by Carl Crow
It wasn’t long before the tobacco company bought out the importer who had established the agency and if he did any more work for the rest of his life it wasn’t because he had to. British competition came into the field but the competitive years were short for the two concerns merged into the British-American Tobacco Company (known as the B.A.T.), one of the most successful concerns the foreign devils set up in China. British and American capital was about equally divided as was the nationality of the employees although Americans always appeared to hold most of the key positions in spite of the fact that the company was organized under British law.
Mr. Thomas did not retire until the employees of his company were numbered by the thousands and its products were on sale in every hamlet in China. Possibly the Chinese consumption of tobacco was not greatly increased but the foul and cumbersome water pipe was replaced by the cigarette. Imports of cigarettes from America and England continued but an initial factory set up in Shanghai was soon followed by a number of others. A new company was organized for manufacturing and employees were encouraged to buy stock in it. Many made fortunes from very modest investments. A printing plant was built to provide labels and cartons and advertising material and ten years ago it was known as the largest color-printing plant in the world and one of the finest.
With factories operating in China it was possible not only to reduce the manufacturing costs but also to produce cigarettes especially for the Chinese trade. Business had originally been built up on the sale of packets of ten, a packaging that has all but disappeared from the American market. But even this was too large for many Chinese consumers and packets of five were produced. An enormous number of cigarettes were not sold in packets at all but singly, just as cigars are sold in America.
Thousands of retail dealers at regular intervals counted out their cash and carried it to the local city dealer in payment for the goods they had bought. The city dealers packed boxes of silver dollars, bank notes or subsidiary coins and delivered them to the nearest office of the B.A.T. Often the foreigner in charge of the office had to employ guards and personally escort the money through miles of bandit-infested territory. Sometimes in the remote districts where coins of larger denominations were scarce, payment would be made in copper coins and a district manager might be called upon to receive a remittance that weighed a ton or more.
All of this cash - coppers, ten- and twenty-cent pieces, silver dollars and bank notes - came pouring into Shanghai. There was so much money that the banks didn’t want to handle it. It took the entire time of twenty-five shroffs just to count the money that was deposited daily. Once the foreign banks got into a controversy with the B.A.T. and the Standard Oil Company over a new ruling on the matter of exchange transactions. The banks adopted an attitude that the companies thought to be unreasonable, and the managers who had learned something of the Chinese method of accomplishing things by indirection took quiet but effective action. They just stored their daily receipts and deposited nothing. In a few days the bankers were yelling for money, for Shanghai was suffering from a serious currency shortage.
The B.A.T. established the finest tobacco plantations in China, not by the purchase of huge tracts of land but by the training, financing and encouragement of dozens of individual Chinese farmers. Tobacco seed had been brought by the Spanish to the Philippines and from there it had filtered up to China where tobacco of an inferior grade had been grown for centuries. The B.A.T. sent practical growers and soil experts into the field and found that the soil and climate of Shantung should produce the kind of tobacco needed for their factories. Seed was brought from America and tobacco growers from the South lived among the Chinese farmers and taught them methods of culture. In a very few years there was a new money crop bringing millions of dollars to the Shantung farmers, and districts which had been debased by poverty were prosperous.
In its contributions to charity the B.A.T. carried out the old princely traditions of the China Coast. When there was an appeal for help for the relief of flood or famine or any other disaster which had overtaken the people of China this company always headed the list. In hundreds of instances the local employees of the B.A.T. took the initiative in organizing relief in stricken districts. They were always certain that the company would refund any reasonable amount they might spend.
Mr. Thomas was believed to draw the largest salary of any one in the Far East. It was generally reported to be $100,000 per year. When he retired he was several times a millionaire. He did not amass this wealth by the careful banking of his pay checks, whatever the amount may have been. His entertainment was on a royal scale, his invitations issued with a lavish hand.
Naturally a company as big and prosperous as the B.A.T. attracted competition. It would not be an inept simile to say that they were attracted like the moth to the candle for most of them got their wings singed. One after another, big companies and little companies, with headquarters in England or America, came out to get some of the cigarette business of China, but all of them failed. Some just lasted a little longer than others. There was no special reason why this should be true. The B.A.T. possessed no special rights or privileges that would give them the virtual monopoly they enjoyed. Its officials and employees knew the business of selling to the Chinese and it had taken them years to learn it.
