Once upon a time, in fact, just two centuries ago, Shanghai was nothing more than a silty corner of the Yangzi Delta. Yet, the humble village had one priceless asset - its location and that’s what brought waves of development onto the muddy shores of the Huangpu River.
From a handful of settlers, through pirate attacks to establishment of foreign concessions,the city rapidly became the place to be – a growing metropolis with the largest volume of business.
Meet some of the most brilliant minds of the Old Shanghai that took the money – making opportunities to the highest levels.
1.Charlie Soong
Charlie Soong has been called many things: a missionary, a businessman, a revolutionary, a pioneer of woman’s education, and North Carolina’s first international student. He was also the father of China's famous Soong sisters : Soong Mei-ling (a.k.a. Madame Chiang Kai-shek ), Soong Ai-ling , and Soong Qing-ling.
As a youth in the 1880s, Charlie spent several formative years living in North Carolina before moving back to China to become a successful business man and a close friend and revolutionary associate of Sun Yat-sen .
Born in 1861 to a fishing/merchant family on Hainan Island off the coast of southern China, Charlie arrived in America while a young man around 1878 in order to work in a relative's tea and silk shop during the formative years of Boston's Chinatown. Unhappy with his fate, he eventually found work on a ship docked in the Boston Harbor.
After returning to China in 1886, Charlie eventually quit missionary work for various reasons, and gradually transformed into a successful businessman through various business enterprises, including both the selling and printing of Bibles and the management of a flour mill.
In the 1890s, he established a friendship with a young Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Chinese Revolution that eventually brought down the last emperor of China and gave birth to modern republican government in China. Charlie secretly supported and financed Sun Yat-Sen and his revolutionary movement for two decades.
2. Moh Shangqing
Moh Shangqing was an influential silk tycoon in Old Shanghai. Moh owned more than 10 silk factories and is at the top of the big family tree on the wall. To mitigate risks caused by fluctuating global silk prices, Moh had decided to enter the silk-weaving business and founded Mayar Silk Mills in 1917. Later he employed his son-in-law, a graduate from Lehigh University in US, to manage it.
It proved to be a wise decision. Tsai adapted American management techniques and achieved great success. By 1930, Mayar had 859 looms and more than 2,000 employees.
“It was China’s first modern silk company. They used modern machines rather than traditional family mills that had been used for thousands of years,” explains Guo Weidong, a senior director of Esquel Group, who renovated the interior and designed the exhibition at No. 4 Wukang Road.
“Mayar’s modern way of production avoided handmade flaws and improved product quality. Many old Shanghai movie stars chose to wear Mayar’s silk,” Guo adds.
The Moh family left Shanghai for Hong Kong in the 1950s. Tsai’s son-in-law Yang Yuan Loong restarted the textile business, Esquel Group, in 1978. It has also been very successful. His daughter Marjorie Yang inherited the business and used No. 2 Wukang Road as her local residence after reacquiring two villas on the street around 2006.
3.Victor Sassoon
We have already mentioned this exceptional gentleman a few times but we couldn’t skip him on this list.
Sir Ellice Victor Sassoon, 3rd Baronet was a businessman and hotelier from the wealthy Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon merchant and banking family.
He was from a Baghdadi Jewish family who had made their fortune in the opium business. The family also had large holdings in the Indian cotton industry. Sir Victor served in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War. He survived a plane crash in 1916 and sustained leg injuries that plagued him for the rest of his life. When his father died in 1924, Victor inherited his title and became 3rd Baronet of Bombay. He moved to India, where he managed his family’s textile mills and served in the Indian Legislative Assembly.
In the 1920s and 1930s, he transferred much of his wealth from India to Shanghai (China) and contributed to a real estate boom there by investing millions of US dollars in the local economy.
Within a decade, Sassoon had utterly transformed the skyline of Shanghai, working with architects and developers to build the first true skyscrapers in the Eastern Hemisphere, in the process creating a real estate empire that would regularly see him counted among the world’s half-dozen richest men.
4.Eric Moller
The Mollers were originally Swedish with British citizenship. Eric Moller was the son of wealthy businessman Nils Moller, who had started a business in Hong Kong in the 1860s. The business grew and expanded into eight cities in China, and although the Mollers left Shanghai in 1950, their companies continued operating in Hong Kong into the 1990s.
The core of the family business was shipping and shipbuilding, and in Shanghai, the Moller portfolio included shipping lines, insurance, real estate and investment. In 1913, Eric Moller took over the family business and prospered. He had a steamboat that ran between Shanghai and Zhenjiang in Jiangsu Province.
Today, the legacy of Moller’s presence on Shanghai’s scene is his gigantic villa that he decided to build for his big family.Its architectural design represents the shipping theme and combines both Chinese and Western themes.
Moller was a horseracing fan and the chair of the Shanghai Horse Racing Club. His beloved horse Blonic Hill, an Arab stud stallion, brought him money and honor in the racing field. In memory of his horse, Moller built a tomb to Blonic Hill that stood on the lawn of the garden. Now only the bronze statue of the horse remains. Later, after the funeral of the horse, the family's dogs and cats joined the statuary. The story is that there was another bronze dog but it was lost during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
5. D.V.Woo (or Wu Tongwen)
The most mysterious entrepreneur on this list . He was a famous paint and dye tycoon, who sold pigments in Old Shanghai and also happened to be the son-in-law of Suzhou Tycoon Bei Runsheng.
Mr Woo made his fortune selling green pigments for military use (China’s Nationalist Army ) and regarded green as his lucky color. That’s why, when in 1930s he commissioned Laszlo Hudec to design his perfect house, the finishing element were green-colored glazed tiles on the façade and surrounding walls. At one point, this extravagant villa, was the largest and most luxurious residence in the Far East
Despite successful career and lavish lifestyle, at the start of Cultural Revolution, D.V .Woo and his mistress committed suicide in their favorite ‘ Green House’…
6 & 7.Liu brothers: Liu Jisheng and Liu Hongsheng
In the first half of the twentieth century, the Lius became one of China’s preeminent business families, presiding over an industrial empire that produced matches, woolens, cotton textiles, cement, and briquettes. It was Liu Hongsheng who was mainly in charge and Liu Jisheng was just a minor shareholder.
Some of their popular businesses were the Shanghai Cement Company , Hong Kong Matchstick Factory and the China Bank of Enterprises.
Liu Hongsheng and some of his sons became politically influential, accepting appointments to high official posts and dealing in person with top leaders such as Chiang Kai-shek in the Nationalist government and Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in the People’s Republic. Even during two of the greatest upheavals in twentieth-century Chinese history – the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45 and the Communist Revolution of 1949 – the Lius retained high positions in China’s economic, social, and political life.
Although Liu Hongsheng was the business genius, Liu Jisheng got to builtd one of the most famous residences in Shanghai - the Italian Renaissance style villa and its Greek-style garden - designed by Hudec himself.
Liu Jisheng and his wife seldom dined out for fear of being kidnapped. They had four Chinese chefs and two Western chefs to prepare the frequent banquets they held when they hosted important guests. Liu's close friend, the Kuomintang spy chief Dai Li, lived in the house during his Shanghai trip in September 1945.
Liu brothers left Shanghai for Hong Kong in 1948. Liu Hongsheng returned and was made deputy director of the Shanghai Federation of Industry and Commerce. However, Liu Jisheng never returned.
Information sources:
Business Expansion and Structural Change in Pre-War China: Liu Hongsheng and ..