Silas Aaron Hardoon

Why Shanghai knows the name

Silas Aaron Hardoon (哈同, Hātóng) was a Jewish merchant from Baghdad who bought up frontage on East Nanjing Road and built Aili Garden (爱俪园), a walled private estate on the old Bubbling Well Road. The Shanghai Concessions Gazetteer calls him the richest foreigner in Shanghai. After he died in 1931 his estate was contested for sixteen years. His name now survives mostly through the exhibition hall that stands where his garden was, and through a shelf of stories about him that are harder to check than they look.

Where did he come from, and when did he arrive?

The sources do not agree on his birth year. The Shanghai Concessions Gazetteer gives 1846. English and Chinese Wikipedia give 1851, and Chiara Betta, who wrote on him in her doctoral work, prints “1851?” in her 2003 article. All agree on Baghdad, a poor Jewish family, and a move to Bombay in his childhood; the gazetteer puts the move at age five, Chinese Wikipedia at 1856. In Bombay he went to a charity school paid for by David Sassoon, the Baghdadi merchant whose firm was then building a trading empire across India and China.

The arrival date is just as loose. English Wikipedia and a genealogy blog say 1868. The gazetteer and Chinese Wikipedia say 1873. Historic Shanghai says 1874, and the University of Zurich’s China-West database, drawing on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Jonathan Goldstein’s The Jews of China, puts him in Hong Kong for the Sassoons from 1868 to 1873 and in Shanghai from 1874. The safe statement is that he came out in his late teens or early twenties, in the employ of the Sassoon house, sometime between 1868 and 1874.

Was he really a rent collector and night watchman?

Probably he started low in the firm, but the colourful detail is thin. English Wikipedia says he began as a rent collector and watchman for David Sassoon & Co.; Historic Shanghai says godown watchman on twelve shillings a week. Neither points to a payroll or letter. The gazetteer, the most official source here, says only that the Sassoon firm sent him to Shanghai. The Sassoon firms did employ many poor Baghdadi Jews, and Betta notes that David Sassoon paid for their children’s schooling, so a modest start is plausible. It is not documented.

How did he move from salaried clerk to property owner?

The gazetteer’s version is short. In 1886 he left the original Sassoon house for the “New Sassoon” firm, E. D. Sassoon & Co., as manager of its property department, and traded opium for himself on the side. Other accounts reshuffle the order. English Wikipedia has him leave David Sassoon & Co. in 1882, try cotton trading for about three years, then manage the E. D. Sassoon branch; the Zurich database has cotton brokerage in 1882–1886 and E. D. Sassoon as manager and then partner in 1887–1901. Everyone has the same middle: a stretch inside the Sassoon world, handling property and opium.

Opium was legal then, and the sources are open about it. The gazetteer says that in the late nineteenth century he and the Sassoon firm jointly ran a foreign-opium exchange (洋药公所) that dominated the Shanghai trade. James Carter, writing for The China Project, says part of the fortune came from opium.

In 1901 he opened his own firm, Hardoon & Co. (哈同洋行), for property. English Wikipedia says instead that he left E. D. Sassoon in 1920, during a land boom; the gazetteer and the Zurich database both support 1901 as the break, so the 1920 date looks wrong, but I have not found a primary record that settles it.

How much of Nanjing Road did he own?

The gazetteer says he bought a great deal of land on and near Nanjing Road and built many houses to rent out. That much is firm. The Shanghai municipal information office still describes the lane houses of Cichang Lane and Ci’an Lane on East Nanjing Road as his development. How much of the street was his is not firm. Chinese Wikipedia and a 2014 news feature say 44 per cent, with no source. A count of his holdings against the street’s total would settle it, and I have not found one published.

The gazetteer adds a second claim: he paid 600,000 taels to pave one section of Nanjing Road with ironwood blocks (铁黎木), which raised his public profile and the value of his frontage. That is a single line in the gazetteer, repeated in Chinese Wikipedia. It is the best-attested part of the paving story, and it is much more modest than the version in which Hardoon built the road. Nanjing Road began in 1845 as a path called Park Lane and was named Nanking Road by the Municipal Council in 1862, according to English Wikipedia; a city government page says it was renamed around 1865. Hardoon cannot have built a road that was already there when he arrived.

What did he do in the two municipal councils?

He sat on both. The Shanghai Concessions Gazetteer says he was a director of the French Concession’s municipal council from 1892 to 1901 and of the Shanghai Municipal Council (the International Settlement’s governing body) from 1900 to 1903. The Zurich database calls both roles advisory and gives 1892–1903 and 1900–1904. Chinese Wikipedia gives 1887 and 1898, and Carter says he was elected to the Settlement council in 1900.

Betta adds a piece of context: Baghdadi councillors who were Sassoon partners gave the Sassoons a direct voice in the International Settlement until 1904. Her paragraph does not name Hardoon, but its footnote points to her work on him. The pattern of a Sassoon man on the council in these years fits the dates the gazetteer gives. I have not seen the council minutes, so the exact years remain unresolved.

Was he a Qing loyalist or a friend of revolutionaries?

Both, according to the gazetteer: late in the Qing period he sheltered anti-Qing revolutionaries and also kept good terms with the Qing government. The source gives no names and no dates. The record here is a single sentence, so I leave it there.

Who was Luo Jialing, and how did the household work?

