Nina Wang, who died Tuesday at 69, was the richest woman in Asia and got that way after inheriting her presumably deceased husband’s fortune in a decade-and-a-half-long legal struggle that featured accusations adultery, opium-smoking, and forgery. She reportedly had ovarian cancer.

After her husband, Teddy Wang, a developer and chairman of Hong Kong’s Chinachem Group, was kidnapped in 1990, Nina Wang became involved in a series of disputes with his father, Wang Din-shin, who insisted that he should inherit Teddy’s fortune, which then stood north of $1 billion.

A will Nina Wang produced was challenged as a forgery, and Wang Din-shin insisted that Teddy Wang had cut her off after she had an extramarital affair. The courtroom drama captivated Hong Kong for years, starring the sprightly Nina Wang, who stood barely 5 feet but favored flamboyant miniskirts, bobby socks, and pigtails.

Even as the case rolled on toward Hong Kong’s highest court, Nina Wang took charge of her husband’s business affairs and managed to outdo him, apparently multiplying his fortune several times over. Although her wealth was a closely guarded secret, Forbes magazine last year estimated it at $4.2 billion, making her Asia’s 35th-richest person.

Wang attempted to build the tallest building in Hong Kong, 108 stories. But when the government blocked construction in 1994, she shortened it to 42 stories and named it after herself. An 89-story tower to be named after her husband is under construction.

In 2001, she teamed up with an artist to produce a comic book version of herself that she named “Little Sweetie,” the same as her nickname in Hong Kong newspapers, “Siu Tim Tim.”

In 2002, she seemed to have lost everything when a court ruled that the will was a forgery and that the fortune should go to Wang Dinshin. Nina Wang was charged with perjury and forgery and held on $7 million bail. But in a surprise verdict in 2005, Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal reversed the lower court, awarding the fortune to Nina Wang. Prosecutors subsequently dropped the forgery and perjury charges.

Born Kung Yu-sum into a middle-class Shanghai family, Wang was a childhood sweetheart of Teddy Wang, whose father founded Chinachem to manufacture paint and chemicals. More important to the firm’s later fortunes were its real estate holdings, and Wang Din-shin moved the firm to Hong Kong after World War II. Nina Wang followed later, and the couple was married in 1955.

Despite her great wealth, Nina Wang was notoriously frugal and was reputed to spend only a few hundred dollars monthly on her personal needs. She spent more liberally on bodyguards — about 50 of them — and a German shepherd named Wei Wei, who accompanied her to all meetings.

Her paranoia was understandable; she insisted that she had been kidnapped along with her husband in 1983. Released, she forked over $11 million for his freedom. He was later found in a refrigerator in a Kowloon apartment building, unharmed. He reputedly berated her for overspending.

The couple had no children.