Dent & Co.

Why Shanghai knows the name

Dent & Co. (宝顺洋行, Bǎoshùn Yángháng) was a British trading house that opened in Shanghai in 1843 and built its offices at No. 14 the Bund. In its day it ranked with Jardine, Matheson & Co. and Russell & Company among the firms that financed early Hong Kong. It did not outlast the 1860s: it folded in 1867. Its lasting mark in Shanghai is less its own record than the people who learned the business inside it, above all the comprador’s nephew Xu Run (徐润, Xú Rùn).

Who were the Dents, and why did a Chinese official want one arrested?

The firm’s roots lie in Canton. Its own history begins with a former East India Company supercargo, George Baring, in 1809; Thomas Dent joined in 1820 and the Dent & Co. name dates from 1824. Lancelot Dent took over as senior partner in 1831. In 1839 the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu (林则徐, Lín Zéxú) issued a warrant for his arrest to force the surrender of the opium stored at Canton, an episode the Wikipedia article calls the opening shot of the First Opium War. That is the best-known moment in Dent’s history, and it happened before the firm came to Shanghai.

When did it reach Shanghai, and where did it build?

Shanghai opened to foreign trade in 1843, and Dent was among the first to open an office. Its Bund premises are given as No. 14. The site is today occupied by the Bank of Communications Building, whose entry on this site records Dent & Co. as the first holder of the land. Dent also appears on the 1844 list of hongs, which is the earliest list of this kind I could trace. No source I read says which Bund lot the firm held or what the original building looked like. The site is on the Bund, and the present building is not Dent’s.

The Chinese name 宝顺 comes with an alternative, 颠地 (Diāndì), which is a transliteration of the surname Dent. The sources I read do not say what the characters of 宝顺 were meant to suggest, so I do not interpret them.

How did Dent fit into the opium business?

Not from Shanghai alone. With Jardine Matheson and Russell & Company, Dent was one of three firms that financed most of Hong Kong’s early economic activity before banks arrived, in the words of Wikipedia’s article on hongs. The two firms are often paired as rivals, and the sources I read give no Dent-versus-Jardine comparison in numbers. For Shanghai I found no tonnage or chest figures for Dent specifically, and I will not invent them. What the sources show is a firm of the first rank in 1843 that is gone by 1867.

What was a comprador, and who was Dent’s?

A foreign hong worked in the treaty ports through a Chinese manager, the comprador (买办, mǎibàn), who vouched for Chinese buyers and sellers and was paid by commission. Dent’s comprador in the 1850s was Xu Yuting (徐钰亭, Xú Yùtíng). In 1852 his nephew Xu Run, then 15, left a Suzhou school after a few months and joined the firm as an apprentice at 10 Mexican silver dollars a month, according to a Chinese article about him.

Xu Run went on to serve as a comprador himself and later became a senior manager at the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, the company that bought Russell & Co.’s fleet in 1877 (the sale is told in the entry on Russell & Co.). He was removed from his post in 1884. His fall was spectacular: on 21 November 1883 he gathered his creditors and declared himself insolvent, handing over real estate and shares against about 2.52 million taels of debt. The same article says he had been planning a large property firm and owned in Shanghai over 2,900 mu of undeveloped land and over 320 mu built on. The article attributes the collapse to a cash panic before the Sino-French War. Those are one Chinese author’s figures and I have not been able to check them in Xu’s own memoir.

How did Dent fail?

The immediate cause was the London financial crisis of 1866. The failure of the discount house Overend, Gurney and Company set off bank runs and hit many firms; Dent & Co. was forced to shut its Hong Kong office. A petition for bankruptcy was filed in the Supreme Court of Hong Kong on 29 June 1867, and the firm is said to have folded officially that year. One account says the headquarters moved to Shanghai after the Hong Kong collapse.

In Hong Kong, half of the firm’s Pedder Street land was sold to the Hongkong Hotel Company, which built the colony’s first deluxe hotel; the site was later redeveloped as The Landmark in 1979.

Why does a firm that failed in 1867 still matter?

Because its people and its site outlasted it. The Bund plot at No. 14 changed hands and now carries a bank, and the comprador’s family fed into the first Chinese-owned steamship company. The firm also marks the point at which the Shanghai hongs stopped being a handful of Canton refugees and began to be a market with failures as well as fortunes: Dent was among the first to open in 1843 and among the first of the great houses to go under.

What does a failed hong tell us about the trade?

Dent’s end shows how thinly capitalised the houses could be. The firm kept offices in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and its collapse followed a failure in London, so it was plainly exposed to the London money market. A firm that had stood at the centre of the coast trade since the 1820s was bankrupt within about a year of the 1866 crisis, and its Hong Kong land was sold off in pieces, as the Pedder Street sale shows. Jardines, with a different balance of partners and a growing list of shipping and warehouse interests, stayed in business. The sources I read do not compare the two balance sheets, so this is an inference from the sequence of events, not a documented finding.

For the Chinese side the lesson was different. Xu Run’s later career at China Merchants, and Tong King-sing’s at Jardines before it, show compradors turning a foreign house’s training into their own enterprises. Xu’s 1883 collapse suggests the same exposure to credit cycles that finished Dent, with land in place of opium chests.

What the sources disagree on

• When Dent failed: the crisis is 1866, but the bankruptcy petition and the “officially folded” date are 1867.
• Where its headquarters were at the end: one source says Shanghai, but I found no Shanghai record of what the firm did there after 1867.
• Why it failed: the sources I read name the 1866 London crisis but give no balance-sheet detail.

What happened after 1949?

Nothing, in the firm’s own terms: it had been gone for eight decades. The later history of the No. 14 plot belongs to the Bank of Communications Building.

What to look for

Stand on the Bund opposite No. 14. The grey building you see is the Bank of Communications Building, not Dent’s. Nothing of the 1840s office survives. The firm’s traces are in two other places: the Xu Run story, told through the China Merchants Steam Navigation Building at No. 9 the Bund, and Hong Kong, where the Pedder Street site is now a shopping complex.