While thousands of foreigners went to China to make their fortunes by the strange methods they thought would be appropriate to so strange a country the facts are that the most notable of the recent individual fortunes were amassed through investments in real estate. Silas Hardoon, a Jewish boy from Bagdad, came to Shanghai penniless and got employment from his rich fellow tribesmen, the Sassoon opium magnates, as a rent collector. When I first made his acquaintance he had traveled far for he was one of the wealthiest foreigners in China. In vain efforts to inspire me to similar frugality he often told me of the pitifully small weekly salary of twelve shillings out of which he always saved a shilling. His job inspired him with the ambition to own property on which he could collect rents for himself. He wasn’t long in getting started for he picked up at a bargain a shack that he rented for a few Mexican dollars a month. The dollars he collected every month added to the shilling he saved every week soon gave him another small piece of property and his wealth increased at a constantly accelerating rate. Shanghai was growing from a village to a city with the consequent increase in real-estate values and he sold properties on which the rentals were small to buy others which produced a greater revenue.
Throughout his long life Hardoon was dominated by the idea of collecting rents. Even when he became a millionaire in terms of pound sterling he would climb tenement stairs to badger poor Chinese tenants who were a day behind in their payments. Very few of them ever were for every one was in terror of being delinquent to him. If on one of these calls he found the head of the family absent he would wait in the odorous kitchen for hours. I was never a tenant of his but there was some curious kind of friendship between us. He was such a queer person that I enjoyed opportunities to talk to him and listen to his advice, which I never followed. When I started my advertising agency he urged me to live over my office so that I would be on hand to take care of any business that might develop outside of office hours. Why he tolerated a spendthrift like me I could never understand unless it was because my companionship threw his virtues into such high relief. At any rate I twice did what everyone said was impossible and got him to make liberal donations to the American Red Cross. If I had never accomplished anything more than that it would have justified a certain local fame in Shanghai. It was equivalent to chiseling a donation out of Stephen Girard, Russell Sage or Hetty Green. But I found it rather easy.
There was nothing about his office that would suggest liberality. The desk at which he sat was one that could not be duplicated in any furniture store in America for no store would stock one so cheap. It had been made of pine by a Chinese carpenter - and not a very good carpenter at that. There was no rug on the unpainted floor, no curtains
at the windows. There was no heat in his office and on cold days he would sit there bundled in his overcoat.
But being an Oriental he combined extreme parsimony with a grand style of living. The Hardoon estate on Bubbling Well Road was the largest in Shanghai, a huge park in which he maintained three separate residences, quarters for hundreds of dependents and a Chinese orphanage maintained by Mrs. Hardoon, a Chinese lady who was independently wealthy in her own name. In addition he had a magnificent Chinese residence on the shores of West Lake in Hangchow. He had the best curry cook in Shanghai. The memories of the curry served at his table make me unhappy every time I see that dish on the menu of a New York restaurant. Though cold to appeals for the usual charities he spent money lavishly on his own charitable enterprises, of which the public knew little. He and his wife were childless and a few years before his death they adopted seven Jewish orphans whose families were entirely unknown to. him; and made a will dividing the residue of his estate among them. Although none of the orphans has yet reached his majority there are already indications that at least a part of the great Hardoon estate which its founder built up so laboriously will soon be dissipated. Perhaps bars and brothels and gambling establishments sometimes perform useful functions by acting as channels for the redistribution of wealth.
Another really great fortune of Shanghai was also built on real estate by an Englishman, Henry Lester, who was more parsimonious than Hardoon and without any tendency toward either luxury or liberality. The owner of many fine properties, he lived in the meanest of apartments. He never owned a motorcar or even a private ricksha. As tramcars were even cheaper than public rickshas, he usually traveled in them and would make the unhappy motorman wait while he went into an exchange shop to change silver money into coppers so that he could pay his fare in the cheaper coin. He owned large blocks of stock in the tram company as he did in every other sound public company in the city. It is said that he did not buy a collar or a shirt for years, depending on a business associate to give him his slightly worn and discarded haberdashery. He was never known to go into the bar of the Shanghai Club except on Christmas Eve when the boys of the club treated the members to wine and cake. He was never known to give anything to charity but as old age warned him that he had but a few years more to live he turned philanthropist. To one who had been so thoroughly parsimonious through a long lifetime it must have been with considerable pain that he gave anything away and he did hang on to every penny and every square foot of land until he died; for all of his bequests were made by will and he extracted the only thing a dead man can demand of posterity. Every institution he founded is, by terms of the bequest, labeled with his unhonored name.
There is one Shanghai resident whose great philanthropy stands out in sharp contrast to the niggardliness of Lester, but I do not know his name. Several years ago an anonymous donor presented the public of Shanghai with the magnificent Country Hospital, completely equipped and debt free. The only string to the gift was a request that no attempt be made to learn the identity of the donor. In the one third-person statement he made he said that he had prospered in Shanghai and that the hospital was his gift to a community that had befriended him. The secret has been well kept. I haven’t the faintest idea who the donor is though I know a great many people who could have given money to build the hospital but I am morally certain didn’t. The only time I ever heard the identity of the donor discussed was when a newcomer began asking questions and an old Shanghailander remarked that if this generous man wanted to remain anonymous the least we beneficiaries could do was to refrain from asking questions about it.
