When the colony of Hong Kong was first established, in 1842, it was forthwith invaded by brothel-keepers and prostitutes from the adjoining districts of the mainland of China, who brought with them the national Chinese system of prostitution, and have ever since laboured to carry it into effect in all its details.26
Until the end of the Second World War, the sex ratio of Hong Kong��s popula-tion was heavily weighted against women, a common feature among migrant societies. In this respect, Hong Kong and San Francisco were quite similar. Th e predominantly male and largely transient population was made up of several main component groups: among the foreigners were merchants, civil servants, soldiers, and, as Hong Kong developed as a key trading port in a global market and a strategic station in a worldwide maritime empire, a vast number of naval and merchant seamen of different nationalities. Among the Chinese, who were to make up over 90 percent of the population, were domestic servants, hard manual laborers, construction workers, clerks, and shopkeepers, not to mention robbers, pirates and smugglers, and later businessmen. In the absence of an orthodox official-scholar gentry class, moral standards among Chinese were less stringently observed, so that visiting brothels was conducted brazenly and without any sense of dishonor.27 Together, these men�XChinese and foreign�X while helping to build the new frontier boom town into the future international city and a jewel in the British Crown, also created an acute demand for female
Table 6.1 Sex ratio in Hong Kong, 1848�V54
Year Adult Male* Adult Female* Percentage Female to Male
1848 10,337 1,820 17.60
1849 11,803 2,590 21.94
1850 12,923 2,715 21.00
1851 9,975 2,234 22.39
1852 13,297 3,068 23.07
1853 14,873 3,137 21.09
1854 19,773 4,991 25.24
1855 29,075 6,976 23.99
* Male and female population include ��Europeans and Americans,�� ��Portuguese (Goa and Macao), Indians, Malays, and Natives of Manila,�� and ��Chinese in the City of Victoria, including Servants to Europeans, and temporary Residents.��
Source: Hong Kong Blue Book, 1855, p. 229.
Table 6.2 Number of brothels compared with families in Victoria, Hong Kong
Year No. of Brothels No. of Families
1850 32 141
1855 152 600
1860 126 698
Source: Hong Kong Blue Book, 1850, p. 149; 1855, p. 219; 1860, p. 193.
sex workers, and prostitution became a vital element in Hong Kong��s social, eco-nomic, and political infrastructure.
Charles May, First Police Magistrate, estimated in the 1870s that in Hong Kong, only one out of six women on the island lived with one man, either in marriage or concubinage, implying that the rest were prostitutes.28 This may be an exaggeration, reflecting poor statistics collection as much as his low esteem of Chinese women in general. On the other hand, Dr Pang Ui-shang, a Chinese doctor who had worked in Hong Kong for many years and had extensive contact with prostitutes through his treatment of venereal diseases, estimated in 1877 that only 25 percent of the female population were respectable women.29 Th ough both these estimates might have been inflated, they assure us of the prevalence of prostitution in nineteenth-century Hong Kong. What is noteworthy is that besides prostitution, women were also needed in Hong Kong for other purposes. Wealthy and ��respectable�� Western merchants, who came to the East without their wives and avoided patronizing brothels because of its stigma in Judeo-Christian societies, kept Chinese mistresses instead, and some even started families with these so-called ��protected women.��30 Since wealthier Chinese men tended to keep their primary wives in the home village, they bought women as concubines or secondary wives. Young girls were brought to work in households as mui tsai. All of this was normal, accepted behavior. Though up to the end of the 1870s no statistics are available on the number of mui tsai in Hong Kong, in 1879 Chief Justice John Smale claimed that there were 10,000 ��slaves�� in the colony, which had a population of only 120,000. Again, while hard to verify, such data give an idea of the prevalence of the practice.31
What is important to note is the fluidity of the women��s circumstances. Mui tsai who came of age could be married off as wives of working men, or sold to wealthier men as concubines�Xsometimes even given away as gift s�Xor they could be sold as prostitutes. Prostitutes, too, could become concubines or sec-ondary wives, not to mention the fact that some prostitutes could work as ��pro-tected women�� and vice versa. The women��s status could change, almost always as part of a money transaction, and the market for women was dynamic and full of opportunities.
Colonial Attitude
The buying and selling of women and girls in and through Hong Kong seem to be carried on with impunity not because there was no law against these prac-tices, or because colonial officials were ignorant of their occurrence. By a special proclamation in January 1845, it was notified that the Acts of Parliament against slavery were to be enforced in Hong Kong, and these were further encapsulated as Hong Kong law by Ordinance 6 of 1845 and Ordinance 2 of 1846. Such laws, which protected individuals against slavery, would have been suffi cient to sup-press any form of human trafficking. However, they remained largely dead letters. Their potential benefit was counteracted by the proclamation made by Captain Charles Elliot when he occupied Hong Kong Island in 1841 that its inhabitants could continue enjoying their own laws, customs, and usages�Xan undertaking that was made to the native peoples of other Crown colonies as well.32 Th ough the Hong Kong government never legalized Chinese customs and usages such as concubinage, domestic servitude, or the purchase of persons, these practices were widely tolerated, so that the anti-slavery ordinances were never invoked to suppress the traffi cking of women.33 The magistrate William Caine, for instance, while acknowledging in 1854 that the majority of Chinese prostitutes had been purchased as slaves in their infancy and trained up for the express purpose of prostitution, did nothing about it. Witnesses frequently spoke openly in court about the buying and selling of women without fear of prosecution.34 Hong Kong officials repeatedly proclaimed that in the colony women were free and did not have to subject themselves to the bondages imposed on them, but they took no initiative to actively free the women. In 1856, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Henri Labouchere, complained of prostitutes in Hong Kong being held in ��practical slavery�� and recommended legislation to improve their lot; yet, the resultant ordinance, the Contagious Diseases Ordinance of 1857, far from fulfilling that objective legitimized the brothel keepers�� status and thus strengthened their control over prostitutes under them.35 In many jurisdictions, now as in the nineteenth century, prostitution is legal but brothel keeping is a criminal offence. In nineteenth-century Hong Kong, however, both were legal with the result that brothel keepers occupied a particularly strategic position to play a key role in the international women market as investors, facilitators, and distributors. Hong Kong therefore became the land of opportunities, not only for empire builders but for brothel keepers and others ready to supply women to the market.
Gold Rush California, similarly a bachelor society, easily became an extension of that market, and with the development of the American Far West and British Columbia in Canada, the market for these ��bawd, broad celestial females��36 expanded exponentially. With ��good�� women in a patriarchal society rarely emi-grating, almost by definition only ��bad�� women, or those coerced or somehow tricked into it, did. The facilities that sent Chinese men to Gold Mountain also made it possible for women to go, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. It is fair to speculate that before her arrival at San Francisco, the famous Ah Toy might have worked in Hong Kong, where she would have familiarized herself with a foreign clientele�Xperhaps even picked up some English�Xand learned to deal with white policemen, toughening herself up for the harsh realities of a wild and male-dominated California. It was believed that Chinese men in California were so rich that prostitutes were able to save enough to redeem themselves within months of working there, and that seven to eight out of 100 of them went home with thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars in savings.37 As we will see, some women returned to Hong Kong quite entrepreneurial aft er working in San Francisco brothels, and continued in the trade in one capacity or another, thus further suggesting strong personal and organizational connec-tions between Hong Kong and San Francisco�Xtwo hubs in an ever-widening network through which women, whether coerced or by their own agency, flowed back and forth.
Where Did the Women Come From?
Most women intended for the overseas market were first collected at Guangzhou from around the South China region and traded through middlemen�Xor, more likely than not, middle-women. Some were then taken to Hong Kong for further distribution to different ports, including San Francisco. Sometimes the women were dispatched right away while others would be made to work in Hong Kong for a few years before being sent away. Yip Mun Chun, for instance, started her career as a prostitute in San Francisco in 1859 without first working in Hong Kong. She had been first sold as a child by her parents to a ��mistress,�� who then sold her in Guangzhou when she was 14. She was taken to Hong Kong and resold there for San Francisco where she worked as a prostitute for seven years until she ran away from her mistress and took up with an American. Aft erward, she lived with a Chinese man; they returned to his hometown in Xinning (later Taishan) county, but he abandoned her after spending all her savings. Desperate, she went to Hong Kong and moved from brothel to brothel until she finally operated one herself. Yip��s story is revealing not only for the way girls were traded outwardly but the extent to which the market for women between China and California, with Hong Kong as the distribution center, was integrated. The ease with which women�Xwhether voluntarily or otherwise�Xmoved across borders and over long distances is noteworthy, highlighting the very porous borders and an infra-structure that facilitated such movements.
Other women, including Lee Kwai Kin and Chan Lin-ho, stayed and worked in Hong Kong before being sent to California. Both women were ��owned by Ng A Fo,�� who was charged in 1870 with attempting to sell them to someone going to California. Lee Kwai Kin had been brought to Hong Kong when she was 17 and sold to Ng for $80. For the next four years, she was a foreigner��s ��protected woman.�� After the foreigner left and she was no longer making any money, Ng planned to sell her for California. Chan Lin-ho, who had been sold by her mother in Fuzhou to a man for $20, and then taken to Hong Kong by him and put into Ng��s house, became a ��protected woman�� for three years. When her protector left Hong Kong, she too discovered that she would be sent to California. Ng seems to have been an old hand at the trade, as it was claimed that from time to time women would be taken to her house before being sent to California. Lee testified that between 10 and 20 women had passed through Ng��s hands.38 The prices varied: the girls who cost from $50 to $150 in Hong Kong were sold in California for $250 to $350, and it was clearly a very lucrative business.39 In some cases, the profit was even greater.
Ng and other traffickers like her were conveniently nestled in the Hong Kong-centered networks that encompassed Guangdong, California, and other places around the world. The mechanism of the traffic is demonstrated in another case. In 1873, six persons were charged with buying and selling girls for prostitution. The Inspector of Brothels testified that he found six girls virtually imprisoned in a house for the purpose of being sent to California. The story of one of the detainees, Wong Hing, aged 15, is especially illuminating. When she was 11, she was taken from Zhongshan county to Guangzhou by her sister��s husband and sold as a servant. One day, her mistress and the second defendant took her to a flower boat (a floating brothel), and then to the house in Hong Kong, and her mistress sold her to the first and second defendants for $120. At fi rst, she was put to work making clothes but was eventually told that she would be sent to San Francisco. It was found that the first two defendants were mother and daughter; the latter��s husband, who worked on a California steamer, was then in America, and it was clear that he provided a useful link to the operation.40 Seamen through the ages are known to have taken advantage of their special position to traffic many things, not least of them passengers. Seamen through the ages, too, are known for their propensity to frequent brothels at their ports of call, and this might also have created useful connections for women-traffi cking purposes. According to Henry Hiram Ellis, a San Francisco police offi cer from 1857 to 1877, Chinese procurers and brothel agents smuggled a small number of these women out of China or Hong Kong by hiding them behind false parti-tions in ships�� cargo holds,41 clearly with the involvement of the steamer��s employ-ees. Presumably, these women passengers had either failed to receive clearance from the authorities to emigrate, had been directed to avoid the process, or were hidden away so that the seamen could pocket the passage money. In October 1875, the US consul David H. Bailey informed customs officials in San Francisco by telegram that thirteen or more prostitutes had been secreted on the steamer Belgic.42 Whatever the details, such machination reveals that seamen might have been the key links in the different types of transpacific networks�Xat least, this was the general impression held in Hong Kong at the time.43
Women, whether sold, kidnapped, or seduced by false promises, were coached beforehand to give the appropriate answers whenever examined by offi cials. (The examination system will be discussed below.) Many were too ter-rified to disobey. In one case in 1874, four girls were found in a house, waiting to board a steamer for San Francisco. When first questioned in court, they all replied that they were going willingly; two said they were joining their husbands there, and one claimed to be a servant. Three days later when they were re-exam-ined, for whatever reason, they recanted, testifying instead that they had been sold to become prostitutes in San Francisco. They admitted that they had earlier repeated in court what they had been taught to say by their purchaser.44 Th e fact that the victims could quite easily be intimidated into repeating answers coached by their captors made detection diffi cult.
As growing demand for Chinese women overseas�Xwhere they were rare�X pushed up prices, unscrupulous individuals resorted to every means to obtain them, not only through purchase but also by a combination of kidnapping and subtler forms of deception, including false promises of good jobs, marriages, and a better life. Liu Yu shi��s45 experience reflects some of the complexity. Married and living a poor life in a county city, she was lured to Guangzhou in 1878 by a woman who promised to help her fi nd a better situation. When she arrived in Guangzhou, the woman shut her up in a room and at the end of three days told her that as there was no work in Guangzhou she had to go to Hong Kong. Once in Hong Kong, the woman handed Liu Yu shi over to a couple and left . During the next 26 days, the couple continually pacified her by promising to fi nd her a good job; they then put her on a vessel and told her that she would arrive in the new place in a couple of days. They placed her in the charge of a man, Wen-kuan, who also asked her not to be distressed and comforted her with promises of fine clothes at the end of the journey. Only after the vessel had passed Japan did she realize that they were bound for California.46 It turned out that Wen-kuan was at the same time ��escorting�� another woman, Chen Liang shi, who had also been lured by the promise of finding a good job�Xalthough she had not been kidnapped.47
It is safe to say that Liu Yu shi��s experience was repeated many times as hun-dreds of women passed through Hong Kong, the nexus of networks that covered North America, Australia, Singapore, and other Straits Settlements. Th e port city offered the perfect vantage point for operators of all kinds to survey market conditions, and accordingly direct and redirect goods and persons to diff erent destinations. The undertakings of the Tai Cheong shop illustrate the fl exibility and wide reach of the market based in Hong Kong. Tai Cheong was apparently a shop that traded in women, among other things. In 1873, its owner, Luk Sin, received an order from Li Shing, who ran the Wa Ki shop in Portland, to buy some women; Li even sent his concubine Tsoi-kam to Hong Kong with $2,000 to help with the purchase. Luk, balking at the high prices of prostitutes at the time, only managed to buy three women servants. An old hand at the game, Luk would be well informed on the current market situation as ��price current�� notices on women, as on other commodities, were sent regularly from San Francisco, giving agents in China information regarding how much to profi tably pay for a woman.48 Tsoi-kam herself could have brought back such circulars.
Having bought the women, Luk was unable to send them immediately to San Francisco; the demand on steamers was so great that all female passengers had to wait two months for a passage. As the cost of living in Hong Kong was too high for him to keep the women there while they waited for a passage, he decided to send them to Singapore instead. Singapore was closer, he reasoned, and he could make the trip and be back in about a month; Tsoi-kam went to Singapore as well.49
Hong Kong was a wide-open market with easy access to markets around the world, for better or for worse. Its leading Chinese merchants observed that: ��Hong Kong is the emporium and thoroughfare for all the neighbouring ports. Therefore those kidnappers frequent Hong Kong much, it being a place where it is easy to buy and sell.��50 Women could easily be bought and sold there because of the highly commercial and free-wheeling business environment, and its effi-ciency as an embarkation port further contributed to its vibrancy as a market for women. Any moral constraints that might have prevailed seemed easily over-whelmed by the profit-seeking impulse. The barrister J. J. Francis hit the nail on the head when he concluded that ��Singapore, Australia, and San Francisco are supplied from Hong Kong with prostitutes, kept women, and concubines��51�X he might have added mui tsai too. It is not a very flattering image, but it seems almost natural that the port that so successfully supplied overseas markets with opium, bird��s nest and opera should, with equal alacrity and verve, supply them with women.
Regulating Women��s Emigration at Hong Kong
While we may assume that some women, including prostitutes like Ah Toy, had gone to America of their own volition, the question remains: Why was it possible for so many others to be sent through Hong Kong against their will? Emigration from Hong Kong was, at least in theory, not completely unregu-lated. The 1855 Chinese Passengers�� Act was enacted to provide a modicum of protection for emigrants, but it was not meant to address the problem of involuntary emigration of women. The Act, as we have seen, had been forced on Hong Kong by London as a result of public outcry against the most inhu-mane types of emigration abuses connected to the ��coolie trade�� to Peru and Havana; to some extent�Xand mostly where male emigrants were concerned�Xit succeeded and drove the ��coolie trade�� out of Hong Kong to center on Macao. With regard to emigration to California, since Hong Kong offi cials were con-vinced that most of the passengers�Xthat is, the men�Xwent voluntarily, the Act��s aim was to ensure adequate provisions and medicine, ensure the seaworthi-ness of vessels, and prevent an excessive carriage of passengers. Though it was obvious that female migration diff ered very much in nature, the Act made no separate provisions for women�Xexcept that in a later amendment, it stipulated that there should be separate accommodations on board for women.52
The Act demanded that before boarding a vessel, passengers passed indi-vidually through the Harbor Master��s office to have their passage tickets signed, and to be asked whether they were willing to leave China. In addition, the day before they departed they were mustered on the upper deck of the ship, men and women separately, and examined by a medical officer to make sure that they were fit enough to sail.53 A big loophole existed right there, as vessels carrying less than 20 passengers were not required to be examined,54 and we may assume that many women sailing on such vessels would have escaped any examination altogether. Th e effectiveness of the examination procedure naturally hinged upon the attitude and competence of the persons conducting it. It was no easy task. Few colonial officials could speak Chinese, often having to depend on interpreters. Nor were they equipped to understand the subtleties of Chinese social and cultural behavior sufficiently to detect fraud easily, or judge whether a woman was under any form of coercion or intimidation. The bottom line, as Harbor Master H. G. Thomsett conceded, was that women were coached by their keepers to give the appropriate answers, and even when he knew that most of them were purchased on the mainland and exported for prostitution, so long as they claimed that they were going voluntarily, as they had been instructed, there was little he could do to help them.55
With few exceptions, the colonial government did not demand that its officials overexert themselves in conducting the examinations. Governor Macdonnell, for instance, admitted: ��I cannot consider this government respon-sible for more than seeing that they [the women] go voluntarily and are really made aware that if they wish at the last moment to decline going the Police are on board with orders to afford them assistance and land them with their baggage.��56 However, given the submissiveness of most women and the intimi-dation to which they were subject�Xhowever reluctant they might have been�X few ever took up such offers, and the trafficking of women continued.
Even fewer colonial officials were really concerned about the fate of emi-grants, who seemed so transient and incidental to Hong Kong. The problem was too immense and the traffickers�� tricks too endless for government offi cials�X even with the best intention in the world�Xto hope to counter them eff ectively.
Macdonnell actually believed that by going to America, Chinese�Xmen and women�Xhad a chance to improve their position well beyond what was possible in China, and the women in particular would have a chance of fi nally settling happily and getting away from their miserable existence back home.57 He also believed that if the trafficking in Chinese women was to be condemned, it was really the Chinese authorities who were to blame as it was they who recognized the buying and selling of women and upheld the legality of the practice in the fi rst place.58 Other colonial officials felt that the trafficking in women could not be combated effectively so long as prostitution was allowed to continue in Hong Kong;59 however, given the geopolitical and geo-economic circumstances of Hong Kong, we can see why trying to abolish prostitution would have required monumental effort. Only rarely did a colonial official like Sir John Smale emerge with strong enough conviction to challenge the status quo, as will be shown.
Even more fundamentally, there was little political will in Hong Kong to suppress emigration abuses, except for the most extreme forms. Th e administra-tion was dedicated to promoting the general prosperity of the colony, and emi-gration was vital to many business interests. There was a constant fear that too much restriction would drive away business.60 For the shipping companies, the main objective was to carry as many passengers as possible with the least gov-ernment interference. We have seen how vigorously merchants in Hong Kong resisted legal restrictions when the Chinese Passengers�� Act was fi rst mooted. But that was not all. Profits from emigration were widely shared, going not only to shipowners but also to their agents, charterers, labor brokers, and pas-senger brokers. There were contractors who fitted the ships and supplied stores and provisions. For the export traders, every additional Chinese going abroad meant an extra potential consumer of Chinese foodstuff and clothing, opium, and opera. There was no economic advantage for Hong Kong in stopping emi-gration, of men or women.
There was a radical difference between the objectives of Britain and America�Xparticularly California�Xwhere the specific issue of female emigra-tion was concerned. It was Britain��s policy to promote women��s emigration along with the men, not to bar them. As Charles Wolcott Brooks, the Japanese consul in San Francisco, observed perceptively, Britain aggressively invited immigra-tion to settle in foreign lands to realize its imperialist ambitions. It needed cheap labor in its colonies and it wanted women to emigrate with men to help them settle down into a permanent and responsible workforce, and provide stability and order in society. The United States, on the other hand, invited immigration to settle ��the waste land within its own territories,�� and because Chinese men did not assimilate and start families, Brooks considered that the women who went there, far from being a stabilizing factor, only made that situation more dangerous.61 This view was widely held in California.
British officials, in addition, believed that the emigration of Chinese prosti-tutes�Ximmoral though it was�Xwas still the lesser of two evils. If women were prohibited from going there, the results would be ��more horrible and disgust-ing than one likes to dwell on.��62 In short, without the women, homosexuality would prevail. These policies and attitudes were in stark contrast to those held in America, where organized opposition to Chinese immigration was gathering momentum in the 1860s and 1870s, first on the West Coast and then spreading eastward. And unlike Britain, its government�Xwhile condemning the immigra-tion of ��bad�� women�Xmade no attempt to encourage ��good�� women to go.
Selling Women in San Francisco
Once the women arrived in San Francisco, they were quickly disposed of. During the early frontier days, Chinese prostitutes who remained in the city were openly sold on the docks, with bidding being carried out in full view of spectators, who frequently included police officers. As Victorian values gradu-ally permeated the general moral consciousness, objections to such activities grew among Euro-Americans, and the site of the auction moved to the vicinity of what later became Chinatown. Sometime after 1860, prostitutes were imme-diately brought to Chinatown following their arrival. In 1871, the sale was held in the Chinese theater on Dupont Street, a major thoroughfare of the city. By 1880, the sale took place in the basement of a ��joss house�� fronting St Louis alley, where prostitutes plied their trade. Th e San Francisco Chronicle claimed that these women ��were stripped and paraded onto a platform where prospec-tive buyers could inspect and bid.�� In 1871, the Alta California reported that they ��were assorted, marked over and sent�� to buyers63�Xjust like other goods.
