Inside Hardoon’s Garden

Hardoon Garden, Aili Garden. Even today, the name conjures up mystery and legend. Mystery, because few photos survive of this exquisite Chinese-style residential garden that lay inside high vermilion gates. Legend, because it was the home of Shanghai’s richest man, Silas Hardoon: to paraphrase a contemporary source, a hundred legends surround him. [1] So when, through a chance Instagram encounter, Silas’ grandson offers to share some of his family photos of the famous garden, you know it’s your lucky day.

“The family story is one of which epic novels are made,” says Philip MacGregor, son of the eldest Hardoon child, Nora Hardoon MacGregor. “Unfortunately, my mother and her siblings honored their parents’ legacy by keeping their stories to themselves, and very private.”

Rags to Shanghai’s Richest Man

As mysterious as life behind the Garden gates may have been, the rags-to-riches story of Silas Aaron Hardoon is part of Shanghai lore:

Everyone knows the story of this son of a poor peddler from Baghdad via Bombay. How he arrived in Shanghai, penniless, in 1874. How he went to work for a firm owned by a fellow Sephardic Jew from Baghdad, David Sassoon & Co., as a lowly godown watchman, paid 12 shillings a week. How he rose to manager.

How savvy he was! How watched the Sassoons investments, and began investing himself — in real estate, opium, and guanxi. The real estate he owned—the length of Nanjing Road! Sprawling lilongs!

How eccentric he was! A millionaire, collecting rent from his tenants himself, and sitting bundled up in an overcoat in his unheated office to save a few pennies!

But most of all, the stories about Silas Hardoon are about his fortune and his unusual family life. He was widely considered Shanghai’s richest man, accumulating a fortune that estimates put at US$15 billion[2] in today’s currency, the likes of which had not been seen in a city laden with fortunes.

Liza, 22 Children, and Philanthropy

In 1895, Hardoon married the half-French, half-Chinese Liza Roos (Loo Jar Ling/Luo Jialing), a devout Buddhist of humble origins. Unable to have children of their own, they adopted: First, 11 Chinese children, raised as Buddhists and surnamed Loo after Liza. Later, 11 European children, surnamed Hardoon and raised in the Jewish faith.[3]

Both Silas and Liza were generous philanthropists, and Aili Garden was opened up for all sorts of benefits—famine relief, flood relief, Allied relief. The couple contributed lavishly to Buddhist causes and to Jewish ones, starting a Buddhist school and financing the building of the grand Art Deco Beth Aharon synagogue (named for his father). Silas Hardoon was said to be the only person to serve on the boards of the Shanghai Municipal Council and the French Conseil Municipal. Hardoon funded and hosted warlords, Sun Yat-sen, former Qing officials, and was invited to the Forbidden City to lunch with the boy emperor, Puyi.

Love Liza Garden

The 113,000 square-meter garden at 243 Bubbling Well Road (Nanjing West Road today) was known as Aili Garden: “Love Li (za) Garden”. It was Silas’ gift to his wife, to whom, by all accounts, he was devoted. The three characters were inscribed in gold on a large lacquer board above the main entrance.

Pavilions and scenic spots dotted the garden, making superb backdrops for photos! Photos 1 & 2: © Philip MacGregor; Photo 3: Shanghai Library

In 1905, Liza commissioned Buddhist monk Huang Zong Yang to design the garden.[4] Huang, who had lived in Japan, combined Chinese, Japanese and western aesthetics, and when it was completed in 1909, Aili contained 18 pavilions, 83 attractions – pagodas, stone boats, rockeries, ponds, even a marble boat, the latter installed after Liza’s visit to the Summer Palace in Beijing and viewing the marble boat there. The garden’s lakes and ponds were fed by the famous Bubbling Well, a spring situated nearby in front of Jing’an Temple that had given the street its name.

