The Best Undertakers in Shanghai

With so many Shanghailanders in the city between the wars plenty of them inevitably died and had to be buried. The two best known undertakers were T. Macdonald & Co of Sinza Road (now Xinzha Road) and the best known of all, and the man who did all the best Shanghailander funerals, EO Scott of Kiaochow Road (now Jiaozhou Road). Both these ads are from 1936.

Mr Macdonald tended to handle the Hongkou dead apparently and, at least in his ad, seems to have had a nice range of monuments in stock. Of course all the cemeteries they used in Shanghai are gone – Shanghai is an odd city (like Peking) in that all the cemeteries in the downtown areas have been built over (and I think we can safely say there was no orderly removal of human remains before demolition – the idea of Shanghai’s rapacious and vandalising property developers doing the job properly is of course a nonsense).

Scott had a prime location – Kiaochow Road ran from the Bubbling Well Cemetery. He also made a nice sideline in supplying obituaries to the North-China Daily News – he was, afterall, the man most likely to know when anyone worthy of an obit had passed on. Apparently he traded obits for ad space. Sadly this odd doesn’t mention it but Scott’s telegram code was “casket”. Don’t know anything about Mr Macdonald but both appear to have been Scots and frankly there is no other race on earth that make better and more professional undertakers.