Fortune magazine's mini-biography:
Silas Aaron Hardoon, who died in 1931, was Shanghai's Julius Rosenwald-millionaire, philanthropist, cultured Jew. Born in Bagdad, educated in Bombay, he joined the firm of David Sassoon& Co., Ltd., switched to E. D. Sassoon & Co. and in 1911 launched into Shanghai real estate. He died worth $150,000,000, most of it representing properties on Shanghai's Fifth Avenue, Nanking Road.
An excerpt from Sin City, by Ralph Shaw, a British journalist in Shanghai from 1937 to 1949:
"Among those who had made immense fortunes by bringing in opium was the 'Baghdad Jew', Hardoon. Starting life as a watchman, he had risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the millions of pipefuls of the drug he had provided for the emaciated sots who were in its deadly grip. But, as if to atone for the misery his trading success had caused, he adopted a family of about nine orphaned children of many races who lived with him in a palatial mansion on Bubbling Well Road."