William Louey: A visionary bringing world-class education to Chinese scholars, in his own unique way
William Louey has an acute vision of the power that philanthropy has in transforming lives. Since the ripe age of seven, his grandmother had taken him to several institutions that catered to elderly and disabled people’s needs and showed him the importance of helping others who are less fortunate.
But little did he know as a child that these trips would go on to have a lasting impact on the way he saw the world, and latterly influence the unique type of philanthropy he would dedicate himself to.
When William Louey’s grandmother died, many went over to him at the funeral to personally thank him for her good deeds. At this point, he realised the true scale of the activities his grandmother had exposed him to as a child. He was in awe of the fact that she had built these charitable institutions herself and that her philanthropy had a widespread impact that benefited thousands of people.
William Louey comes from a prominent family in Hong Kong. His late grandfather William S.D. Louey founded Kowloon Motor Bus in 1921, the oldest transportation company in Hong Kong. His late father was in the movie business which William Louey partook in, producing over 150 movies.
However, William Louey’s father died when he was only 18, making him a fourth generation inheritor of the family wealth. After that juncture, William Louey became financially independent and prepared himself to join the family business. He joined Transport International Holdings Limited, as a director in 1997, making him oversee the success of the company and its subsidiaries which include the Kowloon Motor Bus Company.
The combination of inherited wealth, business success and the birth of his two children made William Louey think deeply about what his grandmother taught him about helping others in society. Since 1994, he had been wondering what would happen if talented children from underprivileged backgrounds were given the same education that he had growing up. As a father in his thirties, William Louey wondered exactly how he would inspire his young children with the lessons that he learned from his grandmother’s philanthropy.
“Instead of helping a few thousand people, I just want to help a handful of people,” he told his wife Marie Louey one evening. And he was determined to do this in a way that created the largest impact.
He came to the conclusion that if he sponsored the education of some of the brightest minds, the effect of that would be broader as they would then go on to help even more people, and eventually, wider society. He believed that charitable giving in education will produce the multiplier effect that will help change the world. Moreover, focusing on a few students at one time will allow William Louey to provide each student with his personal attention and care.
This thinking birthed William S.D. Louey Educational Foundation in 1995, which was named after William Louey’s late grandfather. The foundation was set up to personally provide scholarships to help outstanding students receive world-class education overseas.
William Louey was particularly interested in poor but academically outstanding students in mainland China. During this period, China’s GDP per capita was only $609 US dollars, while the US’ was $28,690 and the UK’s was $23,168, which was closer to Hong Kong’s values. It was two years before the UK government handed Hong Kong over to China, ending a 156-year colonial rule.
With the guidance of his friend Richard Yan, the only Young Presidents’ Organisation member who was representing China at the time, William Louey travelled to mainland China to interview 200 Form 5 students who were selected from some of the top schools in Beijing.
“I was just blown away by how much knowledge they already knew at such a young age. They were all well-prepared, so they knew everything about the Greenwich Observatory. They asked me about the metre-ruler at the Science Museum. They did all this research, and they were like twelve years old when I interviewed them,” William Louey said.
The scholarship’s selection criteria also required students to be good communicators. “I wanted someone who can communicate, because everything is about networking in this world,” William Louey said. “You have to be able to make people like you and then that’s how you become popular and get things done. And no one man can conquer the world, you need teamwork. I had to choose someone who has the potential to be the leader, to create a team and to create a network,” William Louey said.
While academically gifted in STEM subjects, the students he met in Beijing did not have a good command of the English language. Since he was planning to send them to Millfield School, the UK boarding school he attended in Somerset, he was keen to motivate them to improve their grasp of the English language.
“I chose 25 out of 200 [students] in the first round. And then I told them, ‘I will come back in six months and you have to improve your English’,” William Louey said. Six months later, he was pleasantly surprised with their efforts. “They had amazing improvement in English. In the end, I chose 6 people.”
The lives of the first six students that William Louey sponsored, and subsequently, close to 60 others, changed forever. Among the six scholars was Charlie Feng Gao, a student who went on to pursue engineering at Cambridge University. With more than 20 years’ experience in finance, which included firms such as Morgan Stanley, he has been ranked among China’s top private equity investors.
Charlie remembered first hearing about the scholarship in 1995. “William started something that didn’t exist,” he said. According to Charlie, it was a time when top schools in Beijing were so focused on their own benchmark performance that they were reluctant to expose their students to outbound scholarships.
He observed that there was a lot of scepticism around William Louey’s mission, from schools, China’s education ministry as well as from the students’ parents themselves. “He put in a lot of his personal time and energy to ensure everything goes smoothly. He interviewed not just the students, but the parents as well. He was very patient in terms of explaining what his goals were,” Charlie said.
“When you talk about philanthropy, people would expect somebody with a lot of grey hair, and a big belly, things like that. And then people were [instead] looking at these two young guys from Hong Kong,” Charlie said of William Louey and his Mandarin translator Toby’s initial appearances in Beijing.
“I do remember quite vividly…[William Louey] and his friend Toby, they were carrying two big rucksacks of secondhand clothing. He was really worried that we didn’t have Western suits to wear because he was putting us through private schools,” said Charlie Gao, a scholar who was among the first batch of six students William Louey sponsored. The scholars later realised that these were designer suits that William Louey had worn very sparingly before.
Charlie Gao said that for many of the students, even flying on an aeroplane was alien territory. William Louey chose Millfield School for the students, as it was where he received his own education. “Two months really went by with William tirelessly just coming back and forth between Hong Kong and China, really taking care of all aspects of student life, whatever was coming on the horizon for us,” Charlie said.
