The Man Who Inspired Shanghai

The world’s most famous tipple brand became a ’30s symbol of a modern and glamorous Shanghai. It wasn’t limited to jazz venues and speakeasy bars, but was also favoured by the city’s intellectuals, poets and writers, who were vastly inspired by its progressive attitude.Historian and novelist. 

- Paul French ​​​​​​​

THE ICONIC JOHNNIE WALKER STRIDING MAN FIRST STEPPED OFF THE BOAT AND ONTO SHANGHAI’S FAMOUS BUND IN 1910. His progression through the select clubs of the busy waterfront, the emerging grand hotels of the Nanking and Bubbling Well Roads, and his incursions into the city’s tree-shaded French Concession were completely in step with the Chinese port city’s own rise to greatness.

In the early days of Shanghai’s rise in the closing decades of the 19th century, gin had been the city’s drink – gin pahits, gin slings, and gin and tonics. Shanghai, though, developed as a more international city, where sophisticated Chinese mixed with Americans, French, and a myriad of other nationalities – and whisky supplanted gin. Famously, the beggar boys of Shanghai cried: “No mama, no papa, no whisky soda...” The stengah (a term derived from the Malay word for “half” – half whisky and half soda), a drink that resonates through the pages of Somerset Maugham’s Far Eastern Tales, became Shanghai’s favoured tipple.

By the 1920s, when Shanghai was becoming a forest of Art Deco skyscrapers, neon signs and vast dance halls – when the city was earning its soubriquet of “Paris of the East” – whisky became its elites’ drink of choice. Whisky advertising, along with that for cars, passenger ship lines, and newly arrived Hollywood movies, was ubiquitous and instantly recognisable.