Armenia\’s outsized footprint in Asia

What is the connection between Hong Kong, Yangon, Singapore, Penang, Surabaya, Calcutta and Shell Oil? Answer: Armenians. In fact, there is an Armenian Street in Singapore, Penang, New Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, and Dhaka. Armenian Street in Penang is located in an area that draws visitors with its Muslim mosques, and Chinese and Indian temples.

A good friend\’s observation about Hong Kong street names, particularly Chater Road, piqued my interest in the Armenian connection. Having worked in Chater House, I had not realised that Sir Catchick Paul Chater was born of Armenian parents in Calcutta and became a successful businessman in Hong Kong, co-founding Hongkong Land with the Keswicks.

 

 

The Armenian diaspora is probably the largest in the world in relative terms: only about a third of the estimated population of over 10 million Armenians live in Armenia, while just under half of the total Jewish population of about 13 million live in Israel.

Armenians in the Far East came via India, mostly as merchants. In the 17th and 18th century, Armenians were already important traders of Indian goods for the Russian and Italian markets. From their foothold of Surat in Gujarat, western India, they began to trade with China. Despite being affected by wars – a letter in 1797 described an Armenian trading ship that lost all its possessions after being attacked by French frigates – they prospered.

There is no doubt that Armenian entrepreneurs played an important mercantile role in British colonial history in the Far East. Singapore was founded by Sir Thomas Raffles in 1819. By 1835, the small Armenian community in Singapore had grown prosperous enough to build the Armenian Church of Saint Gregory, the country\’s oldest church.

Anyone who had travelled in the Far East was likely to have stayed in the chain of hotels that the Armenian Sarkies brothers – Martin, Tigran, Aviet and Arshak – founded in the key commercial cities: the Eastern & Oriental Hotel in Penang (1885), the Raffles Hotel in Singapore (1899), the Strand Hotel in Yangon (1901) and Hotel Majapahit in Surabaya (1910).

In addition to the church and Raffles Hotel, the Armenian contribution to Singapore included the founding of The Straits Times newspaper, by Catchick Moses in 1845. Singapore\’s national flower, the orchid \”Vanda Miss Joaquim\”, was named after Agnes Joaquim, who was from a prominent Armenian family.

Royal Dutch Shell, today the second largest energy company in the world, was created in 1907 from the merger of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company and the British Shell Transport and Trading Company.

Shell was formed mainly in the face of competition from the rise of the Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil, which was broken up in 1911.

Few people realised that it was the Armenian oil trader Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian who arranged the merger between the two companies. In his time, he was probably one of the wealthiest man in the world, starting in the Russian oil industry and being one of the first to explore oil in Iraq, then part of the Ottoman empire, through the consortium Turkish Petroleum Company.

Even though he was reportedly offered sole ownership of the Iraqi oil concession, he believed in partnership with those European companies that had the ability and capacity to develop the oil fields. He was known as \”Mr Five Per Cent\”, because of his habit of retaining five per cent of all his deals, including the Shell merger.

Most people remember him for the Museum Gulbenkian in Lisbon, which houses his wonderful collection of art, ranging from pieces from the Mesopotamia period to Eastern Islamic artefacts and a stunning collection of Rene Lalique\’s crystal pieces.

When you realise that such a small community of immigrants from a small country in West Asia can make such a footprint in history in the rest of Asia, you begin to understand the importance and opportunities of globalisation.

Globalisation is not about quantity, but the quality of inter-connection between different parts of the world. Small communities of traders have made possible the trading of goods and services around the world, even in the days when communication was difficult. Indeed, their foresight and ability to see opportunities and create partnerships and mergers of new enterprise in new fields is their hallmark of success.

These communities thrived on knowledge, research and innovation.

The footprints of Armenian traders and investors, past and present, suggest to us that talented people from small countries have a lot to offer the rest of the world.

It is no wonder that cities which welcomed and allowed these communities to flourish became themselves the centres of trading and commerce in Asia, especially Hong Kong and Singapore.

Andrew Sheng is author of the book From Asian to Global Financial Crisis