A Bit of Dairy in Old Shanghai (until the Japanese destroyed it) – Red Seal Milk

Milk was a good business in old Shanghai as Shanghailanders liked their dairy. I’ve blogged before on the Shanghai Dairy Farms and also on the Clover Milk Company (both sold pasteurized milk from small locally reared herds out to the west of the city. When the Japanese invaded in 1937 these farms were isolated outside the Japanese lines and milk became scarce in the city proper. Guess what? – for those who like then and now stuff – they shipped in powdered milk from Hong Kong.

Red Seal (the advert below is from 1936) was the brand of the American-owned Poplar Grove Farms and advertised itself as “tuberculin-free”. Though their head office was on Medhurst Road (Taixing Road), Poplar Grove was in Kiangwan, close to Chapei (Zhabei), in northern Shanghai, outside the limits of the International Settlement. It was established in 1934. The farm, termed a “scientific dairy”, was state of the art for a Chinese dairy farm in the 1930s and reportedly cost a million dollars to establish. It suffered badly in 1937 with almost all of its 400-head of “pedigree American cattle” being killed, during two rounds of bombing by 16 Japanese planes during the fighting around Shanghai in August that year (see picture of the devastated farm below). At the time of the attack the farm’s manager, American J.H. McKinnon (from Houston, Texas), pretended to be dead, lying in a crater covered in cow blood, after the Japanese air force strafed and bombed the facility, waiting until they had passed on to other targets. Sadly many of the Chinese staff (who wore white uniforms to denote the high sanitary standards at the farm)  who fled the attack into nearby fields were machine gunned and killed by  low flying planes – their uniforms easy to spot from the air. The raid led to a protest by the American Consulate in Shanghai as McKinnon had hoisted several large American flags around the property which should have warned the Japanese planes off. The ornate and well laid out farm (which included immaculate lawns and flower beds) was left a smouldering ruin.

Following the attack the farm was effectively out of action – Mrs Charles Morris Campbell, the sales manager for Red Seal and Poplar Grove, left Shanghai on an evacuation ship and was back in SanFrancisco by the end of August 1937

Japanese bombing wiped out Poplar Grove’s herd of cows in August 1937