The Thistle and The Jade: A Celebration of 175 Years of Jardine, Matheson & Co.
by Maggie Keswick
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Jardine, Matheson & Co. was founded in Canton in 1832, and built up to become an international trading house with business interests throughout the world. The Thistle & The Jade assembles contributions from both leading historians, such as Professor John King Fairbank and Professor K.C. Lui, and old Jardine hands, including Alan Reid and Sir John Keswick, to tell the story of how this happened. The result is a fascinating miscellany of scholarship and anecdote that tells an exciting tale of show more merchant adventure, of how wealth and influence were accumulated in the early days of trading, and of the special relationship forged by 'the Princely Hong' with China and her people. show lessTags
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Hong Kong History Workshop
Department of History
University of Hong Kong
This Book is a Gift from Dr. Alan Birch.
Department of History
University of Hong Kong
This Book is a Gift from Dr. Alan Birch.
The Thistle and the Jade was an essential source for the novel Yankee Mandarin. The book is a collection of articles regarding Jardine, Matheson and Company in the China trade, some penned by company officers, but others of substantial academic merit (e.g. Yen-p'ing Hao on Jardine's compradors); the book is recommended as an introduction to what is available in the Jardine, Matheson archives at Cambridge.
The following are notes from the reading.
Presents of special old teas, 27.
A. G. Dallas, 28-9.
James Whittall (Shanghai), 33.
Opium (picture), 60-1, 64-5.
tincture of opium, 67;
Malwa molds, 68.
Palmerston, 72.
Silk, 80-1.
Takee's history of his home county, 95. "Takee" is the banker Yang Fang, who provided funding for the army of show more mercenaries led in the book by Fletcher Thorson Wood.
Takee would have a large household, with so many people coming and going that Fletcher never could keep them all straight, and Ch'ang-mei [Yang Fang's young daughter] was lost among them, 99.
Compradores and "limited liability" (this is an important passage that reflects on the "ethics" of compradors). Jardine's characters in 1860 Shanghai: Whittall, Keswick, compradore William Affo.
Other detail was taken from the chapter Jardines in Japan. Yokohama, Nagasaki, and Hakodate were opened for trade on July 1, 1859. Yokohama was an isolated, seaward-facing stretch of shorebacked by a swamp with rivers on either side. A canal was dug to join the two rivers, so ensuring that the only official exits from the port were via two bridges, each guarded and barricaded at sunset. To Rutherford Alcock [British consul] it looked like a prison.
Whitall was in charge of the Shanghai branch in 1859-60. "Early in 1860" [William] Keswick bought Lot No. 1 [on the Shanghai Bund] for the company [so by May it probably was already a done deal and can be mentioned in Yankee Mandarin]. It was in an excellent position on the waterfront with room for expansion to Lot Nos. 22 and 23 behind for godowns.
James Lande show less
The following are notes from the reading.
Presents of special old teas, 27.
A. G. Dallas, 28-9.
James Whittall (Shanghai), 33.
Opium (picture), 60-1, 64-5.
tincture of opium, 67;
Malwa molds, 68.
Palmerston, 72.
Silk, 80-1.
Takee's history of his home county, 95. "Takee" is the banker Yang Fang, who provided funding for the army of show more mercenaries led in the book by Fletcher Thorson Wood.
Takee would have a large household, with so many people coming and going that Fletcher never could keep them all straight, and Ch'ang-mei [Yang Fang's young daughter] was lost among them, 99.
Compradores and "limited liability" (this is an important passage that reflects on the "ethics" of compradors). Jardine's characters in 1860 Shanghai: Whittall, Keswick, compradore William Affo.
Other detail was taken from the chapter Jardines in Japan. Yokohama, Nagasaki, and Hakodate were opened for trade on July 1, 1859. Yokohama was an isolated, seaward-facing stretch of shorebacked by a swamp with rivers on either side. A canal was dug to join the two rivers, so ensuring that the only official exits from the port were via two bridges, each guarded and barricaded at sunset. To Rutherford Alcock [British consul] it looked like a prison.
Whitall was in charge of the Shanghai branch in 1859-60. "Early in 1860" [William] Keswick bought Lot No. 1 [on the Shanghai Bund] for the company [so by May it probably was already a done deal and can be mentioned in Yankee Mandarin]. It was in an excellent position on the waterfront with room for expansion to Lot Nos. 22 and 23 behind for godowns.
James Lande show less
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Maggie Keswick first went to China when she was four years old. Her family had lived and worked in China since the early nineteenth century, and it is perhaps because of this close link that she was able to develop so intimate an understanding of Chinese art, philosophy and garden-making. She was educated in Shanghai and Hong Kong and, in Britain, show more at Oxford University and the Architectural Association, London. She was married to the architectural critic and historian Charles Jencks, with whom she made the famous conceptual garden at Portrack, near Dumfries, Scotland Alison Hardie is a lecturer in Chinese studies at Newcastle University. She has done extensive research into Chinese gardens, specializing in Chinese garden design in the later Ming dynasty, and is translator of the classic Chinese garden text The Craft of Gardens (Yuan Ye) by Ji Cheng. She first met Maggie Keswick in China twenty years ago, and it was following Maggie's lead that she embarked on her study of Chinese gardens show less
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