During the auction, a few merchants might buy a woman to be a secondary wife or a concubine, usually creaming off the best of the lot. Or the women were ��pre-ordered.�� A reporter of a local newspaper claimed that the ��fresh and pretty females�� were used to fill special orders from wealthy and prosperous trades-men.��64 Since (principal) wives of wealthy merchants seldom ventured out of the home village, it is no wonder that women were in demand in California as secondary wives or concubines. According to Dr Gibson, a Methodist Episcopal clergyman working among the Chinese, testifying before Congress in 1875, of all the Chinese females in San Francisco, not more than 300 could claim to be ��wives,�� and nearly all were only secondary wives or concubines. He did not think there were fi fty ��wives�� among all the Chinese in the city.65
Wealthy Chinese families, in addition, bought young girls for domestic service, while proprietors of brothels purchased the remainder. Like Hong Kong, San Francisco was also a distribution center, and some of the women pur-chased for brothels were sent off as far north as British Columbia. Most likely, entrepreneurs engaged in legitimate business were also party to the exploitation of women, as hinted by the following bill of sale:66
Bill of Sale
Loo Woo to Loo Chee
Rice, six mats at $2 $12
Shrimps, 50 lbs, at 10 cents 5
Girl 250
Salt fish, 60 lbs, at 10 cents 6
____
$273
____
American Reaction to Chinese Women
As in the case of Chinese men, the perception of Chinese women by white Americans was quickly transformed. Chinese men, who were initially consid-ered industrious and an asset to the development of the Far West, were soon perceived to be deceitful and a threat to the livelihood of honest white labor; women, initially considered quaint and exotic, quickly became associated with prostitution and were regarded as offensive to Christian sensibilities. With groups of Americans resenting the influx of Chinese immigrants, Chinese pros-titution�Xalong with opium smoking and gambling�Xwere easy targets for those eager to point out the moral decrepitude and barbarity of the Chinese race. In August 1854, a municipal committee visited Chinatown and reported to the Board of Aldermen that most of the women found there were prostitutes. Th is observation soon became a conviction, and it colored the public perception of, attitude toward, and action against all Chinese women for almost a century. During the gold rush and for several decades thereafter, prostitutes of many nationalities lived and worked in San Francisco. Municipal authorities tried spo-radically to suppress prostitution. They singled out Chinese women for special attention from the very beginning. Their attitude hardened, to the extent that in 1866 the California legislature passed ��An Act for the Suppression of Chinese Houses of Ill Fame.�� The result was ��an understanding�� to restrict Chinese pros-titutes to limited geographic areas, but the effort did not end the traffi cking in Chinese women.67
The most primitive racist eugenics played a role in the policy thinking. Chinese women were seen as threats not only because they could reproduce Chinese men but also because they could infect the white population by pro-ducing weak, hybrid children. Fear of infection and infiltration was the basis for resistance against them. Senator Cornelius Cole��s view that they should be excluded because they would ��spread disease and moral death��68 fell on willing ears. In addition, by equating Chinese women with prostitution and the emigra-tion of Chinese women with ��slavery���Xa universally abhorred idea in newly unionized California�Xopponents to Chinese emigration quickly claimed the indisputable moral high ground.
1862 Act against the Coolie Trade
In 1862, the US Congress passed an ��Act to Prohibit the Coolie Trade,�� largely in reaction to the numerous atrocities committed aboard American ships car-rying Chinese ��coolies�� to Cuba. Passed at the height of the Civil War when slavery was a dominant concern, the Act demonstrated the nation��s sensitivity to any form of involuntary servitude.69 It required all American vessels carrying Chinese emigrants to the United States to have the certification of the US consul residing at the port of departure to the fact of their voluntary emigration. The US consuls in Hong Kong�Xoften merchants�Xundertook the task with little enthusiasm or rigor. They relied largely on the procedures established by Hong Kong officials under the 1855 Chinese Passengers�� Act, and piggybacked on their work. For instance, Lt. Col. C..N..Goulding (consul, September 1869�V October 1870) discharged his duties by simply approving any emigrant who had been inspected and passed by the Harbor Master and the Colonial Surgeon. His rationale was that when all the requirements of the local authorities were fully complied with, American legal requirements too would have been satisfi ed.70 Unfortunately, the examination conducted by colonial offi cials was far from foolproof, as they themselves readily conceded, and the consul��s reliance on them appears to have been a classic case of the blind leading the blind. American consuls might be lax because of the general assumption that men going to the United States were not ��coolies,�� so they believed they did not have to take the examination too seriously. As for women, US offi cials faced the same problem as their colonial counterparts. If women claimed they were going voluntarily, it was difficult to reject their statement unless there was some great impetus to do so. That impetus did not exist. The only extra effort that American consuls put in was to examine passengers who sailed on vessels taking less than 20 passen-gers, which Hong Kong��s colonial offi cials omitted.71
When David H. Bailey became US consul in 1871, he criticized his predeces-sors for making the whole proceeding of examination under the 1862 Act ��a complete farce.��72 However, things hardly improved during his tenure. If any-thing, they seem to have gone from bad to worse. This was partly because he was strongly opposed to Chinese emigration in principle and was cynical about the examination process. Claiming that he had made a four-month study of the ��coolie trade,�� he wrote a report to the State Department that was nothing short of a scathing indictment of the whole Chinese emigration phenomenon. He wrote about how men and boys were decoyed by all sorts of tricks, opiates, and illusory promises into the hands of men-dealers and were then overawed into making contracts. In making the contract, the emigrant gave a mortgage on his wife and children as collateral to ensure compliance. His report was in fact full of errors and sweeping statements, as well as biases about the Chinese people and their values�Xtheir ��superstitions�� and ��subtle mysticisms.�� Th ese misrepresenta-tions, whether deliberate or otherwise, enabled him to draw the conclusion that allowing the importation of such ��heathen labor�� would harm American institu-tions. He admitted that Chinese emigration to America through Hong Kong was different from the ��coolie trade,�� but nonetheless it was still ��surrounded, mixed up and tainted with the views of the coolie trade.�� In other words, in his view, even though Chinese immigrating to America were not ��coolies�� (read slaves) as such, they were still undesirable because they were Chinese.
Bailey concluded that to control the situation would require ��the utmost vigilance and scrutiny to separate the legitimate from the illegitimate emigra-tion.��73 His report, despite its many flaws, was printed as part of a ��Message of the President of the United States�� to Congress; his diatribe against Chinese immigration, mixing it sweepingly with the coolie trade and equating it with slavery, resonated with anti-Chinese polemics in California. What distinguished Bailey��s claim, as historian Andrew Gyory points out, was that it was a fi rsthand study by a high-ranking American official in China providing what might be seized upon eagerly as concrete evidence of the prevalence and embeddedness of slavery in Chinese society. 74 He avers that Bailey��s report, coming soon aft er the seminal event of Chinese strikebreakers in North Adams, Massachusetts, gave William Mungen in the US House of Representatives the documentary evi-dence he lacked in his attack on Chinese immigration. How infl uential Bailey��s report might have been in Washington at this point is unclear, but his cham-pioning of the exclusion of Chinese on the grounds of their association with slavery must have had a long-term impact on national policy toward the issue.
Strangely enough, while cautioning vigilance and scrutiny and expounding on the vital importance of thorough examination, Bailey announced in the same breath that he would not be conducting the examination personally. Either due to despair that Chinese emigration was not being stopped altogether, or simply out of a lack of interest, he did not consider the vetting of emigrants a matter of high priority. Instead, pleading a heavy workload, he appointed others to the task. ��I must either abandon the execution of the law as an idle form or I must appoint a corps of assistants sufficient in numbers, in integrity and sagacity to make the examination a rigid and faithful compliance with the letter and spirit of the law,�� he wrote.75
Those he appointed to conduct the examination were persons with neither the knowledge nor the integrity required for the task; they simply continued Goulding��s procedures, with the result that the mechanical nature of simply validating an emigrant��s certificate once the colonial officials had done the same became even more mechanical.76 Such a facile examination was plainly useless for revealing any hidden fraud or attempts at falsification. It is hard to see how any ��integrity�� or ��sagacity�� would have been required, as Bailey claimed, for such a perfunctory ritual. Bailey and his assistants appeared more concerned with collecting the fees for examination than achieving the objectives of the Act. Discrepancies in accounting and the recording of emigrant numbers led John Mosby, who became US consul in Hong Kong in 1879, to accuse Bailey and his successors of embezzlement.77
The emigration of women continued almost unchecked, with the result that many women were landed in San Francisco against their wishes�Xamong them women who had been bought for various purposes, kidnap victims, and intended prostitutes. In 1860, 24 percent of the 654 Chinese women in San Francisco were listed as prostitutes. The proportion reached a peak of 71 percent of the 2,018 women in 1870, while the numbers of ��wives�� and daughters, mui tsai, and concubines are unknown.
Attempts to Suppress Kidnapping in Hong Kong
While Hong Kong��s colonial officials and the US consul went through the motions of enforcing existing laws that prevented the involuntary emigration of women, new developments took place against emigration abuses. Since 1866, the Chinese government, encouraged by Rutherford Alcock, British Minister to Beijing, had actively tried to check emigration abuses. The kidnapping of men and women, which had become so pervasive and brazen as a result of ever-grow-ing demand, was causing distress and resentment in many localities in South China. A convention was introduced by the Zongli Yamen (the Chinese depart-ment in charge of foreign affairs with Western countries) in that year, stipulat-ing that contracts for Chinese emigrant workers must contain certain clauses that gave them greater protection, and foreigner agents were forbidden from recruiting emigrants on the mainland unless their governments had signed the convention.
Alcock, keen for the British government to sign the convention in order to expedite direct recruitment of Chinese labor from the mainland for British col-onies, tried hard to prevent any emigration abuses occurring in Hong Kong that might provoke the Chinese government further. He must have received some pressure from the Zongli Yamen on this matter. It was only in 1869 that this new Chinese government department set up to take charge of foreign aff airs fi nally became aware that women in Guangzhou were being kidnapped and taken to the Gold Mountain on steamers. Frustrated that there was little it could do, with Hong Kong�Xthe only embarkation port�Xbeing British and the steam-ship company being American, the Yamen nevertheless believed it could exert influence on the British and US ministers to check the abuse. It clearly found an ally in Alcock.78
In 1872, the Guangdong authorities further demonstrated their determi-nation by using land and sea blockades to force the emigration trade out of Macao, as it was allegedly dependent on kidnapping. In 1873 the Zongli Yamen appointed a commission to investigate the conditions of Chinese workers in Cuba, one of the main and most horrible destinations. Th e commissioner��s report led the Chinese court to send ministers and consuls abroad, marking a watershed in China��s diplomatic history.79
In Hong Kong, too, things started to change�Xalbeit slowly. Part of the pres-sure, as always, came from reformists in London. It also came from Alcock, who warned Macdonnell that it would be important to avoid emigration-related atrocities that were being reported from time to time.80 Yet another important impetus to change was Chief Justice John Smale��s strident condemnation of the coolie trade and slavery, which represented a landmark in Hong Kong��s judi-cial history. Smale had arrived in the colony in 1861 as Attorney-General, and was appointed Chief Justice in 1866.81 In a place where emigration was widely recognized as a lifeline, his plea for stricter regulation against abuses was at first largely ignored. Then, in 1871, he made a sensational ruling in the Kwok Asing case, discharging him on the grounds that since he had been kidnapped for emigration, he had a distinct legal right to regain his liberty, even by killing the officers on board the kidnapping ship (see Chapter 2). Such a controversial ruling naturally stirred up a great deal of debate. It won support among some circles, and US Consul Bailey praised Smale profusely for taking such ��very high ground.�� Despite feeling it might be ��dangerous�� for Smale to pass such a con-tentious ruling, Bailey believed that the situation was so extreme that some such startling decision was needed to arouse Western civilization to a sense of its duty to stem the ��infamous slave trade.��82
The Kwok Asing case, which dragged on for many months and was exten-sively publicized in the press, had two important consequences. It catapulted the issues of Chinese emigration and slavery into the limelight in both Hong Kong and London, and it provided an opportunity for the Tung Wah Hospital Committee to make a grand debut. The governor, Macdonnell, took advantage of the emergence of this new group of community leaders to stave off the con-stant pressure from Alcock and London for action against emigration abuses. He recruited the committee��s help to examine prospective emigrants before they embarked to ensure that they were going voluntarily, and reported happily to London that these Chinese merchants�X��men perfectly independent���Xwere effectively helping to eliminate fraud.83
Suppressing kidnapping, especially kidnapping related to emigration, became one of the Tung Wah Hospital��s foci of attention. In June 1872, the hospital committee presented the new governor, Arthur Kennedy, with a docu-ment entitled ��A Correct Statement of the Wicked Practice of Decoying and Kidnapping,�� which contained a detailed account of the vices of the Macao emi-gration trade�Xa trade that most of Hong Kong��s officials were happy enough to denounce as ridden with abuses. But the committee pointed out to Kennedy that abuses occurred in Hong Kong��s emigration trade too. In fact, they informed the governor that at that very time, several hundred women were being sent from Hong Kong to San Francisco to be sold as prostitutes.84 Besides sending directors to examine passengers before the vessels sailed, the committee had also been employing detectives to stop kidnappers�Xan ambitious undertaking that might have appeared to be usurping the power of the police and undermin-ing the authority of the colonial state. It was clearly done without Macdonnell��s knowledge or blessing. Now the committee asked Kennedy to support that scheme, not only in principle but materially, by paying for the detectives. Th e committee, for its part, would see to it that proper and trustworthy men were being employed for the job. It suggested, in addition, increasing the number of detectives from two to six�Xthe two head detectives to be paid $20 each, and the others $10. Kennedy agreed, and even proposed giving the detectives papers to prove their authority, and offering the help of the Registrar-General and district watchmen,85 Chinese guards under the management of the Registrar-General.
The scheme proved quite effective. Every day, two or three kidnap cases were brought before the magistrate and a number of persons were saved. Th e detec-tives extended their activities to Kowloon and outlying villages to look out for kidnappers operating in small boats between Hong Kong and Macao. Although acting Registrar-General M. S. Tonnochy thought six detectives too many, Kennedy�Xapparently satisfied with their work�Xwas willing to pay for all six.86
The unusual success reveals several salient points. Up to January 1873, not one case had been brought to court under Ordinance 12 of 1868, which made kidnapping for emigration a felony. Since it is inconceivable that such crimes had not occurred before that date, and then suddenly proliferated in 1873, we can only conclude that in the earlier period they had simply gone undetected. With the rise of the Tung Wah Hospital Committee and the arrival of a more supportive governor, action taken against kidnapping became more vigorous. In 1873, three new ordinances were passed to check emigration abuses, and these were reinforced by Ordinance 2 of 1875, which provided ��better provisions for the punishment of persons guilty of selling, purchasing, or decoying into the colony, or unlawfully detaining therein Chinese women and female children for the purpose of prostitution and of decoying Chinese into or away from this colony for the purpose of emigration, or for any other purpose whatever.�� Th e ordinance reflected John Smale��s fervor to stamp out slavery in any form, and one might assume that the hospital committee would be of the same mind as he and welcome the new ordinance as well. After all, the committee had fought kidnapping and the sale of women for immoral purposes overseas for some years, and it was partly due to its representation that the ordinance was passed.
In reality, the situation was more complex. The Tung Wah Hospital Committee in fact had its own, very different, agenda. It was basically a con-servative social elite whose objective was to uphold conventional values and practices. Its emerging status within the Chinese community in Hong Kong, as well as its recognition in the eyes of Chinese authorities on the mainland and later Chinese consuls abroad, was largely based on its claim to moral leadership. It was therefore imperative for it to continue upholding the patriarchal values current in China. Far from opposing all forms of sales of persons, like Smale, the Chinese merchants on the committee strongly endorsed the system of selling of girls as mui tsai, arguing that it alleviated the burden of poor families and gave the girls a better chance in life, while reducing the instances of female infanticide. They also sanctioned the buying of boys for adoption to continue family lines, as one of the greatest Confucian ��sins�� was to have no male heir. Many merchants, shopkeepers and lesser households in Hong Kong owned mui tsai, who were an important element in the economic and social makeup of the colony. Though the leading merchants were less vocal about it, they obviously also accepted the practice of buying women as concubines, and many would have indulged in it. What they did find immoral was the selling of women to become prostitutes overseas, kidnapping, and the seduction of women to emi-grate under false pretenses. They were therefore quite specific about where to draw the line between what they considered acceptable and unacceptable trans-actions. Whether women went abroad voluntarily or involuntarily was not an issue for them, given that in a patriarchal society women were not entitled to free will in any case. From this perspective, we can see that their agenda departed profoundly from that of Smale, who condemned all forms of traffi cking in human beings as ��slavery�� and wanted the practice criminalized.
Indeed, where women were concerned, the Tung Wah Committee��s agenda departed also from the letter and spirit of the 1855 Passengers�� Act regarding voluntary and involuntary emigration, and their outlook must have conditioned the way they participated in the examination of emigrants. Their detectives were hired only to look out for kidnapping cases, not to seek out unwilling female passengers or women who had been purchased. This crucial rift would not be obvious to foreigners until the late 1870s.
In the meantime, ��kidnapping�� became a buzzword in California as well. Realizing that many Chinese women immigrants had been kidnapped and then exported, the state lawmakers tried to exclude them by passing an Act ��to prevent the kidnapping and importation of Mongolian, Chinese and Japanese females for criminal or demoralizing purposes.�� It was masked as an exercise of police power rather than immigration control. A woman, when landing, had to satisfy the Commissioner of Immigration first that she was immigrating freely, and second that she was ��a good person of correct habits and good character.�� Th e burden of proof was on the woman.87 It might have come into eff ect immedi-ately, as on June 14 a newspaper reported that 29 female passengers were turned away from San Francisco.88 With its vague language and arbitrary enforcement, and the fact that the federal government did not wish states to control immi-gration, this state law was constantly challenged in the federal Supreme Court. However, the idea of barring the immigration of Chinese prostitutes as a key way to exclude Chinese women took root, and a more effective means of doing so later came in the form of an Act of Congress.
Exclusion of Women: The Page Law
On March 3, 1875, the US Congress passed a supplementary Act that prohib-ited involuntary emigrants from China, Japan, and other Oriental countries, and expressly prohibited the immigration of Chinese women for prostitution. Anyone found guilty of trafficking in such women ��shall be deemed guilty of a felony �K [and] imprisoned not exceeding fi ve years and pay a fine not exceed-ing five thousand dollars.��89 Recommended by President Ulysses Grant, the law sailed through Congress without any expressed concern that it might contradict the Burlingame Treaty between China and the United States, which provided for free immigration for Chinese nationals to America and for Americans to China. As legal scholar Kerry Abrams explains, targeting women whose sexual behavior fell outside acceptable standards simply did not appear to be a restric-tion of immigration, yet the Act was, before the Exclusion Act of 1882, the fi rst racially based federal immigration law.90
The law came to be known as the Page Law after its author, Horace F. Page, a Republican congressman from California who made a career out of draft ing and advocating anti-Chinese legislation.91 It demanded much more rigorous action from the consulate at Hong Kong than the 1862 Act, with signifi cantly diff erent procedures for the examination of female emigrants. Section 1 of the Page Law required Asian women to obtain certificates declaring that they were not emi-grating for ��lewd or immoral purposes�� at the port of departure; each woman had to have her own certifi cate and photograph, quite a stringent requirement at a time when photography was still a novelty and presumably expensive. In contrast, the examination of male passengers remained largely unchanged, and only one document was required for the entire group to certify that no one was a contract laborer or criminal. When a vessel arrived at San Francisco, the Port Commissioners or surveyors checked every woman��s certificate individually, as required by Section 5; for men, all that was required was to confirm that the number of arrivals matched the number appearing on the single certifi cate.92
In order to meet the new stipulations, Bailey sought the help of the Tung Wah Hospital Committee. By 1875, the committee��s work among emigrants and the directors�� deep knowledge of Chinese customs and practices must have been widely known in town. Luckily for him, the committee was happy to cooperate. After several meetings, they worked out a system of joint action. Th ey agreed that after each female applicant had filled out the declaration under Section 1, she was to obtain security from a reputable merchant.93 Once these require-ments were complied with, she would then apply to the Tung Wah Committee for examination of her character. If she received a favorable report, the US con-sular officer would send for the surety and examine him to check whether his statements corresponded with the woman��s declaration and with the commit-tee��s report. If all these statements agreed, the emigrant was re-examined by the Registrar-General, who would make further inquiries in order to test the cor-rectness of all the previous statements. Only after clearing this hurdle would the consulate issue her the certificate required by section 5 of the Act and send her to the Harbor Master��s offi ce, where, after another round of examination as to her free and voluntary emigration, a stamp was put on her arm with printer��s ink in order to identify her on board the vessel. Of the three photographs she had to submit, one was appended to her declaration or passage ticket, one sent to the Collector of Customs at San Francisco, and the third retained in the US consulate. The elaborate system apparently worked�Xat least for a short time. The number of women entering the United States fell from 382 in 1875 to 260 in 1876 and just 76 in 1877.94
Giles H. Gray, Surveyor of Customs at San Francisco, when testifying on May 27, 1876 before the Special Commission on Chinese Immigration of the California State Senate, explained the procedures of the ��certifi cate�� system administered by the US consul in Hong Kong, noting that tickets were sold to
Source: Enclosure #9 in Bailey to Calwalader, August 28, 1875, #307: Despatches from US Consuls in Hong Kong, 1844�V1906.
the women only when the consul was satisfied that they were respectable women. He was impressed by how well the system worked: in the past, he recalled, every steamer had brought more than 250 women, but not more than 250 had arrived over some 11 months, and he was satisfied that ��the importation of women for lewd and immoral purposes�� had stopped. He was equally triumphant and optimistic when speaking before the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration of the US Congress that November.95 Notably, Gray did not mention the Tung Wah Hospital��s role on either occasion.
This arrangement, despite its apparent success, did not last long. From about May 1876, reference to the Registrar-General in the consulate��s records was discontinued, and reference to the Tung Wah Committee became scarce.96 Somewhere along the line, it appears, the system started to disintegrate. H. Sheldon Loring (1877�V79), who succeeded Bailey, was much less vigilant. Through a study of Loring��s correspondence for the second half of 1878, his-torian Benson Tong shows that he received no inquiries on female emigration and sent only three requests to the Tung Wah Committee out of a total corre-spondence of 44 letters. This period also witnessed a threefold increase in female emigration over the previous year: 351 in 1878 and 340 in 1879.97
The increasing laxity was resented by the Tung Wah directors. Th ey com-plained that the declarations containing the particulars of the women which the consulate was supposed to produce for examination at the time of the ves-sel��s departure were not always produced. Or they were produced so late that when the directors discovered discrepancies, there was nothing they could do to remedy the situation. They became suspicious that employees at the US con-sulate were being bribed to provide certificates of clearance for women who did not qualify. But they said nothing, rationalizing it as a ��strictly offi cial matter�� for the US consulate. For Chinese businessmen who understood the importance of ��face,�� to query the consulate��s proceedings would have caused undue embarrassment all round. The directors also realized that women could find their way on board ��in a roundabout way,�� and once on board would hide themselves away, and that employees on board the vessels were in the habit of smuggling women.98 But the directors, for their own reasons, said nothing about these practices until much later.
Why did the examination system break down? Was it because of disagree-ment arising between the Tung Wah Hospital Committee and the consuls? Or was it a matter of money�Xa problem that seems to have plagued the US con-sulate in Hong Kong for some years? Mosby, in criticizing his predecessors�� pro-cedures, claimed that it was generally understood that no woman could obtain the consular certificate ��without paying a premium to the consul of ten or fi ft een dollars.��99 Was it possible that the examination of women had become such a lucrative source of income for the consuls, especially Loring, and their under-lings, that to vet women too carefully might discourage applicants and so dimin-ish the source? Traffickers, too, were learning to get around the system, through bribery, more sophisticated ways of ensnaring the women, and more devious ways of hiding them on board.
