Butterfield & Swire

Why Shanghai knows the name

Butterfield & Swire (太古洋行, Tàigǔ Yángháng) arrived in Shanghai in 1867, twenty-four years after the first British hongs, as a textile importer. Five years later it had founded the China Navigation Company, whose steamers shared the Yangtze trade with Jardines, Russell and China Merchants. The firm’s Chinese name, Taikoo, is today better known in Shanghai as a shopping brand than as a trading house. It was the newest of the five hongs in this series, and it came back to Shanghai in 1993.

What brought a Liverpool firm to Shanghai?

John Samuel Swire went to Shanghai in 1866 on behalf of his family’s Liverpool import-export business and formed a partnership with Richard Shackleton Butterfield, who ran a family firm in Bradford. The Shanghai office opened on 1 January 1867 under the name Butterfield & Swire, to handle textile shipments that had previously been consigned to another house, Preston, Bruell & Company. Soon afterwards the firm took the agency for Alfred Holt’s Blue Funnel Line, which widened it from cloth into shipping. Over the nineteenth century it set up branches and agencies up the Yangtze. The partnership did not last. The SOAS archive blog says it was dissolved in 1869, with John Swire & Sons taking control and keeping the name; the AIM25 archive description gives 1 August 1868; a company history says “within two years”. The three sources are near enough that I would write “1868–69”. A London branch opened in 1869 and became the head office in 1870.

What does Taikoo mean?

The firm took the Chinese name 太古, rendered as “great and ancient” in two of the histories I read. For comparison, Jardines’ 怡和 is rendered “happy harmony” and was borrowed from a Cantonese hong, as the Jardine entry explains. I found no account of who chose 太古 or what the partners meant by it, so the English gloss is a translation and not a documented intention.

How did the shipping business start?

In 1872, with Alfred Holt’s backing, Swire formed the China Navigation Company, to run steamers on the Yangtze and the coast, and Butterfield & Swire managed it from Shanghai. Wikipedia says the company was started in London in 1872; the SOAS blog says it was managed from Shanghai. These agree if London held the shares and Shanghai ran the ships. A second company, the Coast Boats Ownery, formed in 1874, merged with it in 1883.

The SOAS catalogue also lists a pool agreement between the China Navigation Company and China Merchants dated December 1877, and notes rate wars and pooling with rival lines in the late 1870s. Taken together, the pool agreement and the sale of Russell’s fleet that same year suggest the coast and river trade was being divided up by agreement more than by fighting once the American line had gone.

By 1874 the line had six steamers on the Yangtze. So did Jardines and China Merchants. The largest fleet was Russell’s, with seventeen. Three years later Russell sold out to China Merchants, and the field was left with the Chinese company and the two British ones.

Why did Swire build a sugar refinery?

The records are explicit about one rivalry. In 1884 Swire created the Taikoo Sugar Refinery in Hong Kong to break Jardine Matheson’s sugar monopoly, and the two firms competed for years. The refinery is in Hong Kong, not Shanghai, but it explains why Swire and Jardines, the two British houses with the largest steamer fleets after 1877, treated each other as the main competitor. A Taikoo Dockyard followed in 1900 to service the firm’s ships. Several China Navigation Company vessels, including the Whang Pu of 1920, the Shuntien of 1934 and the Wulin of 1935, were built there.

How does Swire compare with the older hongs?

Put the five houses side by side and Swire is the latecomer by a generation. Jardine Matheson and Dent & Co. opened in Shanghai in 1843, Gibb, Livingston & Co. in 1844, and Russell & Co. had a branch by 1846 and its headquarters there by 1852. Butterfield & Swire came in 1867, the year Dent & Co. was in its death throes. By then the opium houses had made the money and the contacts; Swire started in cloth, then added shipping, and so entered a Yangtze trade already shaped by Russell’s steamers. Its name survives today as Swire, and its Shanghai office reopened in 1993.

The exits tell a similar story. Dent folded in 1867 and Russell dissolved in 1891, both before the twentieth century. Jardines closed its mainland business in 1954. Swire’s Chinese properties were taken in the wake of 1949 without compensation, and the group’s centre of gravity had already shifted to Hong Kong, where it had built a refinery and a dockyard.

Who were the compradors?

The only named comprador I found is Lee Chun Noun, who wrote to Butterfield & Swire in Shanghai on 12 June 1884 about the discontent of Swatow shipping companies with the firm’s policy; the letter is in the SOAS archive. I know nothing else about him, and I give his name only as the catalogue spells it. The Jardine and Dent entries name compradors, Tong King-sing and Xu Run, but nothing links either man to Swire in my sources.

The pattern matters for the long history of the hongs. The firms that came to Shanghai in 1843 began in opium and tea and later turned to ships and industry; Swire began with cloth and ships and never needed the earlier stage. By the time it opened, Jardines had already announced, in 1872, its policy of ending significant involvement in opium, so a newcomer in the 1860s and 1870s was entering a trade whose centre of gravity was moving to steamers and warehouses.

What the sources disagree on

• When the Butterfield partnership ended: 1868, 1869, or “within two years”.
• Where the China Navigation Company began, London or Shanghai (probably both, as above).
• Whether the 1884 refinery date matches the start of work: the SOAS blog says work began in the mid-1880s.

What happened after 1949?

Swire had already lost ground to the Japanese invasion of 1937, which, according to one company history, closed its northern China and Shanghai interests. After the war the China Navigation Company returned to Shanghai and Hong Kong in 1945 and ran its North China Coast and Yangtze business from Shanghai. The Communist victory in 1949 ended that; the company history says Swire’s Chinese properties were nationalised without compensation. The firm remade itself in Hong Kong, where the Taikoo name is attached to the dockyard and the refinery. John Swire & Sons reopened a Shanghai office in November 1993, after an absence of more than thirty years.

What survives

The SOAS Library holds the John Swire & Sons archive, with title deeds for China Navigation Company property on the French Bund. I could not identify the building from the catalogue. The firm’s trace in the city today is the Taikoo name on a shopping district; the entry does not claim it as a link to the 1867 office.

What to look for

There is no building in the places database tied to the firm, and I have not located its Bund office. If you go looking, start at the French Bund, the stretch of river south of the old Settlement, where the SOAS deeds point. The lot numbers would be the next thing to ask the Shanghai Municipal Archives for. The line’s Yangtze paddle steamers are gone, and the firm’s early Shanghai story survives mainly in the SOAS archive.