Ellis Kadoorie

His family were originally Iraqi Jews from Baghdad who later migrated to Bombay, British India in the mid-eighteenth century.

Ellis Kadoorie arrived in Shanghai from Bombay in 1880 as an employee of the Iraqi Jewish firm David Sassoon & Sons.

Within a few years he had accumulated large sums of money and had gone into business on his own account, with companies in both Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Over the next two decades, the Kadoorie brothers made their fortunes, achieving success in banking, rubber plantations, electric power utilities and real estate, and gaining a major share-holding in Hong Kong Hotels Limited.

Eventually, it was decided to build two separate agricultural schools in Israel – The Kadoorie Agricultural High School which was built in the Lower Galilee for the Jewish population, and another, now known as Israel Technical University – Kadoorie, in Tulkarm for the Arab population.