The Glamorous Celebrity Tutors of Hong Kong

Richard Eng

Richard Eng is the tutor king of Hong Kong. He’s credited with kicking off the celebrity-tutor boom in the mid-1990s. His designer watch and shoe collections are legendary; so is his yellow Lamborghini.

Photograph courtesy of Beacon College.
Buses as Billboards

Eng was the first Hong Kong tutor to realize that the city’s ubiquitous buses made excellent moving billboards.

Photograph courtesy of Beacon College.
King's Glory Bus Ad

Soon, other tutoring companies followed suit. Here’s a bus ad from a competing chain, King’s Glory, featuring several of its best-known tutors.

Photograph courtesy of King’s Glory.
Billboard on Chong Hing Square

The larger tutoring centers pour from $900,000 to $1.3 million into marketing every year, erecting hundreds of billboards that feature what look like squads of business-casual superheroes. This one, for King’s Glory, is plastered on Chong Hing Square, a high-rise in the highly trafficked Mong Kok district.

Photograph courtesy of King’s Glory.
Tutors as Action Heroes

This ad for an English-language tutorial course takes the action-hero notion one step further.

Ad taken from CREDIT: http://www.allstar.edu.hk/.
Beacon College Poster

Are these guys tutors or pop stars? It’s hard to tell.
Photograph courtesy of Beacon College.
Kelly Mok

Kelly Mok, a 26-year-old tutor for King’s Glory, encourages her students to check in with her Facebook page daily, leaving her messages letting her know how amazing she looked in that day’s class and wondering what she’s “up to right now.”

Photograph courtesy of King’s Glory.
Dr. Vic Chan

Tutors in Hong Kong often emphasize their good looks. Wouldn’t you want to be tutored by this man?

Screengrab from CREDIT: http://www.modern.edu.hk/teacher-Dr-Vic-Chan.phtml.