As senior vice-president of MGM Grand Macau, MGM Mirage’s joint venture in Asia, Richard Tsiang is busy, constantly switching languages as the phone callers and the visitors streaming through the office seek instant answers. Tsiang is recruiting 6000 staff and helping oversee the construction of a 31-storey, 600-room, five-star hotel and casino in Macau, financially one of the hottest cities in the world.

He has just returned from Las Vegas along with one of the wealthiest women, Pansy Ho, after testifying at the Gaming Control Board of the Nevada Gaming Commission as the local partner of MGM, now the biggest gaming corporation in the world since its takeover of Harrah’s.

In the last decade, Tsiang has jointly run a Hong Kong-based fund management business that cashed out shortly before the 1997 crash, and worked as Yahoo’s Asian chief financial officer and head of strategy, and as Asian managing director of New York-based travel and real estate giant Cendant Corp.

He switches with bewildering ease between Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghainese and Australian-accented English.Tsiang grew up in Kew as the son of a general practitioner. When he was 16, he earned money during the school holidays by working on a factory floor. The owner used to take him to the factory at 5.30am, stressing the value of a good education.

The owner was a neighbour “and salt of the earth” – billionaire Richard Pratt, one of Australia’s richest people and chairman of the Visy international cardboard empire.

Tsiang, 46, is married with two children and is one of those few palpable Asian success stories.

Tsiang attended Carey Grammar in Melbourne, the same school as Treasurer Peter Costello, then acquired a bachelor of commerce and an MBA from Melbourne University, as well as becoming a chartered accountant.

He shakes his head in bewilderment after recalling how a shareholder of Tabcorp had recently complained in the media that the management had been remiss in incurring a $US2 million loss on China activity, saying the company had taken its eyes off the ball. “Their mistake wasn’t going into China. Their mistake was in not going with more aggression.”

Now he’s taken on a new challenge, shifting into the cut-throat casino business in Macau just as it is steaming past Las Vegas as the world’s biggest gaming centre. And he’s loving it. He dons a hard hat and shows us around the site of the new 600-room complex that is rapidly being completed on a spur of reclaimed land in a whole city that is being reclaimed, economically, by Beijing’s dispensation to make it China’s gambling mecca.

Tsiang finds it hard not to conceal his glee that the new MGM pub is rising between Wynn’s gold-fronted casino and the grey Pearl River.

We later walk through the gaming floor of “the main enemy”, Sands, whose major casino in Macau contains 793 tables, four times as many as the biggest casino in Las Vegas. Up to 40,000 people a day go through.

Tsiang is known there as a rival because of the number of dealers he has been hiring. Two years ago in Macau they were earning an average $1000 a month. Now, they are making $2300 – such is the frantic demand for staff.

The floor is packed with people from across the border, the mainland. They mostly stay at cheap hotels in the border city, Zhuhai, and the casino is suddenly deserted at 11.30pm as they rush to cross the border before it closes.

Gambling is illegal in the rest of China, except for two lotteries and horseracing in Hong Kong, although there is a “grey market” led by soccer betting, worth an estimated $US90 billion ($110 billion). And mainlanders are barred from working in casinos – reinforcing the soaring wages paid to Macau workers.

The Macau rules require gamblers to use Hong Kong dollars. Since they are not meant to take yuan out of the country, the mainlanders usually avoid the risk of contact with formal money changers and obtain their $HK by “buying” gold necklaces or other valuables from jewellers who give the money in change and hang on to the valuables for “safe keeping” – for ever.

Macau, a former Portuguese colony and the home of the oldest and most brilliantly restored European buildings in Asia, is on the west of the Pearl River delta, the opposite side from Hong Kong. Both the cities are “special administrative regions” of China and retain full border controls.

Tsiang is helping supervise – he is also chief financial officer – MGM’s first venture anywhere outside the US. As well as the project in the heart of Macau, with its tasteful, blue-tiled Portuguese references, the company is also building an even bigger hotel-casino on the booming Cotai strip between Macau’s offshore islands of Coloane and Taipa, connected by causeway.

How come Chinese people seem to work and save so hard, yet have a reputation as eager gamblers?

“There’s not much research available,” says Tsiang, whose own family came to Melbourne originally from Shanghai, where their roots were in the diplomatic corps and in commerce. “People have to be thrifty because wages are relatively lower. Outside China, they’ve always been minorities and haven’t trusted bankers, so have often hoarded their cash.”

Cash is thus often available and when the occasion appears auspicious, or a family wants to have fun and make money at the same time, the Chinese dream – a visit to the casino – now beckons.

Not for Tsiang himself, who says he’s not really tempted to punt on the tables. He is a part-owner of a Hong Kong racehorse, though. And – perhaps his bravest throw of the dice – he is tipping his beloved Collingwood to have a great AFL season.

More than 60 per cent of gamblers in Macau are now from the People’s Republic – 22 million of them last year – plus about 30 per cent from Hong Kong, an hour’s jetfoil ride across the delta, in a vessel owned by Shun Tak. Pansy Ho, daughter of Macau’s gambling grandfather Stanley Ho, is MD of Shun Tak as well as of MGM Macau Asia.

Tsiang describes her as “a savvy, tough businesswoman”.

He believes the yuan could be fully convertible within five years, now that the major banks have mostly recapitalised. This would make visits to Macau even easier.

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