Swire's Chinese name, Taikoo ( 太古 ) , can be loosely translated as "Great and Ancient". The character Gu ( 古 ) represents "ancient", while the prefix Tai
( 太 ) puts it into the superlative form, so the full name, Tai Gu Yeung Hong" ( 太古洋行 ) , means something like "Most Venerable Foreign Company".
To Western eyes, the 太古 characters bear a close resemblance to 大吉 , the "Big Luck" characters widely seen around Chinese New Year and it has even been speculated this was the original choice for Swire's Chinese name. Not so: the name Taikoo was chosen by Thomas Taylor Meadows – a British Consul in Shanghai when Swire opened an office there 150 years ago, in 1866. However, Meadows clearly did intend the name to be a clever visual "pun". It was a stroke of genius, because he gave a doubly auspicious name to the company that carries it: Taikoo, the "Great and Ancient", also suggests good luck.
Here are some interesting facts about Swire which you may or may not have heard before:
01
The Swire Flag
The Swire flag is a particularly recognisable one; perhaps it helps that the design is replicated on the “door-close” button in most elevators! The creation of a shipping company in 1872 first dictated the need for a house flag. When The China Navigation Company (“CNCo”) went into operation on the Yangtze River, the trade was dominated by the powerful, American-owned Shanghai Steam Navigation Company. Undeterred, Swire’s Senior Partner, John Samuel Swire, declared he intended to ‘run the river’ and the flag he designed threw down the gauntlet in no uncertain terms: Shanghai SNCo’s flag consisted of two blue triangles, apex to apex, on a white ground; CNCo’s was to be identical – but red instead of blue. Perhaps John Swire decided this was a step too far? At any rate, at a meeting to review the design, someone used a blue pencil to sketch a wide vertical stripe through the centre of the flag, where the two triangles met, and the hung bak lam (red, white, blue) Swire flag we know today was born.
02
Built on Beancake
Though China Navigation began life on the Yangtze River, the company cemented its success in the 1870s and 1880s on the China Coast, where it took a virtual monopoly of the trade in “beancake”. Produced in the north, in what was then Manchuria and shipped south to Xiamen and Shantou, “beancake” was the soya pulp residue from crushing soya beans to extract their oil. It was compressed into large, cartwheel-shaped “cakes”, which were simply rolled on and off the ships through the side-port cargo doors that were a feature of CNCo’s coasters. Beancake was in demand as a fertiliser in the fruit and vegetable growing areas of southern China; sometimes it was used as animal fodder – and when times were tough, fed humans too. Thanks to this trade, up until World War II, CNCo’s coastal cargo steamers were still referred to as “Beancakers”.
03
Leading UK bottler
Swire Beverages is one of the largest Coca-Cola bottlers in the world. Swire acquired its first Coca-Cola franchise, Hongkong Bottlers Federal, in 1965, but the group had a much earlier – and also highly successful – interest in beverage bottling. In 1869, Swire began to bottle and export beer to Australia from Liverpool under licence from major brewers, Guinness and Bass. The new business was managed by John Samuel Swire’s cousin, Jonathan Porter O’Brien, and consequently named J.P. O’Brien & Co. Starting with Australasia, J.P. O’Brien expanded its market to include all of Asia and the Americas and became Britain’s biggest export bottler – in 1882, exporting 29,000 cases of its most popular brand, Dagger Stout, to Melbourne alone. By the late 1880s, the Australian trade had declined, thanks to domestic competition, and Swire sold the business to the O’Brien family in 1894; the company continued to trade well into the 1990s.
04
Working for the Swire $
Once upon a time, Swire printed its own money. Taikoo Tsng (“Swire Bank”) notes went into circulation in Shantou and its environs in 1882 – the year Swire opened an office at the Guangdong port. Shantou was at the centre of the company’s coastal trade in beancake, but as the town did not have a bank, foreign trading hongs with interests there produced their own printed ‘cash’ – actually glorified ‘chits’, or promissory notes. Taikoo Tsng notes were available in denominations of $50, $25, $10 and $5. Issue and redemption were strictly regulated by the Shantou office, but in between, Taikoo Tsng banknotes passed from hand to hand just like regular cash. It is believed Swire was still honouring the notes into the 1930s.
05
Taikoo's cable car
From 1893-1932, Swire operated its own aerial cable car system at Quarry Bay in Hong Kong. Powered by a steam-driven winch, two open cars operating on a counterweight system carried passengers more than 2km uphill to Tai Fung Au (Big Wind Gap) – the high pass in the hills above. This was the site of the “Sanitarium”: a cool, high-altitude summer refuge for European (mainly Scottish) Taikoo Sugar Refinery and Taikoo Dockyard staff and their families during the sweltering, sticky months when bubonic plague regularly swept across southern China.
06
Pirate peril
Before World War II, China was a notorious pirate hot-spot. Coastal and river steamers carried passengers on deck at very low rates, so it was all too easy for a pirate gang, with weapons strategically concealed, to simply buy tickets and mingle with the crowds. China Navigation vessels were pirated in Chinese waters 12 times between 1925 and 1939. As a result, iron bars and locked gates separated the main deck from the bridge area and saloon passenger accommodation on CNCo ships and squads of well-armed guards travelled on board. Standard issue for every CNCo officer were those cowboy favourites, a Winchester .44 repeater rifle and a Colt .45 revolver – with Smith & Wesson handcuffs to ‘clap in irons’ any captured pirates.
07
Early innovation
Necessity was the mother of invention for the pioneering engineers of Pacific Air Maintenance & Supply Co. (“PAMAS”)– the aeronautical engineering company started up by Swire in 1947 and which morphed into Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering Company (“HAECO”) in 1950. An early innovation was this mobile engine test unit: a specially adapted truck with a rear gantry arm on which a propeller engine could be mounted. Instruments in the lorry’s cab monitored the engine’s performance as “PAMAS” technicians raced the throttle. It was a far cry from Hong Kong Aero Engine Services’ (“HAESL”) state-of-the-art test cell, capable of handling the largest turbo fan engines in commercial use today.
08
Delicate cargo
Cathay Pacific’s first outport office opened in Bangkok in 1953. Then, as now, live seafood was important airfreight from Thailand for the restaurants of Hong Kong; but in the early 1950s, to keep the tanks aerated, a man sat beside them on a stool, agitating the water with a stick. On one occasion, Cathay’s ‘Skymaster’ DC-4 even carried an elephant from Bangkok; its handler tied live chickens to its forelegs to dissuade the animal from stamping its feet inflight.
09
Preferred brand
Automotive trading is a key business for Swire’s trading division. It all began back in the late 1970s, when Taikoo Motors forerunner, Cannon, acquired a franchise for Volvo in Taiwan. Initially, to reassure doubtful local customers that the cars carried the Swire guarantee of quality – and much to the vexation of the brand-conscious Swedes – vehicles were sold with a Taikoo flag on the boot!
10
Parking where ships once docked
Swire Properties was established in the early 1970s to undertake redevelopment of the more than 100 acres of real estate released by the closure of Taikoo Sugar Refinery and Taikoo Dockyard in Hong Kong. The area was redeveloped in phases as the residential estate Taikoo Shing, the business/retail centre, Cityplaza, and the office complex, Taikoo Place. Today, shoppers at Cityplaza will find little to remind them of the area’s industrial and maritime heritage, apart from a commemorative stone recording the building of the dockyard’s huge dry-dock – intended, when it opened in 1907, to accommodate the largest vessels then afloat. This stone can be found by the ground-floor entrance to the underground carpark – which is itself located within the former dry-dock.
