mile in 1975.

This investment was perhaps a necessary contribution to Hong Kong, given the opportunities it had afforded Hari and his family over the years. “Hong Kong in the prewar years was a place open to people of all origins to come and try to make a living and a new life,” says England. “This was an essential characteristic of its function as an Asian port city. The early postwar decades also allowed many possibilities of upward mobility for people from around the world.”

Aron says it was a bit of advice from Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru that cemented his father’s attachment to Hong Kong. “My father hosted him for four days,” he says. “During that period my father, who was very proud of his Indian heritage, had said to Nehru, ‘Listen, I’m very proud of my Indian passport.’ Nehru said, ‘Why would you want to have an Indian passport? It’s just a travel document. It doesn’t show what’s in your head and your heart.” The best way to be a good ambassador for India, he told Hari, was to do something good for the place where he lived – Hong Kong. “My father took that on wholeheartedly.”

Since the Golden Mile opened, the Harilelas’ hotel investments have ensured the family’s continued success, but when Aron moved into the business, he had a vision that matched the ambition of his father when he built the family’s very first hotel, against all odds. Instead of working with other hotel brands like Holiday Inn or InterContinental, he wanted the family to develop its own brand. The idea first occurred to him during the economic downturn that hit the travel industry particularly hard after the September 11 attacks. He recalls his dad was enthusiastic but some of the company’s directors were opposed.

Aron persisted and finally managed to convince the company to convert one of its properties in the upscale London neighbourhood of Belgravia into an intimate boutique hotel: the Hari. Aron notes that, before the conversion, it was ranked 78 in a list of top London hotels; afterwards it rose to 10. “That says a lot because there are a lot of great hotels in London and we only have 86 bedrooms,” he says. “Before my father died, I told him we were building a hotel in Hong Kong. It was the success of our London property that urged me to do better here.” The 210-room Hari Hong Kong opened on Lockhart Road in 2020.

Meanwhile, Aron is pushing the family to consider the future not just of its hotel empire but of its renowned house. (He has an apartment in the annex. “It’s a 15 second walk to the main house,” where his mother lives.) “We have started thinking about it,” he says. He wants to avoid a situation where its management becomes untenable as future generations of the family expand and multiply. “We may redevelop internally,” he says. “And I’m turning it away from that horrible green – it was white and black to start with. But I don’t think we would demolish and redevelop.”

For the family members who grew up in the house, there’s too much emotional attachment for that. And the attachment goes both ways. “I think the house has a significance in Hong Kong, and not just because a lot of people know it,” says Aron. “It says you can be any nationality in Hong Kong and still thrive because it is a multicultural society.”