Then & Now | How cotton once rivalled opium in importance for Hong Kong – and helped build city’s textile trade
Hong Kong’s success as a garment hub can be traced to the American and Chinese civil wars – as well as to a humble Indian bottle seller
Opium remains the most widely remembered commodity traded by the British East India Company between India and China. During the 18th and 19th centuries, however, another product assumed nearly the same economic importance – cotton.
Finished cotton products had been traded from ports in western India and into Southeast Asia and China for hundreds of years before the arrival of Portuguese navigators in the early 16th century.
By the mid-19th century, one of the region’s principal cotton brokers was Parsee businessman Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, who had started out trading in glass bottles (he was popularly known as Bottle-wallah for this reason). From that humble beginning, Jeejeebhoy went on to grow a multilayered business empire (opium, admittedly, did play a role) that stretched from India to China, becoming a major philanthropist in his home city of Bombay, where numerous public institutions, such as schools and hospitals, still have “Sir J.J.” as part of their name.
One such institution, Sir J.J. School of Art, employed as its principal the British sculptor and ceramicist John Lockwood Kipling, father of the poet, writer and Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling.