The four companies: Nanjing Road's department stores, roof gardens and neon, 1917–1956

In 1927 A. S. Watson & Co. of Shanghai published a souvenir album of photographs called Shanghai of Today. One plate shows Nanking Road at night. Two towers float above the street, outlined in electric bulbs, and the caption calls it “Shanghai’s ‘Great White Way’”. Another caption explains the towers. They belong to the department stores of the Sun Sun Co., the Wing On Co. and the Sincere Co., “all under Chinese management”.

The next year F. L. Hawks Pott used the same phrase in his Short History of Shanghai. The great change on Nanking Road, he wrote, had been “the erection of large department stores”. Sincere opened first, in October, at the Chekiang Road corner. Wing On followed the next year across the street. Both had high towers, both were lit at night by thousands of bulbs, both ran a hotel, and both were crowded with shoppers, many of them visitors from other cities. Sun Sun came some years later. A fourth, the Sun Company, known in Chinese as Da Sun (大新), opened in 1936.

This story is about those four stores, which Shanghai still calls the “four companies” (四大公司). It covers who built them and on whose land, what they sold, what they put on their roofs, and how they turned Nanjing Road into the city’s showcase for electric light and neon. It ends with what became of them after 1949 and where to stand to see them today.

Whose land was Nanjing Road?

The stores were Chinese; the ground under them was not. The Shanghai Real Estate Gazetteer (上海房地产志) says every plot along Nanjing Road had been leased in perpetuity by foreign holders by 1861. The Chinese firms that later built the four companies, the Continental Emporium and the lane estates behind had to buy or rent from foreigners. When their leases ran out, the buildings went to the landlord.

Land on the road was the dearest in the city and rose faster than anything else. On the Shanghai Municipal Council’s own valuations, the average price along Nanjing Road went from 1,616 taels a mu (about 667 m²) in 1869 to 210,400 taels in 1933, a 132-fold rise. One landlord dominated. In 1933 Silas Hardoon held 111.6 mu along the road. That was 73.1 per cent of all the land held by the road’s three largest landowners, and the gazetteer says the talk of Hardoon owning half of Nanjing Road was “no exaggeration”.

The leases show what that meant for the stores. According to the Shanghai Famous Buildings Gazetteer (上海名建筑志), Sincere rented its corner from Henry Lester’s firm for 30 years at 30,000 taels a year. Wing On’s site across the road came from Hardoon at 50,000 taels a year, and the building itself was to pass to Hardoon without payment after 30 years. A few years later Sun Sun took the next plot west, also from Hardoon. By then the asking rent was 80,000 taels.

Sincere, 1917: one price and a roof garden

Sincere (先施) opened on 20 October 1917. Its founder, Ma Ying Piu (马应彪), had been a merchant in Australia before opening the first Sincere store in Hong Kong, and the Shanghai branch was backed by the Hong Kong head office. The Famous Buildings Gazetteer, quoting the company’s 25th-anniversary book, says more than ten thousand people came to the opening.

The store was built on a scale Chinese shoppers had not seen:

• More than 40 departments on four selling floors, over 10,000 m² in all.
• More than 10,000 kinds of goods, several hundred more than the Hong Kong store carried.
• Lifts, then still a novelty.
• A restaurant and a hotel, the Oriental (东亚). The Council’s licensing committee approved the Oriental’s tavern licence in April 1917, before the store opened, “it is understood that this establishment will cater mainly if not wholly for Chinese customers.”

Sincere also changed how shopping worked. Its slogan promised one price, no bargaining, and goods from all over the world. It marked prices on the goods, wrote receipts, closed on Sundays and hired women to serve behind the counters. By 1918 it had more than 1,000 staff and took 3.6 million yuan.

On the roof was the Sincere Garden (先施乐园). The gazetteer calls it one of the earliest roof gardens in Shanghai; for 20 cents a customer could spend the evening there. An article in The Paper describes the layout: the hotel on the fourth and fifth floors, a theatre on the sixth and seventh, and an amusement ground on the roof, where short films were shown in fine weather. Its author found Sincere’s application to the Council for the roof garden in the Shanghai Archives.

Wing On, 1918: the customer is always right

Wing On (永安) was the work of the Kwok brothers. Kwok Lok (郭乐), from Xiangshan county in Guangdong, went to Australia at seventeen and worked for a Sydney fruit wholesaler. He opened Wing On in Hong Kong in 1907, and in 1915 his brothers came to Shanghai to choose a site. A story is still told that Wing On counted passers-by on each side of the road with beans before choosing the south side. The gazetteer records it as hearsay. Building began in April 1916 and the store opened on 5 September 1918.