V
The land of adventurers
“Crows are black the whole world over.”
A very large proportion of the shady characters who have from time to time added to the interest of life on the China Coast were Americans. They were not just technical Americans who had acquired that nationality by some oblique methods, but honest-to-God hundred percenters whose fathers and grandfathers were born in this country. Their misdoings have supplied most of the major scandals and a very large number of them have been given free passage home by way of McNeil’s Island or some other place to which the United States Court for China is authorized to commit Americans convicted of some crime. This was not a temporary phase. From the time that Americans first began coming to China they have led in crime just as they have led in mission work. The category of crimes was very limited. Unless my memory is at fault the Americans who went from Shanghai to some prison in America during the past twenty-five years were all convicted of mixing up other people’s money with their own. The list is a rather impressive one. It included many of my personal friends:
A world famous aviator
Two bankers
The manager of a big oil company
The district attorney and the clerk of the United States Court for China.
These were all prominent men who belonged to the American Club. One of them was such a pillar of the church that the missionaries did most of their banking with him and many missionary enterprises suffered when his bank failed on account of his being too liberal about loaning money to himself.
For a good many years it appeared that as soon as one prominent American was started on his way to serve a sentence, the investigation or trial of another would begin. In addition to these prominent citizens who fell foul of the law there were a great many other Americans who remained in China only long enough to be convicted of some such crime as fraud, embezzlement or forgery. The prestige of the American community suffered so many jolts that it was surprising that there was anything left of it. But the British and other nationals appeared to be grateful to us for providing more than our share of the crooks who are to be found in every community. The Chinese who can usually be depended on to take the most cheerful and optimistic view of any human problem usually looked on these exposures of the criminal element in our midst as a triumph of American justice. There were many of them who really believed that there were just as many crooks in high places in the British community as in the American but that it was British policy to soft-pedal any blasts of the law that might injure British prestige. Comforting as that thought would be to national pride, I don’t believe it is true.
The geographical location of the China Coast made it inevitable that it should be the rendezvous of more American crooks than those of any other nationality. It was but one jump from any port on the West Coast. Some may have toyed with the idea of stopping in Japan but any such project was abandoned after their first experience with the Japanese police and a survey of the very slim pickings to be found in that island empire. The crooks who stopped in Japan only stayed there long enough to steal enough money to get out. As soon as they got the price of a ticket they hurried to Shanghai.
The crook who for one reason or another decided to go to China from his home in England or Continental Europe had a long trip with many diversions on the way. If he did a kind of maritime hitchhike, which is the usual method of travel for gentry of this type, he would halt at Port Said, where he would find many of his kind and keen competition. His next stop would probably be at Colombo and then possibly Bombay, Penang and Singapore, though there are innumerable other small ports all of which have their attractions, either for the idle tourist or the diligent crook. Some remained at each place and the flow of immigrants which started at, let us say, Southampton, becomes a trickle at Singapore.
However, the distinguished malefactors mentioned above did not come to the China Coast furtively but as respected citizens and presumably honest men and the China Coast merely provided the scene for their downfall. Just why more Americans than those of any other nationality should be affected in this way I do not attempt to understand. It may be that Americans are more sorely tempted than others when there is a chance to make some easy money and will take greater chances with the law.
The Russo-Japanese War started quite a few Americans on the road to fortune. One of them who was selling American goods
in Tokyo showed the Japanese war offices figures as to the consumption of canned corned beef by the principal armies of the world and secured the biggest order he had ever booked. He also had his narrowest escape from facing trial on a charge of attempted murder - not just an ordinary murder attempt but one which involved the lives of Japanese soldiers, infinitely more precious than the lives of mere civilians. This was strange diet for the soldiers who ate it as they would their customary bowl of rice. Every soldier who gorged this new food became seriously ill. Those who did not eat it were in their usual health. For reasons that are not very puzzling, Japanese are always ready to suspect foul play and before he knew what was happening the American was formally charged with attempting to poison the entire Japanese army at the instigation of the Russians. He spent a few very unpleasant hours trying to convince the Japanese army officers that beef provided a wholesome diet but could not be eaten like rice or bean curds. To prove that it was not poisonous he ate so many samples from different cans that he finally got as sick as the soldiers. The investigation was called off while the Japanese waited to see whether or not he would die. In a day or two he was as well as ever and the soldiers had recovered. With prestige and confidence restored, the American immediately sold the Japanese a half-dozen locomotives and so started on the road to an honest fortune.