As a result of the Page Law, Chinese women passengers were ostensibly subject to many rounds of investigation: in Hong Kong by officials at the US consulate, the Tung Wah directors and British colonial offi cials; and aft er arriv-ing in California, by the Collector of Customs. Such humiliating interrogations were likely to have prevented some women from even attempting to emigrate, and ironically it would have been ��good�� women who were most likely to be dis-couraged. In the marketplace, such screening hurdles, by making women more rare, would only have resulted in raising the price of the commodity. It would not have eradicated the emigration of women altogether.
The Chinese Consul-General Weighs In
Things were allowed to slip until early 1879 when the case of two kidnapped women burst on the scene. The discovery was partly due to the efforts of Chen Shutang, the newly appointed Chinese Consul-General in San Francisco. Chen had accompanied Chen Lanbin, the Chinese minister, to America in the summer of 1878 and was appointed to the new post in December. In the inter-vening months, he discovered what most people had known all along�Xthat in the majority of cases, Chinese women going to California had not gone of their own accord, but had been deviously enticed on board by ��vagabonds.�� Th ough the Zongli Yamen had known about the kidnapping of women for emigration since 1869, and Chen must have been briefed accordingly, he might still have been shocked by the scale of the practice. To him, these women�Xmany of them ��virtuous�� women�Xwere faced with desperation when in California, such as the one who tried to throw herself into the sea in September 1878 rather than set foot on American soil.100 However, he regretted that without even the most basic information about them, such as their real names, it was impossible to trace the kidnappers.
On January 4, 1879, when the Occidental and Oriental steamer Belgic was due to arrive from Hong Kong, Chen sent his deputy on board to see that all was in order. The deputy found two women, Liu Yu shi and Chen Liang shi�Xboth mentioned above�Xcrying inconsolably, claiming that they had been kidnapped and refusing to go ashore. The San Francisco customs authorities referred the cases to the Chinese consul for investigation. Full depositions were taken from the women by the consul, and T. B. Shannon, the Collector of Customs, charged with the implementation of the Page Law at San Francisco, was shocked to hear the women testify that all the time they were in Hong Kong and on board, they were never examined by anyone, yet each of them had a certificate issued by the US consulate to the effect that she was a free and voluntary emigrant. Th ere were several possible explanations: imposters could have been sent to the examina-tions, answered all the questions correctly, and received the required documents which were then passed to the real passenger just before the vessel departed. Or corrupt officials at the consulate might have provided the documents for a bribe. Clearly, the elaborately designed system of examination in Hong Kong was, in practice, full of loopholes.
T. B. Shannon wrote a sharp letter to Mosby, the incoming US consul, to draw his attention to the matter and pointed out the urgent need for vigilance. The political need for strict enforcement was particularly emphasized because opposition to immigration of Chinese on the West Coast was growing very strong.101 The message seemed to be that the former consuls in Hong Kong had failed in their duties and future consuls had better pull up their socks.
Soon afterward, other cases came to light that further disconcerted Chen Shutang. On February 15, the City of Tokio arrived with 42 female Chinese emi-grants; only eight of them ��belonged to families���Xin other words, were respect-able women�Xwhile the rest had gone for the purpose of prostitution. Among the would-be prostitutes, one was formerly a mui tsai whose master had sold her on the understanding that she would be married in San Francisco, when in fact she had been kidnapped for prostitution.102 Chen noted that she had every appearance of being ��still a maiden,�� and retained her for examination, thus basi-cally saving her from her captors. Unfortunately, he was unable to retain the other women as well, even though he believed they would become prostitutes, because they did not protest. For him, the need to prevent Chinese women from going to America to become prostitutes was not only a matter of compassion or moral righteousness. He lamented that there were far too many Chinese prosti-tutes in California, and it was a matter of national honor that their numbers be reduced. For the first time, Chinese prostitution in America entered a national-ist discourse on the China side. Interestingly, he too sought the Tung Wah direc-tors�� assistance, this time to uphold China��s good name.103
The Chinese consul sent the women back to Hong Kong on the Gaelic, ��con-signed to�� the Tung Wah directors.104 He instructed the ship��s purser to look after them and prevent them from falling into the wrong hands again. Once in Hong Kong, they were to be delivered to the care of the directors, who were in turn to deliver them to their relatives. His instructions were clear and detailed to forestall any mishaps.105 In addition, Chen asked for the Tung Wah directors�� help to prevent the emigration of kidnapped females and prospective prostitutes on a longer term basis. He urged them to call upon the new US consul John Mosby, who he described as ��a person of very good parts,�� and consult with him as to what could be done. To strengthen the directors�� hands, he enclosed an English letter for them to forward to Mosby.106
Mosby arrived for duty in February 1879 to face the huge furor over kid-napped Chinese women emigrants. He wrote immediately to F. W. Seward, Assistant Secretary of State, to protest the deplorable way inspection of emi-grants was being conducted in Hong Kong, blaming his predecessors for inefficiency and messy accounting�Xa move that was no doubt designed to dem-onstrate his own innocence and eagerness to put things right. He focused par-ticularly on the way the inspection fees had been collected but never properly accounted for, to the detriment of the US Treasury. The fact that lax inspection might have led to the arrival of many undesirable women contrary to the aims of the Page Law seems to have been of less concern to him. Seward, on the other hand, was shocked at the ineffectiveness of procedures in Hong Kong that in effect made the Page Law a ��dead letter.��107 He wrote to Mosby to remind him of the real purpose of the law�Xexamination of prospective emigrants should not be ��mere form�� but the test of intention, the determination of the character of the emigration.108 The State Department in fact found the situation so alarming that an investigation was ordered into what had been going on in Hong Kong, the main embarkation port to America, and General Julius Stahel, American consul at Hiogo, was instructed to conduct a full investigation and report on how the provisions of the Page Law were being enforced in Hong Kong and matters regarding the accounting of emigration-related fees.109
The seriousness of the situation was not lost upon Mosby, who took action to comply with Seward��s instructions. Besides examining every Chinese emi-grant himself with the assistance of his interpreter, significantly he turned to the Tung Wah Committee to revive the, by now, largely defunct collaboration. Th e committee, instructed by Chen Shutang, had written to Mosby in April 1879, referring to the various cases of kidnapping and particularly to Liu Yu shi and Chen Liang shi, now returned to Hong Kong. It also urged him to investigate the case and find out who had stood security for them at the time and to whom the bribes had been paid, implying that it was corruption at the consulate that was expediting irregularities.110 At the same time, the committee conveyed its wish to work more closely with Mosby in the inspection process.
Stahel arrived in Hong Kong on August 3, 1879. Among his various tasks was to meet the Tung Wah directors,111 who, obviously not entirely satisfi ed with whatever arrangement Mosby had made with them, pressed for something more effective. Time was a crucial factor. They wanted the consulate to obtain emigrants�� information at least seven days prior to the vessel��s departure, to give them ample time to examine the documents carefully. If a woman proved to be from a respectable family, the directors would affix their seal to the memo. She would then be required to seek one or two respectable sureties, who should arrange a bond of surety for $1,000; the consul would decide on the form of the bond and the amount would be deposited for safekeeping at the consulate. Two days before the vessel sailed, the directors would return the memorandum to the consul, who would decide whether to allow her to go or not. Th ey also asked for the memoranda of particulars to be sent to the Chinese consul in San Francisco so that he could check that everything was in order when the women arrived. Women who had gone for purposes of prostitution or who had been kidnapped would be sent back to China and the US consul in Hong Kong would be informed so that the delinquent surety would be severely dealt with.112
The Tung Wah Committee emphasized to Stahel that not only must strict regulations be framed but that they must be strictly observed.113 Stahel was impressed by the committee��s good intentions and reported the proposals to Seward for the department��s consideration.114 Whether or not any or all of the suggestions were adopted is unclear, but the situation improved and Mosby was credited with the success. According to Mosby, a customs offi cer at San Francisco was so impressed that he wrote to congratulate him on his eff orts in preventing ��the shipping of lewd women�� to that port, and pointing out that ��vigilance and activity on the part of the consul at Hong Kong was the proper way to enforce the law.��115
For all the Tung Wah Committee��s contribution to the prevention of kidnap-ping and emigration for the purpose of prostitution, it should be remembered that it had its own objectives that coincided only partially with those of other players in Hong Kong and America who also pressed for regulation. Th e basic conflicts in principles soon came into the open, with far-reaching ramifi cations. When Ordinance 2 of 1875 was passed, the Chinese leaders were outraged that the new law not only targeted kidnapping and prostitution, but criminalized all forms of purchase. One can imagine the agitation such an indiscriminate for-mulation of the law would have produced in the Chinese community. As the Chinese leaders put it themselves, it ��put all native residents of Hong Kong in a state of extreme terror.��116 When the police began inquiring into suspected cases of ��illegal detention,�� resentment mounted. Although no charges were made so long as it could be proved that the children involved had been properly treated and that the sale had been transacted with the parents�� consent, this new ordi-nance nevertheless made Chinese householders with adopted sons, purchased concubines, and mui tsai susceptible to blackmail, harassment, and convic-tion. Even though the basic inertia within the government remained and many officials�Xincluding the Registrar-General and the Attorney-General�Xwere resigned to the fact that Chinese customs had to be tolerated,117 Chief Justice Smale��s energetic maneuverings were enough to make some people look at these issues in a new light.
The Chinese merchants had to take action, especially as John Pope Hennessy who arrived as the new governor in April 1877 was known for his idealistic ani-mosity against slavery and the human trade. But he soon fell under the mer-chants�� influence. In 1878, they sent him a memorial asking for permission to found a society to prevent kidnapping and to protect the victims, and for the authority to employ detectives, offer rewards for arrests, and return the victims to their homes.118 Hennessy liked the idea and praised them for their active sup-pression of kidnapping without realizing at this point that there was a hidden agenda, which would be spelt out in a second memorial submitted a year later.
In the meantime, in September 1879 Smale, while hearing a case of selling and buying a child for the purpose of prostitution, demanded that two other persons who had bought the child earlier as a mui tsai should also be prose-cuted. This was strongly resisted by the acting Attorney-General and the verbal clash between the two in court, fully reported in the newspapers, revealed to the public the tensions among colonial officials over the controversial issue of human traffi cking.119 It must have raised many eyebrows. On October 6, Smale made a long and arduous declaration from the Bench before he was to sentence five prisoners for various forms of purchasing a child, lashing out as much at the pervasiveness of the evil practices as at the interference from the executive in judicial matters.120
Smale��s persistence, supported zealously by the local English-language press, threw the Chinese merchants into a panic, not least because the persons Smale wanted to prosecute were a comprador and his wife. It seems the merchants�� worst fears had come to pass, as it was clear that Smale was not just targeting the riff -raff of Chinese society and social status provided no protection from prosecution. A delegation of Chinese merchants instantly called upon Hennessy to press their views, and when he asked them to present their views in writing, they submitted a lengthy memorial signed by the Tung Wah Hospital directors and others.121 They pointed out the need to distinguish between dishonest and ��unworthy�� transactions that should be punished, and ��necessary�� sales that were carried out with ��worthy motives,�� which should be permitted. Past gov-ernors, they claimed, though aware that the sale of girls as mui tsai and of boys for adoption occurred, had treated the matter ��with indulgence�� by prohibit-ing prosecution. These customs were necessary and respected in Chinese society, and there were clearly established safeguards against abuses. They were entirely different from the ��life-long slavery�� that Westerners talked about. On the other hand, they conceded that evil practices such as ��decoying, kidnapping, forcible detention, conspiracy to drive to prostitution and the selling of virtuous girls to putanism�� should be prohibited. The signatories reminded the governor of their right to practice Chinese customs granted by Captain Elliot��s 1841 proclama-tion, which seemed to be used as a talisman by Chinese residents against any encroachment of their rights by the colonial administration.
The memorialists went so far as to point out that the colonial authorities were fully aware that 80�V90 percent of the prostitutes in Hong Kong had been bought; it was common knowledge, and this had been allowed to continue because governments in the past had understood Chinese customs, and did not seek to ��tyrannize and harass the people.�� Implicit in the protest was the ques-tion of why, if such practices had been accepted in the past, things needed to be changed now. They urged the governor to amend the ordinance so that ��moral�� sales might be allowed to continue. They referred to the association that was being established to protect women and girls, obviously hoping to demonstrate that with its establishment, the abuses of the practice could be eradicated and the practice itself should be allowed to continue.122
The memorial was roundly condemned by the English-language press in Hong Kong. Besides attacking their detestable principles, the critics mocked their self-contradicting arguments. Th e Hongkong Daily Press pointed out per-ceptively that the petitioners seemed to forget that wherever there was a market for slaves, it would be supplied by kidnappers.123 Smale was equally scathing in questioning the logic of their thinking: How could the Chinese leaders seek to suppress kidnapping unless they punished those who created the supply and demand�Xthose who sold to, or bought from, kidnappers?124 In other words, how could one expect kidnapping to be stamped out so long as the selling and buying of persons was tolerated?
Such criticisms notwithstanding, the Chinese leaders managed to bring Governor John Hennessy around to their view and, knowing that he would eventually have to answer to the Colonial Office on the issue, the governor quickly fortified his position by asking E. J. Eitel, the Chinese Secretary and leading sinologist, to submit a report on the subject of ��Chinese servitude in relation to slavery.�� Eitel gave him just what he needed. Based on an historical survey of how Western and Chinese slavery had evolved, the report concluded that Chinese slavery and domestic servitude were categorically diff erent from the Western version. The Chinese variety, having ��lost all barbaric and revolt-ing features,�� was only ��the natural phenomena of a social organism held in the bondage of patriarchalism.�� As such, Eitel argued, these practices would disappear naturally in the course of progress, and ��undue interference�� would be ��an act of injudicious intolerance.��125 In other words, the Chinese prac-tices�Xwhich were quite harmless in any case�Xshould be left alone and the government should not take any judicial or legislative action against them. Th is apparently learned, and yet in fact disingenuous, justifi cation for non-interfer-ence became the timely ammunition for Hennessy to defend Chinese customs against British law.
After a long and tense tussle with the Colonial Office in London, which could hardly be seen to tolerate ��slavery�� in its territory, the governor succeeded in somehow fudging the matter. The Chinese memorialists laid down the line for the governor regarding the legality of human trafficking�Xor at least consid-erable aspects of it. A practice so repugnant to English law and the spirit of liber-alism was thus protected in the British colony as a ��Chinese social custom.�� Girls were bought and sold as mui tsai for another 40 years, incurring no prosecution except in cases of ill-treatment. In the 1920s, the Hong Kong government came under strong pressure to abolish the mui tsai system, first from Christians, mis-sionaries, labor unionists, and women activists in the colony�Xboth Chinese and European�Xand then from the Colonial Office and the League of Nations. In 1923, the Domestic Service Ordinance was passed, prohibiting the engagement of any new mui tsai without disallowing the system.126
But that was far in the future. In the late 1870s, ��slavery�� remained an unre-solved and hotly contested subject in the newspapers in London, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Spurred by the turn of events, David Bailey, now US Consul-General in Shanghai, seized the opportunity to reiterate his long-held view that Chinese immigration should be prohibited altogether because, as a people, the Chinese were so tainted by the practice of ��slavery.�� In Bailey��s hands, the Chinese merchants�� memorial of 1879 became the perfect ammunition with which to bash Chinese slavery and Chinese immigration. In October, he had sent the State Department a long and detailed report on the institution of Chinese slavery. He listed four distinct types of Chinese slave�Xslaves of the imperial household; slaves for labor; concubines; and prostitutes�Xfocusing particularly on the last two. He warned that with slavery and concubinage almost indissolu-ble parts of the Chinese social system, American statesmen should be wary of letting in more Chinese: ��Is not this Chinese system of concubinage . . . but a twin sister of polygamy, that other ��relic of barbarism�� 127 now so fi rmly rooted in the heart of the American continent, and toward the extermination of which the government is bending its energies?�� He cited John Smale��s estimate that there were 10,000 slaves in Hong Kong where the population was only 120,000, meaning there was at least one slave to every 11 freemen in that British Colony, ��in spite of laws prohibiting slavery.�� To him, it was clear evidence that there was a ��vitality and strength�� in the Chinese law and in the system of Chinese slavery to enable them to defy foreign laws and courts even after 37 years of existence under British rule.128 It was this tenacity that made it so dangerous.
He reiterated his argument in a second letter, but this time greatly rein-forced by several enclosed documents, including John Smale��s long declaration of October 6 that slavery in every form in Hong Kong was illegal and must be put down, and the second Chinese merchants�� memorial to the governor. Bailey condemned the governor��s complicity in defending ��slavery.�� Th e leading Chinese native residents, he demonstrated, had admitted in their own words that slavery was an essential feature of their political and social life, and now this was to be protected by British law. Americans should note that the situation was allowed to prevail in Hong Kong, an entrepot for all the Chinese emigration to the United States, and he asked rhetorically ��whether that emigration is not thus shown to have in its every lineament the taint of human slavery?��129
Bailey��s letters, along with the attachments, were forwarded by the Department of State to the President and submitted to the House of Representatives as reports ��on slavery in China.�� In a debate in the House in early 1880 on a Bill for restricting Chinese immigration into the country, Mr Berry, a member from California who largely was quoting Bailey��s report, made use of the argument that if the British authorities had not been able to prevent slavery from being practiced in Hong Kong, there would be great danger that, if an unlimited immigration of Chinese were allowed, it would be followed by the prevalence of the same system of slavery in America.130 As Abrams points out, by raising the specter of concubinage and prostitution�Xwhich were deeply anti-thetical to American Christian ideals of monogamy and marriage as a consensual ��love match���XBailey offered powerful ammunition to anti-Chinese groups in America who were able to argue that if such women were to give birth to future American citizens, their ��slave-like�� nature would become part of the fabric of American democracy.131 With ��slavery�� becoming emblematic of Chinese bar-barity and iniquity, it was just the excuse American politicians needed to justify their abhorrence of Chinese people, with their detestable social values and customs, and ultimately to justify excluding them altogether.
Chinese Exclusion Act
By 1880, just five years after the passing of the Page Law, the immigration of Chinese women had become less of an issue, for by then the US government was hard at work introducing laws to restrict Chinese men and women. Th e Chinese Exclusion Laws of 1882, 1884 and 1888 expressed the Americans�� intransigent stance. The 1882 Act suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years, though Chinese laborers residing in California before November 17, 1880 were allowed to remain. Initially, these laborers had the right to leave and return to the United States if they obtained a certificate of identifi cation, popu-larly known as a ��return certificate,�� from the collector before leaving. The Act of 1888 took away this right, however, providing that once a Chinese laborer left the United States, he could not return. The Treaty of 1894 made an exception for some laborers, allowing those with a ��lawful wife, child, or parent�� living in the United States, or with at least 1,000 dollars�� worth of property or debts owed them, to return to the country.
Chinese who were not laborers (merchants, students, diplomats, and travel-ers), and those who had been born in the United States and were thus American citizens, were allowed to enter the country. Chinese exempt from exclusion had to obtain from the Chinese government what came to be known as a ��Section 6�� or ��Canton�� certificate, verifying that they were members of the exempt classes. Such a certificate constituted prima facie evidence of a Chinese applicant��s right to enter the United States.
The statutes did not address explicitly the admissibility of Chinese women and children, but in effect they made it even more difficult for women to immi-grate.132 In addition, since the mechanism for limiting prostitutes�� immigration was well in place before the first Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, the main impact of the Act fell on women other than prostitutes.133
The main control over female emigration shifted from Hong Kong to California, where an elaborate�Xand inhumane�Xsystem was set up to examine men and women by the Collector of Customs. Hong Kong��s function as a sup-plier of women for the American market dissipated when the market was stran-gled by legislation.
Conclusion
The emigration of Chinese men to California created a market for many things, including Chinese women. Given the structure of Chinese families and social practices, many of the women who went to Gold Mountain had been bought and sold to become domestic servants, concubines, or prostitutes. Among them were women kidnapped for the market. Since Hong Kong was the main port of embarkation, its political, social, and cultural environment had a direct bearing on the kinds of women who might pass through. If British laws against slavery and human trafficking had been upheld seriously in its courts, it is conceivable that the passage of purchased women would have been prevented. In reality, things were very diff erent. Though a British colony, in many ways Hong Kong was still a Chinese city where all kinds of Chinese practices prevailed�Xwith the Chinese merchant elite defending vehemently their right to uphold their social principles and customs. With few exceptions, the inertia and apathy of colonial and consular officials and the economic interests of players in this most com-mercial of cities combined to annul the anti-slavery laws and marginalize those who attempted to champion them. Thus Hong Kong became the distribution hub in a well-integrated global market for women, supplying prostitutes, kept women, concubines and mui tsai, and shaping the nature of female emigration across many seas.
So who had the last laugh? The Chinese merchants certainly did not. Th ey would never have foreseen that their insistence on their right to uphold Chinese norms would play into the hands of American politicians who turned Chinese immigration into a key election issue, pointing out the immorality of their social practices as an excuse for exclusion. It is ironic that in winning this right from the colonial governors, the Chinese merchants in fact led indirectly to the Exclusion Act that destroyed the opportunities of several generations of Chinese labor-ers to enter the United States legally, and that must have curtailed their own commercial interests. On the other hand, John Smale, who at the time failed to impose his principles on the social and legal norms of Hong Kong, won the bigger battle by exposing the darker sides of Chinese patriarchy to the world and justifying the action of anti-Chinese politicians in the United States. He perhaps laughed best.
7
Returning Bones
On May 15, 1855, the American ship the Sunny South left San Francisco for Hong Kong with what the Alta California described as a ��strange article of export���X��a freight of seventy dead Chinamen.��1 This was the first of many such shipments; for the next hundred years, the remains of tens of thousands of deceased Chinese from around the world were to be returned to China via Hong Kong. Hong Kong was to become not only the major embarkation port for Chinese departing China, but also the main disembarkation port for those who returned, dead or alive. A study of Hong Kong as the pivotal point in the jianyun (literally collecting and sending [of bones]) process between Chinese emigrants abroad and their home villages, with all its myriad social, politi-cal, cultural, and financial implications, off ers an ideal opportunity to explore further Hong Kong��s role in the Chinese diaspora and the function of the ��in-between place�� in migration.
Chinese migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as we have noted, was intended to be cyclical, not linear. For the Chinese gold rushers, the urge to return to one��s native place was as strong a driving force as the ��mania�� to leave. With centrifugal and centripetal forces constantly at work, the return passage to China was a natural part of the ��going out�� process, and it played a vital role in keeping the vessels moving in both directions.
People started to return quite early on, as shown previously. Among the fi rst were the three or four passengers who arrived from San Francisco in early 1851 on the Race Horse, showing off their gold dust and bragging about the gold regions.2 The dribble became a steady flow. Reporting in early 1852 about the large number of Chinese leaving for China, the Alta California commented: ��These singular men most of whom came here a year or two ago, with a few packages of tea or rice, and by their industry, frugality and strict attention to business, have all made money, some of them amassed fortunes.��3 On one day alone, November 14, 1852, seven vessels arrived in Hong Kong, four of them bringing back 254 Chinese passengers.4 Many of them, having fulfi lled their obligations at home�Xswept their ancestors�� graves, paid respect to their parents, bought land and restored the ancestral hall, impregnated wives�Xor having bought enough merchandise for their business, would return to California and start the migration cycle anew.
