AstraZeneca, Shanghai, and the fall of the Qing Dynasty
by Duncan Hewitt // You may – just possibly – have heard the name AstraZeneca recently…But did you know about its Shanghai connection? One of the pharmaceutical company’s forerunners had a close association with China in the first half of the 20th century, leaving an architectural legacy in Shanghai – where it even played a role in the abdication of China’s last emperor and the founding of the nation’s first republic in 1912.
As with many modern multi-nationals, AstraZeneca’s apparently bland corporate name conceals a long and complex industrial heritage – which, on one side, stretches all the way back to late Qing dynasty Shanghai. The present company was created in a 1999 merger between the venerable Swedish pharmaceutical firm Astra AB (part-owned by the famous Wallenberg family) and Zeneca, the name given to the pharmaceutical arm of the British industrial giant ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) when it was spun off as an independent company in 1993. But ICI’s involvement with China dates back much further, to 1900, and its architectural legacy can still be found in Shanghai to this day.
The name ICI itself stems from an earlier corporate merger: in 1926, four of Britain’s major chemical manufacturers (including Nobel Explosives, the Scottish-based firm established by Nobel Prize founder Alfred Nobel) joined forces to form one of the nation’s biggest companies. ICI would go on to manufacture products that became household names, including Dulux paint, Perspex, artificial fibres like Crimplene and Terylene, and the cancer drug Tamoxifen.
Another of its founder companies was Brunner Mond, which already had a significant presence in China. Its name may now have faded into the pages of industrial history books, but Brunner Mond, founded in Cheshire, England in 1873 by the German chemist Ludwig Mond and British businessman John Brunner, had revolutionised the production of soda ash, for fertiliser and other uses, in the late 19th century. It quickly expanded in the US, until new import tariffs restricted its trade there. Seeking fresh markets, Brunner Mond dispatched a representative, Henry Glendinning, to China in 1899. He disembarked in Shanghai and stayed at the Astor House Hotel, before embarking on a tour of the country and discovering an apparently eager demand for the company’s alkali products. (These could be used in everything from agriculture to dyeing, soap production, and baking.)
The following year, Brunner Mond hired Edward Selby (E.S.) Little, who Glendinning had met at the home of a British diplomat, to set up its China operations. Little was hardly the typical British businessman of the era. Born in Dorset, he had studied at Cambridge University, and then spent fourteen years as a missionary in the Yangtze River Valley for the US-based Methodist Episcopal church (in the process becoming an opponent of the opium trade). Yet despite becoming fluent in Chinese, Little apparently felt that his opportunities in the church were limited by his not being American.
Before joining Brunner Mond, he had already displayed entrepreneurial tendencies by acquiring land to build ‘Kuling’ (牯岭), a mountaintop resort above the Yangtze at Lushan in Jiangxi province. Designed as a ‘cooling’ (hence the Chinese name, which Little invented) retreat from the summer heat for missionaries and other foreign residents of central China, the resort was initially controversial: at one point, Little had to seek consular assistance to free some of his Chinese staff who had been detained by irate locals. But Kuling soon became popular, with 500 stone houses built by 1921, along with a church, library, and department stores. In the 1930s, it attracted Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and other Chinese dignitaries — and was later the venue for the Communist Party’s landmark Lushan Conference of 1959.
Brunner Mond began trading in China in 1901, using the Chinese name 卜內門 (Bu Nei Men), a phonetic approximation of its English name, while retaining the company’s original ‘Crescent’ logo. Little’s fluency in the language allowed the firm to eschew the traditional practice of using Chinese intermediaries or ‘compradores’ [maiban] to do business: instead, he travelled the country demonstrating products himself, and set up a web of agents and branch offices around China (and, initially, in Siberia too). The head office was in Shanghai, where Brunner Mond soon built a three-storey ‘godown’ (warehouse) on East Seward Road (now Dongdaming Lu), north of the river in Hongkew [Hongkou] district.
