EWO Building

SIMON FIELDHOUSE

ARTIST Email enquiries: Simon Fieldhouse

No 27 - THE EWO BUILDING - SHANGHAI

No. 27 The EWO Building

It was justly fitting that Jardine, Matheson & Company were the first to register a building lot on the Bund in 1843. Their first premises on the Bund were completed in 1851. Opium trader and partner William Jardine, known as the ‘iron-headed rat,’ who died in that year, had bees instrumental in influencing the British government to launch the First Opium War. The Jardine interests, however, grew to encompass much more than trading activity. They acted as joint agents for the development of railways in China until 1911, and amongst other activities founded enormous cotton mills, developed extensive shipping interests, established an engineering corporation and pioneered cold storage facilities in the city. Arguably the finest beer in Asia, using imported hops, flowed from their EWO Brewery, founded in 1935. Whilst Jardines were best known by their Chinese name of EWO, meaning happy harmony, they were known to the Scottish in China as the ‘Muckle House’ (muckle signifying greatness).

The Rev. C. B. Darwent, in the second edition of his Shanghai handbook (1920), estimated that the cost of the land on which the company’s first building was completed in 1851 had risen phenomenally from £500 to £1,000,000 in 1900. The original plans for a new building, which were drawn up in London at great expense, were rejected by Mr. John Johnsrone, long term general manager of the firm in Shanghai and Hong Kong, as being unattractive and unsuitable. In the end, the design work fell to Mr. A. W. Graham Brown of local architects Stewardson & Spence. Work on the modern, Renaissance-style, five-story building began in early 1920 and was completed in November 1922. The reinforced concrete structure, faced with granite, was designed to permit the addition of an extra story, which was added at a later date. As was a common practice of the time, the servants’ quarters were placed over the garages at the back of the building and the offices themselves had separate stairs and toilet facilities for Chinese workers.

Continuing its traditional worldwide trade in tea and silk, a specially designed silk room, with exceptional lighting, was created for its silk inspectors who were usually of Swiss or Italian descent. Inside the main entrance at the centre of the Bund frontage, two boards, which used to list the buildings’ occupants have been wiped clean, but remain as a reminder of the past. Although public entry is not permitted, the grandeur of the 16-foot- wide marble and bronze staircase, original woodwork and marble panelling can be viewed from just inside the entrance portico.

The seeds of the EWO institution germinated from a small number of families in, or around, the Scottish county of Dumfriesshire. One family name, which was never to wither, that of the Keswiccs, has been indelibly linked with the company from its earliest days right up to the present. The Keswick dynasty in Shanghai extended over four generations and, at one point or another, a representative from each generation acted as chairman of the SMC. The Keswicks had always had more than a keen interest in racing and it was William Keswick who bailed out the fledgling Shanghai Race Club to avoid financial ruin in 1862. Big company rivalries were fought out on the racecourse at its spring and autumn meetings. The first, fought in the 1860s, was between Jardines and Dent lit Co., another influential British trading firm based on the Bund. By 1922, the private EWO stables, which were located next to the Shanghai Race Club, housed 46 ponies and the company had 21 gentlemen riders on its payroll.

Paradoxically, the race club became an arena where much graver national rivalries were to be fought following a failed Japanese attempt to gain ascendancy in the SMC elections of 1940. Mr. William J. Keswick, the recently elected chairman of the SMC, was shot twice by a Japanese assailant at a ratepayers’ meeting there in January 1941. Cambridge educated William, better known as Tony, baronial doyen of business, social and civic life, escaped major injury and was thereafter to travel around the city in a 1925 seven-seater armored car that had been custom-made for Al Capone. Whilst his company’s building was occupied by the Japanese Navy as the base for their intelligence department after December 1941, Tony himself became the London-based director of British Intelligence’s Special Operations Executive for the Far East during the war. The building’s clandestine history has now come to a close. It, along with two adjacent buildings, is set to be inhabited by high-class eateries and stores, spearheaded by Saks of Fifth Avenue to its rear (see page 342). Luxury residences are also planned as part of this scheme.