William Louey was unique in the way he organised the scholarship. Instead of just giving money away, like many wealthy people he knew, he wanted to add his personal touch to ensure that each student received the full support and care they needed throughout their educational journey.
He went above and beyond, Charlie noted. From waking up in the early hours of the morning to receive them at Heathrow Airport, to giving them a tour of London to sponsoring backpacking trips around Europe, to visiting them at their respective universities at every opportunity, William Louey enjoyed the care and attention he gave his scholars, whom he learned a lot from in return.
“As a way to incentivise us, he said he would cover all our expenses for two years of A-Level studies in the UK, and if we could prove ourselves worthy in terms of getting ourselves into top universities in the UK, that he would continue to support us. That was the deal back then, and we had a lot of drive because of that,” Charlie said. After graduating from Cambridge, Charlie had the urge to return to China as it was his promise to William Louey that he would help even more students from China.
Another recipient of the William S.D. Louey Educational Foundation scholarship in 1997 was Anna Jin Xiang Zhao, who studied engineering at Cambridge. She is now an experienced financier in Hong Kong, having worked at Goldman Sachs. Inspired by William Louey, Anna is a serial philanthropist herself. She described the scholarship as “a once in a lifetime opportunity”.
“That experience was very valuable. It completely changed my life and made it better,” Anna said. “Not only did it help with my education and career, but William always taught us his own philosophy, he told us it’s very important to pay it forward. So I’ve been doing charity work for the past 20 years,” Anna said. She set up her own institution, the Wang Family Foundation, with her husband, which operates under the China Oxford Scholarship Fund. The charity continues to help students from mainland China and Hong Kong study at Oxford University.
Anna is hopeful that her philanthropic work will be a legacy for the next generation, too. “My child is applying for her school scholarship. My daughter has already said that if she got the scholarship, she’s going to donate everything away as well. So I hope we can carry on the same philosophy, you know, with my children,” Anna said.
The cascade effect that William Louey created through his scholarship was largely inspired by Pay It Forward, a 2000 Hollywood movie about the “Pay It Forward” movement which advocates for a “ripple effect of kindness” around the world.
One 2001 scholar, Shield Dun Xiao, a Cambridge-MIT graduate, who’s now a serial entrepreneur in AI technologies based in Palo Alto, California, recalled the moment William Louey mentioned the Pay It Forward movement. He said the story of the unique way William Louey does philanthropy “deserves its own film”.
“On his 50th birthday, he had a celebration in Hong Kong. My parents were there, quite a lot of parents were there and some of the scholars arrived with their kids. It was like a family reunion. And that’s when he shared this movie [with us]. That’s got to be one of the biggest lessons I’ve had in my life,” Shield said.
Shield is a philanthropist himself, as he founded a charity called Sea Star Children’s Foundation, which helped over 200 children with congenital heart diseases from underprivileged communities in Greater China. But besides giving money away, Shield also aspires to use his personal time and skills in his philanthropy, the way William Louey has continuously done with his scholars.
“I think I could use the power of technology to pay it forward, to provide the best opportunities for everyone, and so I’ve been in education, working with young children for the past 17 years,” he said. He has also developed several influential educational apps that operate on a freemium model. One of his companies, 17EdTech, he said, was China’s largest online education company which was listed on Nasdaq and once valued at $5 billion.
Inspired by the same philosophy, Albert Lei Shen, one of the first six scholars that William Louey sponsored in 1995, founded The Pay It Forward Scholarship with the rest of the scholars in the first batch. It operates under the China Oxford Scholarship Fund umbrella and offers partial scholarship and mentorship to students from China. The organisation raises close to £100,000 a year.
Albert studied engineering at Oxford and is now based in Hong Kong, having had decades of experience in fixed income investment at firms such as JP Morgan, ANZ and BNP Paribas. He now lectures at the Peking University Business School and runs an education consultancy, besides other philanthropic activities.
“He paid for everything, there was no requirement. He never asked us to pay back anything and it was very generous,” Albert said. “It was always William’s dream that one day, we’ll help others,” he said, adding that William has told him that he was the “proud grandfather of close to 20 children of his scholars”.
Qi Yan is also a 1995 scholar from Beijing. After his Cambridge education, he started working for Guggenheim Partners in the US. “I consider William as a visionary too, in his own way,” he said. “Before many people thought about how charity, foundation, philanthropy worked, he was way ahead of his time. He did things. He approached it in his own way,” Qi Yan said.
William Louey’s philanthropy in education still continues through his foundation today, but Qi Yan admires the fact that “we still never hear about it”. “He deeply cares about us as individuals, as opposed to for publicity. And he takes a much longer term approach, that you need to instil values through this kid, and hopefully they do the same thing for the next generation of people. That approach itself is very unique,” he concluded.
William Louey’s work has received numerous recognitions. The then Prince Charles, called him to a private dinner after hearing about his scholarships. In 2013, Oxford University presented him with the Elizabeth Wordsworth Fellowship, the first accolade of its kind for his contribution to higher education. Despite these, he remains humble and is still energetic about doing even more.
“In the last 30 years I’ve been trying to encourage people in my position to do the same, to give, but it’s very hard to convince people to give time,” William Louey said. “I can’t really explain to them how much I enjoy doing what I do,” he added. “I have a big family, with all my scholars. I go to their graduation, I go to their weddings, I go to see their newborns. We become like families…there is some kind of unconditional love, this bonding between me and my scholars,” he concluded.