The demographic situation was dynamic and shifting, full of comings and goings, dying and death. In 1856, the Reverend William Speer estimated that of the Chinese who had arrived in San Francisco, 9,000 had returned and 1,400 had died, with about 43,000 remaining; in 1868, the corresponding fi gures were 42,800 returned, 3,900 dead, and 106,000 remaining.5
Returning the Dead
Large-scale repatriation of human remains became a feature of Chinese emigra-tion to California. In the nineteenth century, the paramount Chinese desire to be buried in one��s native village where descendants could make offerings at one��s grave greatly molded emigrants�� social behavior. Death, and the proper rituals attending it, transformed individuals into the privileged role of ancestors and symbolized the continuity of the family. It was widely believed that to be buried in a well-chosen site according to fengshui principles not only enabled the dead to rest in peace but, perhaps more importantly, would bring good fortune to one��s descendants for generations to come. Nothing was more abhorred and feared than dying in a strange land, deprived of attendance from one��s family and becoming a hungry, lonely ghost, unfed and unclothed, drift ing in limbo. The dream of reposing peacefully at home remained mere fantasy for many Chinese emigrants of centuries past, but it would seem that unprecedented wealth in the California emigrant community made the dream realizable. In the same way that they could aff ord high-quality prepared opium, the Chinese in California could afford quality dying.
The desire to be buried in one��s native place was universal, apart from some odd exceptions�Xso odd, in fact, that when Gee Ah Tye, who went to America around 1852, died in 1896, his express wish�Xto be buried permanently in America and not in China�Xmade news! In extra-large letters, the headings to his obituary announced:
HIS BONES TO LIE IN THIS LAND. THE STRANGE REQUEST OF AN AGED CHINESE MERCHANT. HE DID NOT WANT HIS BODY SENT BACK TO THE FLOWERY
KINGDOM. THE FUNERAL WAS POSTPONED UNTIL HIS
ELDEST SON COULD RETURN FROM CHINA.6
Death was a major issue that the Chinese in Hong Kong and California labored to resolve. Very early on, Chinese merchants in San Francisco organized associations for their tongxiang (fellow regionals) with a wide range of objec-tives, from collecting debt and fighting rival factions to providing various forms of welfare to the unemployed, the sick, and the dead, thus giving solace to the sojourner in a foreign land full of perils and uncertainties�Xsolace in both life and death. Repatriating bones became one of the most highly valued of their services.7 It was a way to fulfill one��s obligation to one��s neighbors, a demonstra-tion of shared cultural values. Perhaps there was also the urge to protect oneself against hostile spirits. As Speer notes, the ��extreme anxiety concerning the bones of the dead is caused by the belief that their spirits will haunt the survivors if proper respect for them be not shown.��8 Certainly, another motive for support-ing such activities was the hope that upon one��s own death, one��s remains would enjoy the same treatment with promises of a good aft erlife.
Accustomed to the practice of secondary burial in South China, organizers of jianyun put it to good use. In California, primary burial took place at the local-ity of sojourn, and after a number of years, the bones�Xhaving been disinterred, cleaned, and packed�Xwere shipped back to China for secondary and perma-nent burial in the native village.9 By 1858, ��cargoes of dead Chinamen�� being shipped at San Francisco had become a common sight. Th e Asia, which sailed in early 1858, was reported to have taken no fewer than ��400 dead Celestials�X untombed from their temporary resting places, and packed away in the most mercantile manner at $7 each.��10
From these modest beginnings, the repatriation of bones from California�X and other localities�Xsoon assumed enormous proportions and developed into a regular feature of the transpacifi c traffi c as well as an integral and distinctive part of the China�VAmerica migration experience. For instance, in 1870�Xby which time Chinese laborers were being recruited in huge numbers to work on the railroads�X9,000 kilograms of bones, the remains of 1,200 Chinese railway workers ��blasting their way through the Sierra��s granite,�� were shipped home.11 An even more extravagant claim was made by a local observer in California, who estimated in 1913 that 10,000 boxes of bones would leave the United States for shipment to China during that year.12 It was as if the long, complex process of collecting bones for repatriation had evolved into an industry in itself.
Commercially, the first person to have conceived of what I call ��freightiz-ing the dead�� had hit upon a bonanza. As the American vice-consul in Hong Kong noted in 1858, there was a profitable return trade in bringing back the dead bodies of the Chinese, and he particularly noted one ship recently arriving in Hong Kong with 370 bodies, ��well packed, as merchandise, at $10 freight each.��13 It seems that the actual freight cost for transportation was not as high as the $7 or $10 mentioned above. It is more likely that the $7 or $10 was the amount of ��membership fee�� collected by the associations that would, in addi-tion to freight, cover other expenses such as the cost of the coffi ns/bone boxes,14 gathering, exhumation, cleaning, packing, land transportation, documentation, rituals, government charges, and so on. From various records I have come across, the average cost for sending bone boxes up to the 1880s was between $2 and $3;15 the historian Liu Boji claims it was $5, which might have been the cost for a later period.16 But even this would be a tidy income for ship operators if a steady supply of ��dead Chinamen�� could be guaranteed! Compared with live passengers, who were paying an average of $20 in the 1860s and 1870s for a return passage to China,17 the bone transportation business was easy money. One is tempted to be cynical and speculate that, given the lucrative nature of the bone traffic, at least part of the impetus behind its organization was to provide steady freight business for the China-bound voyages. In the process, what might initially have appeared an unlikely innovation and a luxury soon came to be per-ceived as a necessity.
There was, in fact, a unique dimension to the return of human remains. Being neither normal passengers nor goods,18 human remains constituted a totally dif-ferent type of ��cargo,�� with its very own unique emotional, cultural, and spir-itual connotations, involving different fears, desires, and expectations. Th e social resources required to bring it about were also unique.
The American Perspective
Whereas the repatriation of Chinese human remains was considered quaint by Americans in the 1850s, in a later period when anti-Chinese feelings intensi-fied, these activities were interpreted as another example of Chinese barbarity and transformed into another target for anti-Chinese hostilities. In 1877, the New York Times reprinted an article from the San Francisco Chronicle headlined ��Exporting Dead Chinamen�XA Startling Proclamation from the ��Mansion of Divine Bliss���XBase Individuals Who Have Gone Into the Business of Sending Dead Celestials Home Without Authority.��19 A subsequent article in the New York Times picked up the story:
English speaking people have the short and repulsive name of ghoul for the man that disinters the bones of the dead �K The superiority of the Chinese civilization, which has, according to liberal minded Eastern chronologists, braved for several million years the battle and the breeze, is nowhere more apparent than in the gorgeous appellation it confers upon an association for unburying dead Chinamen.
It goes on to ridicule the very idea of disinterment. The indispensable earth-worker, whose task it was to dig up the bones, wipe them clean with cloth, sun them dry and then sew them in a compact bundle, was mockingly called ��the Blissful Bone Bagger.��20
As always, behind the contemptuous and mocking tone of the English lan-guage newspapers was a willful, vulgar misinterpretation of Chinese aspira-tions. The philosophy of life and death, of family relationships and mutual aid among fellow regionals that was behind the complex and hazardous operation of jianyun was completely overlooked. Along with opium smoking, gambling, and prostitution, the exhumation and repatriation of the dead became further evidence of Chinese decadence. In political terms, it confirmed the claim by anti-Chinese politicians that Chinese should have no rights to citizenship since their sole intention in going to America was to ��make a stake and return [to China].�� At a Senate investigation on Chinese immigration, it was claimed that:
All Chinese contemplate returning �K They must be buried in celestial soil. Their superstition and their religion is that there is no approach to the heavenly and celestial realm except from the Celestial kingdom. Th e spirits of those who are buried here wander in darkness throughout the ages, separated from their ancestors, which is a serious bereaval [sic] to them. Therefore, when they come to this country they intend to return �K they enter into a contract that if they die pending their contract their bodies shall be returned to China. When you see a burial [sic] passing through our streets �K they are taking their dead to the cemetery, not for burial, but for deposit until an accumulation is sufficient to justify the charter of the whole of a ship that shall carry them back to the port from where they came �K Twenty years have demonstrated the purpose of the Chinese in coming to this city, and, as I said, they come to make a stake and return.21
As we know, such prejudice eventually led to the Exclusion Act in 1882. In 1878, it resulted in the passing of a law by the California legislature which, on public health grounds, made it difficult to ship the bodies of deceased Chinese to China for burial. The shipping of dead bodies in coffins, in any case, had been comparatively rare as it was far more expensive than shipping bones in boxes, but with the passing of the law, the Chinese community was left only with the option of bone-repatriation and secondary burial in China.22
Organizing Jianyun
By the nineteenth century, there had long developed in China a tradition of returning the remains of people�Xmainly high officials and wealthy merchants�X who had died away from home for burial in their hometown.23 Th e practice of repatriating en masse the remains of not just the wealthy and the powerful but also ordinary laborers, however, was a phenomenon that appears to have emerged only with Chinese emigration to California. Besides being expensive and labor-intensive, the exercise also required organization, personal attention, and social networking on an unprecedented scale. The long distances that had to be covered�Xoft en from unmarked graves in isolated and remote goldfi elds hundreds of miles from San Francisco to likewise isolated and remote villages in Guangdong, through San Francisco, across the Pacifi c Ocean, then through Hong Kong�Xmade the process all the more formidable.
Those familiar with the history of Chinese in America will know the domi-nant role played by the Six Companies in community aff airs. But long before the Six Companies as a collective body took the shape and assumed the impor-tance that they did, native-place associations had begun to spring up. Th ese earlier associations undertook, or established sub-divisions to undertake, death-related matters�Xarranging funerals, grave sweeping, and repatriation of bones�Xfor members. Among a people who often conceived of the dead as being more important than the living, the rise and proliferation of such organizations seemed only natural.
One of the earliest native-place organizations was the Sam Yup (Sanyi, lit-erally Three Counties) Benevolent Association, which encompassed people from Nanhai, Shunde, and Panyu�Xthe wealthiest counties in Guangdong prov-ince�Xwith a high proportion of merchants among their members in California. Founded in 1850, the association��s main objective was to make representation with the white California authorities and to protect its members against fac-tional conflicts with Chinese from other regions, especially people from Sze Yup (Siyi, literally the Four Counties): Xinning (later Taishan), Kaiping, Xinhui, and Enping. For death-related matters, each of the Three Counties organized its own sub-group. The Nanhai sub-group was known as Fook Yum Tong (Fuyintang), and it may be safe to assume that it was the Fook Yum Tong that had sent the shipment on the Sunny South in 1855.24 ��Fuyin�� literally means benevolence on descendants, an indication that the purpose of jianyun was as much for the benefit of posterity as for the deceased individuals.
The Fook Yum Tong��s record claims that initially its organizers aimed only at providing proper burials for those who had died in California. As life was rough in the frontier territory, and men often died from fights and accidents as well as illness, Nanhai merchants bought land to bury their tongxiang and made offerings at their graves on qingming and chongyang, two days in the Chinese calendar for paying respect to ancestors. However, the cemetery was later forced to move, and instead of relocating the remains locally, the organizers made the momentous decision to exhume the bones and send them across the ocean back to China.25 Thus began the activity of jianyun by tongxiang associations that shaped the migration pattern of thousands of Chinese.
A few months later, on November 12, the bones of another 20 people arrived in San Francisco by boat from Sacramento for transportation to China.26 In June 1856, an unusually large shipment of remains was dispatched for China�X336 in all. Of these coffins/bone boxes, 217 belonged to people of Xiangshan county. In San Francisco, Xiangshan natives were among the fi rst to form an association�Xthe Yeung Wo Association27�Xand each sub-county formed its own association for death-related matters. Thus the work of ship-ping the 217 coffins/bone boxes of Xiangshan natives was in fact undertaken by six different sub-county organizations. By 1900, there would be a total of 12 such Xiangshan sub-county organizations.28 In that same 1856 shipment were also the remains of 94 Dongguan and 17 Zengcheng natives. In addition, there were coffins/bone boxes that had been collected by relatives of the deceased, who presumably were not members of any of the above associations.
Other regional associations subsequently emerged. The level of activity of each group depended on the number of people it had in North America, the wealth of the group and the degree of initiative that its leaders took.
The Chong How Tong, San Francisco
Jianyun was an activity that reflected the pervasive, multileveled, and intricate economic and social networks that straddled California, Hong Kong, and South China. The work of the Panyu association, the Chong How Tong (Putonghua, Changhoutang), provides a rare opportunity to gain insight into the operational details of jianyun and the amazing power of these networks.
At the time of its founding in 1858, there were several thousand Panyu natives in California, and there had been 200 deaths. Under the umbrella organ-ization of the Sam Yup Association, the Chong How Tong��s specifi c function was to conduct jianyun. Its name, which literally means ��bringing prosperity to descendants,�� reminds us again of the importance of the family and forebears in Chinese social thinking and social behavior. Though its own record does not explain why it was in that year that its members felt the need to undertake such work, we may speculate�Xbased on other sources�Xthat the destruction of a cemetery in San Francisco had set off the alarm. The building of a new reservoir had led to widespread damage to Chinese graves inside the cemetery, leading to utter confusion. In some cases, skeletons were exposed to the elements. In others, grave markers were burned or scattered about, so that it was no longer possible to distinguish whose bones were whose.29 Given the Chinese social and supernatural concern for the integrity of physical remains and gravesites, it is easy to imagine the panic that must have broken out as a result of such callous-ness and chaos�Xchaos in the cosmic as much as the material sense. Th at inci-dent could have been the immediate cause that triggered action among leaders of the Panyu and other communities.
Nothing more was done after the initial flurry of activity in 1858. It was only in 1862 that the Chong How Tong took practical steps toward realizing its objectives, when expeditions were sent into the various districts outside of San Francisco to both gather remains and solicit funds. The expeditions, led by Cui Mei, took part in different stages. Led by a scout, he and his companions first went south, then west, and then north of San Francisco to gather remains, always returning to San Francisco with the remains they had excavated and the funds they managed to raise on the way before carrying out the next stage. They had to endure severe hardship searching among the sites in the goldfi elds, their work greatly hampered by rugged terrain, remote localities, and extreme weather conditions.
They managed to excavate over 200 sets of remains, which they placed in coffins or bone boxes ordered specially for the occasion. The search was not entirely successful, as it was impossible to track down all the burial places. In the remote areas, the team had to rely heavily on the information and other forms of assistance that tongxiang and others on the spot could provide. Even with those buried in cemeteries in San Francisco itself, smooth gathering of remains was not guaranteed. In late 1862, fl oods had washed away a number of the headstones in cemeteries, making it impossible to identify the locations of the remains. In some cases, the burial places were simply unknown or too obscure to be trace-able. There is also an interesting reference in the Chinese language newspaper to doctors ��breaking open the belly�� of deceased Chinese to determine the cause of death.30 Was there the implication that, besides the mandatory requirement by American doctors of postmortem examinations, which most Chinese at the
time viewed with disgust and horror, such bodies would be used for medical studies and therefore no longer be available to the friends and relatives of the deceased who might wish to collect them and give them decent burials? We may never know.
When a person was known to have died but his remains could not be found, his spirit was summoned in a ritual and then deposited in a spirit box (zhaohun xiang). The spirit box too would be sent back to China, and given the same care as physical remains.31
Shipment of the collected remains was finally made in 1863 when the Chong How Tong sent home 258 coffins/bone boxes, along with 59 spirit boxes.32 Two more such large-scale exercises were conducted in 1874, and between 1884 and 1887. The former involved 858 coffins/bone boxes and 24 spirit boxes, and the latter 625 coffins/bone boxes and 3 spirit boxes. Th us a total of 1,741 coffins/bone boxes and 86 spirit boxes had been repatriated since the activity began in 1862.
These items were received in Hong Kong by a corresponding society, the Kai Shin Tong (Putonghua, Jishantang), which was responsible for forwarding them to various villages in Panyu for reburial. Th e significance of the partnership between the two associations cannot be emphasized enough. The Chong How Tong��s activities help us understand important aspects of the life and aspirations of early Chinese communities in America. Its collaboration with the Kai Shin Tong demonstrates the crucial role tongxiang networks played in the Chinese diaspora. In addition, the function of the Kai Shin Tong as the transshipper and distributor of bones between California and Panyu, with all the fi nancial, social, and cultural implications of such an activity, illuminates Hong Kong��s position as an ��in-between place.��
Becoming a Member of the Chong How Tong
Every Panyu native newly arrived in America was expected to make a ��dona-tion�� of $10 toward the Chong How Tong; in return, he would be issued with a receipt that would entitle him, when he died, first to a proper burial and sub-sequently to the exhumation and repatriation of his remains. In addition, the donation would show his support for his tongxiang who died in America. Th e work of the association, like other mutual-aid organizations and all insurance programs, depended on everyone��s support for its sustainability. To ensure that every Panyu native observed his obligation, no one was allowed to leave San Francisco unless he was able to present his receipt. Inevitably, there were indi-viduals who would try to evade payment: some members, after letting others use their receipts to return to China, tried to get a replacement by reporting their loss; new arrivals sometimes claimed that they were returnees who had already paid the fee previously while others even assumed the names of individuals who had already returned to China. Offi cials of the association therefore had to be on their guard against fraud and to make sure that everyone paid up.
The association had two powerful means to enforce the system. One was to bar any evader from boarding a ship when he tried to return to China. Anyone who wished to return to China had first to present his receipt to the Chong How Tong��s San Francisco office before he could obtain an exit permit (chukou zhi). Since many passage brokers depended on the powerful Chinese merchants�X who were often the managers of the tongxiang organizations�Xfor their business, they had little choice but to play along with the associations and refuse tickets to anyone without an exit permit. In this way, passage brokers too became part of the policing system.
The second deterrent was probably more powerful, at least psychologically. The association stipulated that it would not collect the remains of any Panyu native who had not paid his dues; nor would it assist in any such work that the relatives of the deceased might wish to undertake on their own. Without the wider support of the enormous transnational mechanism set up by the associa-tion, it would be extremely difficult for individuals to arrange bone repatriation, and the likelihood was that should they die in California, their bones would never return to China and they would be condemned to remain hungry ghosts forever. It was a frightening thought, and the idea was to compel people to pay by striking fear into their hearts and making them realize the dire consequences of their delinquency.
Apart from financial obligations, all Panyu natives were made responsi-ble for reporting the whereabouts of burials in their vicinity, and for assisting in the excavation and other tasks when required. Since the undertaking was very expensive, the membership fee was not actually sufficient to cover costs, and rich merchants who organized and supported the Chong How Tong made large donations to subsidize the activities. In other words, the association oper-ated on a combination of charitable and mutual aid principles�Xa phenomenon common among Chinese tongxiang organizations. Its constitution also provided that the bones of genuinely destitute Panyu natives would be sent home free of charge, and in these cases the charitable aspect of the organization��s work was most apparent.
The Kai Shin Tong, Hong Kong
At the Hong Kong end, wealthy Panyu merchants organized the Kai Shin Tong to receive the bones and coffins. ��Kai shin�� literally means to continue the good works [of the Chong How Tong]. Collaboration over long distances between tongxiang organizations in different localities was common both in China and overseas, enabling them to achieve a variety of goals and strengthening their networks at diff erent levels.33 When first formed in 1863, the Kai Shin Tong was run by a committee of 24 managers (sili). Subsequently, various commit-tees were set up in different years for different purposes. All the members of these committees were men of means and influence, and three of them deserve special mention.
We met one of the 1863 managers, Kwok Acheong, in Chapter 1. He made his early fortune by working closely with the British, serving as a pilot and sup-plier for the British fleet during the Opium War. As a member of the Tanka (Danjia) people, his ��collaboration�� with the British was not surprising. As Christopher Munn points out, being physically mobile and traditionally dis-criminated against in Chinese society, many of these primarily boat-dwelling people were quick to see the advantages of working with the British regime and European capital to propel themselves into respectability.34 Kwok was one of those who did remarkably well. Having had a price put on his head as a collabo-rator by the Chinese authorities, he ��threw in his lot�� with the British when the colony was created. He became provisioner to the Royal Navy, and later com-prador to the P&O Company, the leading British shipping company in Chinese waters. He was a founding director of the Tung Wah Hospital, a distinct mark of his social prominence in the Chinese community. In 1876, he was the third largest ratepayer in Hong Kong and the first among the Chinese. When he died in 1880, he left an estate valued at $445,000,35 a phenomenal sum for that time. Kwok donated the rather large sum of $100 to the Kai Shin Tong when it was first set up and remained associated with it for over a decade.
Wong Ping, another 1863 manager, was the most active member of the com-mittee. A silk merchant, Wong also owned other businesses, including a rope walk. His rope walk was a huge operation and with the increasing demand of the hundreds of ships that called at the colony every year, it must have been highly lucrative.36 He was involved with shipping in another way as well. In the mid-1850s, he owned a lorcha, a coastal vessel with a schooner��s hulk and Chinese rigging, and, taking advantage of a colonial law that allowed leaseholders of land in Hong Kong, regardless of nationality, to operate their boats under the British flag, he obtained a Sailing Letter for his lorcha. Moreover, he hired an Irishman as its master, and must have been one of the few Chinese in Hong Kong with a European on his payroll. Since the British consuls in China were obliged to protect all ships flying British flags against any trouble that might arise, such protection was clearly of immense value, particularly in the mid-1850s when the waters around Guangzhou were constantly disturbed by pirates, the Taipings and other rebel groups.37 Many Europeans in Hong Kong objected to this prac-tice, claiming that it cheapened the value of the British flag in the eyes of pirates and others. The English newspaper, The Friend of China, was especially incensed that ��Mr Wong Ping, who hardly knows one word of English from another, [and one other Chinese person] applied to Her Majesty��s Government for the use of a British flag, and for the fee of Five Dollars, they can have it.��38 But despite this outcry, the practice continued. A year later, an incident over the Arrow, another Chinese-owned lorcha flying a British fl ag, brought about the outbreak of war between China and Great Britain, to be known as the Arrow War, or the Second Opium War.
