Ernest Major

Ernest Major (美查, Měichá) was a British merchant who founded one of the longest-running Chinese-language newspapers in Shanghai. The gazetteer gives no birth or death dates. He arrived in the early 1860s as a dealer in foreign cloth and, with his brother, bought a gold and silver smelting works in 1862.

In 1872 he launched Shen Bao (申报), a daily, and in 1876 the Dianshizhai (点石斋) lithographic press, which printed the illustrated Dianshizhai Pictorial. In 1880 he started the Suichang match works and the trading firm Major Bros. He sat on the Municipal Council in 1884, and the next year enlarged his smelting works to make hydrochloric and sulphuric acid. In 1889 he sold Shen Bao and his other holdings and returned to Britain.