Tung Chee-hwa died Tuesday at 89, RTHK reported. He was Hong Kong's first Chief Executive, sworn in the night of the handover in July 1997, and he ran the place until 2005, when he stepped down partway through his second term citing health. Before politics he ran his family's shipping company, Orient Overseas, the one that nearly went under in the 1980s until a Beijing-backed bailout kept it afloat. That bailout got talked about a lot once he had the top job.

Most people under 40 in this city know him from the "eight-egg fried rice" meme, an old joke about a wildly overpriced restaurant dish that somehow got tied to his name years after he left office. That is basically it now, a punchline that outlived the policies. He gets credited with pushing the link to the mainland hard and blamed for SARS, the 1997 property crash, and a civil service that never forgave him for reorganizing it. None of that is settled and it will not get settled this week. What is true is simpler: he was the first person to hold the job "Chief Executive of Hong Kong," and everyone who has held it since, including the one in office right now, inherited a title he was the one making up as he went.