From
The Age, a very interesting article on early Chinese-Australians and their contributions to Shanghai:
THE Four Great Companies, as they were known, were once the commercial heart of old Shanghai. Their four buildings still stand elegant and proud on Nanjing Road, even if they don't quite dominate the city skyline as they did before World War II.
''Whenever a train reached the outer suburbs of Shanghai, or a boat turned into the Huangpu River, away in the distance all of the passengers could see the tall spires and gleaming lights of the Four Great Companies,'' wrote Charles Lee, whose family built one of them. ''Their eye-catching company insignia shone like stars on the horizon, shedding their beams in every direction, so that every woman and child in Shanghai knew their names.''
Every child in Shanghai might once have known their names and millions of visitors have certainly admired them since, but the remarkable stories they contain have been hidden from mainstream Australian history for generations. Those stories have been resurrected by John Fitzgerald, La Trobe University historian and head of the Ford Foundation in Beijing, in his book Big White Lie.
Remarkably, the Four Great Companies were all built by Australians who wanted to recreate the experience of the Australian department store (and also spread the Bible). The buildings look like the old department stores in Australian capital cities that were pioneered by Anthony Horden and replicated by David Jones and Myer.
Inside, the Shanghai department stores deliberately replicated Horden's egalitarian service model, where every customer was welcomed by trained staff with courtesy and respect, regardless of their background. They displayed fixed-price goods in glass cases, presented in a common corporate style, and offered convenient access to bathrooms and tearooms.
Together, these stores turned Nanjing Road into Shanghai's most prestigious shopping strip. And they were stunningly successful.
The first, as you walk east from the Bund, is the five-storey Sincere store, built by the son of an Australian gold panner in 1917. Ma Ying-piu, like most Australian-Chinese of his time, was from a small cluster of counties in China's southern Guangdong province.
His father arrived in Australia for the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s and members of the family shuttled back and forth between China and Australia. Ma worked as a labourer and in 1890 he founded a trading firm in Sydney's Haymarket.
He then sold his shares to spread the gospel in Hong Kong and southern China, towing behind him a piano and illuminated lantern-slides. In 1900 he set up Hong Kong's Sincere Department Store, and then a grander version in Nanjing Road in 1917. On opening day 10,000 customers poured through the door.
The Sincere Store is five storeys high with a spire on top. It still glows spectacularly at night, although it is now occupied by the East Asia Hotel and partially obscured by a large model of a Chinese junk hanging from its front.
Immediately opposite, at the intersection of Zhejiang Road, is the Yong-An (Eternal Peace or Wing-On in Cantonese) store. This was built by James and Philip Gockchin, who started as labourers in Australia and moved into fruit trading in Sydney's Haymarket. They built their department store six storeys high - one better than Sincere - in 1918.
This store was said to turn over more than all of Shanghai's general stores combined before 1917. The Gockchin family diversified into textile mills, employing 14,000 people, and also real estate, life insurance and banking.
Next door to the Sincere Store, further up the road, Queenslander Charles Lee built the Sun Sun Company store, in 1926. His was seven storeys, now festooned with an extraordinary plastic sculpture of a soup bowl and ladle.
And a little further up the road, on the corner of People's Square, is the Sun Company Store built by Choy Chong and Choy Hing in 1936. It was the biggest of them all; 10 storeys with lifts and central heating, although it was built with yellow brick rather than stone.
Fitzgerald documents how the stores were built on the foundations of British law, which gave these Chinese-Australian families the capacity to reach out widely and subscribe capital from family, business, Christian and other networks across the Pacific rim of the British Empire. The Shanghai stores were also a product of the White Australia policy, which, from 1901, made it increasingly difficult for ethnic Chinese to live and own property in Australia.
The great Australian-Chinese families of a century ago mostly packed up and grew their fortunes in the United States and other places where they were more welcome. Those with assets in China, such as Philip Gockchin's Yong-An store, had them assailed by war and then appropriated by the Communist government in 1949.
Gockchin returned from Hong Kong to visit Australia in 1951. He found a Chinese-Australian population that had dwindled to just 10,000, a mere fifth of what it had been before the White Australia policy of 1901.
''The overseas Chinese hired themselves out as labourers, opened up wastelands with their sweat and blood, and built the foundations for future prosperity,'' he wrote at the time. ''In the end, however, it is others who profited from their efforts.''
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