In 1888, in the coastal village of Nanshui in Guangdong province, a small restaurant keeper named Lee Kum Sheung left a pot of oyster soup simmering and forgot about it. When he came back, hours too late, the soup had...
In 1888, in the coastal village of Nanshui in Guangdong province, a small restaurant keeper named Lee Kum Sheung left a pot of oyster soup simmering and forgot about it. When he came back, hours too late, the soup had cooked down into a thick brown paste. He tasted it before throwing it out. It was delicious. He began selling the accident as oyster sauce, and founded a little firm to make it, named for himself: Lee Kum Kee (Lee Kum Kee corporate history; South China Morning Post).
One hundred and thirty-eight years later, that overcooked pot has become a global condiment empire selling in more than 100 countries, a family fortune Bloomberg estimated at about $15 billion, and a fifth generation of Lees preparing to steward it (Lee Kum Kee Professional; Bloomberg).
But the interesting part of this story is not the sauce. It is that this family nearly destroyed itself twice, brother against brother, uncle against nephew, and then did something almost no family does. It sat down and wrote a constitution. The document, and the council that enforces it, now governs one of the longest-range family plans on record: the Lee family's stated ambition is to keep the enterprise alive for 1,000 years (Forbes).
For its first two generations the firm grew the slow way. Lee Kum Sheung's son Lee Shiu Nan carried the business forward and began exporting oyster sauce to the United States through local importers, following the Cantonese diaspora wherever it cooked (Lee Kum Kee corporate history).
The third generation produced the company's great builder, Lee Man Tat, and with him the first explosion. In 1972, Lee Man Tat wanted to expand the product line beyond the two heritage products into sauces like soy and hoisin. His father backed him. His uncles did not. The disagreement could not be reconciled, and it ended with Man Tat's branch buying out the uncles' branches entirely (Inquirer Business; Bloomberg).
Fourteen years later it happened again, one branch further down. In 1986 Lee Man Tat wanted to expand factory production; his younger brother refused, and the dispute went all the way to court before Man Tat bought his brother out too, leaving his own line in sole control of Lee Kum Kee (Bloomberg; Inquirer Business).
Count the cost of those two episodes honestly. Twice, the family had to raise enormous sums to purchase peace from itself. Twice, relationships between branches were severed, some permanently. Twice, the company's future hung on whether one side could finance the other's exit. The sauce recipes survived on merit. The family survived on luck.
Lee Man Tat, by then known in Hong Kong business circles for his relentless drive, drew the obvious conclusion that almost nobody acts on: the next war was already scheduled. He had five children of his own, all Western-educated, all capable, all future shareholders. Nothing about the family's structure had changed since 1972 except the number of people who could quarrel.
The fix came from the fourth generation. In 2002, Sammy Lee and his siblings brought their father a proposal: a family council, a permanent body separate from the company's board, to govern the family itself. Man Tat agreed, and the council was formed with seven members, Lee Man Tat, his wife, and their five children, meeting on a fixed rhythm to handle everything on the family side of the line: succession, family investments, values, education of the next generation, and the family's charitable arm (Bloomberg; Inquirer Business). The council is obligated to meet quarterly, and a parallel board oversees the business itself (The CEO Magazine; Bloomberg).
Out of the council came the family constitution, and its provisions are strikingly concrete. Among the documented rules: only members of the bloodline may own shares. The group may not hire in-laws, and spouses are prohibited from working in the business, a rule aimed directly at the interbranch coalition-building that fueled 1972 and 1986. Younger heirs must work outside the family company first and prove themselves elsewhere before they can join. Amending the constitution requires a two-thirds majority. Retirement is mandatory at 65 in the business and 70 on the family council. And crucially, non-family professionals may serve as chairman or chief executive of any business unit, so the company is never forced to promote blood over competence (Bloomberg; Nation Thailand).
Then there are the famous personal-conduct rules, the ones that made international headlines. As widely reported, the constitution contains prohibitions on divorce and on extramarital affairs, with reports describing consequences that reach into family governance roles for those who break them (The CEO Magazine; Nation Thailand). The legend has grown florid in the retelling, so it is worth being precise about what these rules are for. They are not moral theater. In a structure where only bloodline members hold shares, divorce and second families are shareholding events: they create rival claims, contested estates, and exactly the branch-versus-branch fractures that nearly ended the company twice. The constitution treats marriage stability as a governance matter because, for this family, it is one.
Above the rulebook sits a phrase. The family's stated core value is Si Li Ji Ren, considering others' interests, an instruction Lee Man Tat repeated for decades: before you act, think about how the other party is affected (Lee Kum Kee, chairman's message). It reads as gentle philosophy until you place it against 1972 and 1986, two years in which nobody considered the other party until lawyers were involved. The value is the constitution's soul; the clauses are its teeth.
Lee Man Tat died in 2021 at the age of 91, one of Hong Kong's richest men (Lee Man Tat, Wikipedia). The structure he blessed in 2002 outlived him without a tremor, which was the entire point.
Put the two halves of this story on a scale. On one side: two buyouts, one court case, decades of estrangement, and the repeated risk that the company would have to be split or sold to settle family scores. On the other: a council that meets four times a year and a document that took the family months of drafting and argument.
The second side is absurdly cheaper. That is the central lesson, and it is the one families resist most, because constitutions feel unnecessary precisely when they are affordable. When the family is at peace, writing rules feels like distrust. When the family is at war, writing rules is impossible. The Lees wrote theirs in the narrow window after the wars, while the memory of the cost was fresh. The smarter move, available to every reader, is to write the rules before the first war, when every clause is hypothetical and nobody is negotiating for advantage.
One: write the constitution before the conflict, not after. You do not need a conglomerate. A family with one plot of land, one shop, or one contested inheritance ahead of it has exactly the same fracture lines as the Lees: who may own, who may work, who decides, who exits, and at what price. Answer those five questions on paper while they are still theoretical. Every clause you write in peacetime is a buyout you will not fund in wartime.
Two: give the family a council with a calendar and rules of membership. The Lee council's power is not its wisdom. It is its cadence: a fixed quarterly meeting that happens whether or not there is a crisis, so problems are handled at the size of a conversation instead of the size of a lawsuit (The CEO Magazine). Your version can be four family meetings a year with a written agenda, minutes, defined membership, and one unbreakable rule: money matters are decided in the meeting, never in kitchen ambushes or funeral-day negotiations.
Three: separate the family's rules from the business's management, and let competence outrank blood. The Lee constitution lets outside professionals run business units while keeping ownership strictly inside the bloodline (Bloomberg). The council governs the family; the board governs the firm; the constitution polices the border. In an ordinary family this means the will says who owns, the family agreement says how members behave, and the question of who manages the asset is answered by ability, reviewed on schedule, and revocable. Mixing those three documents into one verbal understanding is how most families end up with their version of 1972.
A forgotten pot made this family rich. A written constitution is what kept it a family. Between those two events lie the two buyouts, the court case, and every argument that the rules now make unnecessary. The Lees are planning for the year 3002 not because they trust each other more than your family does, but because they finally stopped relying on trust alone.
Here is the decision in front of you. Will you schedule your family's first council meeting, a real one, with a date, an agenda, and every adult stakeholder invited, within the next 30 days? One meeting, four agenda items: what we own, who may own it, how we decide, how someone leaves. If the idea of that meeting makes you uncomfortable, notice what the discomfort is telling you: the conflicts are already in the room. The only question is whether they get a constitution or a courtroom.