By the time the Kai Shin Tong was founded, Wong had long been estab-lished in Hong Kong society. The owner of considerable property, in 1848 he joined the leading foreign and Chinese leaseholders in Hong Kong to protest against the exorbitant ground rent that the colonial government was levying on them. Obviously he was not one to take impositions quietly. The year before, he had petitioned the colonial government against a huge increase in rates on his property, and he shrewdly pleaded his case by reminding the government of the need to be fair and consistent when determining rate levels.39
Wong made another appearance as a public figure in 1851, when together with several other leading Chinese merchants, including Tam Achoy, he peti-tioned the Hong Kong governor for land to build a ��temple�� for the recep-tion of the soul tablets of those who had died in the colony. The idea was that these tablets would only be deposited there temporarily; in time, they would be returned to the dead person��s native place, but until that happened, they could at least find a shelter in the ��temple,�� where the deceased could receive off erings from friends.40 The petitioners raised a fund for the building and the government granted the land, and after the temple�Xmore specifi cally an I-tsz (Putonghua, yici) or common ancestral hall�Xwas built, Wong became one of the three trus-tees of the property, again reflecting his prominence in the Chinese commu-nity. This was the I-tsz out of which the Tung Wah Hospital emerged in 1869. Caring for the sick and providing comfort for the dead were charitable acts that were regarded highly among the Chinese. As the function and cultural meaning behind the organizing of the I-tsz and the Kai Shin Tong were very similar, we may consider Wang��s advocacy of and involvement in the I-tsz a forerunner of his participation in the Kai Shin Tong, both being expressions of his public spir-itedness and largesse.
Nominally, the affiliation between the Kai Shin Tong and Chong How Tong was based on tongxiang ties, but the ties among members on either side of the Pacific were deepened further by business connections.41 The Kai Shin Tong��s committee members included men who were directly involved in the fl ourish-ing businesses between California and Hong Kong, which included import and export, shipping, remittances and money changing, and insurance�Xthese were discussed in earlier chapters. Chan Tsok Ping, for instance, a later com-mittee member of the Kai Shin Tong, was the proprietor of the Tsun Tak Wing California Goods firm. His election as chairman of the Tung Wah Hospital in 1890 as a nominee of the California Trade guild is a clear indication of his standing in Hong Kong��s business world, and his eminence within the trade. For men like him, overseas contacts were highly desirable. Having trustworthy allies as trading partners, agents, brokers, providers of funds and security, sources of commercial and personal information, and so forth was a key to success. In this regard, every act of collaboration between the members of the Kai Shin Tong and Chong How Tong was potentially capable of building up trust, goodwill, and comradeship, and thus a means to realize and consolidate latent sentiments of collegiality among these natives of Panyu. Given that many of the Chong How Tong��s directors were also involved in various businesses with Hong Kong, the dividing line between charitable and commercial activities could become indistinguishable. Besides being a manager of the Kai Shin Tong in 1876, Chan Tsok Ping also sat on several of its subcommittees, which performed specifi c functions for the association, thus reflecting his hands-on involvement with its activities, discussed further below.
These three men�XKwok Acheong, Wong Ping, and Chan Tsok Ping�Xand other organizers of the Kai Shin Tong were, as far as we can identify, men of wealth and influence. Once it became a British colony on China��s doorstep, Hong Kong was also transformed into a fluid and open social space where con-ventional hierarchies of status could be reconfigured with much greater ease than in established societies. It offered opportunities for those who sought for-tunes and upward mobility�Xespecially where these were denied them in their native places. It was open to anyone from around the world who was enterprising and energetic, and not surprisingly many Chinese who were marginal to their own society ventured forth. Adept at crossing borders of all kinds, Kwok, Wong, and others like them became the movers and shakers of Hong Kong��s Chinese society. They participated in charitable works with as much enthusiasm as they made money, eager to flaunt their wealth and public-spiritedness. Not only did they donate handsome sums to different charities, they also played an active part in different levels of public life, using their organizational abilities and mobiliz-ing their extensive social and business networks to deliver the services.
Such work had deep implications. To provide cover for exposed human remains and give decent burials to the poor and dislocated had long been con-sidered acts of political and moral virtue,42 and for many centuries the local gentry in China demonstrated their social superiority through its practice. It was a key activity in Chinese philanthropy which was basically couched in Buddhist ideas of karma and Confucian ideas of ensuring social harmony. Here we have another element: the principle of native-place devotion, which was acknowl-edged as ��natural�� and ��morally excellent,��43 thus making the Kai Shin Tong��s work even more meritorious. But of course, men practice philanthropy for other reasons too. For individuals who were marginalized, philanthropy was a means by which they could be elevated to mainstream society. Members of disadvan-taged minority groups, such as the Tanka Kwok Acheong, used this opportunity to win respectability. At another level, Chinese merchants in late Qing China were still striving to escape the humble position in a social order defi ned by the literati. However fuzzy the class lines had become, and however much the stigma attached to commerce as a vulgar and parasitic activity had diminished by this time, merchants were still socially inferior. Through good works, and thus extending civilizing infl uence (jiaohua), merchants were able to demon-strate their moral and social worth. The dispensation of charity legitimized the accumulation of wealth, translating financial worth into moral worth.44 Among businessmen, moreover, individuals established their trustworthiness and fi nan-cial standing; and, as mentioned, collaboration in charitable activities helped to cement business relationships and demonstrate one��s effectiveness in getting things done. As these activities extended beyond Hong Kong, one may assume that such engagement also enhanced their standing in the native place in China as well as overseas.
Th e Coffi ns Arrive
Nominally, the Kai Shin Tong��s function was simply to receive the coffi ns and bones and forward them to Panyu. In fact, its work was much more compli-cated. As the first shipment of coffins and bone/spirit boxes arrived in Hong Kong in 1863, the Kai Shin Tong advertised their arrival in Hong Kong and Panyu. Relatives of the deceased were notified of the return of remains, and invited to come forward to collect them. In the meantime, the organizers tended to ritual matters. A jiao, or purification rite, was organized to pacify the souls of the deceased.45 The rituals started on the 15th day of the fi fth lunar month ( June
30) and lasted for three days and three nights. Daoist priests and a professional band of musicians performed the rites in a temporary structure erected specifi -cally for this purpose. The elaborate and expensive rituals, resplendent with all the necessary paraphernalia such as paper objects and flowers, lanterns and silk figurines, were obviously considered key components of jianyun, with the accent on grandeur and ritual correctness.46
It seems that no expense was spared to achieve these ends. We can safely specu-late that the rituals provided an important public occasion to display the wealth, prestige, and organizational prowess of the organizers. They also established the organizers�� cultural legitimacy by displaying their knowledge of cultural correct-ness. On a practical level, it is worth noting that the proximity of Hong Kong to the source of cultural resources, such as Guangzhou and other major cities in Guangdong and Fujian, facilitated the attainment of cultural correctness. Most likely, by the 1860s, there were sufficient Daoist and Buddhist establishments set up in Hong Kong to perform religious functions to meet the ritual needs of the growing and increasingly prosperous population. But even if there were not, it would have been convenient enough to invite the necessary functionaries from the mainland on specific occasions or to get the necessary ritual objects. For instance, on this occasion lanterns and figurines were specially ordered from Foshan47 in Nanhai, a city famed for its fine artwork. In this sense, much assisted by its proximity to China, Hong Kong was able to establish itself as a place of cultural authenticity�Xwhere things could be done correctly�Xin much the same way that no one today would doubt the authenticity of the Cantonese cuisine or Cantonese opera of Hong Kong. For people who cared about ritual correctness, and the efficaciousness of such rituals, this was another key advantage that made Hong Kong the ideal place for transshipping coffi ns and bones.
Two weeks aft er the jiao, the coffins and bone/spirit boxes were loaded on to boats for the onward journey, accompanied by ritual music played by hired musicians at the pier. Th e coffins were destined for various locations, depending on where the relatives of the deceased were located, and collected at diff erent points. Of the 200 or so coffins and boxes, seven were collected directly in Hong Kong. The rest, all destined for Panyu, were first taken to Changzhou and then separated into four groups, each headed for one of the four diff erent destina-tions within the county: Mudeli, Jiaotang, Shawan, and Lubu. Relatives coming forward to collect the coffins/boxes were given a sum of $7 as a burial fee.
Throughout, four Chong How Tong men who had traveled all the way from San Francisco, together with Kai Shin Tong managers from Hong Kong, were on hand to oversee the operation, making sure that nothing important�Xsuch as delivering each coffin to the correct party�Xwent awry. It is easy to imagine how crucial it was not to let the coffins, and the $7, fall into imposters�� hands. Indeed, since there were many payments that had to be made along the way for boats, inns, food, offerings, and so forth, having trustworthy and knowledgeable people on hand for the task was imperative. Moreover, the organizers had to ensure that the appropriate rituals were performed at every stage between Hong Kong and Panyu.
Inevitably, some of the deceased had no relatives and their remains were unclaimed. For them�X36 in all�Xthe Kai Shin Tong had to make totally dif-ferent arrangements. To bury these unclaimed remains, the Hong Kong asso-ciation bought roughly 18 mu48 of land in an area called Xinzao in Panyu, and made a part of it into a communal burial ground.49 The property was named Meihuazhuang, or the Plum Blossom Estate. Wong Ping, one of the Kai Shin Tong managers, was particularly active, traveling back and forth many times to effect the transaction.50
It took much planning and organizing to prepare the graveyard, including engaging a fengshui master to make sure that the site was propitious, and divin-ers to make sure that auspicious days and hours were selected for all the activi-ties. A map of the site was drawn to show the topography and the location of each grave. After the burials, masons were hired to make headstones for each grave, and to erect stones to mark the boundary of the grounds. Caretakers were employed to guard the grounds. Regulations were drawn up by the Kai Shin Tong with regard to qingming and chongyang procedures�Xdown to the weight of the roast pig that must be offered. At first, managers were only expected to make the trip to Meihuazhuang, but after the second jianyun exercise in 1874, a ��Committee for Follow Up Action�� was formed within the Kai Shin Tong, consisting of 12 members who worked on a rotational basis; each year, four of them were charged with various duties, which included personally attend-ing the annual sacrifi cial activities.51 Operating the graveyard and ensuring that rituals would continue to be performed year after year was therefore a long-term undertaking.52
Political and Social Ramifi cations
The Kai Shin Tong��s work did not end with the burials. It was now time to make sure that other social and political interests were served.
First, the publication of a commemorative book entitled A Record of the Coffin Repatriation of the Chong How Tong of California was organized. The book gave a full record of the jianyun operation, from the founding of the Tong to the fi nal settlement of the remains. Appended to it was the record of the operation of the Kai Shin Tong.53 Not surprisingly, the printing was done in Hong Kong, where the expertise in Chinese language printing remains to this day one of its greatest industrial and cultural assets.54
As was common with this sort of publication, the Record listed the names of the association��s offi cers, the donors, and the amount of each donation. It gave the full membership list. It also contained the regulations of the association, showing clearly the aims, functions, and accomplishments of both the Chong How Tong and Kai Shin Tong. It contained a statement of accounts, detailing all the incomes and expenditures, reassuring members that the association��s duties had been faithfully discharged, and their donations and membership fees prop-erly spent.
An important social objective of such a publication was obviously to enhance the reputation of the donors by recording their generosity for the admiration of contemporaries and posterity alike. The publication established the credibility and legitimacy of the institution and their leaders. On another level, it raised the status of Panyu natives among the different county and dialect groups in California, Hong Kong, and South China; considering the intense competition and sometimes violent hostility among these groups, such display of wealth and competence was purposeful. It should be remembered that other groups were organizing similar activities at the same time, making it all the more imperative that every activity, every item of expenditure and income, be carefully recorded for competitive and exhibition purposes.
There were political points to score, too. Th e Record was prefaced by four members of the local gentry in Panyu county, all middle-ranking offi cials of the Qing empire. In different ways, but in all cases using highly literary and fl owery language, these distinguished authors lamented the misfortune of those who had died in far-away California. They referred to the horror of wandering spirits abandoned in the wild and declared what a good thing it was for the migrants to be buried back in their native place, where they might find peace and receive offerings from their descendants. Perhaps more pertinently, they all praised the benevolence of the organizers�Xthe Chong How Tong and the Kai Shin Tong�X who made the repatriation possible.
We should not overlook the significance of the prefaces. As we know, the imperial ban against Chinese subjects traveling overseas was still on the books in the 1860s. It was not until 1893 that it was fi nally repealed.55 Until then, those who left the empire were nominally criminals liable to severe punishment, including having their heads chopped off. Although outright prosecution of returned sojourners was rare, the threat of prosecution was ever present, and returned emigrants took practical steps to avert such a threat. Given this back-ground, it was certainly a coup on the part of the Kai Shin Tong managers to have persuaded these middle-ranking officials to acknowledge the need of the sojourners for a decent burial�Xand thus the legitimacy of their sojourn�Xand to praise those who facilitated the return of their remains.
In this sense, one may perhaps say that arranging the preface writing was the crowning act of the bone-repatriation exercise. The Kai Shin Tong manag-ers thus obtained sanction for the migrants from the state, if only in its local manifestation. Of course, policy discrepancies between the central government and local authorities regarding many issues, including emigration, were hardly anything new. The point to note here is that the Hong Kong merchants were sophisticated and worldly enough to negotiate with mainland offi cials on behalf of their sojourning tongxiang over a very delicate issue, and proved themselves invaluable intermediaries in the bone-repatriation exercise.56
Financial Dealings
Th e financial aspects of in-between places were equally important, fund man-agement being central to the Kai Shin Tong�VChong How Tong relationship. In 1863, the Chong How Tong remitted funds to pay for the fi rst round of repa-triation, and after that it continued to send further amounts to the Kai Shin Tong for various purposes, including investment.
Given Hong Kong��s position as a hub for international trade, by the 1860s its merchants had gained extensive experience in dealing with the currencies of many different countries. In addition, as mentioned earlier, it developed into a center of remittances sent by Chinese abroad. When the first round of remit-tances from the Chong How Tong came in 1863, they were partly in silver and partly in gold�Xone gold brick weighing 83.849 taels and 89 gold coins.57 Th e gold was converted to silver taels, the preferred currency among Chinese. Th e ease with which different currencies were handled was clearly another of Hong Kong��s strengths. The Kai Shin Tong in Hong Kong also raised money locally for its own upkeep and various activities. A total of HK$1,497 was donated by a number of individuals, firms and associations. Including ��incense donations�� and income from the Chong How Tong, there was a total of 2,923 taels to start off the institution.
In 1877, the Chong How Tong remitted $10,000 to the Kai Shin Tong with instructions to buy property on its behalf. The objective was to have a steady income from rent to meet expenses for future activities,58 and accordingly a shop house in Hong Kong was bought. Presumably it was considered a sound invest-ment given the general stability in Hong Kong and the British law��s rigor when it came to protecting property rights. Faced with the anti-Chinese violence prevailing in California throughout the 1860s and 1870s, Chinese merchants there must have viewed the relative peace and stability of Hong Kong with envy. Besides, members of the managing committee of the Kai Shin Tong were noted for their acumen in real estate investment, an asset that should be exploited. Significantly, the property was bought from Wong Ping who, as shown, had been especially active in purchasing the burial ground and was a substantial landowner himself.
In 1893, the Chong How Tong made another major investment when, through the agency of the Kai Shin Tong, it bought 147 mu of agricultural land in Panyu. Since the Chong How Tong was a new, unknown legal entity as far as local registration in Panyu was concerned, the Kai Shin Tong not only organ-ized a committee to act as signatories for the transaction, it also set up another committee to petition the local magistrate to proclaim the legitimacy of the Chong How Tong as landowners.
The magistrate responded positively, and issued a proclamation that stated clearly that the Chong How Tong, properly registered as a payer of taxes, was an acknowledged corporate entity with legitimate title to the property.59 Moreover, the proclamation went on, since the Chong How Tong was doing such fi ne benevolent work, everything must be done to guarantee its income in order for the work to continue. Anyone committing offences against the property�X whether by encroaching on the land, evading rent payment, or selling it surrep-titiously�Xwould be charged and punished, and no leniency would be shown. While the Kai Shin Tong managers might have been very pleased with the proc-lamation, as it provided the necessary official endorsement and warning, it was still not good enough for them. To make the situation foolproof, they had the proclamation inscribed in stone, and erected the stone stele on the property. In this way, the proclamation was transformed into a permanent affi rmation of the legitimacy of the Chong How Tong, and the state��s commitment to protect its property. Thus we see one more demonstration of the strategy that the Kai Shin Tong adopted to create in Panyu an environment as friendly as possible to their fellow Panyu natives residing in California�Xparticularly for those who wished to return.
Another way the Kai Shin Tong invested the Chong How Tong��s funds was to earn interest, either by depositing them with individuals and firms or by lending them out as loans. The existence of such a large ��floating�� fund was likely to be a boon to any merchant needing to improve his cash flow. Members of the various Kai Shin Tong committees were involved in these transactions, both as borrow-ers and as recipients of deposits. Wong Ping, for example, was one of the Kai Shin Tong managers who took loans from the fund.60 Over the years, Tsun Tak Wing, the California trading firm owned by Chan Tsok Ping, accepted deposits from the Chong How Tong; it also lent money to the Kai Shin Tong when the latter was in need.61 Thus we see the intricate and fl exible fi nancial relationship between certain members of the Kai Shin Tong and the moneys of the Chong How Tong.
We must remember that there was nothing improper about these transac-tions. The Kai Shin Tong��s regulations clearly stipulated that the Chong How Tong��s money would be deposited with a reliable committee member for inter-est; besides, every transaction was�Xas far as we can see�Xclearly entered in the statements of accounts.62 Although we might wonder whether the association lending money to Wong Ping might be interpreted as making deposits, the fact that the transactions were listed in the accounts probably indicates that they were above board. In fact, the Kai Shin Tong managers boasted that it was through the earnings from investments they had made on the Chong How Tong��s behalf that enabled the latter to buy land in Panyu.63 The Chong How Tong�VKai Shin Tong collaboration undeniably rested very much on mutual benefi t, a partner-ship that generated as much social capital as it did business capital.
The creation of such a large fund through subscription for bone repatria-tion and used as financial capital is a subject that warrants further investigation. Suffice to say here that the financial dealings between the two associations clearly demonstrate one form in which capital was transferred between California and Hong Kong. Whatever the original intention of their founders might have been, the result was the establishment of a fund to which insiders could resort as a means for increasing cash fl ow. The existence of many such organizations�Xand relationships�Xin Hong Kong, each with its own coffer, created a convenient and effective capital pool for those concerned.
Apart from effecting the purchases, the Kai Shin Tong also managed all the housing and agricultural properties owned by the Chong How Tong in Panyu and Hong Kong, and collected rents, paid taxes, bought insurance and took care of other related matters on its behalf. According to the Kai Shin Tong��s regulations, the ��duty managers�� for the year were charged with these tasks. Th e financial arrangements between the two associations, being so inextricably intertwined, were often ambiguous, even messy.64 Despite the publication of the statements of accounts, it was not always possible to distinguish the funds of one society from the other. Thus, when times were good, the close collaboration between the Chong How Tong and Kai Shin Tong was a matter of mutual trust and mutual benefit, but when disputes arose, the intricate web of interests could become a source of contention.
The once-smooth running (at least on the surface of it) of the fi nancial provi-sions between the two associations finally broke down in the twentieth century. There is unfortunately no record of either the Chong How Tong or the Kai Shin Tong after 1893 to explain what subsequently happened, and we only hear about the troubles from other sources. According to the Sam Yup Association of San Francisco, the money in the care of the Hong Kong and Panyu managers was later mishandled. Though several members of the Chong How Tong went to Hong Kong between 1920 and 1921 demanding to see the accounts kept by the Kai Shin Tong, these accounts were never produced.65 According to another account, however, the decline of the societies was a result of the exclusion of Chinese imposed by the US government in the late nineteenth century: with so many Chinese returning to China to protest the Exclusion Act, the charity fund of the Chong How Tong and Kai Shin Tong, now viewed as no longer needed for its original purpose, was remitted back to China to promote education instead. It was used to build a school in Guangzhou, which was named aft er the two associations�Xthe ��Ji Chang Higher Junior School of the Four Sub-counties of Panyu.��66 It is most likely that each account contains some truth.
The Wider Web
It needs to be stressed that the Kai Shin Tong and Chong How Tong were by no means the only associations engaged in bone repatriation. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, many other associations like the Kai Shin Tong existed in Hong Kong, each with its own corresponding institution, or institutions, in different parts of the world�X mostly tongxiang in nature. Collectively, their work resulted in a thick and multidirectional traffic of bones and coffins�Xfrequently accompanied by remit-tances�Xthrough Hong Kong.
One of the longest-running of such associations was the Min Yuen Tong. Founded in 1876 by leading Shunde merchants, it is still in existence today, although some of its functions have naturally been circumscribed by new his-torical realities. In the late nineteenth century, it organized a number of yifen (communal graves) in Hong Kong for Shunde natives too poor to aff ord funeral services. In Daliang, the county seat of Shunde, it established the Huaiyuan yizhuang, a communal repository of coffins and bones, to receive the remains of Shunde emigrants. From there, relatives of the deceased collected the remains for reburial, while the Min Yuen Tong buried those that were unclaimed. Political changes in 1949 interrupted its work, but in 1976 the Min Yuen Tong directors managed to open negotiations with Shunde authorities over coffi ns/bone boxes that had been awaiting burial for several decades in the county. Agreement was finally reached, and in the following year 101 sets of remains were cremated and the ashes reburied in a communal grave built in Shunde by the Min Yuen Tong.67
By the mid-1890s, almost every regional group in Hong Kong had organ-ized bone-repatriation societies. Among the last to do so were the people of Dongguan. In 1893, after discovering how negligent they had been in discharg-ing their tongxiang obligations, a group of Dongguan merchants promptly raised a fund in Hong Kong and the home county and founded the Tung Yee Tong (Putonghua, Dongyitang). Like other such societies, the Tung Yee Tong cared for the county��s tongxiang both in Hong Kong and overseas. It operated on a fairly large scale. For instance, in 1927, after its chairman Zhou Bingyuan visited America, Australia, and Vietnam, about 1,000 sets of bones were returned to Hong Kong for redistribution. Another major exercise took place in 1931, when 889 sets of bones were returned from Vietnam, in addition to nine from Victoria, British Columbia.68
Hong Kong��s position as an ��in-between place�� for the return of emigrants�� remains was greatly enhanced by the founding of the Tung Wah Hospital.69 Soon after its establishment in 1870, it evolved into an immensely eff ective facil-itator for bone repatriation, mobilizing the vast transnational networks that it had established through the business and social connections of its directors and members overseas and on the mainland. On the one hand, it assisted organiza-tions such as the Kai Shin Tong with their repatriation work. On the other, it created new connections and enlarged the ��catchment areas.�� Individuals, shops, and institutions abroad without corresponding organizations in Hong Kong sent the remains of their xianyou (deceased friends) to the hospital for collection or dispatch. With its participation, even isolated individual emigrants in remote areas not belonging to any association could now look forward to being buried at home with a degree of certainty.
