In January 2024, one of Hong Kong’s most storied addresses — a mansion on the city’s ultra-exclusive Peak, once home to one of colonial Hong Kong’s most influential business dynasties — changed hands at a price that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. The sale of 25-26 A&B Lugard Road 山頂盧吉道25及26號A&B, at a steep discount to its asking price, offered a rare window into both the current state of Hong Kong’s luxury property market and the quiet rise of a mainland Chinese medical-device fortune.
A House on Hong Kong’s Most Exclusive Street
Lugard Road stands as one of Hong Kong’s most prestigious locations, with a mere 11 residential single lots, and among them, only four — including this one — provide captivating views of Victoria Harbour. The property itself is substantial by any standard: the two-storey detached house has a maximum gross floor area of 11,687 square feet and sits on a registered site of 31,544 square feet, with panoramic views of Victoria Harbour. The house has 12 bedrooms and is accessible via Mount Austin Road, just a three-minute drive from The Peak Galleria shopping complex and The Peak Tower, home to the upper terminal of the Peak tram.
The estate’s pedigree runs deeper than its address. The house was once owned by the late Hong Kong entrepreneur and Hongkong Land director Sir Robert Hotung — one of the most prominent Eurasian businessmen in early twentieth-century Hong Kong, whose family name remains woven into the city’s commercial and philanthropic history. Long before mainland capital reshaped Hong Kong’s luxury market, the house had already passed through the hands of the colonial-era business elite that once defined The Peak.
The Sellers: A Toy Dynasty’s Retreat
By the time it came to market in late 2023, the mansion belonged to a family whose fortune came from an entirely different industry. The property was sold by the family of Tsim Wing Kong, chairman and founder of toymaker Weina Group, who had purchased the property in 1999 for HK$145 million, according to local media accounts. Weina Group is one of Hong Kong’s established toy manufacturing and trading businesses, and the Tsim family’s ownership of the Lugard Road estate for roughly a quarter-century placed it firmly within a generation of Hong Kong manufacturing wealth that built its fortunes well before the mainland Chinese capital that now dominates the city’s luxury real estate.
The two-storey detached house went on the market in October 2023 and was valued at HK$1.3 billion. That asking price worked out to HK$111,235 per square foot — reflecting just how rarefied Lugard Road real estate had become, even amid a broader slowdown in the city’s luxury segment.
The Sale: A 30–35 Percent Discount
What closed was considerably less than the ask. The mansion sold for HK$838 million (US$107 million), at a price of HK$71,703 per square foot. Depending on which benchmark is used, that represented a significant markdown: Savills, which brokered the transaction, described the price as roughly 30 percent below the height of the market, while other reporting characterized the sale as a 35 percent discount relative to the property’s HK$1.3 billion valuation.
Savills executives were candid about what the steep discount signaled for the broader market. Godfrey Cheng, deputy senior director of the investment CEO office at Savills Hong Kong, said the luxury property market had become less active, with a reduced pool of buyers reflected in the discounted price — a dynamic he attributed mainly to a slower-than-expected economic recovery in mainland China, along with stricter capital-outflow controls. Raymond Lee, CEO of Greater China at Savills, noted that luxury residential sites on The Peak with unobstructed Victoria Harbour views can fetch over HK$100,000 per square foot during peak periods, making this transaction roughly 30 percent below that high-water mark.
The sale fit into a wider pattern of distressed and discounted luxury deals across the city around the same period. In September 2023, a luxury apartment in Mid-Levels seized from Shenzhen tycoon Chen Hongtian reportedly sold for HK$420 million, representing a 38 percent discount to the property’s market value, while in July 2023 a pair of mansions on The Peak sold for a combined HK$560 million, about HK$200 million less than their asking price. More broadly, prices of Hong Kong’s super-luxury residences — defined by Savills as properties valued above HK$200 million — had slid 25 to 30 percent over the preceding eighteen months.
Living on the Mountain
Whatever the legal battles over who could live there, Lugard Road and the Peak more broadly cultivated a genuine, distinct culture of mountaintop living — one still visible today. Victoria Peak, standing 552 metres above the city, long attracted European residents seeking respite from the subtropical heat below; the area was initially reachable only by sedan chair, which limited development until the opening of the Peak Tram in 1888 made the mountain practically accessible for the first time. The road today remains shaded, thick with tropical and sub-tropical vegetation, dotted with waterfalls, and prone to the occasional wild boar crossing the path — a strange, semi-wild pocket of nature within walking distance of one of the densest cities on earth.
The architectural character established along Lugard Road in the 1910s and 1920s — grand houses, high stone walls, deep gardens engineered into a steep hillside — set a template of discretion and enclosure that has persisted through every subsequent generation of ownership on the street, this house included. Even now, the property retains a two-storey form with a maximum gross floor area of 11,687 square feet on a registered site of 31,544 square feet, oriented for panoramic views of Victoria Harbour — sightlines that were, from the very first colonial residents onward, the entire point of building this high up a mountain in the first place.
The Buyer: A Medical Device Fortune from Shenzhen
The identity of the buyer was not disclosed by the broker, but corporate filings and reporting quickly connected the dots. The mansion was acquired by Huashengjia Co Ltd, an entity under the directorship of Gu Fang, according to Hong Kong Companies Registry records — a name matching that of the wife of Xu Hang, the billionaire co-founder of Shenzhen-listed medical device maker Mindray Medical. The company behind the purchase had been set up in December 2023 by a director sharing the same name as Xu Hang’s wife, according to people familiar with the matter, though Savills itself declined to identify the buyer.
Xu Hang is one of mainland China’s most successful entrepreneurs in the medical technology sector. He is the founder and chairman of the board of directors of Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics, a major supplier of medical devices, and the company he built ranks among China’s largest medical device manufacturers. Beyond Mindray, Xu also controls property developer and investment firm Shenzhen Parkland Group, best known for its One Shenzhen Bay commercial and residential complex, while Gu Fang serves as vice chairman of a charitable foundation under Parkland Group. According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Xu’s net worth stood at $12.1 billion at the time of the purchase.
The purchase came with a substantial tax bill attached. Gu Fang was set to pay a 15 percent tax equivalent to HK$125.7 million on the purchase, comprising a 7.5 percent buyer’s stamp duty and a 7.5 percent new residential stamp duty — levies specifically designed to cool non-resident and investment-driven demand in Hong Kong’s residential market.
The progression — from Hong Kong’s colonial business elite, to a generation of local manufacturing wealth, to the newer fortunes of mainland China’s technology and healthcare sectors — mirrors much of the broader arc of wealth creation in the Pearl River Delta region over the past century. It also underscores a more immediate reality: even amid one of the more prolonged slowdowns in Hong Kong’s luxury property history, a handful of addresses on The Peak remain valuable enough to draw the region’s wealthiest buyers back to the table.
