The Shanghai Horse Bazaar and Motor Company Limited

In the early years of the twentieth century there were a lot of factories that made car chassis and engines. These chassis and engines were exported to other countries where local bodybuilders assembled and finished these automobiles.

The International Concession in Shanghai city was an important place where several body builders were settled.

In this story I will start with the most important: the Shanghai Horse Bazaar and  Motor Company Limited (short: SHB). As you understand from the name of company they had something to do with horses. SHB (in Chinese: Longfei, which means Dragon Fly)  was erected in 1851.

It was established near the Shanghai Horse Track, nowadays the People’s Park in downtown Shanghai.  In the lanes of the People’s park you can still recognize the race track.

My friend Lou Ling showed  us a 1908 order catalogue which includes all the products you could buy from the SHB. Horses, carriages, horse food, harnesses and other leatherwork, stable materials etc. etc. In this thick book also cars are offered: made by Swift in the United Kingdom, SHB offers: “We have purchased working drawings from the best body builders in England and claim that we are able to build Motor Car bodies that will equal the best European production. Quotations on application. Upholstered in any material and painted any colour. Estimates free, enquiries solicited.”

At this time the Shanghai Horse Bazaar were also agents for Renault, Morse, Daimler, Rolls Royce, La Buire, Ariel, Westinghouse, Stella, Rapid, Dennis and Alley & McLellan.

A second source of information is a booklet with photos, published by SHB in the early 1920s. It was the granddaughter of a Major Keylock, who found a bound photographic record of the SHB including outside views, staff, main floor, machine shop, painting dept., godown’s, sample of body building, office and upholstery & blacksmith. She sent me a copy.  Major Keylock was in Shanghai from before 1919 when he led a troup into Beijing. He probably had a share in SHB. Great pictures! I show you a small selection. There seems to be more copies of these booklets as I found some of the photos later on the internet.

The more than 30 photos are taken in the beginning of the 1920s or late 1910s.

I showed the photos to Kit Foster, a famous American automotive historian and writer. He identified the vehicles.

SHB made bodies for a lot of different makes, as Scripps-Booths, Stearns-Knights, Bébé-Peugeot, but most of them were Studebakers. Especially the Special Six and the Light Six.

In 1921 there was a Shanghai Automobile Show (yes, I found another earlier one!)  Besides of Studebaker you can see Rolls Royce, Fiat and Maxwell announced on the booth of SHB.
SHB made a lot of Studebakers.

It is difficult to tell how many cars are made by SHB. In the quite good statistics of pre-war Shanghai the cars are arranged by their original make, so for instance all Studebakers are taken together, imported and locally assembled.

Though the company seemed to have stopped in the 1930s, I found it back in a 1947 telephone directory. It most certainly disappeared after the start of the People’s Republic.

OK, yes, there is a car left!!
In the Studebaker museum in South Bend, Indiana, USA, you can find one of the SHB Light Six Coupes. This car belonged to a mr. Coy C. Goodrich who worked for SHB from 1916-1923. The last two years he was the manager, in that time SHB made 500 cars. Goodrich took his car with him when he returned to the US. Everything of the car is made by hand. The body is hand-crafted aluminium and features a four-section windshield and polished aluminium window frames. The interior is trimmed in teak with blue mohair upholstery. The car was donated to the Studebaker collection in 2006 by the Goodrich family.

This is most certainly the oldest Chinese made car still existing.

In my publication `Made in China. Automobiles made before World War II´  I show a big selection of the Shanghai Horse Bazaar photos. This document is still available.