Lawrence Ting

Lawrence S. Ting was a Taiwanese decorated soldier and a pioneer businessman who became one of the largest foreign investors in Vietnam. As founder of Phu My Hung Corporation and Saigon South Urban Development Project, Lawrence Ting was instrumental in the southward expansion of Ho Chi Minh City. Today the neighborhood created by Ting has become “a new sustainable, inclusive, knowledge-based urban center.” Ting received the Ho Chi Minh City Medal of Honor in 1993, and Certificates of Merit of the Government of Vietnam from the Prime Minister in 1997 and 2001. In the 2013 Harvard Business Review article The Big Idea, Building Sustainable Cities, John Macomber of Harvard Business School chose Phu My Hung's Saigon South Development Project started by Lawrence Ting as one of the leading sustainable urban development examples in the world. “Phu My Hung was promoted by industrialists who took a long-term ‘build and hold’ approach and had an infrastructure-first master plan...The Model of Phu My Hung, where thoughtful, long-term oriented, private-sector actors help the world create efficient water, power, and transit solutions, can-and must-be replicated.” Ting received posthumously the Friendship Medal of Vietnam from President Nguyen Minh Triet in December 2007. Lawrence S. Ting School in Ho Chi Minh City, a private non-profit junior high and senior high school is named after him. In 2010, the school became the first Microsoft Pathfinder School in Vietnam. In 2020, Taipei American School names its middle school Lawrence S. Ting Middle School in honor of Ting.