Rich People Problems-Kwan 2017 (WWT)

CHAPTER FOUR
SURREY, ENGLAND
Anyone lucky enough to be a guest at Harlinscourt should wake in time to watch the sun
rise above the gardens, Jacqueline Ling thought as she sipped the orange pekoe tea that
had just been brought to her bedside on an exquisite bamboo tray. Propped up against
four layers of goose-down pillows, she had the perfect view onto the pure symmetry of
the box parterres, the majestic yew hedges beyond, and the morning mist rising over the
Surrey Downs. It was these quiet moments before everyone began to assemble
downstairs for breakfast that Jacqueline relished most during her frequent visits at the
Shangs’.
In the rarefied stratosphere inhabited by Asia’s most elite families, it was said that the
Shangs had abandoned Singapore. “They’ve become so grand they think they’re British”
was the common refrain. Though it was true that Alfred Shang enjoyed a lifestyle that
surpassed many a marquess at his six-thousand-hectare estate in Surrey, Jacqueline knew
it would be a mistake to assume that he had transferred all his allegiances to queen and
country. The simple truth was that over the decades, his three sons (all Oxbridge
educated, naturally) had one by one taken English wives (all from appropriately
aristocratic families, of course) and chosen to make their lives in England. So beginning
in the early eighties, Alfred and his wife, Mabel, were compelled to spend greater parts of
the year there—it was the only way they would get to see their children and grandchildren
regularly.
Mabel, being the daughter of T’sien Tsai Tay and Rosemary Young T’sien, was far more
Chinese in her ways than her husband, who was an Anglophile even before his Oxford
days in the late 1950s. At Harlinscourt, Mabel set about creating a decadent domain that
indulged her favorite aspects of East and West. To restore the nineteenth-century
Venetian revival–style house built by Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur, Mabel coaxed the
great Chinese decorative-arts historian Huang Pao Fan out of retirement to work
alongside the legendary British decorator David Hicks. *1 The result was a ravishingly bold
mix of modern European furnishings with some of the finest Chinese antiquities held in
private hands.
Harlinscourt soon became one of those great houses that everyone talked about. At