[ { "id": 210879, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1986", "page_number": 230, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "213\n\npious, became more prominent.\n\nPIONEER BEHIND THE MINING TRAIL TO NEW ZEALAND\n\nThe career of Ho A-mei, the younger brother of Ho A-low, is of particular interest because he was an innovator. He introduced the first group of Chinese miners into New Zealand goldfields. He opened up lead, tin and silver mines in Kwangtung province. He was a principal in organising a company to build a telegraph line between Canton and Hongkong. He initiated a proposal to organise a waterworks company at Canton. He was the first president of a Hongkong Chinese Chamber of Commerce. I shall be writing about these and other aspects of his career in this and future articles.\n\nAfter leaving Dr. Legge's school he left Hongkong in 1858 to join his brother in Australia. Here he acquired enough capital to embark on a project to introduce Chinese labour to the goldfields of New Zealand. The details of his effort are set forth in a letter he sent in 1871 to the Otago Daily News Times in New Zealand.\n\nHe begins with an estimate of himself and his intentions. \"Sometime in the month of November 1865, being an energetic and enterprising man, blessed with the health and hopefulness of youth, and more especially animated by a spirit of speculation, I started from Melbourne for your city (Dunedin)... My object was for obtaining reliable information, and making necessary preparation previous to the introduction of Chinese labour into your goldfields, but being not a miner myself, my view therefore was to first secure the introduction of labour; then, with a hope to reap the benefit by having the full command of provisioning business, should the scheme prove a success.\n\nA-mei gives the impression that he alone was responsible for initiating the project. The account of the coming of Chinese to New Zealand given in Charles Price's book, The Great White Walls are Built, states that he had been invited to Dunedin by the Otago Provincial Council and the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210880, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1986", "page_number": 231, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "214\n\nCARL SMITH\n\nAfter the discovery of gold in Otago in 1861, there had been a great rush of prospectors. When the fields had been worked over and new fields opened in other areas, there had been an exodus.\n\nThe local authorities were eager to recruit men who would be willing to continue to work the Otago minefields, hence their hope to attract Chinese labour from Australia.\n\nThere was a possible obstacle. Threats had been made that if the Chinese entered the goldfields they would be run out. This had been published in 1857 in another district, where an Anti-Chinese Committee had been organised to fight the \"Mongolian filth.\"\n\nThe fear expressed itself in spite of the fact that no Chinese were planning to come to New Zealand at that time. The memory of the threats remained, however, and before bringing any of his countrymen, Ho A-mei wanted to assure himself they would receive protection.\n\nHe received an open welcome from the Dunedin merchants and the Otago authorities. After a brief stay at Dunedin, A-mei returned to Melbourne with the assurance that Chinese miners would be both welcomed and protected.\n\nWhen he arrived back in Australia, he had posters put up at the various mining areas inviting Chinese to the New Zealand fields.\n\nThere was a decidedly cool response. The Australian Chinese miners were still uncertain of the reception they might receive in New Zealand.\n\nA-mei, however, remained undaunted. In words reflecting his pride and persistence, he reminds his readers: “Desiring, however, not to be discouraged by the shaken confidence in me by our countrymen, nor relishing the idea of frustrating the hopes of those friends of your city, under whose hospitable roofs I had the opportunity of enjoying many a pleasant hour during my visit, and much less did I like to have a failure in any scheme I undertake, I commenced at once with undivided attention and vigorous activities, and after much difficulty I succeeded in inducing a", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210881, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1986", "page_number": 232, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "215\n\nsmall party of 12 practical miners to join me.”\n\nA-mei says he expended about £20 on each of his party. The sum included their passage, provisions and outfits. The group, accompanied by A-mei, arrived at Dunedin early in 1866; a few days later they set out for the fields at Taupeka, where, according to A-mei, \"they were received by all classes with quite an enthusiasm.”\n\nHe had also arranged for another group of a dozen or so to follow in a few days. After their arrival, he sent them off to a different area.\n\nHe did not accompany either group but remained in Dunedin, where he waited for reports from the miners so that when he returned to Melbourne he could spread the news of riches to be gained in New Zealand by Chinese labourers. However, no news reached him.\n\nThere did appear a lone Chinese whom he had met in Australia. He was a gold counterfeiter. Finding the law closing in on him in Australia, he intended to ply his craft in a new place. Unfortunately for his plans to fleece the gullible, A-mei recognised him.