Who is Maria Lee, Hong Kong’s Queen of Cakes? ‘Extraordinary life’ of bakery founder told

Maria Lee built a bakery empire, saw it go into liquidation, and moved on and up. Summing up her life was a challenge, her biographer says

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Maria Lee Tseng Chiu-kwan, the founder of Maria’s, started her first cake shop in the late 1950s. A recently published biography details her life. Photo: SCMP

Published: 5:15pm, 26 Dec 2024

There is no Wikipedia page in English about Maria Lee Tseng Chiu-kwan. But ask a Hongkonger over the age of 40 and chances are that many will know her name.

The 95-year-old “Queen of Cakes” was the owner and face of Maria’s, one of Hong Kong’s largest bakery franchises. The bakery had branches in Taiwan and the United States and, during the 1980s, was bigger than fellow rival Maxim’s Cakes.

Although her empire suffered a sudden and rather dramatic liquidation in 1998, when Lee was 69, she is still revered in Hong Kong, where she returned to university as an octogenarian and has since published a cookbook.

Many biographies feature rags-to-riches and “phoenix rising from the ashes” stories, but Lee’s life is about more than that, as Professor Kenneth Leung Wai-yin and his wife, Andrea Ngai Yiu-chi, relate in their recently published biography of the bakery founder.

The cover of Kenneth Leung Wai-yin and Andrea Ngai Yiu-chi’s book. Photo: Joint Publishing

With a title that translates roughly as The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Maria Lee Tseng Chiu-kwan, Hong Kong’s Queen of Cakes, it took them 20 years to research and write.

Leung taught for 25 years in the School of Journalism and Communication at Chinese University of Hong Kong and is a senior researcher in media law and ethics. He founded Shiu Pong College, part of the University of Macau, after he retired from Chinese University.