PERCY CHEN (1901-1989)

Percy Chen, an Afro-Trinidadian Chinese lawyer, businessman, and political activist, was a founding member of the Hong Kong Bar Association. Born in Belmont, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago in 1901, he was the eldest of his parents’ seven children. His father, Eugene Chen, a Chinese lawyer and diplomat, would later become the foreign minister for the Chinese government. His mother Agatha Ganteaume, a French Creole, was the daughter of the largest Trinidadian landowners on the island. Chen grew up in London and studied at the University of College School. Chen who studied law in London, passed the English bar in 1922, at the age of 21, and then moved back to Trinidad where he practiced law from 1923 to 1925.

In 1926, Chen moved to China and assumed a position at the office of foreign affairs with his father. While in China, they both never learned to speak Chinese. Yet, a year later, Eugene Chen asked his son, Percy, to bring Mikhail Borodin, a Jewish Communist agent to the Nationalist Party. After that visit, Percy Chen moved to the Soviet Union and lived there for six years under a Russian name. He returned to China in 1933 but after becoming dissatisfied with the Nationalist Party which then ruled China, he joined the Chinese Communist Party. In 1947, Chen left Peking, the capital of China, and moved to Hong Kong, then a British colony. He established a private law practice there and in 1948, founded the Bar Association of Hong Kong.