Sir Victor Sassoon

Why Shanghai knows the name

Victor Sassoon is the man behind Sassoon House, the green-roofed tower at the Bund end of Nanjing Road, and behind a line of apartment blocks that changed the skyline of the 1930s. He was a British baronet from a Baghdad-born Jewish merchant family, and in the 1920s he moved the centre of the family’s business from India to Shanghai, turning an opium-and-cotton house into one of the city’s biggest landlords. By one archive’s count he held more than 1,800 properties here at one time.

Who was he before Shanghai?

Victor was born in Naples in 1881, on his parents’ way to India, and grew up in England (the birth date is given as 20 or 30 December, depending on the source). His family was the Sassoon house founded in Bombay in the 1830s; his grandfather’s generation had split it into two competing firms, and Victor belonged to the branch behind E. D. Sassoon & Co. His names vary in print: Southern Methodist University’s archive calls him Sir Ellice Victor Elias Sassoon, the Shanghai gazetteer Elias Victor.

The First World War left him with a damaged left foot after service in the air force. In Shanghai it earned him a nickname, 翘脚沙逊 (Qiàojiǎo Shāxùn), the limping Sassoon, which Sixth Tone renders “Lame Sassoon”. The gazetteer says he took over the family property in India in 1918 and the running of E. D. Sassoon & Co. with it; other sources put his succession at 1924, when his father Sir Edward Elias Sassoon died and he became a baronet. Wikipedia adds that his uncle Meyer Harry Sassoon also died in 1924, leaving Victor and Meyer Harry’s widow, Mozelle Gubbay, as the main owners of a business then valued at £15 million. In India he sat in the legislature and on the Royal Commission on Labour, according to the gazetteer.

When did he come to Shanghai, and why?

The sources do not agree on the date, and the answer is easier to give as a range. The Shanghai gazetteer and Sixth Tone say 1923. A 2006 magazine account says only that he moved his operations in the 1920s. A 2026 review of Jonathan Kaufman’s book puts the shift of the business headquarters in the early 1930s. The Southern Methodist University note, written by the library that holds his papers, says he moved much of his wealth from India to Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s and divided his time between the two cities. The documents point to a transfer that began in 1923 and was complete by about 1930, when the firm’s headquarters moved into Sassoon House.

The reasons are also given differently. The gazetteer attributes the move to India’s rising independence movement. The 2006 article says taxes in India were high. The 2026 review says he had become disillusioned with Indian taxation, and quotes him as saying he gave up India and China gave him up. None of them shows how much tax he avoided, so the popular claim that he left India to escape tax is partly supported and not proven.

A first step in 1923 is documented: E. D. Sassoon & Co. bought the majority of shares in Arnhold & Co. of Shanghai, which controlled the Cathay Land Company. Cathay Land already owned apartment blocks and a hotel, and became the vehicle for much of what followed. In 1928 he also set up the E. D. Sassoon Banking Company as a subsidiary.

How did a trading family become a property empire?

The family had been in Shanghai since the 1840s, and its Bund plot was an old holding. The gazetteer says the firm bought the corner at Nanjing Road in 1875; Sixth Tone says 1877, for 80,000 taels, and adds that by the 1920s the site was worth 1.7 million taels. Sixth Tone, citing the historian Tang Peiji, estimates New Sassoon’s Shanghai real estate at 13.3 million taels in 1921, before Victor’s building boom.

The gazetteer gives a hard-headed reason for building upward. In the 1920s and 1930s the Settlement taxed land by area, not by floor area, so a tall block of flats earned far more per taxed square metre than a lane of low houses. The Sassoon group pulled down many of its lane houses and put up ten tall buildings in their place. The figures for Grosvenor House show the logic: land and building cost 4.25 million yuan, rents ran to 337,000 yuan a year, and the investment paid for itself in thirteen years.

Palmer & Turner (公和洋行, Gōnghé Yángháng), the firm that had designed most of the Bund, drew the buildings.

What did he build, and in what order?

Sassoon House (Cathay Hotel, now the north building of the Fairmont Peace Hotel) came first. It was built in 1926–1929, 77 m high, and was the first high-rise Victor built in Shanghai. The ground floor held two banks and shops; E. D. Sassoon’s offices took the third and fourth floors; the Cathay Hotel occupied floors five to nine, with rooms decorated in national styles, a Chinese restaurant and ballroom on the eighth and a nightclub on the ninth; the Sassoon family lived above. The hotel group dates the opening to 1 August 1929, Chinese Wikipedia to 5 September 1929. E. D. Sassoon & Co. moved its headquarters into the building in March 1930.

Cathay Mansions (华懋公寓, Huámào Gōngyù) went up in 1925–29 for the Cathay Land Company at 3.3 million yuan, with 13 or 14 storeys depending on the account. Its neighbour, Grosvenor House (峻岭公寓, Jùnlǐng Gōngyù), followed in 1934 (the heritage registers say 1935). Both are now the Jin Jiang Hotel.

Hamilton House (Fuzhou Building), an office block at Jiangxi Middle Road and Fuzhou Road, was built in 1931–33. The Metropole Hotel stands on the corner opposite. The hotel was one of the first buildings in Shanghai set on deep piles, a method chosen, the gazetteer says, so as not to disturb the Kincheng Bank next door.

