Intra-Asian Marketing: Aw Boon-haw's Commercial Network, 1910–1937

Between the 1910s and the 1940s, a Chinese merchant named Aw Boon-haw (Hu Wenhu in Mandarin) created and utilized a commercial network that spanned almost all of East Asia. ¹ In 1908, upon the death of his father, he had inherited at age twenty-six nothing more than one drug store, a traditional-style Chinese herbalist’s shop in Rangoon, Burma, which had sold all of its goods locally for decades. By the 1930s, he presided over a pharmaceutical business that had more than 10,000 employees and branches in almost every major East Asian city, ranging from Rangoon in the west to Taipei in the east and from Beijing in the north to Jakarta and Surabaya in the south (see map). ²