Guinness was one of the most notable of Swire's regular consignments during this period and when the brewers ceased exports to Australia under their own name at the end of the 1860s, John Samuel Swire acquired the right to bottle Guinness in Liverpool and to export it under the brand of Dagger Stout.

Swire’s Chinese name Taikoo (太古) can be loosely translated as ‘Great and Ancient’. The 太古 characters bear a close resemblance to 大吉 or D’ai-Gut, meaning “Big Luck” – the good-luck characters widely to be seen around Chinese New Year, and many people have wondered whether those auspicious characters were the original choice for Swire’s Chinese name.
 
In fact, the name was selected by Thomas Taylor Meadows (1815-1868), the British Consul in Shanghai at the time of the establishment of Butterfield & Swire, and an eminent sinologist. 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.

At the time when The China Navigation Company (CNCo) was established, its major competitor on the Yangtze River was an American-owned business, the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company. John Samuel Swire was determined to outdo his rivals and the flag he designed for his new shipping company was deliberately provocative. Shanghai Steam Navigation’s flag showed two blue triangles, apex to apex, on a white ground; CNCo’s was to be identical - but red instead of blue. However, at the last minute, John Samuel Swire introduced a wide blue vertical stripe through the centre of the flag where the two triangles met, and the Swire flag was born.

The China Navigation Company crest, with the Swire group and Swire family motto, Esse Quam Videri – often referenced as “EQV”. It is a Latin proverb dating to the time of Cicero and has been in use by the Swire family since the 18th century. Literally translated, it means “to be, and not to seem to be”.

The rapid expansion of China Navigation was largely based on the profit from cargoes of ‘beancake’, which its vessels carried on the China coast. Produced in Manchuria as a by-product of the soybean oil industry, ‘beancake’ consisted of dried soybean husks compressed into large ‘cakes’ for shipment to South China, where they were spread on the land as a fertiliser.

In the early days, Butterfield & Swire (B&S) acted as a banking agent at some of the smaller coastal ports in China. Taikoo Tsng or “Swire Bank” notes were for a time common currency in Shantou in southern China. Available in various denominations, the notes were produced by specialist printer Waterlow & Sons in London, as a guard against local counterfeiting. Issue and redemption were strictly regulated by the B&S Shantou office, but Swire banknotes nonetheless passed from hand to hand just like cash in this coastal margin of Guangdong Province. It is believed Swire was still honouring the notes into the 1930s.

Taikoo Dockyard and the adjoining Taikoo Sugar Refinery at Quarry Bay covered a wide area and together formed an almost entirely self-contained community, providing housing, clinic and hospital, cinema, canteen and recreation ground for their employees; as well as a school - Taikoo Primary School - for employees’ children that exists to this day.

Taikoo Free School was founded in 1923 to provide free education for the children of workers employed by the Taikoo Dockyard and Taikoo Sugar Refinery at Quarry Bay in Hong Kong. Funded by Swire and administered by Taikoo Dockyard’s management, the school’s first home was in an office building within the dockyard. After World War II, the school was transferred to larger premises and from 1947, the government provided an annual subsidy towards running costs and the school was opened up to children whose parents were not employed by Swire. The first purpose-built Taikoo Primary School, a joint venture between Swire and the Education Department, opened in October 1966 and from that date the school was government-run. The school moved to its current site on King’s Road in 2003; the campus was built by Swire Properties as part of a broader redevelopment of the district and senior Swire management continue to sit on the Taikoo Primary School board.

Cathay Pacific was founded in 1946 by Roy Farrell and Sydney de Kantzow – respectively an American and an Australian - who saw an opportunity to start passenger and cargo flights out of Shanghai. They moved their enterprise to Hong Kong in the same year and paid HK$1 apiece to register the airline. They named it Cathay Pacific Airways, because Cathay was the ancient name for China and far-sighted Roy Farrell speculated that one day the airline would fly across the Pacific Ocean.