Wing On, second into the market, worked hard to catch up. The gazetteer says it put its English motto, “The customer is always right”, up in the store in neon. It sold Chinese-made goods alongside imports. It also issued gift coupons, sold by post and delivered to the door. Shanghai Daily, quoting the archives researcher Zhang Yaojun, adds window displays, fashion shows inside the store, and a “Miss Conklin” hired to sell Conklin fountain pens.

It paid. By 1930, the gazetteer says, Wing On’s accumulated profit had reached HK$10.7 million, more than four times its original capital, and its profit in 1930 alone came to 47.55 per cent.

What was on the roof?

The roof gardens made the stores into amusement halls. Wing On’s roof tower, the Yiyun Ge (倚云阁), held the Tianyun Lou (天韵楼) amusement hall and a garden. Its daily advertisements in the Shen Bao listed the regular acts:

• Suzhou ballad-singing;
• drum songs;
• Chinese conjuring and Western magic;
• Ningbo opera;
• plays by women’s companies;
• comic songs;
• a strongwoman.

The Council’s police records show the other side of the crowds. In 1932 a man was wounded by pistol shots “on the roof garden of Sincere’s”. By 1939 the police were searching roof-garden patrons as a matter of routine, 39,062 in one month of that year and 48,569 in another. In March 1939 someone threw a cigarette-tin bomb that exploded behind a neon sign on a Sincere balcony. The police thought it had come from the Wing On roof garden opposite.

Sun Sun, 1926: the breakaway with a radio station

The third store was a split from the first. The Famous Buildings Gazetteer says that in Sincere’s fifth year the shareholders fell out. Its manager, Liu Xiji (刘锡基, S. K. Lau), and some senior staff left to start their own store. They raised 3 million yuan, 60 per cent of it from overseas Chinese, and leased 5.33 mu west of Sincere from Hardoon. The building was finished in 1925 and the store opened on 23 January 1926 as Sun Sun (新新). The name comes from a line in the Great Learning about renewing oneself day by day. Shanghai Daily, citing the North-China Herald, says more than 50,000 people went through the store on its first day.

Sun Sun had less money than the other two and the gazetteer ranks it last of the four. It competed with novelty instead. According to Zhang Yaojun, Lau saw no point in copying the roof amusement parks of Sincere and Wing On. Instead he built a radio station walled in glass, known as the “glass station”. It went on the air in March 1927, six hours a day, advertising the store’s goods and relaying Peking opera, Cantonese opera and comedy staged in the building. The Paper adds that Sun Sun sold a higher share of Chinese-made goods than either rival. It does not give a figure.

Da Sun, 1936: escalators and a Chinese architect

The last of the four was the largest. Da Sun opened on 10 January 1936 at the Xizang Road end of the street. Its founder, Cai Chang (蔡昌), was, like the others, from Zhongshan, and had opened Da Sun stores in Hong Kong and Guangzhou first. Its capital was HK$4 million.

It was also the only one of the four designed by Chinese architects, the firm of Kwan, Chu and Yang (基泰工程司). The building is ten storeys and 42.3 m high, on 1,102 piles, and the gazetteer describes its equipment:

• A basement sales floor, the first in Shanghai.
• Heating and cooling throughout the shop floors.
• Seven Otis lifts.
• Two escalators linking the three lowest sales floors, each able to carry 4,000 people an hour.

Above the shop were offices and a showroom for Chinese manufacturers on the fourth floor, a dance hall and restaurant on the fifth, and an amusement park from the sixth floor to the tenth. The historian Ge Tao (葛涛) quotes the architects’ published plan: the basement store and the escalators were firsts “for Shanghai and the whole country”.

The other three stores answered with a price war. On 24 February 1936 they held a joint spring sale. Da Sun refused to cut prices, opened a bargain counter in the basement, and borrowed 2.8 million yuan from the Chartered Bank against its building. It paid no dividend for three years. The Council noted the building in its annual report for 1936, listing “the Sun Company’s Department Store (with amusement section)” among the year’s noteworthy new buildings.

How big were they?

The Shanghai Consumer Goods Commerce Gazetteer (上海日用工业品商业志) gives each store’s takings in its first year and in 1936:

• Wing On: 4.55 million yuan in 1919, 8.69 million in 1936.
• Sincere: 3.6 million in 1918, 6.0 million in 1936.
• Sun Sun: 3.0 million in 1926, 5.4 million in 1936.
• Da Sun: 1.1 million in 1935, before its formal opening, and 4.25 million in 1936.

