Shanghai Daily news

The house at No. 5, Lane 24, Lixi Road used to be the family residence of the Kwoks, the founders of the Wing On Department Store on Nanjing Road.(Photo: Shanghai Daily)

An glimpse inside one of the rooms, one of many that were subdivided and are now the homes of more than a score of families. (Photo: Shanghai Daily)


The Wing On Department Store is the most famous legacy of the Kwok family, but there is another. Tina Kanagaratnam searches out the Kwok family house, and finds the story of brothers who built a fortune and of a Shanghai princess.

Lixi Road, in Shanghai’s western Changning District, is a small enclave of surprisingly grand houses, long past their prime. More than 80 years of wind, sun and rain have peeled much of the green paint from the flared eaves of the Dutch-style house at No. 5, Lane 24 Lixi Road.
Well-worn laundry hangs out of the arched windows, flapping like flags on parade, and a quartet of old men play mahjong on the sunlit patio.
But even so, it only takes a little imagination to conjure up a vision of this house when it was young, and the home of Australian-Chinese businessman George Kwok Bew. He owned the renowned Wing On Department Store on Nanjing Road (today the Hualian Department Store), and this is where his family of 10 was raised, along with 24 servants, who lived in their own wing.
A 1930s photograph, taken on the lawn in front of the house, shows 18 family members, the patriarch in a white colonial suit, and the young men in dark jackets and white pants (one especially dapper dresser is sporting a bow tie and a kerchief in his breast pocket). The women are wearing loose flapper-style dresses, stockings and high heels, and fashionably bobbed hair.
The life that was lived here was a privileged one. Daisy, George Kwok Bew’s favorite daughter, told her great friend, Shanghai historian Tess Johnston, tales of sitting around the dining table, set with fine china and silver, and food both Western and Chinese. Thanks to their start in Australia, they all spoke English at home—and that meant to the servants, too.
Beautiful, elegant Daisy Kwok, born in 1908 in Australia, was the most sought after young lady in old Shanghai. Johnston explains why:“She was the prettiest girl in Shanghai, and the richest one, too.”She was engaged“at least five times,”reports Johnston, to scions of old, wealthy families, as was the norm for wealthy families. In the end, though, she married the man she loved, Y.H. Woo (he had lineage, as a descendant of Commissioner Lin Zexu, whose flushing of the opium into the sea of South China instigated the Opium Wars in 1840, but not money). Unlike her other suitors, she told Johnston, Woo was
“never boring.”And when Johnston pressed her—“never? Not even after years of marriage?”She replied firmly,“never.”
Their engagement party was held at the house, and the sight of more than 100 tables on that vast lawn must have been a sight to see. Shanghai writer Chen Danyan’s biography of Daisy Kwok sums it up in the title:“Shanghai Princess.”
The fortune that built the house was made by George Kwok, Daisy’s father. He was born in 1883 in Zhuxiuyuan village, Xiangshan County (today’s Zhongshan City) in Guangdong Province, and followed his older brother to Sydney at the age of 16. The Kwoks set up the Wing On Fruit Store in Sydney, made an ultimately unsuccessful foray into shipping, and became one of the leaders of the Australian Chinese community. As one of the overseas Chinese who had supported and funded Dr Sun Yat-sen, whose republican revolution in 1911 toppled the Qing Dynasty (1644- 1911), he had been invited back to China by Dr Sun. George arrived in 1917, and established the Wing On Department Store in 1918.
The department store was located across the street from the Sincere Department Store, opened by a fellow Australian Chinese from Xiangshan County, Ma Ying-piew, one year earlier. In fact, old Shanghai’s four great department stores—Sincere, Wing On, Sun Sun and Sun—were all founded by Australian Chinese from Xiangshan, who wanted to bring to China the tradition of Sydney department stores such as Anthony Hordern & Sons New Palace Emporium and David Jones.
Local lore has it that George and his brother selected the south side of the street for their store on the basis of a survey: They hired two men to count the people on each side of Nanjing Road, throwing a bean into a bag whenever they saw someone pass by. After several days of this, the south side bag was heftier than the north side bag, and the store duly opened there.
The brothers leased their land from Silas Aron Hardoon, Shanghai’s richest man at that time. Hardoon, a Baghdad Jew whose sumptuous mansion on Bubbling Well Road (today the site of the Shanghai Exhibition Center on Nanjing Road W.) is a legend, drove a hard bargain: The Kwoks could lease the land for 50,000 taels of silver for 30 years, after which the land and the store would revert to Hardoon. The store was an instant hit, with its attractive salesgirls, modern setup and hotel, dance hall and teahouse, all in the same building. After Hardoon and his wife died, the Kwoks eventually bought the land on which Wing On Department Store stood from their son George Hardoon, in 1946.
By Liberation in 1949, Daisy had already moved out of the house into her own married home with Woo, and the rest of the family soon followed suit. The subsequent years were not easy for a graduate of the elite McTyiere Girls’School and Yenching University, married to a man of a similar background. Woo, an MIT graduate and a man of rich tastes, who favored sharp suits and the high life, was imprisoned during the late 1950s and accused of being a rightist; he died in Tilanqiao prison hospital. The graves of her parents (and of Woo’s) were destroyed, and she had to“reform herself through labor,”writes Chen in“Shanghai Princess,”“doing jobs such as factory work, iron smelting, road construction.”She also scrubbed toilets and peeled turnips (the latter when she was sent to Chongming Island).
But rather than being embittered about the experience, Daisy’s spirit was such that“she wanted to be the best toilet scrubber or turnip peeler in the group,”says Johnston, who recalls Daisy saying of the period,“I learned a lot.”
“Unbowed by decades of turmoil that robbed her of almost everything she owned and loved, she showed no resentment,”says Johnston in“Frenchtown Shanghai.”“In her last 25 years, Daisy (who died at age 89) accepted her reduced circumstances with equanimity. Although the silverware no longer matched and the cups were chipped, she still poured tea for her guests as graciously and elegantly as if she were still in the drawing room of her youth.”Adds Chen:“She held her head high.”“Shanghai Princess,”indeed.
After the Kwoks left, their home was, and remains, subdivided into rooms for multiple families—Johnston counted 24 on one visit. One woman lives in the old breakfast room, which opens out to the patio, and sports a faded, but still discernible mural of Dutch farmers, trotting to market in carts pulled by sturdy white horses—perhaps a reference to the Dutch style of the house. Inside, the once grand lobby is shabby with neglect, but the elaborate carving on the banisters is still there, as is the stillexpensive looking marble tile in the patio—now used as a kitchen. Upstairs, corridors lead off to room after room, and in the room under the eaves, an old man stretches out his head for some afternoon sun.
It was in this room that the Swiss architect who built the house kept his Chinese mistress, hidden from the prying eyes and wagging tongues of the foreign community. It was he, too, who named the road outside after his hometown: Lucerne Road (now Lixi Road).
Like Daisy, the house has been through a great deal—and like Daisy, despite the weaknesses of age, the Kwok house retains every bit of its elegance and grandeur. Perhaps in this state of disrepair it is somehow even more elegant, even more beautiful, the fine breeding shows even more, as it holds its head high, as befits a house for a princess.