Huang family, Shanghai, ca. 1959-60 - a photo on Flickriver

Huang family, Shanghai, ca. 1959-60

Charles Gesner van der Voort (1916-1991) was working in Shanghai for Holland-China Trading Company (HCHC). When he arrived in 1939, Huang Lijun (or Richard Huang in English; 1907-1971), was already working for the company.

His son Huang Weixin in Rotterdam contacted me when he read about the research for my book “Charles in Shanghai” and recognised his father in a 1936 office group photo: www.flickr.com/photos/161392673@N02/33096482348/

He told me his father did not tell much about his time with Holland-China Trading Company. After the People’s Republic of China took over the Republic of China in 1949, it was not considered positive to have worked for a foreign company in China. Huang Weixin, however, does remember his father and mother discussing helping HCHC employees in an internment camp in Shanghai. From March 1943 to August 1945, foreign enemy nationals were interned by the Japanese. Something else he heard was that ‘frozen company assets’ in Indonesia were released after WWII and this was positive, as his father received some extra money because of this.

During the cultural revolution (1966-1976), many things related to the past like photographs and documents were burnt. This is the reason his parents had almost no photos of themselves and so Huang Weixin and his brother and sister were very happy to find a photo of their father in my Flickr account: the 1936 company group photo. The fact that Huang Lijun was sitting in the front row, next to senior staff, indicates he had an important position in the company.

Huang Weixin studied International Economics at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and, surprisingly, came to Rotterdam himself in 1986 through an exchange program at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He finally got a Dutch PhD. He has been working for a Dutch bank - ex-Mees Pierson (Fortis, now ABN-AMRO) as a banker for commodity trade finance - the same business line of his father but from the banking side. Besides working as a banker, Huang Weixin has been teaching as well. He has continued some teaching activities after his retirement as a banker.

Upon arriving in the Netherlands in 1986, he tried to find out more about the company where his father had worked. However, knowing only the company name in Chinese - 好时洋行, Hǎo shí yángháng, which is the sound of the abbreviation Ho Chi plus yángháng , a special name of foreign companies before 1949 - he was not able to find anything.
Having retired a couple of years ago, his interest for his father’s history increased. Searching the internet for the Chinese name 好时洋行, he found an item for sale which had this name and the name in English (Holland-China Trading Company). This led to finding information on the internet about the research for my book.

If you read this and you also have relatives who worked for Holland-China Trading Company, please contact me at charlesinshanghai1939@gmail.com.
如果有人/有亲戚曾经为这个公司工作过，请联系邮件我 charlesinshanghai1939@gmail.com

This photo shows the Huang family, ca. late 1950s, early 1960s in Shanghai.

Courtesy Huang family archives

Taken on: January 1, 1959

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