The Shanghai tailoring tradition has the same origin as most Western influence in China: Opium. The British were buying vast quantities of tea and silk to take back to England and had only illegal narcotics to close the trade gap. Poppy farms and opium processing plants in India, fast clipper ships to bring the product to the China market, and heavily-guarded opium storage hulks moored off the coast where local smugglers could pick up supplies.

In 1839, China's opium commissioner seized and destroyed 20,000 chests of opium from British traders in the southern city of Canton. The British demanded compensation and, as an added penalty, the opening of five ports along the China coast - at that time all foreigners in China were still confined to Canton.

This started the First Opium War, which ended in defeat for the Qing Dynasty at the hands of the superior military power of the British East India Trading Company. The Chinese were forced to open up the five ports including Shanghai which was declared open to foreign trade on November 14th, 1843.

In the years that followed, foreigners from many nations began expanding their businesses and trade in China and especially in Shanghai. Living and working here naturally meant establishing lines to supply the necessities and creature comforts from home, and bringing in expert tailors was no exception.

It is a little known fact that during the years immediately following the Treaty of Nanking which ended the Opium Wars there was a wave of Jewish immigrants into Shanghai, mostly from Baghdad and Bombay (now Mumbai), among them the famous Sasoons and Hadoons who built many of the buildings and trading empires here at the time.

Whether there is a direct connection or not, it is interesting to note that many (if not most) of the famous Savile Row tailors were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Filling Shanghai's newfound need for quality tailors from England saw many skilled Jewish tailors arriving on the shores of the Bund on the Huang Pu River.

Over the decades as the master tailors who had come from England grew old. They had brought with them young apprentices who were by this time master tailors in their own right, but sending back to England seemed unnecessary if there were ready and able hands available locally to learn the craft.

During the 1880s and 1890s these master tailors began to recruit young boys from the nearby province of Zhejiang. These boys were the sons of farmers and Chinese dressmakers. They were used to a bitter life of hard work, their hands were small and well-suited to the craft, and their economic situations were such that the prospect of moving to the big city to apprentice under a master tailor from England was a fine opportunity indeed.

These young boys from Zhejiang became the first Chinese Western suit makers and by 1928 at the height of Shanghai's Grand Days when it was know as "The Paris of the East, the New York of the West" practically all of the tailors in Shanghai were Chinese. It was during this time that Shanghai tailors truly acquired the international reputation as world-class tailors for Chinese prices.

After the revolution in 1949, attitudes towards the West as well as ideas about fashion, conformity, and virtually everything else underwent huge changes. Most of the tailors that could, left for Hong Kong or Taiwan; the majority of those who stayed in Shanghai eventually stopped practicing their trade all together.

Many of the tailors who went to Hong Kong or Taiwan set up shop and took on new apprentices there. They continued to flourish over the years. Taiwan never achieved the kind of status for tailoring that Shanghai had once had, and although Hong Kong enjoyed a similar reputation for cheap prices and quality work, the Chinese tailors there have since been largely supplanted by Indian suit makers. Neither of these places ever truly replaced old Shanghai for quality.

In 2003, Dave K.C. Shiung, originally an apprentice to one of those long-gone master tailors of old Shanghai, brought his shop back the source of his master's training. With his little shop on Wuyuan road in the old French Concession, Dave keeps the tradition of those old masters alive today and continues to pass on the same techniques and values to the next generation of Shanghai tailors.