The hospital��s correspondence at the turn of the twentieth century reveals that it was dealing as much with nearby localities such as present-day Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, and Myanmar as with distant places like Australia, Peru, Panama, the East Coast of North America and, of course, California.70 In the case of Peru, the connections were particularly strong, since all the China-bound correspondence and transmissions of the Zhonghua Tonghui Zongju, the umbrella organization of Chinese there, were channeled through the hospi-tal.71 Moreover, at the same time that it was dealing with the overseas�Vmainland traffic, the hospital was also transshipping remains between diff erent localities within China, thus adding to the multidirectional nature of its work. Its opera-tion highlights the reality that, at some levels at least, ��emigration���Xwhich we conventionally associate with leaving one��s country�Xmust really be conceived of and studied as a seamless extension of ��in-migration.�� The separation between internal and external migration in our study of people��s movements should, as Philip Kuhn points out, be seriously reconsidered.72
Since its work depended so much on cooperation with other institutions and individuals, it was necessary for the hospital to monitor its activities closely, making sure that all involved were acting efficiently and honestly. When remains were not being collected as quickly as desired, for instance, the hospital would write to urge the institutions concerned to hasten the process.73 It wrote con-stantly to remind its counterparts everywhere to update records�Xfor example, which coffins had been collected and which had not�Xso that the sending insti-tutions could be informed of the state of aff airs.74
Frequently, as we saw in the Chong How Tong�VKai Shin Tong case, institu-tions sending remains also remitted money for various expenses, and managing these funds became a major administrative undertaking. The Tung Wah Hospital itself kept meticulous accounts of all the incoming and outgoing funds relating to the hundreds of corresponding institutions. Where it had forwarded funds to one institution on behalf of another, it monitored and audited the use of these funds painstakingly. With so many different funds coming from so many diff er-ent sources, it was inevitable that confusion sometimes occurred. For instance, in 1901 we see the hospital rebuking a charitable institute in Guangzhou for using the funds from Vietnam to bury bones coming from another locality, and refusing to send it any further money until its accounts were straightened out.75 Without trust, the repatriation of remains, and the concomitant remittance of funds, would not have been realizable. Fundamentally, the collective social standing and integrity of the Tung Wah Board of Directors were mobilized to guarantee the effectiveness of its work. For example, boats carrying coffi ns to the mainland were subject to inspection by Chinese customs offi cials. Objectively speaking, Hong Kong being a free port, one can easily imagine the opportunity the coffin traffic might provide for smuggling. To prevent the coffi ns and bone boxes from being opened for inspection, the hospital applied for exemption permits from the customs authorities at Guangzhou. This generally suffi ced, but on occasions when customs officials were especially suspicious they would demand to inspect the cargo, which was a great nuisance�Xespecially for those who considered interference with coffins a taboo. At first the hospital tried to get around such interference by flying Tung Wah Hospital banners on boats to indicate that they were carrying ��bona fi de�� coffi ns.76 The customs authorities wanted more stringent safeguards, however, and by 1907 they would only recog-nize those permits endorsed by hospital directors who had personally inspected the contents of the coffi ns.77 Thus the credibility of individual directors was brought to bear to ensure smooth passage.
Compared with institutions like the Kai Shin Tong, the diffi culties the hos-pital encountered were magnified by the sheer volume of the workload and the multidirectional nature of the exercise. Whereas single-county associations like the Kai Shin Tong dealt mainly with only one locality overseas�Xmainly California, although later it did receive remains from other localities as well78�X and only one county on the mainland�XPanyu�Xthe Tung Wah Hospital dealt with numerous overseas localities and equally numerous mainland localities. The scope and density of its networks were overwhelming. Not only did it enlarge the scale of bone-repatriation of Chinese emigrants worldwide, but the increased systematization of the process, as well as the enhanced dependabil-ity and consistency of its services, transformed bone-repatriation into a deeply embedded feature of the Chinese�Xor at least the Cantonese�Xdiaspora, thus reinforcing the cohesion of the Chinese migration process.
Throughout the early twentieth century, the Tung Wah Hospital continued to facilitate the return of bones to China. Its yizhuang, which received and stored incoming coffins and bone boxes awaiting shipment, handled thousands of cases each year. First built in Kennedy Town at the northwestern tip of Hong Kong Island, it was relocated in 1899 to much larger premises in Sandy Bay further to the south to accommodate the growing demand.79 It underwent several major renovations and was one of the hospital��s most important facilities.80
Jianyun declined after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and stopped altogether after Hong Kong itself was occupied by Japan in 1941.
As soon as the war ended, contacts were resumed with renewed energy, with people, remittances, and coffins all waiting to rush back to the mainland. Huge numbers of coffins and bone boxes arrived from the United States, Australia, Vietnam, and Thailand in the postwar years, but the movement was again halted by the establishment of the People��s Republic in 1949, and many bone boxes and coffins were stranded in Hong Kong. By 1959, there were still 4,500 sets of bones in the Tung Wah yizhuang awaiting their onward journey.81 At the same time, the American embargo against Communist China meant that many bones that had already undergone the cleaning ritual and were ready for the homeward journey never left America.82
The End of an Era
The fate of jianyun as a historical phenomenon is well illustrated by the case of the new Ning Yeung Benevolent Association Cemetery in San Francisco. In 1889, members of this association�Xnatives of Taishan county�Xhad bought a cemetery for the primary burial of its members; the bones were disinterred aft er ten years for repatriation to China. After 1949, when bone-repatriation was no longer possible, the cemetery turned into a permanent rather than tempo-rary abode for the deceased, and naturally enough it gradually ran out of space. In order to deal with the new situation, the association sought more land for burial. Finally, in 1987, a new cemetery was opened in Colma, California, about 2 miles from the old one. Commenting on the process, Tan Boquan writes: ��[Establishing this cemetery] is really the good fortune of our fellow-regionals. Thenceforth, those who pass away in San Francisco will be able to rest in peace permanently.��83 The ideal of ��returning to the roots in the native place�� has given way to ��resting in permanent peace in the host country.�� Tan also notes that the grounds, which cost US$3.5 million, broke the record for a real estate transac-tion in the Chinese community. What is significant for our study is that this time, the sums raised for burial stayed in the United States and were no longer remitted to China through Hong Kong.
Social and political realities shape ideals by defining the limitations and pos-sibilities of their realization, and thus mold so-called ��cultural practices.�� In recent decades, a host of factors have reoriented thinking about burials among Chinese on the mainland and overseas, and contemporary burial practices deserve studies of their own. A walk through San Francisco��s cemeteries today can be very revealing. There are graves of Chinese who have died locally, their remains never exhumed for repatriation to China. Even more signifi cantly, there are also graves of Chinese who have died elsewhere in the world, notably Hong Kong and Macao, but whose remains have been relocated to America by their families who plan to make the United States their permanent home.84 Change in the location of ��home�� in the last half-century has led to a paradigm shift in Chinese migration, a shift that may be seen partly in the way people live, the way they die, and the way people are treated aft er death.
Conclusion
As coffins, bone boxes, and spirit boxes joined the streams of returning passen-gers, ginseng, flour, and gold and silver bullion that made their way westward across the Pacific, the repatriation of human remains became a feature�Xalmost a defining feature�Xof Chinese emigration to California. Returning home in this way was no less part of the Gold Mountain dream, for dying overseas was one of the calculated risks of the emigration process, with its concomitant hopes and fears, and re-interment in the home village was far, far preferable to being left a wandering ghost in an alien land.
An exercise that had such deep emotional connotations required extraordi-nary efforts by far-flung networks of organizations and individuals, involving long-term strategic planning, monetary investment, ritual knowledge, and an inordinate amount of goodwill on all sides. The fact that it provided opportuni-ties for profit-making should not detract from the truly charitable spirit that underlay it.
Hong Kong, as in other aspects of the emigration process, played the vital in-between role. It was not only that its status as a shipping center made possible the physical movement of human remains as cargo; the freedom of movement of people, currencies and funds, relative peace and social stability, and the rule of law that protected property and persons all made it possible for organiza-tions there to interact in intricate ways with their counterparts in China and overseas. These organizations, oft en tongxiang or dialect-based in nature�Xwith the inclusive Tung Wah Hospital a distinct exception�Xperformed a wide range of functions to promote the common interests of members, from co-investing funds to managing communal property to transporting bones. In turn, they were manipulated by different parties for political, social, financial, and cultural ends. They were important social spaces where native-place and dialect group loyalties were reaffirmed, and shared identities constructed and regenerated. Furthermore, they were sites for creating and accumulating financial and social capital that had global application. In the process, acting as mechanisms that bonded the migrant to the native place, they embedded Hong Kong as an ��in-between place�� in the transnational world of the Chinese diaspora, and at the same time augmented the coherence and unity of that world.
Conclusion
It would be hard to exaggerate the immense impact of the California gold rush on Hong Kong history. By expanding horizons in terms of new geographical frontiers, new navigation routes, new markets, and new potential for network-ing, the gold rush brought far-reaching economic and social consequences. Whereas Hong Kong��s function up to this point had been mainly to link the China market westward to Britain and Europe, and to North America via the Atlantic, through Southeast Asia and India, a good part of its attention was now diverted eastward to the emerging market across the Pacific. (For twenty-fi rst century readers, think BRIC.) Although for years to come the raw opium trade continued to dominate Hong Kong��s economy, this was greatly diversifi ed as new cargoes and services appeared on the scene. The trickle of eastward ship-ping in the mid-1840s, taking China goods from Guangzhou to the Sandwich Islands, and occasionally to California itself, turned into a flood as vessels, heavy with a wide range of goods, sailed for San Francisco to satisfy the army of gold rushers arriving from all corners of the earth.
Gold Mountain fired the imagination of people in the Pearl River Delta, the region in China with the oldest and closest association with the West. Hong Kong, where the infrastructure of an entrepot and shipping hub had been evolv-ing for almost a decade, made the dream of gold possible. Together with the growing cargo trade, passengers boarding at Hong Kong for California turned the formidable Pacific into a superhighway between South China and the West Coast of North America. To a large extent, the Pacific became a Cantonese ocean. In the way that emigrants from Fujian and Chaozhou regions had earlier carved out enclaves for themselves in Southeast Asia, men from the Pearl River Delta began spreading their dominance throughout the gold-rush countries�X Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand�Xand beyond, fanlike, from the North Pacific to the South�Xalmost always through Hong Kong.
Gold was the beginning of the story, but by no means the whole of it. By the end of the century, decades after the gold rush was over, Hong Kong was still thriving as a world-class Pacific port, the terminal for all major Pacifi c liners. With ever-widening and ever-deepening flows of people, goods, infor-mation and funds, coffi ns and bones, Hong Kong demonstrated that it was an enormously porous and fluid space, capable of generating amazing energy and mobility. Shipping�Xwhether cargo or passenger�Xwith its attendant trades and occupations including provisioning, insurance, ship repairing and fi tting, ware-housing, and stevedoring meant investment opportunities for businessmen and employment for thousands of working men and women. It was a heady time when the sense of the possible was infi nitely heightened.
Stretching in all directions, the effect of the California trade stimulated other trades, particularly the Nam Pak trade. With increasing density, old shipping and trade routes that ran from north to south intersected and overlapped at Hong Kong with new ones that ran from east to west. Goods from North and South China, Southeast Asia and India�Xrice, medicines, dried marine prod-ucts, sugar, tea, and much more�Xwere transshipped to feed the high-end con-sumption market of California, sometimes for redistribution to South America and the rest of the United States. In return, Hong Kong became the redistribu-tion hub for ginseng, bullions, quicksilver, wheat, flour, and other exports from California. The bond between Hong Kong and San Francisco grew tighter with every transaction, be it the chartering of a ship, the collecting of a debt or the granting of an advance on cargo. Passage money and emigrants�� remittances were extraordinary sources of capital that added special vibrancy to the traffic. Networks among merchants, particularly Chinese merchants, expanded and became ever more complex.
The consumption habits of the Chinese community in California, to a large extent, dictated the composition of the trade. The emergence of the high-income, big-spending Chinese emigrant, popularly dubbed the ��Gold Mountain sojourner,�� had long-term consequences. Trade in Hong Kong was upgraded across the board because of the high value of the California trade. Likewise, as a result of the sojourner��s taste for fine, expensive California flour, for instance, flour found a market in China and Southeast Asia, and Hong Kong rose as the unlikely distribution hub for the product. Who would have dreamed in 1850 that Hong Kong would one day become the flour capital of the region, reaching out as far as Vladivostok? Or, for that matter, that the granite quarried on the island would be turned into curb stones in San Francisco?
Nor would anyone have imagined that prepared opium would ever become Hong Kong��s leading export. The preference, even fixation, of California��s Chinese for Hong Kong��s prepared opium led to a rise in the profi ts of opium merchants as much as in government revenue�Xboth the Hong Kong and US governments. How deeply Hong Kong��s political, social, and economic devel-opment was enmeshed with Chinese emigration is highlighted by this trade; through it, the twists and turns in the intricate relationship between the colonial government and Chinese businessmen, and among Chinese businessmen them-selves, become manifest.
Hong Kong and the Diaspora
Yet Hong Kong��s relationship with California was far from purely commercial. Among the Chinese, diasporic dimensions loomed large. Personal, family, and native-place networks coincided with business ones, often strengthening each other. Funds in different guises flowed back and forth across the Pacifi c with great fluidity. Trade and shipping aside, remittances sent by emigrants featured strongly in Hong Kong�VCalifornia connections and quickly became an invalu-able and integral component of Hong Kong��s financial structure, providing capital for trade and other activities and boosting the colony��s position as an international foreign exchange center. Remittances came in many forms and through different channels, and served different purposes. Money such as that sent by the Chong How Tong to the Kai Shin Tong, earmarked as investment to sustain the repatriation of bones, illustrates how deeply interpenetrating were the financial, social, cultural, and ritual arrangements between Chinese mer-chants in California and their counterparts in Hong Kong.
The repatriation of bones, like the remittance of emigrants�� savings, required extraordinary efforts by far-flung networks of organizations and individuals, involving long-term strategic planning, management and an inordinate amount of goodwill on all sides. Both activities, equally ways by which emigrants main-tained ties with the homeland, were full of emotional meaning. Remittances, especially among ordinary Chinese workers in California duty-bound to support their families in China, were often money earned from back-breaking work and saved through relentless self-sacrifice. Sadly, the need to live up to the image of the glamorous Gold Mountain sojourner frequently exacerbated the burden. Bones were returned so that emigrants who had died abroad could enjoy a proper burial at home, among family; only then would they escape the terrible fate of becoming wild, hungry ghosts. Bone repatriation was a widely celebrated charitable act, as it comforted the souls of the dead and brought peace of mind to the living. Even though opportunities for profi t often existed in the convoluted arrangements behind these exercises, and organizers frequently had their own agendas, it was always the philanthropic and altruistic nature that was emphasized in public discourse, and for the ordinary emigrant and the families of the deceased, this was probably all that mattered. Hong Kong was not just a common entrepot in the minds of emigrants, but a vital link between them and home, fulfilling their many desires.
Organizations that made bone repatriation possible included tongxiang organizations, multipurpose institutions that tended to a wide range of their members�� needs. These organizations were poignant transnational social spaces where native-place and dialect-group loyalties were reaffi rmed, and shared identities constructed and regenerated. They were, furthermore, sites for creat-ing and accumulating financial and social capital that had global application. They were mechanisms that bonded migrants to the native place, almost invari-ably with their counterparts in Hong Kong acting as intermediaries. Tongxiang networks between Hong Kong and California, and across the globe, underline Hong Kong��s central position in the transnational world of the Chinese dias-pora even as they augmented the coherence and unity of that world.
The Tung Wah Hospital, above all, with its monumental work for the welfare of emigrants, epitomized Hong Kong��s special relationship with Chinese emi-gration. It offered relief to poor, sick, and disabled sojourners, and sought to eradicate abuses in the emigration process, including kidnapping, the sale of women as prostitutes abroad, and gambling rackets on ships. It acted as an indispensable channel of information between Chinese abroad and those at home. Decade after decade of bone repatriation work especially touched the hearts of emigrants and their families, and earned the hospital the profound respect and gratitude of Chinese around the world. On another level, the Tung Wah demonstrated what Chinese merchants could do to bring moral order to society�Xa function that hitherto had been performed in China primarily by the literati-gentry. When Chinese merchants in California proposed organizing a hospital based on the Tung Wah, ��with its perfection,�� they were acknowledging it as a new social and cultural model for overseas Chinese. They could not have paid it a greater compliment.
Hong Kong, we can see, occupied a special place in the consciousness of emigrants. For many emigrants leaving China, Hong Kong was their fi rst stop outside China, and paradoxically also their first stop in China on their return home. With its fuzzy borders, it must have been difficult at times to tell where China began and the rest of the world ended. Not a few returned emigrants chose to remain in Hong Kong rather than return immediately to their home-towns, and on occasion that stopover could last the rest of their lives. No doubt some must have been attracted by Hong Kong��s relative stability and, given the anti-Chinese brutality of California, freedom from racial violence, but the dynamic business environment and its vibrant connections with communities and markets in all directions must also have been particularly alluring. Hong Kong appears to have interfaced so seamlessly with China and the outside world that for those wishing to remain equally connected with their home in China, and friends and business opportunities they had left behind in California, it was a good place to be. But might not the social and cultural in-betweenness of Hong Kong�Xits transitional character�Xalso have induced them to do so? With those returnees who had assimilated well in the host country, such as Fung Tang, one might even wonder whether choosing to reside in Hong Kong was not a means to escape the culture shock they might encounter in the home village. The comfort zone that Hong Kong offered might have contributed to its reputation as the second home of overseas Chinese.
Lesson in Openness
A study of Chinese emigration to California reveals some fundamental charac-teristics of the nature of Hong Kong society, one of which was certainly its open-ness. Its status as a duty-free port, open to shipping and trade of all nationalities, enabling through-movement in a relatively free and economical way, ensured its status as the predominant embarkation port for Chinese migrants. Naturally, openness alone was an insufficient condition for a great embarkation port. For passengers, personal safety was a primary concern. In the mid-nineteenth century, this included safety from kidnapping, from being tricked into signing exploitative contracts and from being herded into overcrowded or unseawor-thy vessels. Provoking strong opposition among Hong Kong��s merchants, the Chinese Passengers�� Act of 1855 was enacted for imperial rather than colonial interests, but the Act and subsequent legislation provided a modicum of safety for free emigrants, however ineffectively and indifferently it was administered. By curtailing some of the worst abuses of the trade, Hong Kong stood out as a beacon of free emigration, distinct from other ports such as Macao where coerced emigration occurred with impunity.
Hong Kong was also open in another sense: it provided Chinese merchants with an unprecedented space not only to do business but also to play new social roles and claim new social status. Though never a level playing field, as foreign�X especially British�Xbusiness was always at a greater advantage, Hong Kong��s thoroughly commercial atmosphere allowed Chinese who were enterprising to get ahead. Chinese and foreign merchants had a common language in money-making that led to competition as well as collaboration and, despite inherent racism, grudging mutual respect. Some might call it a common culture of greed. In this unprecedentedly open environment, the structure of Chinese society was reconfigured. In the absence of the literati-gentry class that for centuries had dominated Chinese society, Chinese merchants in Hong Kong were able to play top dog in the local community and among Chinese abroad. Making full use of their wealth, organizational skills, and worldliness, they provided leader-ship in charitable work, implementing cultural ideals that brought comfort and security to emigrants at every step of their sojourn, and that in turn established their legitimacy as community leaders. Though operated in different ways and for different ends, native-place organizations, the Tung Wah Hospital, and Gold Mountain firms all demonstrated the potency of merchant power. Th e capacity to build and sustain webs of obligation that provided reassurance in situations of uncertainty, whether in business or migration, was a cornerstone of that power.
It was, of course, not all sweetness and light. It is without irony that Hong Kong��s openness, which was one of its greatest assets facilitating all kinds of flows, also made life easy for smugglers, kidnappers, and other kinds of criminals. Nor should it surprise us that the leading embarkation port was also the nerve center of multidirectional and overlapping transnational networks for buyers and sellers of women who supplied overseas demands for prostitutes and concu-bines. Hong Kong might have been a colony of Britain, where anti-slavery had become official ideology since the early 1800s, but it was also a Chinese city in many ways, a Chinese city where Chinese practices, virtues, and vices persisted. Rising Chinese merchant power is even more clearly manifest in the merchants�� defense of ��Chinese traditions�� in their demanding the need and right to distin-guish between ��licit�� and ��illicit�� trafficking in girls and women. Th e inertia and apathy of the majority of colonial and consular officials, added to the economic interests of players in this most commercial of cities, combined to diminish the effect of the anti-slavery laws and marginalize those, such as Judge John Smale, who attempted to champion them. Hong Kong��s political, social, and cultural environment had a direct bearing on what kinds of women might proceed over-seas�Xfor surely, if British laws against slavery and human traffi cking had been enforced seriously by Hong Kong��s officials and in its courts, the passage of pur-chased women to America and elsewhere would have been prevented.
Th e effect of openness on the press was especially pervasive. A channel of information on markets and prices, shipping schedules and cargo space, customs regulations and immigration laws, the press�Xboth in the English and Chinese languages�Xwas essential for facilitating shipping, trade, and emigration. Of particular significance was the growth of the Chinese press in this open atmos-phere, for Hong Kong offered not just an economic, social, and political space unlike anything on the mainland, but an unprecedented intellectual space as well. Its Chinese newspapers served many purposes. Besides generally edu-cating their readers about the bigger world and advocating political and com-mercial reforms, both locally and in China, they also focused on promoting the interests of emigrants, including demanding the establishment of Chinese consuls to protect Chinese abroad. To do so, they published views that were at odds with the Chinese government��s official policy�Xfor example, that the gov-ernment should set up consulates abroad to protect emigrants, who were offi-cially still criminals. Such freedom of the press would have been unthinkable on the mainland, where such comments would have been treasonable, not to mention the fact that commoners were, in any case, barred from commenting on public affairs. It would appear that Hong Kong��s Chinese press, though long studied as a pioneer in the history of Chinese journalism, has never been given sufficient credit as the tail that wagged the dog. Perhaps it is time for its newspa-pers to be studied seriously as businesses and not just vehicles for ideas. When this happens, it becomes clear how ��progressive�� newspapers such as Wang Tao��s Xunhuan ribao reflected the business interests of their owners, the Chinese mer-chants of Hong Kong.
I have often marveled at how such a small place could have had such a large impact on the world. To understand a place like Hong Kong�Xwhich was so porous, so receptive to outside influences, and in turn exerted so much infl u-ence on processes beyond its shores�Xit is clearly futile to look only within its physical borders. Much more than a fixed physical territory, ��Hong Kong�� may better be defined as layers of overlapping historical experiences, its ��boundaries�� measured by the social, political, economic, and cultural processes and networks that centered or touched upon it, stretching in all directions. What is required is a wider-angle lens for looking at the multiplicity of roles that a place like Hong Kong embodied.
The In-between Place: Paradigm for Migration Studies
There was, strictly speaking, no emigration fr om Hong Kong, only emigration through it. This may partly explain why Hong Kong��s role in the history of Chinese migration has largely been overlooked by migration scholars, who tend to focus on either end of the migration process�Xthe sending country (Place A) and the receiving country (Place B). In recent years, scholars have focused more on qiaoxiang1�Xlocalities that have sent large numbers of people overseas�Xand placed greater emphasis on the interconnectedness between the two ends; but despite this, little consideration has so far been given to the places and processes in between. Hong Kong��s experience demonstrates that an in-between place could play a defining role in the process.
