The Shanghai Club claimed the invention of the drink, but it spread so rapidly throughout East Asia that the waters were quickly muddied. There are numerous references to it in newspapers and such from the early 1920s. The earliest and sanest recipe I’ve found for the drink dates back to 1922, when J.A. Wolfson, a Manila lawyer, included it in a little cocktails section he contributed to Elsie Gaches’s Good Cooking and Health in the Tropics, published in Manila that year:
Beyond that (as with nearly every early cocktail out of Asia) every recipe is different. The gin, pineapple, egg white and grenadine seem to be bedrock; vermouth, brandy, etc. etc. are all, let us say, grace notes.
I tinkered with this drink quite a bit early this year in preparation for a talk at Tokyo Bar Show on early Asian cocktails and the tastiest version I managed to come up with is this:
Shake well with ice:
1.5 oz/45 ml Plymouth gin
.75 oz/22 ml Martini & Rossi red vermouth
.5 oz/15 ml pineapple juice (canned is acceptable, if not ideal)
.25 oz (heavy)/8 ml lime juice
.5 oz/15 ml egg white
.25 oz (light)/5 ml grenadine
Strain into chilled cocktail glass.