The Embankment Building on North Suzhou Road, finished in 1935, was the largest block of flats built in Shanghai in the 1930s: S-shaped, 282 flats and 126 service rooms, with a 15.5 m swimming pool. It replaced a lane estate called Baokang Li that the Sassoons had owned since 1887.

The gazetteer’s list of his holdings also includes the Verdun Apartments (凡尔登公寓), the Ciro’s (仙乐斯) property and several operating companies: Cathay Land, the Shanghai Land Investment Company, 祥泰 and Arnhold. By the 2006 magazine account’s reckoning he was the top realtor in Shanghai by the mid-1930s.

What else was in the business?

The gazetteer says that besides property he dealt in opium and arms; Sixth Tone also says he sold arms. Neither gives figures or documents for the arms trade, so treat that part as a claim in the secondary record. The opium business was the family’s old trade, and its decline is treated in the entries for the Sassoon family and for E. D. Sassoon & Co.

What did he do for the refugees of the 1930s?

From 1938 Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria and Poland reached Shanghai in large numbers. Maisie Meyer writes that by the end of 1939 relief committees were caring for about 16,000 of them and that Victor Sassoon housed some 2,500. A 2006 magazine article says he paid for soup kitchens and schools, gave Embankment House as a shelter, and credits him with the resettlement of some 20,000 people. Kaufman’s book, as the Swarajya review reports it, puts the arrivals of 1938–41 at roughly 18,000 and says he converted the Embankment Building and negotiated with Japanese officials on their behalf. These numbers measure different things, housed, helped and arrived, and cannot be reconciled into one figure. The Kadoorie family, Meyer notes, opened a school in January 1942 for 600 refugees with seventeen teachers.

His standing in the older Baghdadi community was not simple. Chiara Betta reports that in the 1930s his arrival in a bar was sometimes met with the chant “Back to Baghdad”.

What do the stories about him get right?

Several stories attach to the Cathay and its owner. Coward is the best documented. He wrote that he used an influenza convalescence in Shanghai to write Private Lives, and Wikipedia, citing his autobiography, says he typed the final draft in the Cathay Hotel; see the legends panel. The “tallest building in Shanghai” claim is weaker: Sassoon House was 77 m, the gazetteer calls it the tallest on the Bund at completion, but the Customs House tower of 1927 also has that billing in other sources, and the Park Hotel of 1934 (about 83.8 m) overtook it within five years. The belief that Sassoon kept the Bank of China from building higher has no support in the Council’s minutes, according to a 2017 museum study. And a rivalry with Silas Hardoon is not documented in the sources here: Hardoon had been a Sassoon employee, sent to Shanghai in 1873 and moved in 1886 to E. D. Sassoon’s property department, and he died in 1931.

What the sources disagree on

• Arrival in Shanghai: 1923 (gazetteer, Sixth Tone), “the 1920s” (2006 article), the early 1930s (2026 review).
• Succession: 1918 (gazetteer) or 1924 (Wikipedia, the archive, the 2006 article).
• Birth date: 20 or 30 December 1881.
• Grosvenor House: 1934 (gazetteer) or 1935 (heritage registers).
• Cathay Hotel opening: 1 August or 5 September 1929.
• Refugee numbers: 2,500 housed, 16,000 in relief by 1939, about 18,000 arrivals in 1938–41, about 20,000 resettled.
• Departure: he left Shanghai in 1941, and the larger withdrawal of capital is dated to 1948 by Sixth Tone and to after 1949 by the archive note.

How did it end?

The gazetteer says that from 1932, as the Japanese threat grew, he began to sell Shanghai property. By 1941 the book value of the real estate held by his direct subsidiaries was 86.893 million yuan. In spring 1941 he was advised to leave; he was in Bombay on 8 December, when Japan attacked, and the Japanese quickly took the Cathay and his other Shanghai holdings. After the war he sold off property in stages, moved the money to Hong Kong and London and shifted E. D. Sassoon’s headquarters to Nassau; the Shanghai businesses were handed in 1958 to a Chinese state company, 中华企业公司, against tax arrears.

He was made GBE in 1947, married Evelyn Barnes in 1959 and died in Nassau on 13 August 1961 with no children, so the baronetcy ended. He was also a leading racehorse owner; his horses won the Derby several times.

What to look for

Start at the Bund end of Nanjing Road. Sassoon House, the north building of the Peace Hotel, still has its green pyramid roof; the 1929 plan put an octagonal inner hall under a stained-glass dome at the crossing of two ground-floor passages. Across the road is the former Palace Hotel, now the south building.

Then go to the Embankment Building. Look for the stone in the wall with the letters E.D.S. The building has three extra storeys added in 1978. In the former French Concession, the two towers of the Jin Jiang Hotel are Cathay Mansions (north) and Grosvenor House (middle); stand on Maoming South Road to see the stepped outline. Hamilton House and the Metropole face each other across the corner of Jiangxi Middle Road and Fuzhou Road. What is gone is the world around them: the lane houses they replaced, the company offices, and the Sassoon name on the businesses.