With a fifth, smaller store, Lihua, the five together took 26.74 million yuan in 1936. Each of the four stocked more than 5,000 kinds of goods.

Lighting the street

The towers were lit with ordinary bulbs at first. Neon came to Shanghai in 1926. The Consumer Goods Commerce Gazetteer, and the Shanghai Concessions Gazetteer (上海租界志) in its section on advertising, both date the first neon to that year: a sign for Royal typewriters in the window of the Evans book company, at the corner of Nanjing Road and Henan Road. The first Chinese neon maker, the Far East Chemical Works (远东化学制造厂), opened the same year. In 1927 a group of Americans started the Li’an (丽安) electric company. Far East made the first neon shop sign, “中央大旅社 / Central Hotel”, for a hotel on Hubei Road. Li’an made the two characters 先施 on the Sincere roof.

The roofs of the amusement halls became display boards. Far East made patent-medicine advertisements for the roof of the Great World, and a sign for the Nanyang Brothers’ White Gold Dragon cigarettes. In 1928 Li’an built a sign for the Yee Tsoong Tobacco Company’s Ruby Queen (红锡包) cigarettes opposite the Great World. In it, cigarettes jumped one by one out of a packet, and the last one was lit, with smoke curling from its tip. The gazetteer calls it the largest neon sign in Shanghai before 1949. The highest was the 天厨味精 seasoning sign on the roof of the Park Hotel.

The English-language account of the same years, by the Hong Kong industrial historian York Lo, names the foreign firm differently. Claude Neon, which held the patents, came to Shanghai in 1924. It won Yee Tsoong’s contract for the largest neon sign in China in 1928, and then the Sincere sign.

Writers noticed. Mao Dun’s novel Midnight (子夜), published in 1933, has on its first page a neon sign reading “Light, Heat, Power!”.

What did the Council make of the signs?

The Council treated signs as a source of revenue and a fire risk, and later as a traffic hazard. Its special advertisement tax, voted by the ratepayers in 1914, raised 95 taels in its first year, 1,329 in 1917 and 7,702 in 1926. In 1925, the Council’s report says, its staff inspected 2,870 signs, spaces and boards. The tax, it explained, was meant “to keep down unsightly and objectionable advertisements from residential districts”. By 1932 an electric sign on Nanking Road, the Bund or Bubbling Well Road paid Tls 0.20 a square foot a year, twice the rate on side streets. In July 1941 the main-road rate was $0.60.

The Council was cautious about light that drew a crowd. Between 1920 and 1923 it refused to let companies project lantern-slide advertisements and spotlights onto the streets, because they stopped the traffic. It allowed lit advertisement clocks on buildings from 1928 and lit columns at bus stops from 1929. The French council across Avenue Edward VII issued its own rules for signs and lit advertisements in 1928. In 1932 it turned down the Yokohama Specie Bank’s request for neon signs at tram and bus stops. By 1939 the International Settlement’s police were vetting every neon sign planned within 100 feet of a traffic signal, after complaints that the lights confused drivers.

Fire turned out not to be the danger. In 1932 the Council’s Fire Brigade found only five fires involving neon, “in spite of the very large number of Neon lights in use throughout the Settlement”. In 1936 it estimated about 5,000 exterior neon signs in the Settlement, possibly 250 more on the roads outside it, and had attended only 20 fires involving them.

Power was not the issue either. When fuel ran short in 1941 the Council’s rationing committee ranked the users of electricity. Advertising signs and floodlights came seventh of eight groups, just ahead of amusements and entertainment. They used about 0.1 per cent of the metered supply, and the committee agreed that “Neon signs in particular consume very little power”. It still proposed a 75 per cent cut, to be made by limiting the hours when signs could be lit. Its reason was that darkening the advertising lights would have a “psychological effect, quite out of proportion to their consumption of electrical energy”.

The war years

The fighting of August 1937 reached Nanjing Road. The Fire Brigade’s report records that at 12.58 p.m. on 23 August a shell struck a balcony on the front of the Sincere building at second-floor level. Firemen found “hundreds of dead and injured” at the Zhejiang Road crossing, and put out three small fires inside the store. The explosion killed 215 people, three of them foreigners, and wounded 558. The Famous Buildings Gazetteer puts the loss to Sincere and Wing On at 764,000 yuan in buildings and goods. Within months the four stores’ takings had fallen by about half. Sun Sun became a refugee camp; it appears on the Council’s list of camps that October.