His wife was Luo Jialing (罗迦陵), known in English as Liza Hardoon; the gazetteer writes her name 罗嘉陵. Chinese Wikipedia says she was born in Shanghai on 28 March 1864 to a French sailor who left soon after and a mother from Fuzhou who died when she was a child. Carter names the father as Isaac Roos. Some Chinese accounts say she was a sailors’ companion in Hongkou; the Chinese Wikipedia article states there is no substantive evidence for that. On the marriage, Chinese Wikipedia gives 24 September 1886 and Carter says 1886, in both Jewish and Chinese ceremonies; Historic Shanghai says 1895. According to the Chinese Wikipedia article on the estate case, the ceremony had no legal registration and they registered at the British consulate in 1928.

She was a devout Buddhist; he did not convert. Betta pictures a man who was, by her reading, the least Anglicised of the Baghdadi elite: his English carried a thick Arabic accent, he still jotted notes in Judaeo-Arabic in the late 1920s, and he was the only Baghdadi who regularly received visitors in Chinese dress. She argues that in Chinese scholarly publications he sponsored, he had himself shown in a scholar’s gown, as a Chinese merchant-philanthropist, not an English gentleman.

The couple had no children of their own. Hardoon adopted foreign children who took his surname, and Luo adopted Chinese children who took hers. Counts vary: Chinese Wikipedia says 11 foreign and 9 Chinese (though its own list has 11), Historic Shanghai says 11 and 11, and a genealogy blog says about ten or eleven in all. The Hardoon household also relied on Ji Juemi (姬觉弥), who grew up in the garden and later served as manager and as an executor.

What was Aili Garden?

In 1901 Hardoon bought land beyond the settlement boundary on the Jing’an Temple road, now West Nanjing Road. Luo hired the monk Huang Zongyang (黄宗仰) as designer; Chinese Wikipedia says 1902 and Historic Shanghai says 1905. The garden was finished in 1909 (Historic Shanghai, Shanghailander) or 1910 (Chinese Wikipedia). Sizes quoted include 113,000 square metres, 26 acres and 30 acres. Its name, Aili, is generally read as combining the character for love with the first character of Liza’s given name.

The garden doubled as a Buddhist centre. Luo funded a lead-type edition of the Buddhist canon from 1909. In 1913–14 the Huayan University for monks was founded in the grounds and left within months. Hardoon and Ji Juemi then set up Cangsheng Mingzhi University (仓圣明智大学) with attached schools.

Aili Garden was also a household of dozens: family, monks, nuns, tutors and staff. Hugues Martin writes that, before Historic Shanghai published family pictures in 2020, no pictures of the garden were known.

What happened to the garden?

After the Pacific War began in December 1941 the Japanese army used the garden as a base. A fire in 1943 destroyed most of it (Shanghailander and Carter); Historic Shanghai says a fire in the winter of 1941. The graves in the grounds were later moved. After 1949 the city took over the land and put the Sino-Soviet Friendship Building there, dated 1954 or 1955 by different pages. It is now the Shanghai Exhibition Centre.

How did he die, and why did his estate go to court?

Hardoon died at Aili Garden on 19 June 1931. The funeral caused a rift: Luo’s Buddhist customs clashed with the Jewish burial society, and its president resigned, according to Mishpacha. Hardoon was buried in a marble mausoleum in the garden.

His estate was reported at £4 million by the British consul, 172 million yuan or US$150 million in one Chinese account, and US$650 million in an unsourced English Wikipedia line. Chinese Wikipedia’s article on the estate case describes a will dated 10 February 1931 that left everything to Luo if she outlived him, and a British consular court certified it.

The claims came quickly. Ezra Abdullah Hardoon, said to be a cousin, sued in the British court in Shanghai in September 1931; another claimed cousin followed in 1932; both claims were dismissed. A Baghdad court on 2 May 1932 named twelve cousins as heirs. In February 1937 the British court in Shanghai set that judgment aside and upheld Luo’s right. The Iraqi government also said he had died an Iraqi national, a claim complicated by the fact that Hardoon had sought British and French consular protection that conferred no citizenship.

Luo died on 3 October 1941, and the contest passed to the adopted children over a second will dated 30 September 1937. A Shanghai court closed the family case in 1947, sixteen years after his death. An Iraqi claimant, Ezra Salch Hardoon, kept filing until a Shanghai court ended the matter in June 1957.

What the sources disagree on

• Birth: 1846 (gazetteer), 1851 (most others).
• Arrival: 1868, 1873 or 1874.
• Leaving the Sassoon firm: 1882, 1886, or never, until 1901 or 1920.
• Council years: three different sets, and one version calls the roles advisory.
• Marriage: 1886 or 1895; registered 1928 or civil at an earlier date.
• Adopted children: ten, eleven or twenty-odd, depending on the page.
• Fortune: from £4 million to US$650 million.
• Garden: finished 1909 or 1910; destroyed in 1941 or 1943.

Where Betta’s work is the source, it is the stronger one: her archive notes cite the surviving Hardoon Company papers in the Shanghai house property administration archives. I could not read her thesis or her Scribe article, so some of her conclusions reach this page only through secondary summaries.

What to look for

The garden is gone. Its site is the Shanghai Exhibition Centre on West Nanjing Road, and that building is the place to stand if you want to picture the estate that once filled the plot. For Hardoon’s property work, walk East Nanjing Road and look for the lane entrances at Cichang Lane and Ci’an Lane, which a city government page credits to him. The ironwood paving is gone, and the pedestrian street surface is modern. The Beth Aharon synagogue he paid for stood on Museum Road; I did not find a source saying whether the building survives, so check before making a trip.