1 · Position
Founded in Hong Kong in 1850, thirty-five years before Isetan and two before Boucicaut took his partnership in Paris. Its original list of services reads as a small town rather than a shop: tailor and outfitter, draper, provisions dealer, wine and spirits merchant, auctioneer of antiques, baker, restaurant, bar.
2 · ⚑ Taken, and rebuilt
During the Japanese occupation between 1941 and 1945 all Lane Crawford properties and assets were seized by the Japanese authorities and the store's operations were transferred to Matsuzakaya, itself a Japanese draper of 1611. After the war Lane Crawford rebuilt from nothing, expanding its import-export division from foodstuffs into cosmetics and pearls. No European house in this group was ever confiscated and handed to a competitor; the Library records it because the survival is the achievement.
3 · Why it is in the Library
It is Asia's pioneering luxury department store and its buyers are known for finding designers before anyone else in the region. Its Hong Kong flagship sits inside the IFC — LHL-S-238 IFC, Hong Kong — which places one entry of this Library physically inside another.
4 · Candour
⚑ The founders, the ownership history and the current position are not established here, and the entry does not state them.