Then trade came back, for a while. With the Chinese city occupied and the settlements left as an “isolated island”, refugees and their money crowded into the concessions. The gazetteer’s table shows the stores’ takings soaring:

• Wing On: 8.42 million in 1937, 68.96 million in 1941.
• Da Sun: 3.79 million in 1937, 39.26 million in 1941.

Prices, though, rose almost ten times in the same years, from an index of 100 to 985, so the stores’ takings barely kept pace with inflation. After Japan occupied the settlements in December 1941 the island ended. On 25 March 1942, the gazetteer says, the Japanese Kōain (興亜院) called the four companies to a meeting and told them accounting supervisors would be sent in to control them.

After 1949

The private stores ended one by one in the 1950s.

• Wing On reopened three days after the People’s Liberation Army entered the city, Jiemian reports, but its customers had gone. It lost 225,000 yuan in 1950, 478,000 in 1951 and 587,830 in 1952. On 14 January 1956 it became a joint public-private enterprise, valued at 7.5 million yuan, about 83 per cent in private shares. It was renamed the Dongfanghong (East is Red) store in 1966, the No. 10 Department Store in 1969 and Hualian in 1988.
• Da Sun closed its store on 10 September 1953, and the state No. 1 Department Store moved into the building.
• Sincere’s building became, in August 1956, the Nanjing Road Fashion Store, later the Shanghai Fashion Company.
• Sun Sun’s building became the No. 1 Food Store.

The lights went out with them. Before 1949 a neon sign had needed a permit from the city’s Public Utilities and Public Works bureaus. At the start of 1950, as an air-defence measure, every neon light in Shanghai was switched off; relighting began in June. In 1954 the neon advertisements came off the tall buildings, leaving three in the whole city. From January 1956 the rooftop signs that remained were turned into political slogans, and by 1966, the gazetteers say, there was no commercial neon on the streets at all.

Neon came back with the night markets. In 1987 the city planned Nanjing Road as a “neon street”. Three years later the 2,500 m from the Bund to Chengdu Road carried 118 neon advertisements, 96 neon shop signs, 119 neon decorations and 87 light boxes. By 1995 Nanjing Road East had nearly 200 neon advertisements. The most, 18, were on the old Sincere building. Hualian took back the name Wing On in 2005.

What the sources disagree on

The radio station. The Famous Buildings Gazetteer dates Sun Sun’s first broadcast to 18 March 1927; The Paper says 19 March.

“First” escalators. The architects’ plan, as Ge Tao quotes it, claimed Da Sun’s escalators as the first in Shanghai and in China. The headline of the same interview calls them the first in the Far East. No source compares them with stores in Japan.

Who made the Sincere roof sign. The gazetteer names Li’an, a company started by two Americans in 1927. York Lo names Claude Neon, which came to Shanghai in 1924. Both credit the same firm with the 1928 Yee Tsoong sign.

How many neon signs. York Lo gives 6,000 neon signs in Shanghai by 1932, a figure that appears to come from Claude Neon’s own publicity. The Council’s Fire Brigade estimated about 5,000 exterior signs in the International Settlement in 1936, not counting the French Concession, the Chinese city or interior signs.

When Wing On became Hualian. Jiemian says 1988. The Famous Buildings Gazetteer says the store was reorganised as Hualian in 1987.

How tall the new Wing On was to be. The Famous Buildings Gazetteer gives the 1932 tower 22 storeys at the front and 8 at the back. The Council’s notice of June 1932, approving the bridges across Zhejiang Road, describes the new building as seven storeys. The notice may refer only to the rear block the bridges join.

What to look for

Zhejiang Road and Nanjing Road East. Stand at the crossing on the pedestrian street. To the north is the Sincere building, its open clock tower at the corner. The tower was added to outdo Wing On. To the south is Wing On, its curved front and the two-storey tower above it. Look up Zhejiang Road for the enclosed bridges linking the old store to the 1932 tower. The 1937 shell struck the Sincere balcony above this corner.

Guangxi Road. One block west, the Sun Sun building is the No. 1 Food Store. Its square roof tower was taken down in 1949.

Xizang Road. At the west end of the pedestrian street, Da Sun is the No. 1 Department Store. The building is the 1936 one. Look for the black granite at the base and the cream tile above.

Down Xizang Road. South towards Yan’an Road is the Great World, whose roof carried some of the first neon advertisements, and the Park Hotel further west, which carried the highest.

After dark. Come back at night, when the four buildings are lit again, Wing On’s name in red neon on its roof.