In the 1850s, Hamburg was the third-largest city in the German Confederation; only Berlin and Vienna were larger. Trading in wild animals had begun in 1820 and a road-house menagerie was in operation in the 1840s. A wealthy merchant named Ernst von Merck, a member of parliament in the German government at Frankfurt am Main in 1848 and 1849, assembled a society for the purposes of creating a zoo. On 10 July 1860, at the charter meeting of the Zoological Society of Hamburg (German: Zoologische Gesellschaft in Hamburg), Merck was selected as president.
