Then & Now | When Chinese didn’t value eggs, a foreigner saw opportunity and launched a roaring trade from Shanghai in tinned eggs to the UK
- There was a time when Chinese people considered eggs a useless by-product of raising chickens. A trade in canned Chinese eggs for export sprang up in the 1920s
- After 1949 and with a UN trade embargo on China, preserved eggs from certified Free World poultry in Hong Kong were sold in the Chinatowns of North America
Industrial production of chickens evolved globally over the past 70 years, with chicken only becoming a staple in much of Asia in recent decades. Armies fight to victory on their stomachs, as has often been observed, and a key reason suggested by various scholars for limited Allied ground force commitments in China during the Pacific war was the logistical difficulty of feeding them an appropriate diet in the absence of industrial production of meat, eggs and dairy products.
Despite limited production, mostly at village level, various chicken by-products – in particular, eggs – were an important Chinese export in the interwar years, and for some decades afterwards in Hong Kong. Dr Gren Wedderburn’s entertaining memoir No Lotus Garden: A Scottish Surgeon in China and Japan (1979) describes the egg export industry from Shanghai, just before the Communist assumption of power in 1949.
“Although chicken is an important dish, by quirk of culinary aberration the Chinese neither value nor prize the humble egg. Before the turn of the century, some astute foreigner realised this and over the years built up an enormous business.
“As long as there was water transport and collecting depots, small farmers and peasants were only too willing to be paid for a commodity for which there was little demand. The peasant’s wife, by selling a few eggs, gained a copper or two for what was barely a useful item.
“The eggs were delivered from a million sources, preserved in ice as soon as they reached a small depot, collected on junks and sampans to be brought down river to Shanghai. The eggs could only be sufficiently fresh and in commercial quantity if the collecting system cast an enormous net into the hinterland with a widespread batch of agents.