\n\n\"This nefarious speculator, however, had come to grief, as at my request... he was searched. Apparatus adapted for the manufacture of the spurious precious metal, as also a parcel of already manufactured gold, were found in one of his baskets. He was, of course apprehended, and at my request he was again transported to the place whence he came, under my vigilant escort at my expense. Thus the object of his villainy was cut short without spreading any injury to the country.”\n\nA-mei, of course, had financial as well as patriotic interest in protecting the good name of the Chinese in New Zealand.\n\nReceiving no news from his miners, A-mei finally decided to return to Australia. Here he continued to wait for news. He finally gave up hope. \"I certainly felt sick of the delay, and naturally became low spirited from disappointment.”", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210883, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1986", "page_number": 234, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "217\n\nWHEN A-MEI STRUCK SILVER IN LANTAO\n\nHo A-mei also maintained an interest in mining.\n\nAfter his return from Australia in 1868, his first position was at Canton with the Chinese Imperial Customs Service. It was not to his liking, for after six months, as he says, he \"threw it up in disgust.\" He then intended to return to New Zealand to see if he could not recoup the money he had paid out on the labourers he had introduced. While he was in Hongkong waiting for a ship, he was offered the position of clerk and interpreter in the office of the Registrar-General.\n\nHe philosophised about his acceptance of the offer. \"It is a little more remunerative than the one at Canton, but it may be designated the same ‘a mere living.' No doubt it is not exactly to my liking. Still, taking into consideration the untoward circumstances and hard trials which I had already experienced through the many stages of my life, I surmised a halt here would not be amiss, as it is a mere step of self-denial and of biding my time” for new opportunities.\n\nHe regarded Hongkong as a good listening post for “anything fresh that may be turned up at any time in the colonies in which I am more or less interested.”\n\n**\n\nThe only thing that turned up was the opportunity in 1870 and 1871 to despatch groups of emigrants to New Zealand. He did hear, however, that the Fiji islands might be an area seeking Chinese labour, and in a letter to Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1871, he suggested that “should any of your well-to-do companies desire to embark their surplus capital in speculating upon Chinese labour for that quarter, perhaps you will not fail in recommending me to the post of agency for the procuring of the labour.\"\n\nIn 1872, he resigned his post in the Hongkong Registrar-General's office. His activities as an emigrant agent placed him in a position open to a conflict of interests. There was also a rumour that he had been having some shady dealings with the Chinese Customs authorities.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215610, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2001", "page_number": 387, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "337\n\nThe paper began as a collection of notes squirreled from all sorts of sources, and as other information arose it grew almost on its own. For example, when I was in New Zealand for some months teaching at the University of Canterbury in 2001, a postgraduate student popped a just-published newspaper article on my desk about a shipload of Chinese coffins that had foundered on its way to China in 1902. Maori villagers had buried some beached remains with due respect.\n\nThe house where I'd lived in Dunedin for ten years had been close to a big cemetery, but I'd lived there in ignorance of the fact that there were Chinese graves there. By 2001 I had met Les Wong, a Kiwi Chinese who has made it his business to restore those graves and other Chinese graves in cemeteries close to the old gold-mining centres of Central Otago. Dunedin's Dr James Ng, who came to Otago as a child from Guangdong Province, sent me in late 2001 a copy of an autobiographical article which vividly brought to life the familial links (and breaks in links between 1949 and 1979) between Chinese family members in New Zealand and their home villages in Guangdong. I have appreciated the encouragement of both Les and James.\n\nTeather, E.K. (2001). The case of the disorderly graves: contemporary deathscapes in Guangzhou, Journal of Social and Cultural Geography 2(2): 185-202.\n\nThis paper describes three agendas that are shaping contemporary deathscapes in Guangzhou: the modernist planning agenda, the market economy, and the Chinese Communist Party ideology and resistance to it. It develops the concept of deathscapes into deathspace, \"a symbolic system that represents a stage in the ongoing process of conflict and compromise involving the traditional and the modern, the personal and political, and the sacred and the secular'.\n\nPreparing for this research was quite a challenge and I can't imagine how I ever thought I'd find out what I wanted to know. An introduction from James Hayes led to my meeting Dr. May Bo Chan, from the Department of History at Zhongshan University. This department generously hosted my second week in Guangzhou and invited me to give a seminar. Existing links between Hong Kong Baptist University and Zhongshan University were invaluable.\n\nAn enormous stroke of luck was finding a superb and energetic", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]