Genting Highlands, the mountaintop casino and resort complex close to Kuala Lumpur, illustrates Malaysia's grudging relationship with gambling and, some have argued, with its entire Chinese community of 7.3 million. Lim Goh Tong, its creator, was granted permission to build a casino “on a 1,700m mountain, out of sight and out of mind”, as one journalist put it, in return for helping to build a tourist infrastructure in the newly independent federation. As his gambling retreat grew and grew — becoming “the Las Vegas of Malaysia” — it became an ever-greater affront to the Muslim majority but ever-more indispensable to a government in need of money.

Lim was born in Anxi, Fujian province, the son of a petty trader. He attended the village school until the age of 16, when his father died and he was obliged to help to raise his younger siblings. At 29 he left the country to join his uncle's construction business in Malaya, then a British protectorate. In 1942 the territory fell to Japan, and Lim was forced to scratch a living selling food from a motorcycle tender. After the war he set up a company to collect the invaders' spent hardware and sold it for scrap or to small businesses. He quickly amassed a fortune.

As the country's economy picked up and a new age of optimism dawned with the anticipation of independence, Lim diversified into construction and selling mining and plantation machinery. In the early 1960s he delivered two bulldozers to a struggling tin mine that was on the verge of closure. Lim accepted a share in the mine as payment and restructured its operation, while buying British-owned mining operations as they were wound up after independence in 1963. It proved a shrewd move; Malaysia became the world's largest exporter of tin until the market's collapse in the early 1980s.

The first showcase project for the new nation was the Cameron Highlands Hydroelectric Scheme, for which Lim's construction firm was sub-contracted by a German consortium. He marvelled at the coolness of the area, at the northern tip of Pahang state, and vowed to build himself a retirement home on a mountaintop closer to Kuala Lumpur; a plan he soon widened to include a hotel.

Lim's chosen site, Gunung Ulu Kali at Genting Sempah, 36 miles from the capital, looked geographically ideal, but was politically fraught. It straddled the boundary between Pahang and Selangor, meaning that two sultans had to be appeased and two leases sought. After taking an expedition through the jungle to the summit, however, he marvelled at the view and set his mind to securing the plot: 4,940 ha in Patang and 1,110 in Selangor.

Lim's autobiography paints the Genting Highlands development as a green-minded project that takes Malaysians closer to nature and reinvests millions of dollars in local conservation projects, notwithstanding that 15,000 ha (37,000 acres), mostly virgin rainforest, were levelled to make what became “Genting City of Entertainment” between 1965 and 1990. Lim claimed, too, that it was “a pleasant surprise” when, on laying the foundation stone for a hotel in March 1969, Prime Minister Abdul Rahman announced that Lim was to be granted a casino licence. Lim had spent four years and the better part of his fortune building a 20km road to the summit, a task that many claimed could not be done in less than 15 years. The 38-room hotel on the blueprints turned into the 200-room Highlands Hotel. It seemed that, embroiled in conflict with Indonesia and unable, politically, to grant start-up funds to a Chinese businessman, the Malaysian Government was nonetheless keen to encourage someone willing to build tourist infrastructure with private money. Thus Lim's project was exempted from tax for five years, sultans were persuaded to give him freehold to the land and he was paid 900,000 Malaysian dollars for finishing the access road on time.

With no other competition for the gambler's ringgit, Genting Highlands grew exponentially; by 1985 it had a staff of 7,000 and was the fifth-largest employer in Malaysia. Today this figure is doubled; its many hotels accommodate 14 million visitors each year and include the First World, the second-largest hotel in the world. Some arrive via the Genting Skyway — the longest cable car journey in South-East Asia.

As Malaysian politics shifted towards Islamic puritanism in the 1980s, however, the outlook for Genting looked bleak. Lim attempted to diversify in case it should lose the Highlands that was the jewel in its crown. Genting Berhad became a clutch of companies; at home investment in plantations was ramped up and Genting International Limited was created to invest in casinos overseas. In 1988 Lim became one of the founding members of South East Asia Bank, incorporated in Mauritius.

Some ventures were clumsily handled: in 1987 Genting International was refused a listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and soon after the group's tender to build a massive casino at Darling Harbour, Sydney, was cancelled after irregularities were found at the group's Burswood Island casino. Investigators recommended that Genting International's president, one of Lim's sons, be formally charged.

Undeterred, Lim returned to the fray in 1990 by funding the Pequot Tribe of Connecticut, who had just won the right to open a casino on their land and could find no American sponsor. Once completed, the tribe's casino made $700 million in its first two years, money the chiefs claim will be used to buy back the rest of their tribal lands. Lim opened casinos in the Bahamas and at Subic Bay in the Philippines. In 1993 he created the Star Cruise line, and Genting completed its purchase of Stanley Leisure, the UK's largest casino operator, in November last year.

The feared curbs on the Highlands' expansion never came to pass, but Lim's relationship with his government remained strange and fraught. He was forced to renew his business licence every three months, while the sin of gambling was denounced in the run-up to every election. In 1983 the Sultan of Pahang made it illegal for the state's Muslims to visit the resort, on pain of three months in jail, and ever-deeper tax cuts in the 1990s by the (majority Malay) Government were accompanied by a raid on gambling profits. By 1994 the Government was taking $400 million a year from gambling, most of it from Genting.

Lim was an unassuming billionaire who would appear in public dressed in old batik shirts. Although prime ministers, particularly Mahathir bin Mohamad, liked to refer to Lim as proof that Malaysia was a land of opportunity, “the man who moved a mountain” profited, to some extent, from the country's divisions and prohibitions.

He amassed one of South-East Asia's greatest private fortunes while never learning to speak more than schoolboy Malay, dealing whenever he could with Chinese businessmen, if possible in his native Hokkien. Yet he was a talisman of Chinese enterprise and stoicism: he never complained about the hoops he was obliged to jump through. It spoke volumes when Mr Mahathir attended a celebratory dinner with Lim in 1990, to crown a year of conciliatory gestures towards the Chinese community that had included legalising firecrackers and lifting a ban on the lion dance — illegal since the Chinese-Malay race riots of 1969.

Today the capitalisation of Genting Group companies is estimated at about US$11 billion. Lim was awarded the honorific title “Tan Sri” by the Malaysian Government in 1979. He is survived by his wife, Lee Kim Hua, and by six children.

Lim Goh Tong, Malaysian businessman, was born in China. He died on October 23, 2007, aged 90