[3] His family was poor and he left school at the age of 12 to serve as an apprentice to a silk merchant.
When Chen was 22 years old, he was already chief manager of his family business and owned several shops and factories in Shanghai and Ningbo.
[2][5] He set up a successful cotton-yarn maker called Nan Fung Mill.
[9] In 2010, his wife Yang Foo Oi and elder daughter Angela, a trained architect who lived in the United States and now in Hong Kong, sued younger daughter Vivian, alleging that Chen was misled into transferring assets to a trust fund controlled by Vivian.
[2][5] At his death he was ranked by Forbes as the 14th wealthiest person in Hong Kong, with a net worth of US$2.6 billion,[7][12] though earlier in his career he had been among the top ten.