Origins
Eu's father, Eu Kong Pui also known as Eu Kong, was a Chinese immigrant from Foshan, Guangdong. He went to Penang, British Malaya, to work as a grocery shop assistant. He had a wife in Foshan, Madam Leung, and a wife in Malaya, Madam Man.
He built his fortune by acquiring from the British, monopolies for tax or revenue farming (opium, alcohol or spirits, gambling and pawn broking) in Perak in the 1880s and when tin started to boom, he acquired land for mining tin. He expanded this to retailing and taxing goods from China that he sold to the miners he employed and set up a grocery shop in Gopeng that was later expanded to include a Chinese dispensary for Chinese immigrants. He operated his businesses under the mark Chop Yan Sang. He had two younger brothers, Eu Kong Chun and Eu Kong Tak. His business partner was Chiu Tong Hin and his attorney was Grant Mackie of the Straits Trading Company.
Eu Kong Pui died in 1890 or On 24 March 1891 at the age of 38.
While he was still a child, Eu Tong Sen had been sent back to his mother in Foshan, China, to study. However, with the sudden death of his father, he found himself, at only 13, heir to the family estates and tin mining businesses. He returned to Malaya in 1892 but his stay with his two uncles and his stepmother was short. He moved to the home of R. Butler and lived there for two and a half years, taking private tuition in English from F. W. Harley. From there he moved to Ipoh and enrolled in a government school. Later he would move to Singapore where he lived for some time before moving to Hong Kong when business conditions changed.
In 1898, at the age of 21, he took over his father's estate from Grant Mackie and discovered the business to be in decline. Over the next ten years he was to expand the family business and multiply his fortune many times over. He expanded his business empire in Singapore, Malaya and Hong Kong and, at 30, was one of the richest men in the region.
In Malaya and the Straits, when tax farming was abolished and tin prices started to fall, Eu ventured into rubber plantations in British Malaya and remittances between Malaya and Hong Kong.
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