People · Municipal Council engineer, financier and land speculator
Frank J. Raven
蕾文Lěiwén · b. 1875
American former Municipal Council surveyor who built a bank and property group in Shanghai in the 1910s-20s; it collapsed in 1935.
Frank J. Raven (蕾文, Lěiwén) was an American who moved from the Shanghai Municipal Council’s engineering staff into banking and property speculation, and whose business group failed in 1935.
He arrived in 1904 as a district supervisor in the Council’s Public Works Department. Three years later he left to start the China Realty Company, and the gazetteer says he used what he had learned about planned road extensions to speculate in land. Over the next two decades he added the Union Trust Company (1915), the Asia Banking Corporation (1917), a Sichuan joint-venture bank (1922), the American Oriental Bank Corporation (1923) and the Union Land Company (1926), plus directorships in two insurance firms.
He sat on the Municipal Council in 1931-1932. In 1935, according to the gazetteer, he went bankrupt through over-speculation and was sentenced by the United States Court for China. The gazetteer gives no death date.