The story of Watsons: how a Guangdong eye clinic became Hong Kong’s major licensed opium supplier and Asia’s biggest retail pharmacy
- In an excerpt from a forthcoming book, Patrick Chiu writes that Watsons started in China, supplied opiates under licence, and today has stores all over Asia
The origins of Hong Kong’s ubiquitous pharmacy Watsons date back to 1828, to a clinic in the Pearl River Delta.
In the port city of Canton (Guangzhou), a simple clinic was established by Dr James H. Braford to provide free eye surgery for locals. It expanded to become the Canton Dispensary in 1832 – the first retail chemist and druggist to install a soda fountain in China – and later that decade, Alexander Anderson and Peter Young, both naval surgeons in the British military as well as the East India Company, volunteered there.
When England declared Hong Kong’s occupation on January 26, 1841, Anderson and Young followed the empire south, and jointly set up an apothecary at Possession Point, on Hong Kong Island, then opened the Hong Kong Dispensary at Morgan’s Bazaar in Admiralty, on January 1, 1843.
They were among a handful of chemists who supplied Western medicine and consumer goods to the merchant navy and sailors passing through the then city of Victoria. Two years later, the foundation stone of the Dispensary was laid at 16 Queen’s Road, where the New World Tower now stands.
That same year, upon graduation from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Thomas Boswell Watson journeyed to the Far East, acquiring Dr Anderson’s other clinic in Macau, with his wife, Elizabeth, joining him the following year. In 1848, T.B. Watson wrote to his sister in Scotland about life in Macau, remarking that in addition to the Portuguese, “we count ourselves only four families and one or two Americans and French”.
In 1856, after 12 years in Macau, T.B. Watson sold his clinical practice and joined the Dispensary in Hong Kong as senior partner. His health deteriorated the following year, so he invited his brother’s third son, Alexander Skirving Watson, then aged 22, to come to Hong Kong to take over.
