As we wind up for the winter holidays and bid farewell to 2017, it seems every archivist here at SOAS Archives and Special Collections has a festive archive anecdote to share, so we thought we would collate our favourites into a short seasonal Blog post! SOAS Archives and Special collections, broadly speaking, documents the British interaction with Africa, Asia and the Middle East over the past two centuries. The collections
Taking place in the wake of serious drought, floods and hunger, The Boxer Rebellion, Yihetuan or most poetically, The Righteous and Harmonious Fists Movement, was an uprising in China that took place between 1899 and 1900. Tensions rose quickly, culminating with serious anti-foreigner violence in Peking (Beijing) and the city being taken under siege by ‘the Boxers’. Eight international forces eventually forcibly subdued the rebels and the following September the Peking Protocol was
In continuation of our celebration of the bi-centenary of John Swire & Sons, this week’s blog post takes a closer look at Butterfield & Swire, the Eastern managers for the interests of John Swire & Sons in China and Japan. Butterfield and Swire, the Far Eastern trading company of John Swire and Sons [JS&S], was one of three companies established from the partnership of John and William Swire with R
This week we continue our series of posts celebrating the bicentenary of John Swire & Sons by taking a look at the iconic Taikoo Sugar Refinery. Established by John Samuel Swire in 1881 in direct competition to Jardine, Matheson & Co who already owned a refinery, the Taikoo Sugar Refinery in Hong Kong soon became the world’s largest and most sophisticated plant in its day. Butterfield and Swire,
In celebration of World Maritime Day, this latest post in the series commemorating the 200th anniversary of John Swire & Sons focuses on The China Navigation Company [CNCo]. Established in 1872, today CNCo is the wholly owned, deep-sea shipping and operating arm of the Swire Group, operating a a global network of multi purpose liner services, drybulk, and bulk logistics services. By the early 1870s John Samuel Swire was convinced
A keen amateur photographer, the legacy left by (George) Warren Swire goes beyond his contribution to the development of John Swire & Sons, today one of the most successful companies in the world. G W Swire’s collection of documentary photographs provides a valuable pictorial record of the expansion of trade in China throughout a forty year period. G W Swire was born in 1883, (d. 1949), to John Samuel Swire
John Swire may have established the firm of John Swire & Sons, but it was his son, John Samuel Swire, known as ‘the Senior’ who can be credited with laying the foundations of the business we know today. He was just twenty one when he took control of his father’s company, but it was clear that he had inherited his father’s work ethic and shrewdness along with a great sense
This is an important year for John Swire & Sons: they are celebrating their 200th anniversary, no mean feat for a family-owned business. In celebration of this success we will be writing a series of blogs under the banner of ‘200 years of Swire’, looking in more detail at some of the key moments in the firms history, the challenges it faced and the individuals who were instrumental in its
It’s been a busy few weeks here at SOAS Archives, but we are pleased to announce that the papers relating to Cathay Pacific Airways have been catalogued and are now available online. These form part of the Swire Collection, which we have blogged about before. Today, Cathay Pacific Airways is one of the most successful and well-known airlines in the world, operating scheduled cargo and passenger services to more than
Despite not having much to celebrate during their time in captivity, civilian inmates of Hong Kong’s Japanese-controlled internment camps during the Second World War were determined to keep up the tradition of sending each other Christmas cards. Using what little resources they had available prisoners painstakingly hand-decorated postcards with festive greetings to send to fellow inmates. The examples pictured above were sent to Charles Collingwood Roberts during his time at
