While You On and HK Old Mary were important pioneers, it was the Dongyang craftsmen and Shanghainese merchants who elevated the HK wooden furniture industry to the next level both artistically and commercially.
” You On had stores at 72 Canton Road in Kowloon and Queen’s Road on Hong Kong island and a factory in the New Territories and before the War it was the largest wooden furniture maker in Southern China with over 500 workers. In suiting the taste of foreigners, the Wan family developed remarkably eclectic products, such as the “altar cocktail bar”,”traditional Chinese telephone table” and the “praying scholar among Chinese clouds with electric light bulb on its head. One of the family members, Wan King-shan (温镜山) was the founding supervisor of HKFCMA and according to Matthew Turner (author of “Made in Hong Kong” and historian of HK industrial design), another family member Wan Sze-yau was a pioneer in adapting Chinese furniture to American taste in order to facilitate exports to the United States and “ideas for new pieces seem to have come directly from American servicemen, who would suggest them to Wan himself”. The wooden furniture industry in Hong Kong can be traced back to the late 19 th century with You On Company (耀安), which was founded in Hong Kong in 1897 by the Wan family. Starting from the 1920s, Dongyang craftsmen began to migrate overseas, first arriving in Hong Kong, then Malacca, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore in around 1935 and later Taiwan in 1949. With the dawn of industrialization in China, mass production of furniture by Dongyang craftsmen in factories began at the turn of the 20th century and the most prominent of the earliest factories was Ren Yi Factory (仁藝廠) in Hangzhou which was founded in 1896 by the Scottish medical missionary David Duncan Main (梅方伯, 1856-1934), the first enterprise known to mass produce Dongyang furniture and also export it overseas, winning a prize at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.īy 1920, there were over 30 Dongyang furniture factories in Shanghai, employing over 400 Dongyang craftsmen. During the reign of Ching Dynasty Emperor Jiaqing and Daoguang, hundreds of Dongyang wood craftsmen worked in the Forbidden City palace. Dongyang, which is located in the Jinhua prefecture (金華) near Hangzhou, had been famous for its woodcarving since the Tang Dynasty and by the mid Ching Dynasty onwards, its wood carving was very intricate, depicting scenes from famous Chinese folklore and recognized as the best of the four top wood carvings locations in China. To tell the story of these Shanghainese carved wood furniture makers, one must start with Dongyang, where many of the craftsmen came from. Although today most of these firms are no longer active, their products continue to be fixtures in many homes from generations to generations and remain highly valued in the antique furniture market. From the 1930s through 1980s, these Shanghainese furniture and chest makers through excellent craftsmanship and global vision exported their products all over the world, entering the homes of American families and even Buckingham Palace. However, the founding president of the HKFCMA in 1961 and many of the key players in that industry during that period actually came from Shanghai, specifically the city of Dongyang (東陽) in Zhejiang province which had been known for its carved wooden furniture for centuries. were pioneers of the export carved wood furniture industry in Hong Kong and Jimmy himself actually served as president of the industry group – Hong Kong & Kowloon Art Carved Furniture & Camphor-Wood Chests Merchants Association (港九藝術雕刻家俬樟木槓商會, hereafter referred to as HKFCMA) – for many years.
York Lo: Shanghainese Wood Carvers and the Development of the Wooden Furniture Industry in Hong KongĪs mentioned in the article “There was Something About Hong Kong Old Mary…”, Chiuchow natives Mary Wong and her son Jimmy Tse of HK Old Mary Sing Shun Co.