My Amazon Review of Jonathan Kaufman's "The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China"

Silk Road Globalists

Journalist Jonathan Kaufman tells the fascinating story of two 19^th Century Jewish Baghdadi families who would come to dominate trade in India and China. David Sassoon (no relation to Vidal Sassoon) escapes Baghdad in the 1830s and founds a dynasty in India. First in textiles and later he supplants Jardine Matheson in running the opium trade into China. So successful was he that he and his family become British citizens.

Elly Kadoorie starts out working for Sassoon and then strikes out on his own. He sees his and his family’s future not in India, but rather in China. And it was in the international city of Shanghai in the 1930s where the family makes its fortune. Kaufman is very good at giving the reader a feel for the Shanghai of that time as it became to be known as the Paris of the orient. It also was city of stark contrast between the rich westerners and the poor Chinese and it became a breeding ground for the Maoism that was to come. It was there where he builds real estate business and he becomes fortunate in diversifying his portfolio into Honk Kong. As with the Sassoons the family loses all of its assets, first to the Japanese and then to the Chinese Communists.

With Shanghai being an open city, 20,000 Jews from Europe flood into it in the 1930s. The Kadoorie family establishes a network of social services that enable the Jewish community to survive under the Japanese occupation. Among them were future Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal, Hollywood producer Michael Medavoy and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.

After the communist takeover of Shanghai the Kadoorie’s salvage their Hong Kong assets and start to rebuild under British rule. Out of this would become one of Asia’s great fortunes built upon China Power and Light, Hong Kong’s electric utility, and the Peninsula Hotel chain. His success brings with it a Knighthood. The Kadoorie’s are also British citizens. 

Throughout the 1950s-70s the Kadoorie’s maintained their contacts with the Chinese rulers and when China was ready to open up its economy the Kadoorie’s got the first call from Deng Xiaoping. To this day they remain friendly to the regime and its current ruler Xi Jinping. Unfortunately this means siding with autocracy over freedom demonstrators of Hong Kong.

Jonathan Kaufman is a good story-teller and he does justice to the history of these two very important families and their influence on the history of India and China. An interesting sidelight is that today both the Sassoon’s and the Kadoorie’s are held in high respect in Shanghai. It was those two families that made Shanghai the Paris of the Orient in the 1930s.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1WE9ZJ637RVBF/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv