Butterfield & Swire ranks as one of Britain's most proud and powerful companies in the China trade. Sometime in the late 19th Century it came to dominate Yangtze River shipping; it also operated a first-class fleet of ships up & down the China coast. When the Japanese in 1895 demanded the cession of Formosa, after defeating China in war, the influential taipans of Butterfield & Swire sent a haughty admonition to His Majesty's Minister in Peking: the Japanese, they insisted, must not be permitted to encroach on British trading privileges.
Now, as His Majesty's...
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