The passing of Sir TL Yang

May Sir TL rest in peace. 

The passing of Sir TL is mourned by a lot of people. As a custom, in the moment of grief, nobody wishes to speak ill of the dead, nor do I. Was he an outstanding CJ or a judicial officer at all? One should ponder objectively. He presided over the trial of the disgraceful Chief Superindent Godber on corruption charges seems to be the most remembered deed he did. In that era, a colonial-bred corrupted gweilo cop was only a minnow in the tank when compared to the kingdom of the 4 infamous Chinese Station Sergeants. Did Sir TL localise the Hong Kong Judiciary? Yes and no. Localisation was the government policy then when 1997 was approaching. Whoever was on the CJ's bench would have to do the same. He was the first Chinese CJ. He wanted to be the first Chinese to head the Court of Final Appeal too. Failing that he resorted to entering the race for the Chief Executive. He renounced his British citizenship and gave up his knighthood to prepare for the race. My cronies and I still refer to him as Sir TL, teasingly,  in our conversations. He was the first judicial officer to enter the race, followed by Simon Li and Woo. Was he pressed to do so to create a contested election? The verdict speaks a lot. 

Sir TL exemplified the characteristics of a true gentleman. No one will dispute it. How good was he as a judge? Little can be said. Almost none of the judgement he wrote was engrossing. 

How was he regarded in contemporary times? 

In The Hong Kong Diary, the last governor wrote this,

"    Sir T.L. is a slight, perky Shanghainese, trained in London. He has 'risen without trace' through the magistracy and the judiciary largely because he's clean (no bad thing) and local. He became the first local CJ partly as a result of a failure to bring on better local lawyers or to parachute a really top-class Chinese QC into the job: someone like Andrew Li or Denis Chang, but there are others too these days. He is a decent and well-read man, who translates Chinese novels into English as a pastime. There isn't an ounce of malevolence in him. I hope that the ambition of others doesn't press him on towards self-destruction...."

(Sunday 1 September 1996)

What did he translate into English?

,

《說岳全傳》(General Yue Fei), 《桃花扇》(The Peach Blossom Fan), 《官場現形記》(Officialdom Unmasked)

Everyone has to go one day or another. Heaven has one more gentleman now.