Wing Sang

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This is 219 King Edward Street

Although it is quite hard to see in the photo this building is labled Wing Sang Fruiterer.

As a point to try and establish some history this did not seem very promising as recorded history of what was potentially a chinese family business is thin on the ground.

However it turns out that Wing Sang is potentially not a local chinese family business but potentially a branch of a more substaintial Australian business.
I can't be certain of this but this article published in the Evening Post (A Wellington newspaper unfortunately) refers to a court case around fruit and its export to New Zealand and sights Wing Sang (as an innocent party) as the exporter, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that this may have been a branch of their fruit business.

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Assuming that the two are related (the Dunedin and Sydney Wing Sangs) then a short history is as follows taken from http://about.nsw.gov.au/collections/doc/sign-wing-sang-co/

After the gold rush, many Chinese Australians took to growing vegetables or became hawkers. Mar Sun Gee, grandfather of the sign's donor, was one of the five business people who founded Wing Sang & Co in Sydney's Haymarket in 1890. (The others founders included Kwok 'George' Bew and Ma Ying-piu.) Like many of Sydney's Chinese community in the nineteenth century, they had come from Canton (Guangdong) province. In fact all five had come from the same Chinese village, Sha Chung, which is 45 minutes drive north of Macau, in the Zhongshan area.


Wing Sang & Co bought and sold fruit and vegetables in Sydney's markets, specialising as banana wholesalers. As a result of considerable business acumen, the company expanded rapidly and became the marketing agent for fruit and vegetables produced by Chinese growers in northern New South Wales, Queensland and the Pacific. It began importing bananas from Fiji in 1900. Wing Sang & Co became one of the most successful firms in Sydney's Chinese community.