世界首富中國造

世界首富中國造

It is said that the world's richest man in 1834 was a Qing-dynasty businessman from Guangzhou (then Canton). This man was Wu Bingjian, known to the West by his trading name of Howqua. He was listed in 2001 by the Wall Street Journal Asia as one of the world's wealthiest people in the past millennium, together with Genghis Khan, the Rockefeller family and Bill Gates.

Wu's fortune was intertwined with the fate of the Thirteen Factories or Thirteen Hongs. In 1801, he off i cially took over the family business, E-wo Hong, from his father, and began his 40-plus years of business life as a trade agent. His business grew very fast as the dominance of the Factories of foreign trade grew ever stronger. A savvy merchant, Wu not only made himself the owner of numerous lands, properties, tea plantations and shops at home, but was also heavily invested in assets in America, including railways, securities and insurance, and in the famous British East India Trading Company. In fact, he was the largest creditor of the company at the time. William C. Hunter, an American businessman who had lived in Canton for more than 20 years in the fi rst half of the 1800s, recounted in his book The FanKwae at Canton (Foreigners at Canton), “…but on one occasion, in referring to his total wealth in connection with his various investments in rice-f i elds, dwellings, shops, and the banking establishments known as shroffs, and including his American and English shipments, he estimated it, in 1834, at 26 million dollars.” It would now represent a sum of RMB 5 billion based on the international prices of silver then and now. Even the wealth of the richest American at the time was supposedly less than 7 million dollars. So Wu was known to some Western scholars to be the richest man in the world at his time.

It is said that Wu and his family had a mansion the size of the Grand View Garden depicted in the classical Chinese novel A Dream of Red Mansions. The estate was reportedly home to 500 family members and servants, and had a garden planted with 10,000 pine trees as well as a back garden that joined with the Pearl River through a waterway.

Wu was not the only wealthy merchant that the Thirteen Factories produced. Others, such as Pan Zhencheng, Pan Youdu, Lu Wenjin and Ye Shanglin, were also considered by the West as some of the world's richest men in the 1800s. Their private gardens built in Chinese and Western styles were by no means less luxurious than those of today's billionaires in the West and were often home to rare and ancient trees, all kinds of fl owers and even animals like deer, peacocks, storks and mandarin ducks.

1834年的珠江邊，出了位世界首富。2001年，“紅頂商人”伍秉鑒與洛克菲勒、比爾·蓋茨以及成吉思汗、和珅、宋子文等人一起，被美國《亞洲華爾街日報》評為上一千年世界上最富有的50個人。

伍秉鑒這個名字與十三行密不可分。1801年，他從父親手中繼承了十三行中的怡和行，開始了長達40余年的外貿代理生涯。隨著十三行的貿易壟斷，伍家快速崛起。商業奇才伍秉鑒不但在國內擁有地產、房產、茶園、店鋪等，而且在美國投資鐵路、證券、保險等，是英國東印度公司最大的債權人。一位清朝時曾在廣州十三行居住了20多年的美國商人亨特，在他的《廣州番鬼錄》一書中說：“1834年，有一次，浩官（伍家自封的商官）對他的各種田產、房屋、店鋪、銀號及運往英美的貨物等財產估計了一下，共約2600萬元。” 按照國際銀價換算，這個數目相當于今天的50億元人民幣。而在當時的美國，最富有的人資產也不過700 萬元。一些西方學者稱伍秉鑒為“天下第一大富翁”。

十三行中涌現出的豪商巨富不止一位， 伍秉鑒、潘振承、潘有度、盧文錦、葉上林等這些中國商人被西方世界認為是18世紀世界上最富有的人。在現存的圖片中可以清晰地看見，同為十三行富豪的潘家，其中西結合的別墅絲毫不遜色于今天西方億萬富翁的私家庭院。這些極盡奢華的庭院中，處處種植著稀有的古樹、各種各樣的花卉等。“此外園子里還養著鹿、孔雀、鸛鳥以及鴛鴦。”

THE RlCHEST MAN MADE lN CHlNA

Text edited fromLecture Room, by China Central Television Translation by Leo
圖片由文仕文化博物檔案館提供

Canton1840 is an initiator of mobile museums. Mr. Wen Shi, owner of the Canton1840 mobile museum, has been collecting forty thousand items representing Lingnan region culture and European culture in over forty years. (WeChat: canton1840)文仕文化博物檔案館是“近代海絲文化流動博物館”概念的創導者。館長文仕先生歷經40多年對珠江嶺南地域文化及歐洲百年文化的搜集，收藏了近40000件博物館級珍貴史料文物。（官微“canton1840”）