Hong Kong was the hub that witnessed the constant coming and going of persons, as well as funds, goods, information, ideas, personal communications, even dead bodies and bones. With both centripetal and centrifugal forces at play, it provided the conditions allowing sojourners to leave China and travel far and wide, while also furnishing migrants with a variety of means to maintain ties with the home village. Mechanisms�Xformal and informal, legal and illegal�X that recruited migrant workers played as essential a part as the ��commercial intelligence�� that informed merchants of opportunities abroad. Networks of different types, often transnational in nature, coincided and overlapped. Social organizations tended to the material and psychological well-being of migrants in transit by providing accommodation, job opportunities, occasions for ritual and religious participation, financial relief, and a sense of community among fellow sojourners. These services, which made the migratory journey both physi-cally possible and emotionally less lonely and terrifying, were an integral part of the infrastructure of an in-between place.
What other in-between places were there besides Hong Kong? In the context of nineteenth-century Chinese migration, San Francisco, Singapore, Bangkok, Victoria and Vancouver in British Columbia, and Sydney and Melbourne in Australia immediately come to mind as embarkation ports, transit points and places of work and residence, sometimes over quite long periods. Some Chinese arriving in San Francisco, for example, stayed and worked there until they returned to China; others used it as a stepping stone to other localities, both within California and beyond. In some instances, while they moved from place to place, migrants repeatedly returned to San Francisco, using it as a home-base to wait for new employment or investment opportunities, or for other activities that required dense and overlapping linkages.
Philip Kuhn speaks of the countless ��corridors�� that linked Chinese migrants in the destination countries with their native homes, and claims that ��the essence of the matter is not the separation but the connection.��2 Connection was key, certainly, and he might have added that the corridors�Xkept open and vibrant with the flow of people and things�Xconstantly were reconfi gured.
Hong Kong was the nexus of thousands of such criss-crossing and multidirec-tional corridors.
The diasporic world may be conceived as both concrete and abstract. In one sense, it was ��fixed�� and geographically defined�Xnot only because the native home was a specific locality on the map, but because ��corridors�� and ��in-between places�� concretely determined shipping routes, channels of remittances, markets for goods and cultural products, sources of capital, and sites for investment, and in turn were determined by them. In another sense, this world was a shift -ing, groundless, constructed notion; the idea of home, being portable, could be carried by the emigrant wherever he went.3 The corridors between Place A and Place B were not fixed. Pulled this way and that by competing forces, corri-dors were twisted and turned, bent and stretched, as the migrant roamed along, changing the shape of the diaspora in the process.
So far in the scholarly literature, the Chinese diaspora has been considered mainly in terms of geographical space. But, time played an important part too. Over time, the old ��home�� might gradually lose its emotional and cultural hold on the migrant, or be made inaccessible by war or revolution or some other calamity. In these situations, in-between places could become substitute homes, complementing or even undermining and replacing the old one. When overseas Chinese called Hong Kong a ��second home,�� they demonstrated the pliability of the idea of home and recognized that it was possible to have more than one.
The diaspora is not flat. Emphasizing in-between places enables us to re-vis-ualize it as a multidimensional and, yes, messy phenomenon molded by a hier-archy of ��homes���Xranging from the ��original,�� ��ancestral�� home to secondary or tertiary ones�Xand a hierarchy of ��in-between places,�� its shape ever-chang-ing in the unending process of dispersal and re-dispersal, returning and re-returning. Just as the diaspora��s shape changes, so does its tone, for the corridor between the old ��home�� and the migrant��s locale could get eroded and lose its intensity. Or it could be reinforced during ��high-temperature�� moments such as the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, when the corridors vibrated and bulged with China-bound migrants and war donations. The situation is ever fluid and dynamic.
To use another metaphor. Like a river that transforms the shape of its banks, every migrant that passes through a locality makes a social, economic, and cultural difference to it, however minute, and in in-between places like Hong Kong and San Francisco, the footprints of countless migrants, like the layer upon layer of alluvial sediments, defined and redefined their landscape. The migration experience of individuals was multilayered too, their hearts and minds being filled with memories and influences and associations of many in-between places. We can see a deeper picture of the larger migration process by taking ��in-between places�� into consideration as important component parts of the individual migrant��s lived experience.
What about other migration movements? For example, during the century between the 1830s and 1930s, Liverpool and Hamburg, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta, the port of Santos in Brazil, Philadelphia in the United States, and Ouidah in Benin on the African coast certainly played the part of in-between places, and there must have been many more. It would be interesting to compare in-between places�Xgeographical, logistical, financial, cultural, emotional in-between places�Xin different migration strands. If, instead of merely marking Place A and Place B on a migration map, we were to insert in-between places as well, how diff erent the map would look. And how much more meaningful it would be for tracking the movements of people, and for understanding the layered effects of migration.
A study of Hong Kong��s different roles in Chinese migration from the mid-nineteenth century can tell us much about Hong Kong��s development and its transpacific ties. But it can do more than that: it can present a new picture of the migration process�Xa process that affected those who moved as well as those who did not�Xand provide a better understanding of the relationship between place and mobility. The concept of the in-between place, I believe, may serve as a useful paradigm for the study of migration movements by alerting scholars to the need to look more widely and deeply across the physical, economic, social, and cultural landscapes of human migration, and seek out hitherto unexplored interconnections that would bring new insights into migration as a collective process and as the lived experience of individuals.
Appendix 1
Hong Kong Exports to San Francisco, in 23 vessels, 4,950 tons, 1849
Article No. casks xx cases bales pkgs piculs bags chests . chests
1 Adzes 3
2 Arrack 20
3 Beer 40 312
4 Bricks 148,122
5 Brandy 536
6 Boots 2
7 Blankets 5
8 Beef 18
9 Bedstands 2
10 xx 10
11 xx 1200
12 Chairs 160
13 Canvas 2
14 Cigars 110
15 Crockery 54
16 Couches 55
17 Crackers 7
18 Cumquats 6
19 Coff ee 286
20 Chocolate 25 2
21 China goods 138 153
22 Corks 2
23 Caps and hats 2,350
24 Champagne 21
(continued on p. 310) (Appendix 1 continued)
Article Embroideries No. casks xx cases 2 bales pkgs piculs bags chests . chests
26 Eggs 9
27 Frying pans 2
28 Furniture 55
29 Gin 28 190
Glass 42
31 Grindstones and boxes 52
32 Grasscloth 15
33 Ginger 12
34 Gunpowder 1
Guns 3
36 Iron steam vessel in pieces 1
37 Knives and forks 1
38 Kittysols 200
39 Liquids (jars) 102
Lacquered goods 1
41 Merchandise 80 2,139 150 12,767 565
42 Mattresses and pillows 2
43 Matting 26
44 Medicines 1
Marble slabs 1,158
46 Musical boxes 24
47 Nankeens 8
48 Nails 40
49 Oilman��s stores 24
Powder 28
51 Preserved meats 27 11
52 Preserves 39
53 Paint 13
54 Paper ware 3
Piece goods 92
(continued on p. 311)
(Appendix 1 continued)
56 Article Rope (coils) No. 360 casks xx cases bales pkgs piculs bags chests . chests
57 Rice 690
58 Rum 1 8 2
59 Sundries 38 399 17,024
Silk 258
61 Stools 164
62 Shoes 395 5
63 Sugar 63 2,827
64 Sugar candy 508 25
Spirits 18 10 32
66 Silverware 5
67 Shovels and hoes 72
68 xx 54
69 Slops 2
Soda water 20
71 Starch 16
72 Saddlery 2
73 Tar 12
74 Tongues 2
Timber, logs 418
76 Timber, planks 12,059
77 Timber, mast pieces 16
78 Tables 6
79 Tiles 3,775
Tea oil 100
81 Tobacco 7
82 Tea 1,235 1,267
83 Wearing apparel 138
84 Window frames 312
Wines 16 510
xx = illegible. Source: Hong Kong Blue Book, 1849, pp. 229�V230.
311
Appendix 2
Migration Figures between Hong Kong and San Francisco, 1852�V76, 1858�V78
Table A2.1 Arrivals and departures since 1852
Year Arrived Departed
1852 20,026 1,768
1853 4,270 4,421
1854 16,084 2,339
1855 3,329 3,473
1856 4,807 3,028
1857 5,924 1,938
1858 5,427 2,542
1859 3,175 2,450
1860 7,341 2,090
1861 8,430 3,580
1862 8,175 2,792
1863 6,432 2,494
1864 2,682 3,910
1865 3,095 2,295
1866 2,242 3,111
1867 4,280 4,475
1868 11,081 4,210
1869 14,990 4,805
1870 10,870 4,230
1871 5,540 3,260
1872 9,770 4,890
1873 17,075 6,805
1874 16,085 7,810
1875 18,021 6,805
1876 (1st quarter) 5,065 625
Total 214,226 90,089
Source: Compiled from the San Francisco Custom House records, US Congress, Senate, ��Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration,�� February 27, 1877: US Congressional Serial Set Volume 1734, Session Volume No. 3, 44th Congress, 2nd Session. Senate Report 689,
p. 1176. Figures for 1852 to 1st quarter 1876, p. 1176.
Table A2.2 Chinese emigrants departing from Hong Kong for San Francisco and arriving in Hong Kong from San Francisco
Year From Hong Kong From San Francisco
1858 4,989 NA
1859 4,080 NA
1860 7,240 NA
1861 7,734 1,181
1862 7,532 2,380
1863 7,274 3,108
1864 3,041 3,547
1865 2,603 2,306
1866 2,338 2,411
1867 2,995 3,803
1868 5,172 4,427
1869 14,225 5,103
1870 9,394 3,602
1871 4,848 3,378
1872 9,147 3,721
1873 5,172 5,724
1874 15,988 7,454
1875 19,168 5,503
1876 14,034 6,871
1877 9,562 7,130
1878 6,340 6,611
Total 162,876 78,260
Source: Figures provided by the Hong Kong Government, Hong Kong Blue Book, respective years.
Appendix 3
Ships Sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco, 1852
Arr San Dep Hong
Days Name of vessel Master Type Flag Passengers Francisco Kong
Mar 2 60 Jan 4 William Watson Ritchie Barque British 160
Mar 20 63 Jan 23 Henbury Clark Ship British 236
Mar 26 52 Feb 2 Land o�� Cakes Grant Ship British 289
Mar 25 73 Jan 11 Frederich Boehm Woller Barque Prussian 179
Mar 29 59 Jan 29 North Carolina Foster Ship American 283
Apr 9 94 Jan 5 Henrietta Oats Ship British 210
Apr 9 49 Feb 20 Ann Welsh Ryder Barque American 162
Apr 11 70 Feb 2 Glenlyon Haddock Barque British 150
Apr 12 65 Feb 3 Emperor Gentle Barque British 181
Apr 12 56 Feb 11 George Washington Probst Barque Bremen 185
Apr 19 56 Feb 22 Blenheim Molliston Ship British 346
Apr 19 60 Feb 20 Ternate Cass Barque Dutch 260
Apr 22 33 Mar 18 Challenge Land Clipper American 550 (continued on p. 315) (Appendix 3 continued)
Arr San Dep Hong
Days Name of vessel Master Type Flag Passengers Francisco Kong
Apr 22 60 Feb 21 Oseola Waite Ship British 469 Apr 23 63 Feb 20 Nicolay Nicolayson Fieff er Brig Norwegian 100 Apr 28 73 Feb 8 Constant Coombs Barque British 250 May 1 57 Mar 4 Brahmin McEacharn Ship British 310 May 7 55 Mar 12 Rajasthan* Anderson Ship British 320 May 11 53 Mar 20 Robert Small Small [sic] Ship British 378 May 15 76 Mar 9 Apollo Huntelm Brig Bremen 124 May 16 44 Mar 27 Witchcraft Rogers Clipper Am 344 Jun 4 48 Apr 16 Gellert Ihlder Ship Bremen 280 Jun 4 50 Apr 7 Ville de Tonniers Moonier Ship French 310 Jun 6 49 Apr 16 Sir George Pollock Withers Ship British 330 Jun 8 53 Apr 13 Exchange Keller Ship 258 Jun 9 54 Apr 16 Iowa Washburn Ship Peruvian 378 Jun 10 63 Apr 7 Emily Taylor Smith Barque American 213
(continued on p. 316)
(Appendix 3 continued)
Arr San Dep Hong
Days Name of vessel Master Type Flag Passengers Francisco Kong
Jun 14 45 Apr 26 Walter Morrice Morrice [sic] Barque British 336 Jun 15 55 Apr 20 Aurora Winnenburg Barque Swedish 234 Jun 19 5 9 Apr 22 Monsoon Moldock/ Wyse Ship British 454 Jun 25 65 Apr 21 Arcadia Dunn [sic] Ship British 286 Jun 25 65 Apr 20 Ann Martin Martin Barque British 255 Jun 29 59 May 2 Pera Stewart Schooner British 0 Jun 28 65 Apr 24 Eliza Morrison McCullogh Ship British 494 Jun 28 60 Apr 28 Sarah Hooper Mahood Barque British 76 Jun 28 65 Apr 8 Lombock Densher Brig Danish 175 Jun 30 61 Apr 28 William Money Buckley Ship British 480 Jul 3 53 May 8 Cornwall Maundrell Barque British 500 Jul 5 37 May 8 Akbar Milne Ship British 377 Jul 5 64 May 2 Augusta Parsons Barque British 164
(continued on p. 317)
(Appendix 3 continued)
Arr San Dep Hong
Days Name of vessel Master Type Flag Passengers
Francisco Kong
Duke of
Jul 5 65 May 2 Hodson Ship British 238
Northumberland Jul 5 66 Apr 29 Gulnare Lucas Barque American 148 Jul 19 62 May 19 Sobraon Rodgers Ship British 630 Jul 19 61 Apr 21 Lord Western Phi lips Ship British 300 Jul 19 66 May 14 Louisiana Drew Barque American 167 Jul 19 77 May 4 Emma Stover Brig Bremen 130 Jul 20 70 May 12 Essex May Barque British 200 Jul 21 63 May 12 Baron Renfr ew Curran Ship British 580 Jul 27 74 May 13 Ellen Frances Pierce Barque American 200 Aug 4 86 May 13 Patria Marcel Schooner Portuguese 96 Aug 1 61 May 27 Amoy Cunningham Ship British 391 Aug 12 65 May 27 Enigma Morrison Schooner British 0 Aug 4 60 Jun 6 Emma Isidora Paine Barque American 178(continued on p. 318)
(Appendix 3 continued)
Arr San Dep Hong
Days Name of vessel Master Type Flag Passengers Francisco Kong
Aug 17 67 Jun 7 Argyle Norvilla Brig American 0 Aug 1 52 Jun 8 Far West Briard Ship American 323 Aug 1 50 Jun 12 Lady Amherst Dandow Barque British 263 Aug 4 52 Jun 13 Dragon Andrews Barque American 21 Aug 2 48 Jun 15 Troubadour Blow Ship British 273 Aug 1 43 Jun 19 Sultan Brown Ship British 432 Aug 17 58 Jun 21 Martha Marshall Schooner British 2 Aug 14 48 Jun 28 Land o�� Cakes Grant Ship British 302 Sep 11 67 Jul 5 Hannibal Hoyrup Schooner Hamburg 3 Oct 16 84 Jul 22 Duke of Bronte Barclay Ship British 218 Sep 25 52 Jul 26 North Carolina Foster Ship American 90 Oct 6 60 Jul 29 Berkshire Fillan Barque British 166 Oct 16 65 Aug 10 Nile Livesay Ship British 124
(continued on p. 319)
(Appendix 3 continued)
Arr San Dep Hong
Days Name of vessel Master Type Flag Passengers Francisco Kong
Nov 12 66 Sep 5 Volanti Swainson Brig British 0 Nov 22 60 Sep 23 Sarah Hooper Mahood Brig British 0 Dec 7 60 Oct 5 Wilhelmine Prehn Barque Danish 0 Jan 1 84 Oct 13 Aurora Wennenberg Barque Swedish 56 Jan 17 88 Oct 21 Zarah Crighton Ship British 51 Jan 17 88 Oct 24 George Fyfe Barrow Barque British 5 Jan 10 75 Oct 26 Ocean Queen Rees Barque British 26 Jan 8 65 Nov 1 Dragon Andrews Barque American 0 Jan 31 79 Nov 9 Dudley Yates Brig American 0 Jan 31 77 Nov 13 Sir George Pollock Withers Ship British 0 Feb 2 80 Nov 17 Frederick VII Love Brig Danish 0 Jan 30 60 Nov 22 Clara Lundborg Swedish 0 Feb 19 81 Nov 28 John Laird Sweetman Barque British 105
(continued on p. 320)
(Appendix 3 continued)
Arr San Dep Hong
Days Name of vessel Master Type Flag Passengers Francisco Kong
Mar 3 90 Nov 29 Hannibal Hoyrup Ship Hamburg 0 Feb 17 78 Dec 1 Phoenix Lassen Ship Hamburg 32 Jan 31 44 Dec 11 Pathfi nder Macy Barque American 3 Feb 17 58 Dec 19 Skjold Lock Ship Danish 0 Feb 17 55 Dec 23 Ann Welsh Gillespie Barque American 238 Feb 28 62 Dec 27 Troubadour Th ornhill Ship British 169 Feb 26 57 Dec 30 Ellen Frances Darby Barque American 0 86 ships 17,246
Notes: Pera sailed into San Francisco in a leaky condition.
* By my calculation, taking time of arrival minus days of voyage. In my notes, there were a few more ships that departed from Hong Kong but I cannot fi nd their arrivals despite checking many times, so I have left them out. Th e zero is given by me in the ��passengers�� column. In some of the entries, no mention is made of passengers, but that does not necessarily mean there were no passengers.
Source: China Mail, Hongkong Register, Th e Friend of China, Alta California.
Notes
Introduction
1.
James Gerber, ��Th e Trans-Pacific Wheat Trade, 1848�V1857,�� in Pacifi c Centuries: Pacific and Pacific Rim History Since the Sixteenth Century, edited by Dennis O. Flynn, Lionel Frost, and A. J. H. Latham (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 125�V151, pp. 125, 130.
2.
James P. Delgado, Gold Rush Port: The Maritime Archaeology of San Francisco��s Waterfr ont (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), p. 52.
3.
Delgado, Gold Rush Port, p. 3.
4.
Delgado, Gold Rush Port, p. 9.
5.
According to Dennis O. Flynn, Dennis Frost, and A. J. H. Latham, the fi rst Pacifi c century was the century of Spanish supremacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries based on American silver, and the second Pacific century was brought on by California gold. See their ��Introduction: Pacific Centuries Emerging,�� in Flynn, Frost and Latham, Pacifi c Centuries, pp. 1�V22.
6.
Th e Blue Book was a compilation of statistics and information on the income and expenditure of the government. It was published annually and submitted to the Colonial Office in London, often accompanied by a covering letter by the governor of Hong Kong on the year��s developments.
7.
See Appendix 1 for table on Hong Kong exports to San Francisco, 1849.
8.
Mary Hill, Gold: The California Story (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), p. 42. The longest trip took 300 days in a paddle-wheel steamer. San Francisco was located some 13,600 miles from London by sailing vessel and about 500 miles further still from New York, which explains why it was not a regular port of call in the sea lanes of the time before the gold rush. See Th omas Berry, Early California: Gold, Prices, Trade (Richmond: Botswick Press, 1984), p. 2.
9.
��Arrival of the Clipper Challenge. This splendid vessel has performed the quickest passage between the coast of China and Northwestern America yet recorded in our
annals of modern voyages. She left Hong Kong on 19th March and the coast of Japan on 5th April arriving in this harbor early yesterday morning�X33 days�� time!�� Alta California, April 23, 1852.
10.
Bush to Webster, April 11, 1851: US National Archives, Despatches from US Consuls in Hong Kong, 1844�V1906.
11.
William Speer, Th e Oldest and Newest Empire: China and the United States (Hartford, CN: S.S. Scranton & Co., 1870), p. 486.
12.
This was probably an exaggerated figure. The problem of statistics is discussed in Chapter 2. See also Chapter 1, note 3.
13.
Bonham to Newcastle, June 13, 1853, #44 in Hong Kong Blue Book 1852, pp..136�V
137. See also E. J. Eitel, Europe in China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1895]), p. 359.
14.
Henry Anthon Jr., Vice-Consul to Peter Parker, Charge d��Aff aires for the United States, Canton, March 25, 1852, in American Diplomatic and Public Papers�XUnited States and China, Series I: The Treaty System and the Taiping Rebellion, 1841�V1860 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources), 21.volumes, vol. 17: The Coolie Trade and Chinese Emigration, p. 151.
15.
For Chinese migration to the inland states, see Sue Fawn Chung, In Pursuit of Gold: Chinese American Miners and Merchants in the American West (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011) and Arif Dirlik (ed.), Chinese on the American Frontier (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); for Chinese in the Southern states, see Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War South: A People Without a History (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1984). For the range of occupations other than mining, see Ping Chiu, Chinese Labor in California, 1850�V1880: An Economic Study (Madison, WI: State Historical Society of Wisconsin for Department of History, University of Wisconsin, 1963).
16.
For an overview of Hong Kong and Chinese emigration, see Elizabeth Sinn, ��Emigration from Hong Kong before 1941: General Trends,�� in Emigration from Hong Kong, edited by Ronald Skeldon, pp. 11�V34 (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong), and Elizabeth Sinn, ��Emigration from Hong Kong before 1941: Organization and Impact,�� in Emigration from Hong Kong, edited by Ronald Skeldon, pp. 35�V50 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press). Th e discrep-ancy in the numbers may be explained partly by the fact that many of the emigrants who had returned to China (either permanently or on visits) via Hong Kong had departed from another port, possibly Whampoa, Xiamen, Shantou, or Macao.
17.
Using different sets of statistics from myself, Kaoru Sugihara gives the following figures for the total number of emigrants ��immigrating to�� and ��immigrating from�� Southeast Asia between 1869 and 1939:
Sources: See Kaoru Sugihara, ��Patterns of Chinese Emigration to Southeast Asia, 1869�V1939,�� in Japan, China and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850�V1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp..247�V250.
18.
For instance, in July 1852, some 8,000�V15,000 contract laborers were being pro-cessed for shipment in Xiamen. See Robert Schwendinger, Ocean of Bitter Dreams: Maritime Relations Between China and the United States, 1850�V1915 (Tucson, AZ: Westernlore Press, 1988), p..29. Xiamen continued to dominate the older emigration routes to Southeast Asia, and for a few years in the 1850s the trade to Havana, but it never became an international passenger port of the same status as Hong Kong. By the early twentieth century, Hong Kong had become the major transshipping point for Xiamen passengers, both inbound and outbound.
19.
Th e Economist, March 8, 1851, reprinted in Hong Kong��s China Mail, May.29, 1851.
20.
Bowring to William Molesworth, October 6, 1855: #147: Great Britain, Colonial Office, Original Correspondence: Hong Kong 1841�V1951, Series 129 (hereaft er, CO 129)/52, pp. 108�V114; Bowring to Edward B. Lytton, October 22, 1858: #141: CO 129/69, pp..332�V336.
21.
Bush to Webster, April 11, 1851: Despatches from US Consuls in Hong Kong, 1844�V1906.
22.