The company also built a large house for senior staff at 30 Gordon Road (today’s Jiangning Lu – located in the block between Beijing Lu and Xinzha Lu) in Shanghai’s International Settlement – and it was here that Brunner Mond became a small but significant footnote in the history of modern China. In autumn 1911, according to ICI’s company history, Little returned to Shanghai from a trip to the UK, to find that civil war had broken out between the Qing government and Republican forces. Alarmed, he leveraged contacts on both sides and, with backing from the British Consul General, proposed an armistice and peace negotiations.
His proposal was accepted, and during the peace talks – held in the International Settlement’s Shanghai Municipal Council chamber on Nanjing Road – the Qing emissary Tang Shao-yi stayed with Little at 30 Gordon Road (though, perhaps unsurprisingly, he brought his own chef with him.) According to Little’s daughter Gladys, the Republican leader Sun Yat-sen also visited Gordon Road for behind-the-scenes discussions – and it was here that “the deed of abdication [for the child Emperor Puyi] was drawn up.” Tang Shao-yi became (briefly) the first Premier of the new Republic, which honoured Little’s role with an award. [As regular Historic Shanghai walk-goers may know, Tang eventually met a gruesome end at the hands of Nationalist (KMT) secret agents at his home on Route Ferguson (Wukang Lu) in 1938.]
Little proved as adept a businessman as he was a peacemaker. Brunner Mond quickly became an agent for a number of other British companies in China. And since the firm’s initial strategy was to import its products rather than manufacture them locally, Little bought up land for warehouses, offices and accommodation in a number of Chinese cities. This land, which quickly soared in value, was often close to existing or planned stations on China’s fast-growing railway network, to facilitate convenient transport from Shanghai and other ports. (Brunner Mond’s former warehouse in the inland city of Chongqing, built in 1915, is now a protected heritage site).
Little’s control over the firm’s China operations was highlighted by the fact that he hired several family members — his brother Owen, his son Edward Jr., and his son-in-law, Billy Hawkings. All three were Chinese speakers, a rarity among western businesspeople in China at the time — and this skill later led to them being called in to to help lead the Chinese Labour Corps of Chinese volunteers who worked for the allied armies in the trenches of France and Belgium in World War I. (Much later, on the eve of the Communist revolution, E.S. Little’s daughter Gladys, Billy Hawkings’ wife, would also come to global attention for her Chinese language skills, when fierce fighting erupted around the family home (‘The Limit’) on Hungjao Road (Hongqiao Lu) in Shanghai’s western suburbs. A LIFE magazine correspondent reported that, while she allowed refugees to take shelter in her large garden, Mrs Hawkings put her foot down when retreating Nationalist soldiers tried to dig trenches in her lawn and chop down her trees. “The soldiers, overwhelmed by her bearing and her perfect Chinese, obediently put away their hatchets,” the journalist noted admiringly.
E.S. Little left Brunner Mond China in 1919, after an unspecified disagreement with his bosses in England over company policy — though Brunner Mond took out an ad in a local newspaper to deny “rumours” regarding his departure, praising him for his “great success”, and allowed him to stay on at 30 Gordon Road until his new family home on Hungjao Road (see above) was built. But the strong foundations he had established enabled Brunner Mond to continue its expansion in China: its ‘Crescent’ brand fertilizer became popular with Chinese farmers, while the firm took on new agencies for products ranging from dyestuffs to cod liver oil, shoe polish, and even Colman’s English Mustard.
Soon the company commissioned a new office building on Szechuen Road (Sichuan Zhong Lu), just behind the Bund. The six-storey building, in a neo-classical style with imposing front pillars, was designed by the Scottish architect Alexander Graham-Brown (who also worked on Jardine Matheson’s office building on the Bund, and the Kadoorie family’s spectacular Marble Hall.) Its construction, by contractor Feng Tai Shing, was apparently a stressful process: “The office building is the curse of my life. The amount of trouble and worry, unheard of,” wrote the company’s second China boss, Percy Fowler, in 1922.
