Shanghainese Tailoring in Hong Kong: The Red Gang Tradition Explained

Ask a Hong Kong tailor where the city's craft came from and the answer is usually Shanghai. Before 1949, Shanghai had the largest and most skilled Western tailoring trade in China, run mostly by migrants from Ningbo who called themselves, and were called by others, the Red Gang. When they followed their foreign clients south, they gave Hong Kong its reputation for fine suits. Understanding that tradition helps you choose a house today and know what to ask for.

What is the Red Gang in tailoring?

The Red Gang, or Hongbang, is the name for the Ningbo tailors who learned Western tailoring in the late 19th century and went on to dominate Shanghai's suit trade. Many came from Fenghua, on the Fenghua River near Ningbo, which is why they are also called the Fengbang. The name comes from their first customers: Chinese people then called Westerners red-haired, and these were the tailors who dressed them.

Where did Shanghainese tailoring come from?

Shanghainese tailoring grew out of Ningbo's long tradition of tailors and Shanghai's foreign concessions. Ningbo tailors learned Western cutting from British firms with branches in Shanghai, from Russian tailors in China's northeast, and from French, German and Japanese tailors. One Ningbo tailor, Jiang Liangtong, opened one of Shanghai's first suit shops in 1896. By 1946 a tailors' union in Shanghai counted 3,050 members working in 420 shops.

Training was long. Apprentices usually started at about 14 and spent around three years before they were trusted to cut trousers; jackets came later. In 1941 the Shanghai Cutting and Tailoring College opened, and its graduates carried the Red Gang methods into the next generation.

Why did Shanghai's tailors move to Hong Kong?

Shanghai's tailors moved to Hong Kong because their clients did. During the civil war of 1946 to 1949, European firms and many foreign residents left Shanghai for British-run Hong Kong, and after 1949 more than 600 Red Gang tailors followed. They came from a trade far larger and more sophisticated than Hong Kong's.

• Chan Wing-wah, born in Ningbo in 1922 and a 1943 graduate of the Shanghai tailoring college, began making suits in Hong Kong in 1948. His firm, W.W. Chan & Sons, set up a workshop in Kowloon in 1950 and opened its first shop on Cameron Road in 1960.
• Jimmy Chen, from Pudong, arrived the same year and opened at 12A Cameron Road. Lyndon Johnson, Clark Gable and William Holden became clients, and Jimmy Chen & Co still trades from The Peninsula's arcade.
• H. Baromon, founded in Shanghai in 1919, opened in Hong Kong in 1948 at the Hotel Cecil in Central and later dressed John F. Kennedy.
• Ascot Chang, a shirtmaker from Fenghua, arrived in 1949 with about $10, sold shirts door to door and opened his own shop on Kimberley Road in 1953. Ascot Chang is now run by his grandson.

Demand came quickly. American sailors and servicemen on shore leave became regular customers from the 1950s, and by the 1960s an estimated 500 tailor shops worked in Tsim Sha Tsui. Kimberley Road was once spoken of as Hong Kong's Savile Row.

What makes the Shanghainese cut different?

The Shanghainese jacket is known for a full, rounded chest. Built on British and Russian technique, it relies on a canvas front and heavy pressing with steam to curve the fabric over the chest. The cut was developed for Western clients and favors careful detail and basted fittings over speed.

House styles have moved on. W.W. Chan's standard jacket now has little padding, a light three-layer chest, a 3-roll-2 front and a Milanese lapel buttonhole, and the firm will build a roped, padded shoulder or a soft Neapolitan one on request. What has stayed is the method: a floating canvas, hand-sewn lapels and buttonholes, and as many basted fittings as the fit needs. Our guide to English, Italian and American tailoring shows where these shoulders come from.

Did the Red Gang make the first Chinese suit?

Ningbo's tailors are credited with several firsts: China's first Western suit, the first Chinese-owned suit shop, the first tailoring school and the first textbook on suit making. They are also linked to the Zhongshan suit, the high-collared tunic later known abroad as the Mao suit. One account says Sun Yat-sen asked a Ningbo tailor living in Yokohama, Zhang Fangcheng, to design him a new outfit in the early 1900s, and Shanghai firms later advertised their own claims to the design.

Historians treat parts of this story with caution, since the origin of the Zhongshan suit is told in several versions. What is clear is that Red Gang tailors changed how China made clothes. In 2011 the tailoring technique of Baromon's Shanghai company was added to China's national list of intangible cultural heritage. For the collar itself, see our guide to mandarin collars and Nehru jackets.

Which Hong Kong tailors carry on the Shanghainese tradition?

A handful of houses still trace a direct line to the Shanghai migration, and a few more keep the Shanghainese way of working. Fewer still make in Hong Kong: by 2025 most of the city's houses had moved production elsewhere.

Empire International is a useful example of how the tradition survives. It was founded in 1983 by Anthony Asaf, a generation after the migration, but its five veteran tailors, led by a head cutter who began at 12, work the Shanghainese way, with basted fittings in a glass-walled workshop on Mody Road.

How has Shanghainese tailoring changed since the 1980s?

Two shifts reshaped the trade. In the 1980s, lighter and finer Italian fabrics became fashionable; they were less forgiving to work, especially in Hong Kong's humidity, and many tailors switched to fused fronts, glued rather than stitched, to work faster. The best houses kept the canvas, and the trade split between craft and volume. Our guide to fused vs canvas explains the difference.

The second shift was decline. Hong Kong had 815 tailor shops in 1991 and 265 in 2004, many of the remaining master tailors are older, and few apprentices join. Some firms are trying to change that: Bonham Strand, a social enterprise founded in 2012, pairs veteran tailors with young apprentices.

What does Shanghainese tailoring mean for a client today?

For a client, the Shanghainese label is a promise of method more than a fixed look: a pattern cut for you, a canvassed jacket shaped by pressing, and fittings in a basted jacket. Bespoke at the established houses of Central starts at about $1,150 to $1,900 for a two-piece suit, and often more, approximate 2026 prices, and W.W. Chan quotes about six weeks. Our guide to getting a suit made in Hong Kong covers prices and timing in full.

To find the houses, see our guide to Hong Kong's tailor districts and our ranking of the best tailors in Hong Kong.

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