Each location in the garden was bestowed with a poetic name: the Gazebo to Listen to the Wind; the Corridor of Butterfly Shadows; the Chamber to Await the Rains; the Fox Fairy chamber–172 names in all. There were three halls, residential buildings (by the 1940s, there were 20) a stage, and the first Buddhist school in Shanghai, Huayan. [5] That school was followed by another, Sheng Cang Mingzhi, 圣仓明智大学 which grew to become quite influential, attracting luminaries such as philosopher and political reformer Kang Youwei, poet Chen Sanli and artist Xu Beihong. Locals called it Grand View Garden on the Sea, a reference to the famous fictional garden in the classic novel, Dream of the Red Chamber. [6]

Photos: Left and center: © Philip MacGregor. Right: the gravel path that surrounded the garden. ©Miranda Eu

Behind those vermilion gates, the sprawling garden contained a multitude: the Hardoon and Luo children, their spouses and children, maids, nannies, gardeners, cooks, tutors, Buddhist monks and nuns. Yet the enormity of the gardens meant that the Garden residents were spread out. So much so that when, during the Japanese occupation, the Hardoons and Luos had to live opposite each other in two large houses separated by a courtyard ( the Japanese had requisitioned the rest of the garden), granddaughter Miranda observed, “it was strange being forced to live in such close vicinity with so many.” [7]

Few photographs are available in the public domain, but detailed descriptions of the gardens and its residents survive, written by the controversial major-domo, Chi Cho-Mee/Ji Juemi, children of staff raised in the garden, one account purportedly written by Huang, the garden designer, and a memoir by Miranda Eu, daughter of the eldest Loos son.

Silas Hardoon died in 1931, aged 80, and following a grand funeral that combined Jewish, Buddhist, and Taoist rites, he was buried in a three-tier marble mausoleum in the garden, guarded by two life-sized marble lions, leaving Liza the sole inheritor of his vast fortune. Inheritance squabbles erupted immediately, with Lisa prevailing–but her death, in October 1941, incited fresh squabbles. She, too, was buried in a grand mausoleum on the property.

Silas Hardoon was gone, but with a grand mausoleum and a statue at Aili, he was not forgotten. Left: Ruth Hill Barr (front row, in a hat) and John Barr (behind her, second row) at Silas Hardoon’s mausoleum, in the grounds of Hardoon Gardens. Photo courtesy Betty Barr. Right: Miranda Eu, Silas Hardoon’s granddaughter, and schoolfriends poses with Silas’ statue in the garden. Photo © Miranda Eu

But less than a month after Lisa’s funeral, on December 8 1941, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese occupied the International Settlement and Hardoon Garden. They took a number of priceless antiques and art–never again seen by the family–and left them with two houses: one for the Luos and one for the Hardoons. Later that winter, a fire destroyed more than half the garden.

The inheiritance battles went on–in 1946, even Green Gang leader Du Yuesheng was involved in reconciliation attempts [8–but in 1949, following the Communist victory, most of the Hardoons and Luos had left Shanghai. Aili was in disrepair, but the space made it ideal for a new project the government was developing with the Soviet Union:  the Shanghai Exhibition Center. But that is another story …

References

Carter, James. (2020). Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai. W.W. Norton & Company.

Eu, Miranda with Tisa Ng. (2005). Shanghai Sisters: A Memoir. Singapore: Landmark Books.

Jin G. (2017) Jewish Past and Colonial Shanghai: Trade, Treaty-Port and Transitive Modernity. (PhD Disseration) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

McGrady, Patrick. (1933, April 23) Synagogue in Shanghai a Monument to S.A. Hardoon, China’s Richest Jew, Jewish Daily Bulletin, Sunday Edition, p. 5.

Philip MacGregor, personal correspondence

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[1] Patrick McGrady, “Synagogue in Shanghai a Monument to S.A. Hardoon, China’s Richest Jew,” Jewish Daily Bulletin, Sunday Edition (1933, April 23), p. 5.

[2] James Carter, Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai (W.W. Norton, 2020), p. 121

[3] Jin Gong , Jewish Past and Colonial Shanghai: Trade, Treaty-Port and Transitive Modernity. (PhD Disseration) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, p. 150-151

[4] Gong, p. 188

[5] Miranda Eu, Shanghai Sisters, (Singapore: Landmark Books, 2005) p. 15.

[6] Gong, p. 130

[7] Eu, p. 105

[8] Gong, p. 166