世界首富中国造

世界首富中国造

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年的珠江边，出了位世界首富。2001年，“红顶商人”伍秉鉴与洛克菲勒、比尔·盖茨以及成吉思汗、和珅、宋子文等人一起，被美国《亚洲华尔街日报》评为上一千年世界上最富有的50个人。

伍秉鉴这个名字与十三行密不可分。1801年，他从父亲手中继承了十三行中的怡和行，开始了长达40余年的外贸代理生涯。随着十三行的贸易垄断，伍家快速崛起。商业奇才伍秉鉴不但在国内拥有地产、房产、茶园、店铺等，而且在美国投资铁路、证券、保险等，是英国东印度公司最大的债权人。一位清朝时曾在广州十三行居住了20多年的美国商人亨特，在他的《广州番鬼录》一书中说：“1834年，有一次，浩官（伍家自封的商官）对他的各种田产、房屋、店铺、银号及运往英美的货物等财产估计了一下，共约2600万元。” 按照国际银价换算，这个数目相当于今天的50亿元人民币。而在当时的美国，最富有的人资产也不过700 万元。一些西方学者称伍秉鉴为“天下第一大富翁”。

十三行中涌现出的豪商巨富不止一位， 伍秉鉴、潘振承、潘有度、卢文锦、叶上林等这些中国商人被西方世界认为是18世纪世界上最富有的人。在现存的图片中可以清晰地看见，同为十三行富豪的潘家，其中西结合的别墅丝毫不逊色于今天西方亿万富翁的私家庭院。这些极尽奢华的庭院中，处处种植着稀有的古树、各种各样的花卉等。“此外园子里还养着鹿、孔雀、鹳鸟以及鸳鸯。”

THE RlCHEST MAN MADE lN CHlNA

Text edited fromLecture Room, by China Central Television Translation by Leo
图片由文仕文化博物档案馆提供

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)文仕文化博物档案馆是“近代海丝文化流动博物馆”概念的创导者。馆长文仕先生历经40多年对珠江岭南地域文化及欧洲百年文化的搜集，收藏了近40000件博物馆级珍贵史料文物。（官微“canton1840”）