LT Lam, rubber duck tycoon who helped Hong Kong eclipse Japan in toy manufacturing

Lam Leung Tim, better known as LT Lam, who has died aged 101, was a Hong Kong industrialist whose ubiquitous yellow ducks came to symbolise harmony and goodwill in the former British territory – as well as providing cheerful bath-time companionship around the world for millions of children and unknown numbers of adults.

Lam was the last survivor of the generation that created a toy industry of more than a thousand factories that was Hong Kong’s first postwar flourishing as a low-cost manufacturing base, surpassing Japan as the world’s largest toy exporter in the early 1970s.

His rubber duck, for which the original mould was made in 1948, represented in his own words “a typical Lion Rock story of how we built a global empire from nothing” – Lion Rock mountain being a rugged Hong Kong landmark.

Lam Leung Tim was born on March 30 1924 in Hong Kong’s Wanchai district, into a family from Nanhai in Guangdong province. His father was a chef and his mother a schoolteacher.

He returned to Nanhai for primary schooling and studied briefly at Wah Yan College in Hong Kong in 1941 before war intervened. His father having died at the hands of the invading Japanese, young Lam toiled with his mother on a mainland vegetable farm for the remaining war years, subsisting on tree bark when food was short.

He returned to the colony in 1945 to find work with an undertaker, earning HK$2 per funeral, and as a news-stand salesman in the central business district, before joining a business owned by a family connection selling plastic raw materials.

When his boss decided they should move into moulded products in a new company, Winsome Plastic Works, they began making household goods, car parts and signage for Elizabeth Arden cosmetics counters. But Lam’s fascination was with toys that he felt could restore playfulness to the drab postwar era, and his brainwave was the duck.

“My ideal toys are durable and colourful and attractive to children,” he said. “I studied Japanese toy catalogues and thought a floating duck would be fun to play with, even in the bathtub. A rubber duck was different from most Japanese toys, which were made of cellulose that was inflammable and breakable. As for the colour, there is an old Chinese saying, yellow goose and green duck. Well, I guess I made a pleasant mistake.”

Ambitious to branch out on his own, Lam went on to found a string of businesses including Forward Products, which in due course merged with Winsome to create his master company Winsome Forward – making a range of toys, latterly in mainland factories, for export to Europe and the US. One of its successful partnerships was with the US toy giant Hasbro to produce GI Joe and Transformer dolls: when sales of the latter took off in China itself, Lam became known as “the father of Transformers”.

Meanwhile, so iconic had the yellow duck become that it made worldwide news in 1992 when 7,200 of them went overboard in the north Pacific from a Greek container ship Ever Laurel, bound from Hong Kong to Tacoma – to be dispersed by storms across the oceans and find landfall as far apart as Australia and (having navigated the North-West Passage) even Scotland.

In 2014, aged 90, he founded a new company, Funderful Creations, with plans to revive and extend the duck brand. He was named Hong Kong’s Industrialist of the Year in 2015 and in 2023 two giant inflatable yellow ducks appeared in Hong Kong harbour as an art installation that was reported as a symbol of “double happiness”.

Lam’s first marriage, in Nanhai at the insistence of his mother, did not endure. He is survived by his second wife Shelley Lam Qi Xiaobin, a former optometrist for the Chinese military some 30 years his junior, whom he met in Beijing and married in 1994. She once said of him: “You know, when I first met him, I thought, he’s so old and so short. But the more I got to know him, the more I realised he had a good character. He was always so considerate.”

Lam’s sons Daniel and Jeffrey (a member of Hong Kong’s legislative council) worked in his companies, as did several of his grandchildren.

LT Lam, born March 30 1924, died November 10 2025

[Source: Daily Telegraph]