Yet the building quickly came into its own: initially, Brunner Mond used the top two floors and rented out the rest of the space, to companies including the Dutch shipping agency Java-China-Japan Line, but as business developed, it began to use more of the office space for itself. After ICI’s founding in 1926, the English name on the building was changed to ‘Imperial Chemical Industries China’ — but the Brunner Mond brand was so well-established in China that ICI continued to use the Chinese name Bu Nei Men卜內門 and the Crescent logo for its business in the country. The building, currently leased by both a private club and a co-working space, still stands, at 133 Sichuan Zhong Lu. The (very) faded English words “Imperial Chemical…. China” can still be made out on the plinth above the second floor, on either side of the current tenant’s logo. Remnants of Cultural Revolution slogans, previously visible higher up on the façade, have recently been painted over.
Brunner Mond’s heritage also lives on in the residential compound the company built for its senior managers in the 1920s. Located on Yuyuen Road (Yuyuan Lu) in what were then Shanghai’s western suburbs, it housed half a dozen detached villas with spacious gardens, a small apartment building, and a couple of semi-detached houses. (One of the larger houses provided the model for a similar property built in Tianjin for ICI’s representative there.) The long entrance road, and indeed the entire compound, bore the English name Crescent Avenue — a reference to ‘The Crescent,’ the residential development the company had built for its managers in Hartford, Cheshire a couple of decades earlier. (In Chinese it was known by the more poetic ‘Emeiyue Lu’ 蛾眉月路, or ‘Crescent Moon Road’.)
One of the compound’s residents, from 1933-40, was Valentine St. John Killery, a man as grand as his name suggests. A graduate of Eton and Oxford, he became managing director of ICI China at the age of just 33, and regularly wined and dined Chinese friends and officials at his Crescent Avenue residence. Killery also appointed Chinese businessman Russell Sun to the company’s board, and, in 1934, used his local connections to arrange a meeting with Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek: the aim was to gain permission for ICI to build its own nitrogen fertilizer factory in China, as imports had become more expensive after China regained its tariff autonomy in 1928.
The spread of war across China put paid to such plans, however, and also brought new threats: after the Japanese takeover of the KMT-controlled sections of Shanghai in 1937, the Crescent Avenue neighbourhood became part of the notorious “Badlands”, an area awash with gangsters, gambling dens, and crime. The head of the Japanese-backed puppet government, Wang Jingwei, now lived almost opposite the compound’s entrance, while many of his notoriously thuggish henchmen were based a block away along Yuyuen Road. In May 1940, Crescent Avenue’s British caretaker William Carine was shot dead after he challenged two men, one wearing a “long-gown” and one a “foreign-style suit”, who tried to enter the compound early one morning.
And by December 1941, when the Japanese military took over Shanghai’s International Settlement after Pearl Harbor, many of ICI’s British staff had already left or sent their families away. One of those who stayed was Hugh Collar, who wrote in his memoirs of racing to the office on Szechuen Road the morning after Pearl Harbor, to burn important company documents to prevent them falling into Japanese hands. By the time he re-emerged onto the street, “the air was thick with paper ash, and the ground was almost completely hidden under a carpet of ash. Every office was burning, burning as hard as they could every scrap of paper that they felt it necessary to destroy,” he recalled.
But Collar, who later became head of the British Residents’ Association in Shanghai, was powerless to prevent the Japanese from taking control of the company and installing their own supervisor. And in November 1942, the long-expected knock on the door of his Crescent Avenue home finally came, as the Japanese military began rounding up Shanghai’s foreign residents for internment. Collar and one of his colleagues were taken by truck to a camp at Haiphong Road (Haifang Lu) — though not before getting their cook to provide them with bread, sausages and “a couple of fried egg sandwiches” — and remained prisoners until 1945. The Crescent Avenue compound was used to house Japanese naval officers for the rest of the war.
