Jardine, Matheson & Co.

Why Shanghai knows the name

Jardine, Matheson & Co. (怡和洋行, Yíhé Yángháng) was one of the first foreign firms to open an office in Shanghai, in early 1843, and its building at No. 27 the Bund is still one of the most recognisable on the waterfront. In Shanghai it was known as Ewo, the name the firm took from a Cantonese hong. It sold opium among other goods, and over the next century added steamers, wharves, a cotton mill and a brewery. It left the city in 1954.

When did it come, and where did it put down?

Sources agree that Jardines started trading in Shanghai in early 1843. They disagree on almost everything about the plot. One history of the firm says it was the first to register a building lot on the Bund in 1843 and finished its first premises at No. 27 in 1851. The article on the present building says the firm rented about 2,100 square metres and built a two-storey cottage with a garden there in 1845. A travel guide gives 1851 as the year the first building went up. These are not necessarily contradictory (a lot registered in 1843, a cottage in 1845, a larger building in 1851), but no source I could read lays the sequence out from the land records.

The site sits at the corner of Beijing Road (then Peking Road) on what became the Bund. The cottage was renovated three times before it gave way to a larger three-storey masonry-and-timber building, and a gatehouse and canopy were added in 1865. The present building dates from 1920 to 1922, designed by Moorhead & Halse in Beaux-Arts style and raised by one floor in 1930 and by another in 1983.

Where does the “Lot 1” story come from?

The popular version holds that Bund lots were numbered in the order foreigners applied, and that Jardines held Lot 1. The record I have supports half of it: the firm is described as the first to register a lot on the Bund. The numbering, however, appears only in secondary web accounts, and Gibb, Livingston & Co. is placed on Lot 2 on the street that bears its name, not on the river front. Nobody in the sources shows the application order. The story is plausible and may be true, but it should be told as a local tradition until someone reads the 1840s land registers.

What did it trade, and how did opium fit in?

By 1860, one reference account says, Jardine Skinner and Jardine Matheson dominated the opium trade, and with Dent & Co. and Russell & Company the firm financed much of Hong Kong’s early commerce. The firm then moved away from the drug. A history records that in 1872 Jardines adopted a policy of ending significant involvement in opium. Cambridge’s catalogue shows the policy was not a clean break: it holds statements of opium stocks and sales at Amoy, Shanghai and Swatow dated mostly to 1875. The honest summary is that the firm began reducing its stake in 1872 and was still tracking sales at Shanghai in 1875.

How did a comprador sit between the firm and the market?

Foreign houses did not sell directly to Chinese buyers. They worked through a comprador (买办, mǎibàn), a Chinese manager who guaranteed the firm’s local transactions and dealt with the Chinese merchants. At Jardines the best-known was Tong King-sing (唐廷枢, Táng Tíngshū, 1832–1892), who joined in 1861, was named comprador in Shanghai in 1863 and became chief comprador over the firm’s other ports. In 1873 he left to run the China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Company, which he did until 1884. That move matters to this story, because China Merchants was the rival that bought Russell & Co.’s fleet in 1877 (see the entry on Russell & Co.).

Dates for Tong vary between accounts, and I have used the one in Wikipedia’s biography; a full treatment should check Hao Yen-p’ing’s study of the comprador system.

Which ships and wharves did Jardines own?

In 1874, when the Yangtze was crowded with rival lines, China Merchants, Jardines and Butterfield & Swire each had six steamers on the river, against seventeen for Russell’s Shanghai Steam Navigation Co. Jardines formed its own line, the Indo-China Steam Navigation Company, in 1881, and it ran until 1939. On shore it formed the Shanghai & Hongkew Wharf Co. in 1875, adding the Old Ningpo Wharf in 1883 and the Pootung Wharf in 1890.

How did the firm move from trade into industry?

The industrial turn came in the 1890s and after. The EWO Cotton Spinning and Weaving Co. was founded in Shanghai in 1895 and is described as the first foreign-owned cotton mill in China. An Ewo Yuen press-packing company followed in 1907, cold storage making powdered eggs in 1920, and the EWO Brewery, built in 1935–36, which became a public company under Jardines’ management in 1940. By 1906 the firm was a limited company, and Cambridge’s account says the heart of its business was in Shanghai; the head office was officially based there from 1912.

Who ran it?

The Shanghai managers were in the line of Jardine’s partners and relatives. William Keswick (耆紫薇, Qí Zǐwēi, 1835–1912), a relative of the founder William Jardine, came to China in 1855, became manager of Jardines in 1859, shuttled between Hong Kong, Shanghai and Yokohama, and served as chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council in 1865–1866. The gazetteer’s biography adds that he pressed the Council to build roads beyond the Settlement boundary toward the racecourse and Jing’an Temple.

What the sources disagree on

• The Bund plot: registered 1843, cottage 1845, first building 1851 (see above).
• Tong King-sing’s years at Jardines.
• Whether Jardines “left opium” in 1872 or began to wind down.

What happened after 1949?

Trade became hard for foreign firms under the new government. Jardines announced in January 1954 that it had ceased to act as general managers of the EWO Cotton Mills, and by the end of the year had sold, moved or closed everything on the mainland. The Cambridge catalogue says the China offices’ assets and liabilities went to the state-operated Chung Hwa Development Company on 1 October 1954. The brewery was sold at a loss. The Bund building had already passed through Mitsui’s hands in the war, returned to Jardines in 1946, and was used from 1955 by the Shanghai Foreign Trade Administration.

Where can a reader check all this?

The firm gave its records to Cambridge University Library in 1935, and the Jardine Matheson Archive now covers the company, its predecessors and its subsidiaries up to 1941. It is arranged in series that include accounts, correspondence, legal documents, printed circulars and a large run of Chinese documents, and most of it is in English with significant French and Spanish papers. Access is by application and at the discretion of the owners, and some volumes are too fragile to issue. For this entry I read the catalogue descriptions, not the letters themselves, which is why the dates above rest on secondary histories and why a longer account of the hongs should go back to the archive.

What to look for

Stand on the Bund opposite No. 27, at the corner with East Beijing Road. The building is five storeys of Beaux-Arts stone with an extra storey added in 1983 that critics say alters its proportions. The ground floor now holds shops. Nothing of the 1845 cottage or the 1851 building survives. For the paper trail, the Jardine Matheson Archive at Cambridge University Library holds the firm’s accounts, letters and Chinese documents up to 1941; the 1954 closure files are in the same catalogue.