Charlie Soong built a career in business at a period when the rules of commerce were themselves changing.
The record lists Charlie Soong as Methodist Episcopal missionary, late Qing revolutionary, businessman (1863-1918).
Charlie Soong was born at Hainan in 1863. His recorded nationality is China. He was educated at Vanderbilt University and Duke University.
Industrialisation changed the scale of everything: factories, railways, joint-stock capital and the first modern corporations.
He worked as missionary, businessperson and politician.
Enterprises outlive their founders or they do not, and that is the whole test.
That the business was built from China shaped it: capital, regulation and market size differ by country, and they decide what is even attemptable.
Charlie Soong died in 1918, aged 55. What remains is the enterprise and its consequences, which is the only durable measure of a commercial life.
Achievements
- Educated at Vanderbilt University and Duke University
