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$62-million dowry has male suitors chasing Hong Kong tycoon's gay daughter

By Joyce Man, The Daily Telegraph September 27, 2012

HONG KONG undefined A Hong Kong billionaire’s daughter has been bombarded with marriage proposals, and even nude photographs, from as far afield as Oklahoma, Nigeria and Bulgaria after her father offered 40 million pounds to the man who could woo her.

Gigi Chao, daughter of property tycoon Cecil Chao, entered a civil partnership with her girlfriend of seven years in a ceremony in Paris five months ago.

But Chao, 76, has said that reports of his daughter’s civil ceremony are "false." He announced the $62.2-million dowry this week.

Speaking yesterday Chao, 33, said she had received about 200 proposals and that the number following her on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook had jumped by 1,500 since her father’s announcement.

"It’s ridiculous. I can’t sort out the serious proposals from the half-hearted ones. I can’t make head or tail of it," she said.

Chao, an executive director of her father’s company, Cheuk Nang, said they included gentlemen who said they were looking for love and asked her out on a date, as well as some less conventional introductions. Some have attached nude photos of themselves or provided information about their finances.

"Some of them had obviously done their research, you know, gone on my Facebook and looked at my background," she said. "Some of them are quite poetic."

But far from feeling angry at her father, she said she was "touched".

"At first I was entertained by it, and then that entertainment turned into the realization and conviction that I am a really lucky girl to have such a loving daddy, because it’s really sweet of him to do something like this," she said. She knew that her father would go public to deny the union, but did not know he would offer the reward. "I think the ($62.5 million) really came as an afterthought."

Chao said that she loved her father and they had a good relationship. "It’s not that he can’t accept me," she said. "It’s that he can’t accept how society would view me and the status that it would incur. Marriage is still a form of social status. I do understand him. I understand why he’s doing this.

"But I don’t appreciate getting 1,500 emails."

Chao, who also runs a model management and PR firm, met her partner, Sean Yeung, while they were working together.

Chao, who has dated men and women, said she had always been open and honest about her relationships to her family. But when she told her mother about a relationship with a girl when she was 16, her mother "banged her head against the wall, literally". Members of the homosexual and lesbian community in Hong Kong are not widely accepted.

Chao’s father is somewhat unconventional himself. He made headlines in 2003 when his Rolls-Royce caught fire while he and his girlfriend were inside.

The tycoon has never married and once claimed to have had "intimate relations" with about 10,000 women.