The famed Sassoon dynasty traces its origins to its patriarch, David, who was born in 1792 in Baghdad to a wealthy Iraqi Jewish family.

In 1832, he relocated to Bombay and founded a company that was later renamed David Sassoon & Co.

This enterprise quickly came to dominate the opium and cotton trades in the Persian Gulf, India, and East Asia.

Like Mayer Amschel Rothschild before him, David dispatched his sons to important financial centers and trade posts to establish new branches of the family business. The most significant opportunity of such kind emerged after the First Opium War in 1844, when David sent his second son, Elias David Sassoon, to China, where he opened a branch of David Sassoon & Co. in the newly established treaty port of Shanghai. The company's Chinese name was transliterated as Shāxùn Foreign Trade Company (沙逊洋行), and it soon gained prominence by flooding the market with cheap Indian opium.

In 1853, in recognition of his loyalty to the imperial crown and “assistance in the expansion of British trade interests in the East” (i.e. drug trafficking…), David Sassoon was made a British citizen.

Ten years later, he was granted a coat of arms by the Kings, Heralds, and Pursuivants of the College of Arms, featuring symbols that alluded to various biblical verses and Jewish ideas: a palm tree (“The righteous bloom like a date-palm” [Ps. 92:13]), pomegranate (“as full of good deeds as the pomegranate is full of seeds” [Sanhedrin 37a]), lion with a rod in its paw (“The scepter shall not depart from Judah” [Gen. 49:10]), and dove with a laurel branch in its beak (“The dove came back to him toward evening, and there in its bill was a plucked-off olive leaf” [Gen. 8:11]). This armorial emblem was accompanied by its Hebrew motto Emet ve-emunah (Truth and Faith), as well as the Latin equivalent, “Candide et Constanter,”.

David Sassoon passed away in 1864, and under the terms of his will, his oldest son Abdullah became the new chairman of the family enterprise. Abdullah later changed his name to Sir Albert David Sassoon after being knighted, received a baronetcy, and ultimately relocated to London. Soon, however, David’s middle son Elias David—who had built up the operations in China—had a falling out with his brothers, Albert and Sassoon David, and in 1867 opened a rival firm bearing his own name, Messrs. E.D. Sassoon & Co., which directly competed with his father's company. There was no commercial association whatsoever between the two firms, and they became bitter rivals in the opium trade.

To reflect these changes in China, Albert's company, David Sassoon & Co., was dubbed 'Old Sassoon' (老沙逊), while Elias's company, E.D. Sassoon & Co., was referred to as 'New Sassoon' (新沙逊). Despite the rift between Elias and his brothers—and their competing firms—the Sassoons already by the 1870s controlled a staggering 70 percent of the opium flowing into China.

While moral revulsion toward the opium trade was gathering force in Europe and India, the Sassoons proudly embraced their business. Some say that the pomegranate in the family crest commissioned by Albert was, in fact, a poppy capsule—the resemblance is certainly uncanny; judge for yourself. Meanwhile, in China, the trademark and logo of E.D. Sassoon & Co. remained an image of an innocent dove with a laurel branch, and the 'New Sassoons' soon proved to be more dynamic than David Sassoon & Co. By the later Edwardian years, its capital had grown to two or three times that of David Sassoon & Co.'s nominal capital. The company later expanded its operations to Persian Gulf ports, Baghdad, and Japan, and from the late 1870s onward, it acquired poorly performing cotton mills in Bombay, transforming them into successful enterprises.

After the death of Elias David Sassoon in 1880, his oldest son, Jacob Elias Sassoon—who was later also rewarded with a baronetcy—took over the business and opened additional branches in Calcutta and Karachi.

In 1907, the United Kingdom signed a treaty agreeing to gradually eliminate opium exports to China over the next decade, while China agreed to eliminate domestic production during that period. Following this agreement, E.D. Sassoon & Co. was forced to retreat from the opium trade, eventually stopping it completely. Instead, the company invested further in its cotton mill business in Bombay.

This takes us to around the time when our cotton yarn wrapping paper was likely produced. It features the trademark—or “chop”, as it was called then—of E.D. Sassoon & Co., aka “New Sassoon” (新沙逊洋行), with the previously alluded to logo, composed of innocuous parts of the Sassoon family crest. Above the label, an illustration of an imposing building is attached. At that time in China, it was common to add an eye-catching key visual on packaging paper alongside the trademark. The building bears a strong resemblance to the twin building of E.D. Sassoon at No. 20 on the Bund in Shanghai; however, upon closer inspection, it turns out to be the headquarters of the Mitsui Bank in Tokyo, identical to a photo published in 1906. There is no connection between Mitsui and any of the Sassoon family’s financial establishments, such as the Eastern Bank, so it must be assumed that the key visual was attached either in error or as an approximation of what E.D. Sassoon’s China headquarters looked like at the time.

Diversifying away from the opium trade, E.D. Sassoon & Co. had become India's largest textile group by the First World War, renowned for its advanced production technology.

After Sir Jacob Elias Sassoon passed away in 1916, his brothers, Sir Edward Elias Sassoon and Meyer Harry Sassoon, assumed control of the company.

When both died in 1924, Edward's son, Victor, took over E.D. Sassoon & Co. as the main owner and chairman, inherited his uncle's baronetcy and became known as Sir Victor Sassoon.

In 1927, the company was the largest cotton mill owner with 6,500 looms and 250,000 spindles in Bombay, where it was still headquartered.

The profits generated in Bombay were reinvested by the notorious playboy Sir Victor in luxury real estate and hotels in the oriental boomtown of Shanghai. First and foremost, in the "Sassoon House" of the Cathay Hotel (today’s Peace Hotel) on the old Bund No. 20 location, where in March 1930 E.D. Sassoon & Co’s new global headquarter was opened.

By the time the Second World War broke out, E.D. Sassoon & Co. owned 15 cotton mills and was Bombay’s largest private employer with over 30,000 staff, all while its real estate arm, the Cathay Land Co., was the largest property developer in Shanghai, if not in all of China.

Sir Victor lived in Shanghai until the Japanese invasion of the International Settlement in 1941 when all of E.D. Sassoon's assets were seized. 

With the Chinese market closed off, the business of both the Old and the New Sassoon company collapsed. David Sassoon & Co. was "a shadow of the firm it had been at the turn of the century". The company withdrew from India, management passed out of family hands in London, and the firm limped along until it was unceremoniously liquidated sometime in the 1980s.

About a year after Indian independence in 1947, E.D. Sassoon & Co. in Bombay entered voluntary liquidation after selling its mills at low prices, ending more than a century of commercial activities in the city. Sir Victor Sassoon moved to the Bahamas in 1950, where no personal or corporate taxes were imposed, and also transferred E.D. Sassoon & Co.'s head office there. He later married his nurse, who was 38 years his junior, but the union produced no children, and his baronetcy became extinct upon his death in 1961. E.D. Sassoon & Co. continued to operate until 1978, when it merged with an investment company in London and was eventually dissolved.