Mark Ten Suie Trading Company Records, 1899-1906

Mark Ten Suie, also known as Ten Suie Mark and T.S. Mark, was a Chinese American merchant working in Seattle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Born in China around 1861, he immigrated to the US around 1872, arriving in the Seattle area around 1876, though published records of the exact date vary. Beginning around 1888, entries in the Seattle city directory business section note import businesses run by Mark Ten Suie, including the Mark Ten Suie Co., the Mark Ten Suie & Long Co., and Mark Ten Suie Bazaar, selling items like Japanese and Chinese curios, coffee and tea, as well as “Ladies Underwear.” Between 1891 and 1902, these businesses are listed at 813 2nd Avenue, and later at 908 1st Ave. From 1899 to 1904, he was president of the Mark Ten Suie Trading Company. Later, he was a manager of the Chinese side (Canton branch) of the American-Chinese Silk Manufacturing Company, which manufactured silk in China for the American market. With this work he traveled back and forth between Seattle and China in the 1910s, and in the 1920s he unsuccessfully advocated for the construction of a silk manufacturing plant in Seattle. Though he is described in newspapers of the time as being wealthy, he also suffered some financial difficulties and filed for personal bankruptcy in 1905.

Mark Ten Suie was a member of the First Methodist Church and is described as a Christian in the local press. In 1899, he married a white woman, Stella Crane, and in 1909 became engaged to another European-American woman, Helene Tobyne. He never married Tobyne, and local newspaper accounts discuss issues with the interracial marriage. Their friends discouraged the union and the couple could not find a minister willing to perform the ceremony, so they parted ways.

There is little record of the life and work of Mark Ten Suie after the early 1920s.

The Mark Ten Suie Trading Company

In 1899, Mark Ten Suie formed the Mark Ten Suie Trading Company together with partners J.W. Kahle, one of the owners of the Crescent Manufacturing Company in Seattle, and local businessman H.T. Stoel, Jr. According to a ledger in the collection, most of the stock in the company was issued to Chinese Americans in Washington State, Oregon, and Montana, with additional stock issued to shareholders in St. Paul, Minnesota and Boston, Massachusetts. Mark Ten Suie sold his stock in the company and left the business in 1904, filing for personal bankruptcy in 1905. The remaining owners dissolved the company in 1906 and sold the remaining stock and a building owned by the company at First and Broad Street.