Far East Bank was a bank in Hong Kong which has since merged into

Bank of East Asia The Bank of East Asia Limited, often abbreviated to BEA, is a Hong Kong banking and financial services company, headquartered in Central, Hong Kong. It is currently the largest independent local Hong Kong bank, and one of two remaining family ...

. Far East Bank was founded in 1959 by Mr.

Deacon Chiu Deacon Chiu Te-ken, JP (; 1 May 1924 – 17 March 2015) was a Hong Kong entrepreneur. He founded Far East Bank and Far East Consortium and was formerly chairman of Asia Television (ATV). Life Chiu was born in Shanghai in 1924 and moved to Hong ...

(), the founder of Far East Holdings. It started as a

qianzhuang Qianzhuang () were local independent Chinese banks in the early modern period, as distinguished from the nation-wide bank networks headquartered in Shanxi province called the " Shanxi banks" (票號, ''piaohao''). Also known by a variety of reg ...

(native bank) in

Tsuen Wan Tsuen Wan (formerly also spelled Tsun Wan) is a town built on a bay in the western New Territories of Hong Kong, opposite of Tsing Yi Island across Rambler Channel. The market town of Tsuen Wan emerged from the surrounding villages and flee ...

by collecting

deposits A deposit account is a bank account maintained by a financial institution in which a customer can deposit and withdraw money. Deposit accounts can be savings accounts, Transaction account#Current accounts, current accounts or any of several othe ...

from

farmers A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, raising living organisms for food or raw materials. The term usually applies to people who do some combination of raising field crops, orchards, vineyards, poultry, or other livestock. A farmer mi ...

. In the 1960s, it suffered heavily from heavy lending to

property Property is a system of rights that gives people legal control of valuable things, and also refers to the valuable things themselves. Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of property may have the right to consume, alter, share, r ...

sector and fraud. In 1965,

bank runs A bank run or run on the bank occurs when many clients withdraw their money from a bank, because they believe the bank may cease to function in the near future. In other words, it is when, in a fractional-reserve banking system (where banks no ...

occurred in several small and medium banks in Hong Kong, which eventually triggered the

stock market crash A stock market crash is a sudden dramatic decline of stock In finance, stock (also capital stock) consists of all the shares by which ownership of a corporation or company is divided.Longman Business English Dictionary: "stock - ''especia ...

in 1965. By order of the

British Hong Kong Hong Kong was a colony and later a dependent territory of the British Empire from 1841 to 1997, apart from a period of occupation under the Japanese Empire from 1941 to 1945 during the Pacific War. The colonial period began with the Briti ...

government, the bank was aided by

The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (), commonly known as HSBC (), was the parent entity of the multinational HSBC banking group until 1991, and is now its Hong Kong-based Asia-Pacific subsidiary. The largest bank in Hong K ...

until it was acquired by

First National City Bank Citibank, N. A. (N. A. stands for " National Association") is the primary U.S. banking subsidiary of financial services multinational Citigroup. Citibank was founded in 1812 as the City Bank of New York, and later became First National City ...

in 1969. In 1992, the bank was acquired by

First Pacific First Pacific Company Limited () is a Hong Kong-based investment management and holding company with operations located in Asia. It involves telecommunications, consumer food products and infrastructure. History * 1981: First Pacific Finance ...

and merged to

Hong Nin Savings Bank Hong Nin Savings Bank (Traditional Chinese: 康年儲蓄銀行) was a bank in Hong Kong, founded in 1921. The bank went into administration in September 1986 following defaults on several loans related to shipping, and was taken over by the colo ...

to form

First Pacific Bank First Pacific Bank Limited was a bank based in Hong Kong. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of the investment holding company FPB Bank Holding Company Limited (FPB Bank Holdco). Its headquarters were in the First Pacific Bank Centre in Wan Cha ...

. In 2000, First Pacific Bank was acquired by the

. In 2002, the bank was merged into Bank of East Asia.BANK OF EAST ASIA MERGES WITH FIRST PACIFIC BANK
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References

{{Authority control Defunct banks of Hong Kong Bank of East Asia Banks established in 1959 Banks disestablished in 1992