Valentine Killery, meanwhile, had left China in 1940, but was soon dispatched by the British government to Singapore to head the Asia mission of the newly formed Special Operations Executive, and organize espionage against the Japanese in China. Although reportedly hand-picked for the job by Winston Churchill himself, he received little cooperation from MI6, which was unimpressed by his methods: these involved hiring several of his old British business contacts from the Shanghai Club to spy on the Japanese military. This ‘espionage ring’, headed by Champagne and spirits importer W.J. Gande, was quickly cracked, and its members imprisoned. Killery returned to England after the fall of Singapore in 1942, and later became a director of ICI, before dying in 1949 at the age of just 49.
At war’s end in 1945, ICI revived its China operations. To provide accommodation for an expanding staff, it even acquired the prestigious Rivers Court apartments, built by the Toeg family at today’s 753 Yuyuan Lu, in a joint purchase with Standard-Vacuum Oil. The company’s optimism about its China trade, even as civil war raged in the late 1940s, may have stemmed from a meeting between another Crescent Avenue resident, Victor Farmer, and future PRC premier Zhou Enlai in China’s wartime capital Chungking (Chongqing) in the early 1940s. Farmer reported that Zhou was unimpressed by his suggestion that a future Communist state should focus on light industry rather than heavy industry – but added that Zhou reassured him, “in a kindly and pleasant manner”, that, if the Communists came to power, western companies would be needed for some years, and any subsequent takeover by the state would be gradual, with “full compensation” guaranteed.
Yet the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, and the resulting sanctions imposed on China by countries including the UK, affected the atmosphere for western companies that had remained in Shanghai. Farmer, by now head of ICI China, and his wife departed from Crescent Avenue for Hong Kong in September 1951, and after several years of negotiations, the company finally closed down its China operations in mid-1956.
The Crescent Avenue compound still stands, though it is now overshadowed by high-rises. It is now state-owned and off-limits to visitors; only the grey pebbledash apartment building nearest the road is visible from the entrance. But a hint of its past can be found in the fact that it retains its Yuyuan Lu street number, even though another road (Xuanhua Lu) has since been built between that street and the compound, on the site of what used to be a creek.
Despite departing mainland China, ICI did not give up on the Chinese market, sporadically attempting to trade with the country in the early 1960s, and then again in the 1970s, from its regional base in Hong Kong. In 1984 it opened a new office in Beijing, and six years later reestablished a presence in Shanghai. In conjunction with Swire Pacific, it soon built a new paint factory in the city — still using the original Bu Nei Men卜內门brand (and thus conveniently avoiding the need to translate the now taboo word ‘Imperial’ in the company’s name). It was only in 2008, when ICI itself was taken over by AkzoNobel, in yet another corporate merger, that the Bu Nei Men name finally vanished from the Chinese market — more than a century after E.S. Little opened the doors of Brunner Mond’s first office in Shanghai.
Duncan Hewitt is a former BBC China correspondent and Newsweek Shanghai correspondent. He is the author of Getting Rich First – Life in a Changing China (Vintage UK 2008), a book on social change in the reform era, and has also researched and written on Shanghai’s history and architectural heritage. He has led walks in various areas of Shanghai, and contributed a chapter on Hongqiao Road to Tess Johnston’s book Still More Shanghai Walks.
Bibliography
Patrick Brodie, Crescent over Cathay – China and ICI, 1898 to 1956, Oxford University Press, 1990
Hugh Collar, Captive in Shanghai – A Story of Internment in World War II, Oxford University Press, 1990
Tess Johnston & Deke Erh, Near to Heaven: Western Architecture in China’s Old Summer Resorts, Old China Hand Press, Hong Kong, 1994
Frederic Wakeman, Jr., The Shanghai Badlands – Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937-1941 Cambridge University Press, 1996
* “Briton Shot Dead at I.C.I. Garden”, North China Herald, May 1st 1940
* “Brunner, Mond & Co., Ltd., England – Important Notices”, The Shanghai Times, July 4th, 1919
[* The author would like to thank Katya Knyazeva for drawing his attention to these two articles, and for her kind assistance in locating material relating to the ICI building and Gordon Road residence.]