Ten Thousand Prosperities (萬興利) - Part 2

I received some good news by email yesterday. The graphic designer of my book, Ten Thousand Prosperities: the Story of Ban Hin Lee Bank, sent over the layout with the chapters completed and all the images inserted. Of course, I still need to go over the PDF file and correct whatever omissions I can find. That'll keep me occupied until Chinese New Year, I'm sure! But I'd like to give a peek here of the first page of every chapter in the book, plus the one picture of the man who made it possible for the book to be even written in the first place. That man? None other than Yeap Chor Ee. 

Chapter I: The Founding covered the pre-war years in the Straits Settlements, touching on Yeap Chor Ee's arrival in Penang and the growth of his business empire. In Chapter II: Surviving the War Years, I covered the period from the Japanese Occupation until the 1950s. 

Chapter III: Forging a New Image talked about the struggles that the bank faced in navigating its way through the difficult years of the 1960s and 1970s while Chapter IV: The Busy Eighties detailed the busy years after the bank had successfully reinvented and rejunevated itself for the future.

After the successful public listing exercise in 1991, the progress of the bank knew no bounds, as described in Chapter V: Roaring into the Nineties. Then in Chapter VI: Merger, I covered those crucial two years or so when the banking industry was pressured into mergers.

In Chapter VII: Across the Causeway, I delved into researching the history of the bank in Singapore and was delighted to find gems of information that were previously unknown. Chapter VIII: The Pursuit of Technology covered the bank's progress from a different point of view: firstly through mechanisation and then the computerisation of its banking services from the early 1980s until the merger in 2000. 

The bank was probably one of the pioneers that looked into incorporating financial services into its everyday banking business, which I covered in Chapter IX: The Financial Services. Finally, Chapter X: The Quest for Control touched on the changing board of directors and how in the 1980s, it accepted the inevitability of bumiputra equity participation, plus in the 1990s after the public listing, the pressures of takeover attempts.

There are also six appendices in the book of which the most interesting ones should be Appendix Five which touched on the bank's two logos and Appendix Six which was a reminiscence by an old staff of the bank before his retirement in 1980. In Appendix Seven, I attempted to reconstruct a list of the bank staff from 1935 till 2000. I have to admit that despite having more than 3,000 names here, I have missed out on many, many others because of incomplete records. It's regrettable, of course, but regardless of whether or not a name appeared here, this book is dedicated to them, all of them who had contributed to the success of Ban Hin Lee Bank.