o Kwon Ping’s decades in the hospitality industry have gifted the world with over 70 resorts and hotels. The first of these, the Banyan Tree Phuket, whose origin story—a luxury resort built on the former site of an abandoned tin mine deemed unfit for development by the United Nations and which has been gradually and painstakingly rehabilitated through a tree-planting initiative spearheaded by Ho and his wife Claire Chiang—has become the stuff of legend, an exemplar of “sustainable development”, a term which had yet to go mainstream during the resort’s completion in the 1990s. If the resort were an award-winning first book in Ho’s hospitality saga, then his latest endeavour in Phuket would be both a continuation and the start of a spin-off series in the
