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TIN-YUKE CHAR
The 1876 Reciprocity Treaty with the United States increased the demand for labor. The 1876 biennial report of the Hawaiian Minister of Finance furnished some data of government expenditures for its active assistance in importation of Chinese labor. The expenditures for the aid of immigration during that past fiscal period was $8,850; of which $3,850 was to pay the passages for 154 arriving Chinese laborers and $5,000 was advanced to a firm of rice planters, Chulan and Company, who had 210 Chinese laborers on their way from Hong Kong.
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Letters of credit were also given to Afong and Achuck and to Luke Asiu to assist passages of 400 laborers to come to Hawaii's sugar plantations. The Hawaiian government expected return of the money advanced by an arrangement with the plantations through payroll deductions.
Labor conditions in Hawaii were strongly influenced by Christian missionary presence in Hawaii. In the 1882 report of the Hawaiian Evangelical Association, it was said that missionaries kept vigilant watch on the treatment of laborers. "A responsibility rests upon the plantations and the Christian public for the moral and spiritual welfare of the Chinese laborers who are not mere chattels but as human beings possessing rational and immortal souls and having the same natural rights as all others.
The labor supply problem was one of the concerns that led King Kalakaua to make his historic voyage.
With the affairs of his Kingdom in good order, King Kalakaua started on his world trip on January 20, 1881, on the City of Sydney which was then northbound from Australia to San Francisco. Accompanying him were Attorney General William Armstrong and the Royal Chamberlain, Colonel Charles H. Judd. Armstrong was commissioned as Minister of State, which would place him in the same rank as the Cabinet Ministers of any sovereign and entitle him to the respect and courtesies due to that rank. He was also made Royal Commissioner of Immigration to look for "cognate" sources of labor to solve the problem of a depleted native population. Colonel Judd, also from an American missionary family and an 1849 schoolmate of David Kalakaua at the Royal School, joined the Royal party to advise and guide the King on protocol and etiquette. Robert von Oehlhoffen, former German baron and an...