Old Shanghai Beers

By The Little Museum of Foreign Brand Advertising in the R.O.C (MOFBA) //

For almost 30 years, a single brand dominated the local Shanghai beer market: U.B. (友啤), created by the Shanghai Union-Brauerei AG. As its name suggests, U.B. had German roots: it was incorporated in 1912 by a German company, Schwarzkopf & Co, based in Tsingtau (Qingdao), then a German Concession.

The Biggest Brewery in the East

At the end of the Great War in 1918, a minor Norwegian shareholder, Mr. Frithjof Hoehnke, took over the business and renamed it Aktieselskabet Union Bryggeri—Scandinavian Brewery Co. Ltd. By 1931, the company was reorganized again, this time as Union Brewery Ltd., and acquired prominent new investors, including wine & spirits merchants Caldbeck, MacGregor & Co., and the famous E.D. Sassoon & Co.

With this fresh injection of capital, U.B. contracted the prolific Hungarian architect László Hudec to design a new brewery building. The factory, parts of which still stand along the Suzhou Creek, opened in 1936 and boasted of being the biggest beer producer in the Far East: the 28,800 square meter brewery had a capacity of 1 million cases a year, and stood on a 11,100 square meter plot.

Enter Jardines

The booming 1930s beer market and U.B.’s massive investment did not go unnoticed by Shanghai’s other major players, notably Jardine, Matheson & Co. One of the oldest and largest trading firms in Asia, Jardine’s was also Sassoon’s biggest rival. If the flamboyant business tycoon Victor Sassoon was getting into the beer market, so was Jardines. The company soon constructed its own brewery on Tinghai Road (Dinghai Lu) in Yangshupu, in the eastern outskirts of Shanghai, and production of EWO beer commenced in 1936.

EWO, named for Jardine’s Chinese business (‘hong’) name, Yi He  怡和, produced pilsner and Munich-type beers, and their output and prominence were soon almost on a par with U.B. The EWO Beer slogan, “Here’s luck!” (in Chinese, the idiom 多福多寿 meaning “good fortune and longevity”) and the iconic beer-chugging girl visual, both prominently displayed on the hand-held fan, were most likely created by British advertising agency Millington Ltd.

A small label on the back of the fan reveals that it was printed by Willow Pattern Press [柳荫印刷公司], a printing company which Millington acquired in 1927. Interestingly, U.B. Beer had been a client of French Oriental Advertising, which also merged with Millington in 1930, meaning this agency served both of old Shanghai’s main beer competitors!

Records from another artefact in our collection, the EWO Brewery Indent Register, confirms Millington’s Willow Pattern Press as the creator of the fans and also reveals their production year as 1939: 50,000 pieces were produced for the total price of $1,100.

Two Western ladies in Shanghai with the very same EWO hand fan model ca. 1939 (from the documentary “Port of Last Resort”)

Ewo in Wartime

After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the brewery was temporarily commandeered by the Japanese army, but production soon resumed and—despite its location at the center of hostilities–the building escaped the conflict unscathed. That is not to say that EWO’s staff was not harmed and maltreated during the Japanese occupation. Tom Plevey recounts how his grandfather Charles T. Tsang See-Kee, a manager at the EWO plant, was tortured with mock-execution for refusing to install an anti-aircraft gun on top of the brewery.

In 1940, under Jardine management, EWO Breweries became a public company, with Chinese investors buying up 75% of the stock. In 1942, however, Japan seized all Chinese and Allied assets in Shanghai, including EWO. The brewery was then managed by the Japanese Sakura Beer company for the duration of the war, and handed back at war’s end, in 1945.

During the time, supplies of EWO beer found their way to such far distant places as Tobruk, in Libya, and Greece. A 1947 Jardines company brochure claimed that “German prisoners at Tobruk who had sampled captured EWO beer were unable to understand how such fine quality beer could be brewed in any country other than Germany.”

Original late 1930s EWO Beer trays. From the MOFBA collection.

Following the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, new government regulations were introduced, and by 1950, the effects of increased taxes, restricted currency exchanges and banned redundancies forced EWO to reduce its prices by 17 percent; the brewery racked up losses to the tune of $4 million annually.

Jardines withdrew from China in 1954, having sold the brewery at a loss in 1952. With that, the EWO brand was discontinued indefinitely. Instead, it became the Huaguang Brewery 华光啤酒厂, producing beers such as Shanghai Seagull 上海海鸥 and Guangming 光明. As with U.B., the old EWO brewery building still stands today – now empty, as the area awaits redevelopment – and now ironically once more belongs to a Japanese brewer, Suntory.

“The Little Museum of Foreign Brand Advertising in the R.O.C. (MOFBA), or 民國中外廣告微博物館 in Chinese, is a private collection in Shanghai, showcasing the captivating history of Western brands advertising & selling in China during the Golden Years 1912 to 1949”: www.mofba.org