Eitel, Europe in China, p. 344.
23.
As early as 1852, merchants trading with California were recognized as a separate category. In a report on the annual colonial rent and police rate roll, it was stated that ��premises occupied by Merchants and Agents doing the chief of their business with California and South America�� paid $1,000 (The Friend of China, September 18, 1852).
24.
This idea of the ��in-between�� place should not be confused with the concept of ��liminity.�� Liminality is used in anthropological and migration studies to describe ��in-betweenness�� in people��s emotional, psychological, or political state of being. See Antonio Noussia and Michal Lyons, ��Inhabiting Space of Liminality:
Table I.1 Emigrants departing from Xiamen, Shantou, and Hong Kong, 1869�V1939
Xiamen Shantou Hong Kong
Number of 3,655,719 4,910,954 6,154,777
migrants departing
Number of 2,156,266 1,906,657 7,590,908
migrants returning
Immigrants in Omonia, Athens,�� Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 35, no. 4 (2009), pp. 601�V624. ��Liminal zone�� is also being used to describe a kind of ��in-between�� place with reference to the legal status of migrants (Conversations on Europe: ����Fortress Europe��: Pushing Back Unwanted Migrants,�� http://lsa. umich.edu/umich/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=413ef0baa84be210VgnVCM100000a 3b1d38dRCRD&vgnextchannel=c937d8d398e42110VgnVCM10000096b1d38 dRCRD), viewed April 28, 2011. ��Liminal�� is used as well in diaspora studies to describe a transitional stage in the process of political development for an emigrant community. See Ramla M. Bandele, Black Star Line: African American Activism in the International Political Economy (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008). I am not using ��in-between place�� in any of these senses here.
Chapter 1
1.
See Appendix 1 for table on Hong Kong exports to San Francisco, 1849.
2.
Th e Economist, March 8, 1851, reprinted in Hong Kong��s China Mail, May.29, 1851.
3.
Bonham to Newcastle, June 13, 1853, #44 in Hong Kong Blue Book 1852, pp. 130�V 139, 136�V137. The number of 30,000 is probably inaccurate. The Hong Kong gov-ernment did not keep very accurate records of emigrants, partly because of general negligence and inefficiency. Until 1856, when the Chinese Passengers�� Act was enforced, there was no need for inspection of ships or to report on their passengers, and even after its enactment, vessels carrying fewer than 20 passengers were not subject to the Act, and therefore those passengers were not counted. In addition, a certain amount of under-reporting by ships�� captains was common. See tables in Appendix 2, which show discrepancies between different sets of fi gures.
4.
Many books have been written on the China trade before the Opium War. One of the most recent, informative, and insightful is Paul A. Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the Canton Coast, 1700�V1845 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005).
5.
See Austin Coates, Macao and the British, 1637�V1842: Prelude to Hongkong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988).
6.
T. N. Chiu, The Port of Hong Kong: A Survey of Its Development (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1973), p. 16, quoting E. M. Gull, British Economic Interests in the Far East, 1943, pp. 19�V20. Despite its great significance, the development of Hong Kong as a shipping center has not been studied seriously. Baruch Boxer��s Ocean Shipping in the Evolution of Hongkong (Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of Geography, 1961), which is basically the only study of its kind, is very preliminary. More insight is offered by Bert Becker in his ��Coastal Shipping
in East Asia in the Late Nineteenth Century,�� Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 50 (2010), pp. 245�V302, although it focuses only on coastal shipping.
7.
Kowloon Peninsula was ceded to Britain in perpetuity in 1860 and the New Territories was leased for 99 years, from 1898 to 1997.
8.
The Hong Kong Almanack and Directory for the Year 1848 of Our Lord (Hong Kong: D. Noronha, 1848).
9.
George Beer Endacott, A History of Hong Kong (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 28�V29; George Beer Endacott, An Eastern Entrepot: A Collection of Documents Illustrating the History of Hong Kong (London: HMSO, 1964), p. viii.
10.
Endacott, An Eastern Entrepot, p. xii.
11.
Endacott, An Eastern Entrepot, pp. viii�Vix. A total of 440 out of the 1,526 troops stationed in Hong Kong were killed in the summer of 1843, a ratio of 1:3.5. ��Hong Kong fever�� took 155 and dysentery 137; 100 men from a single regiment based in West Point died of fever between mid-June and August. ��Hong Kong fever�� was not identified but probably most cases were malaria and of a particularly viru-lent kind. Four of the five of the Colonial Surgeons appointed between 1843 and 1847 died. See Veronica Pearson, ��A Plague Upon Our Houses: Th e Consequences of Underfunding in the Health Sector,�� in A Sense of Place: Hong Kong West of Pottinger Street, edited by Veronica Pearson and Ko Tim Keung, pp. 242�V260 (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 2008), p. 244.
12.
Report by Charles A. Winchester, British consul at Xiamen, August 26, 1852, in British Parliamentary Papers 1852�V53, vol. LXVIII (1686), enclosed in Dr..Bowring to Earl of Malsmesbury, Despatch no. 8, September 25, 1852, enclo-sures no. 1, 3: extracted in Walton Look Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies 1806�V 1995: A Documentary History (Barbardos: The Press, University of the West Indies, 1998), p. 74.
13.
Robert Irick, Ch��ing Policy Toward the Coolie Trade, 1847�V1878 (Taibei: Chinese Materials Center, 1982), p. 8.
14.
The earliest group of organized Chinese laborers could be the 192 Chinese taken to Trinidad in 1806, soon aft er the British takeover. The experiment was encour-aged by British officials who had had experience with Chinese migration to Penang since the 1780s. Two hundred men were recruited in Macao, Penang, and Calcutta, and were brought to Trinidad on a vessel of the East India Company called the Fortitude, along with a cargo of goods. They were dispersed over a number of sugar plantations and many remained on a small settlement just outside the capital Port of Spain, where they became small cultivators and fishermen. With the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and of slavery itself in 1834�V38, the idea of recruiting Chinese labor was revived. See Lynn Pan, ed., Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999), p. 248.
15.
Irick, Ch��ing Policy, p. 84.
16.
Endacott, An Eastern Entrepot, p. ix.
17.
Disagreeing with the governor��s decision to legalize opium consumption within Hong Kong, and to levy a luxury tax by selling to the highest bidder the right to retail opium, Martin resigned from his post after only two months�� residence and returned to England where, ��with pen dipped in gall,�� he denounced the colony and all its works. Geoffrey Robley Sayer, Hong Kong 1841�V1862: Birth, Adolescence, and Coming of Age (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1980 [1937]), pp. 160�V161. Also see Frank H. H. King, A Bio-bibliography of Robert Montgomery Martin (Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1977);
G. B. Endacott, A Biographical Sketch-book of Early Hong Kong (Singapore: Donald Moore, 1962), pp. 72�V78.
18.
��Extracts from a Report on Hong Kong by Robert Montgomery Martin, July 24, 1844,�� Document no. 19 in Endacott, An Eastern Entrepot, pp. 96�V106, pp. 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 106.
19.
��Report from the Select Committee on Commercial Relations with China: Ordered by the House of Commons to be Printed, 12 July 1847,�� Document no..21 in Endacott, An Eastern Entrepot, p. 112.
20.
Endacott, An Eastern Entrepot, p. ix.
21.
Kathleen Harland, The Royal Navy in Hong Kong 1841�V1980 (Hong Kong: Th e Royal Navy [1980?]), p. 143.
22.
Harland, Royal Navy, pp. 143�V152.
23.
1848 Almanack, n.p.
24.
Youssef Cassis, Capitals of Capital: A History of International Financial Centres, 1780�V2005, translated by Jacqueline Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
25.
David R. Meyer, Hong Kong as a Global Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) gives an interesting account of the intermediaries of capital in Hong Kong from the time of the ��Canton trade.�� However, his main focus is on connections with Southeast Asia.
26.
Christopher Kingston, ��Marine Insurance in Britain and America, 1720�V1844: A Comparative Institutional Analysis,�� September 7, 2004, p. 2. http://cniss.wustl. edu/workshoppapers/KingstonCNISS.pdf, viewed November 20, 2011; 1848 Almanack.
27.
��Brief description of the town of Victoria, with remarks on the various trades, institutions etc prepared as an accompaniment to the Hongkong Almanack,�� 1848 Almanack.
28.
Cree gives a vivid description of life among Hong Kong��s civil, naval, and military personnel, with plenty of banquets, dancing, riding, and so on, not only in words
but also with illustrations in watercolor. See Edward H. Cree, The Cree Journals: The Voyages of Edward H. Cree, Surgeon RN, as related in His Private Journals, 1837�V1856, edited and with an introduction by Michael Levien (Exeter: Webb & Bower, 1981).
29.
For brothels and prostitution in Hong Kong, see Elizabeth Sinn, ��Women at Work: Chinese Brothel Keepers in 19th Century Hong Kong,�� Journal of Women��s History, vol. 13, no. 3 (2007), pp. 87�V111.
30.
John D. Whidden, Ocean Life in the Old Sailing-ship Days: From Forecastle to Quarter-deck (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1908), p. 50. My description of port activities has largely been inspired by him. Also see James B. Lawrence, China and Japan (Hartford: Press of Case, Lockwood and Brainard, 1870), pp. 134�V137.
31.
See, for example, Matthew Calbraith Perry, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, Performed in the Years 1852, 1853 and 1854, under the Command of Commodore M.C. Perry, Comp. from the Original Notes and Journals of Commodore Perry and his Offi cers, at this Request and Under his Supervision by Francis L. Hawks (New York: Appleton, 1856).
32.
David and Stephen Howarth, The Story of P&O: The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), pp..78�V79.
33.
Freda Harcourt, Flagship of Imperialism, The P&O Company and the Politics of Empire: From Its Origins to 1867 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 87. See also Freda Harcourt, ��Black Gold: P&O and the Opium Trade, 1847�V1914,�� International Journal of Maritime History, vol. 6, no. 1 (1944), pp 1�V83; Andrew Pope, ��The P&O and the Asian Specie Network 1850�V1920,�� Modern Asian Studies, vol. 30, no. 1 (1996), pp. 145�V170.
34. 1848 Almanack.
35.
Coins specially issued for Hong Kong did not appear until 1863, when the fi rst regal coins of Hong Kong�Xthat is, coins bearing the portrait or Royal Cypher of the reigning monarch�Xwere issued. They were produced by the Royal Mint, London, and consisted of the silver ten cent, the bronze one cent and one mil, the last being one-tenth of a cent. Foreign currencies continued to circulate along-side local coinage, but most of these were not acceptable for government pay-ments. Owing to the fi nancial loss, the Hong Kong Mint established in 1866 was closed two years later. As a substitute for the regal dollar coins, silver trade dollars from the United States, Japan and Britain were used. See ��Hong Kong Currency,�� http://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/History/en/pspecial_2.php, viewed March 6, 2009. The most popular silver dollar in the nineteenth century was at fi rst the Spanish dollar and later the Mexican dollar.
36.
Pope, ��The P&O and the Asian Specie Network.��
37.
Sayer, Hong Kong 1841�V1862, p. 203, Appendix II ��Original Gazetteer and Census, May 15th, 1841.��
38.
1848 Almanack. The editor, William Tarrant, complains that Hong Kong was harsh on criminals and minor crimes were punished excessively. For an excellent analytical account of the legal and judicial system in Hong Kong, see Christopher Munn, Anglo-China: Chinese People and British Rule in Hong Kong 1841�V1880 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2001).
39.
��Extracts from a Report on Hong Kong by Robert Montgomery Martin, July 24, 1844,�� p. 96; Carl T. Smith, ��The Emergence of a Chinese Elite,�� in his Chinese Christians: Elites, Middlemen, and the Church in Hong Kong, with a new intro-duction by Christopher Munn (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005 [1985]), pp. 111�V112. Two illustrations of Chinam��s splendid hong in Hong Kong (one of the exterior, the other the interior) appear in E. Ashworth, ��Chinese Architecture,�� in Architectural Publication Society (ed.), Detached Essays and Illustrations Issued During the Years 1850�V51 (London: Thomas Richards, 1853), pp. 1�V18.
40.
Another Guangzhou firm that established itself in Hong Kong in the early days was Akow (Acow) and Company. Though not in the same league as Chinam��s Tun Wo firm, Acow was a cut above the shopkeepers and tradespeople concentrated in the Bazaar areas. The company was granted Inland Lot 22 at the corner of Queen��s Road and Pottinger Street in the European section. In the meantime, the company also operated a hotel for foreigners in Guangzhou. It is interesting to observe that though Acow spoke only pidgin English, he nevertheless managed to prosper, and seems to have had no problem doing business with Americans and other foreigners. Benjamin Lincoln Ball, an American physician visiting Hong Kong and Guangzhou around 1848�V49, was amazed to discover that Acow, who did not appear to be worth $500 was indeed worth $78,000�X��which is considered immense wealth by the Chinese.�� See Benjamin Lincoln Ball, Rambles in East Asia, Including China and Manila, During Several Years�� Residence: With Notes of the Voyage to China, Excursion to Manila, Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai, Ningpoo, Amoy, Foochow, and Macao (Boston: James French, 1856), pp. 101�V102.
41.
��List of Chinese Traders in Victoria in the Autumn of 1845,�� in The Hong Kong Almanack and Directory for 1846 with an Appendix, compiled by William Tarrant (Hong Kong: Office of the China Mail, 1846):
Construction: 3 bamboo workers, 11 cabinet makers, 19 carpenters, 1 house-painter, 3 glaziers Trading: 12 European goods vendors, 8 Manchester goods vendors, 13 silver smiths, 11 silk dealers, 8 timber dealers Shipping: 40 chandlers, 1 rope maker, 1 sail maker Druggists: 18 Lodging houses: 30 General: 7 earthenware and porcelain dealers, 3 money dealers, 5 crude opium dealers, 11 opium refiners and retailers, 5 pawn brokers, 3 rice dealers, 15 sham shui vendors.
42. Joe England and John Rear, Chinese Labour Under British Rule (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1875), pp. 74, 207; James William Norton-Kyshe, Th e History of the Laws and Courts of Hongkong, Tracing Consular Jurisdiction in China and Japan and Including Parliamentary Debates, and the Rise, Progress, and Successive Changes in the Various Public Institutions of the Colony from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (London: Unwin, 1898), 2 volumes, vol. 1, pp. 436�V
437. In fact the failure to understand Chinese guilds was a long-standing problem among foreigners in China. See Hosea Ballou Morse, The Gilds of China with an Account of the Gild Merchants or Co-hong of Canton (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967 [1932]).
43.
Descriptions of port life in China and other parts of East Asia are provided by Lawrence, China and Japan, pp. 134�V137; Whidden, Ocean Life, and Van Dyke, The Canton Trade.
44.
Sampans are small and relatively flat-bottomed Chinese wooden boats. Th ey gen-erally are used for transportation in coastal waters or rivers, as fishing boats and sometimes as permanent habitation.
45.
For example, Captain Whidden bought some 30,000 cigars at Manila where they were very cheap, kept some for himself and sold the rest in Boston at a good profi t (Whidden, Ocean Life, p. 224).
46.
For stowage expertise, for example, how to make a heavy cargo ��springy,�� see Whidden, Ocean Life, p. 90.
47.
Samuel Fearon, the Census and Registration Officer, in a report dated June 24, 1845, describes the origin of the first settlers of Hong Kong, cited by Carl Smith in ��Chinese Elite,�� p. 108.
48.
E. J. Eitel, Europe in China, with an introduction by H. J. Lethbridge (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1895]), p. 168. Eitel was a German missionary, born February 13, 1838 in Wurttemberg, Germany. He went to China as a mis-sionary and came to Hong Kong in January 1870 while still having charge of the Buluo Mission. He was considered a China specialist. In April 1879, he resigned from the London Mission Society and became Inspector of Schools in Hong Kong and subsequently private secretary to Sir John Pope Hennessy. In 1866, he married Mary Anne Winifred Eaton of the Female Education Society. He died in Adelaide, Australia in 1908. For his biography, see Europe in China, pp. v�Vxvi.
49.
Lawrence, China and Japan, p. 136.
50. 1848 Almanack. 51. 1848 Almanack.
52. Hong Kong Blue Book 1848, p. 28. 53. 1848 Almanack.
54.
W. K. Chan, The Making of Hong Kong Society: Three Studies of Class Formation in Early Hong Kong (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 72�V73; for the memorial, see CO 129/23: 222.
55.
Canton Press, September 11, 1841, cited in Sayer, Hong Kong 1841�V1862, p. 118.
56.
When the Lower Bazaar was destroyed in the Christmas fire of 1852, Tam Achoy soon rebuilt it, operating it under his firm��s name, Kwong Yuen. In front of his lots he erected a wharf, which he leased to the Hongkong, Canton and Macao Steamboat Company after its formation in 1865. In 1860, he appeared in the courts on a charge of piracy. In response to a request by the mandarin of his home district in Kaiping for assistance in suppressing some Hakka bandits, Achoy had chartered the vessel Jamsetjee Jeejeehboy from Kwok Acheong, the P&O company��s comprador. Engaging a number of Europeans in the colony, he took them up to Kaiping, where they attacked some Hakka villages. Achoy pleaded that he had not realized that this would be against British law, and threw himself upon the mercy of the court. He again assisted his home district in 1865 by supplying the local militia with Western-made armaments. This earned him offi cial recognition and a biographical note in the Kaiping Gazetteer. In later years, his constitution was aff ected by habitual opium smoking and he did not participate actively in public affairs. He died in 1871, leaving a large fortune. In 1857, the editor of The Friend of China described him as being ��no doubt the most creditable Chinese in the colony�� (Smith, ��Chinese Elite,�� pp. 114�V115).
57.
Sacramento Daily Union, June 2 and 3, 1853; Alta California, June 3 and 25, 1853.
58.
Death announcement, Daily Press, April 23, 1880; see also Smith, ��Chinese Elite,�� pp. 115�V124.
59.
Report of the Hongkong, Canton and Macao Steamboat Co. in Daily Press, January 18 and 21, 1869. When Kwok Acheong retired from the board, a $12,000 subsidy was paid him for the withdrawal of his steamers from the river, because the four steamers he owned�Xall in good running order�Xmight prove a formidable oppo-sition to the company. The company was set up on October 19, 1865. See Eitel, Europe in China, p. 453.
60.
Th e fluidity of Dan (Tanka) sub-ethnic identity is analyzed by Helen Siu and Liu Zhiwei in ��Lineage, Market, Pirate, and Dan: Ethnicity in the Pearl River Delta of South China,�� in Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China, edited by Kyle Crossley, Helen Siu and Donald Sutton, pp. 285�V310 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
61. According to the Li family genealogy, Li Danlian (Li Leong) was the founder of the Wo Hang Gold Mountain Firm. He had come to Hong Kong the year aft er it became a port [1842?]. He was good at guohua (Chinese-style ink painting) and as there were many foreigners who liked Chinese art and admired Li��s work, he made friends with them and got to know about happenings overseas. See Li Shi Ju��antang jiapu����~�w��a�� [Genealogy of the Li family] (Hong Kong 1958), p. 24. However, it is highly unlikely that an ink-painter would come to Hong Kong at this point to make a living, or become associated with foreigners. It is more likely that Li made oil paintings that were very popular among foreigners who bought them to decorate their homes or as gifts to take home or send to Europe and America. Interestingly, the 1848 Almanack reports that: ��Rice paper and other painters in Victoria are far behind their Canton brethren in the art, and great encouragement is not given to them.�� See S. Wells Williams�� description of paintings as an export item in his The Chinese Commercial Guide (Hong Kong: A. Shortrede & Co., 5th edition, preface, 1863), p. 132.
62. Li Leong died at 42. Li Sing was the executor of his will and continued the business. Though Li Leong referred to Li Sing as his ��brother,�� Li Sing was in fact his cousin, being the son of his paternal elder uncle.
63. Eighth Annual Report of the Morrison Education Society for the Year ending September 30, 1846 (Hong Kong: China Mail Office, 1846), p. 33, cited in Carl Smith, ��The Morrison Education Society and the Moulding of Its Students,�� in Carl Smith, Chinese Christians, p. 20.
64. Alta California, August 23, 1852 made reference to the intelligent rebuttal of Bigler��s ��Cooly [sic] Message�� by Tong Achick (a.k.a. Tang Maozhi) and Norman Assing as ��an admirable example of the sound sense and logical reasoning which sometimes comes from despised and humble sources of intelligence to oppose and overthrow the pretentious wisdom and weak-brained fulminations of would-be demagogues and rulers.�� In a tongue-in-cheek account of Chinatown fighting, Tong Achick was referred to as ��General Tong Achick�� (Sacramento Daily Union, July 28, 1854). He also acted as court interpreter for cases involving Chinese, and even swore in wit-nesses by burning yellow paper, a ritual common in Chinese oath-making, and pro-vided the translation of the oath (Sacramento Daily Union, September 13, 1854). For Chinese gold miners, he translated the regulations governing Chinese miners, reprinted in Xia��er guanzhen�I��e�� (Chinese Serial), vol. 1, no. 1 (1853).
65. Smith, ��Morrison Education Society,�� p. 19.
66. For Lee Ken, see Smith, ��Morrison Education Society,�� pp. 24, 28. 67. 1848 Almanack.
68. Quotation from Michael Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: Th e United States and China in 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 9.
Hunt gives a good general description of the background to US�VChina rela-tions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See also Jacques M. Downs, Th e Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1788�V1844 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses and Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, c. 1997) and Tim Sturgis, Rivalry in Canton: The Control of Russell & Co., 1838�V1840 and the Founding of the Augustine Heard & Co. (London: The Warren Press, 2006).
69. See letters of the Thompson family collected in D. Mackenzie Brown (ed.), China Trade Days in California: Selected Letter from the Thompson Papers, 1832�V1863 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1947) for the development of California in intra-Pacific trade. The rise and fall of the Pacific fur trade, which was dominated by Boston shipowners and merchants, is described in James R. Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coats 1785�V1841 (Montreal: McGill-Queen��s University Press, 1991).
70.
James P. Delgado, To California by Sea: A Maritime History of the California Gold Rush (Columbia, SC: University of South Caroline Press, 1996 [c. 1990]), p. 1.
71.
James O��Meara, ��Pioneer Sketches�XIV, To California by Sea,�� Overland Monthly, vol. 2, no. 4 (1884), pp. 375�V381; see also John Haskell Kemble, Th e Panama Route, 1848�V1869 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, c. 1990) for the early history of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company.
72.
Sayer, Hong Kong 1841�V1862, p. 114. It was on Marine Lot 46. Carl Smith��s pio-neering work on the connections between Hong Kong and California has sadly been overlooked. See Smith, ��The Gillespie Brothers�XEarly Links between Hong Kong and California,�� Chung Chi Bulletin, no. 47 (December 1969), pp. 23�V28.
73.
Delgado, Gold Rush Port, p. 40. He describes in detail the trade between Yerba Buena (later San Francisco), Acapulco, Callao, Valparaiso and other ports on the eastern Pacific rim to demonstrate that a trade zone was already emerging there even before gold was discovered.
74.
Samuel J. Hastings (New York) to Thomas Oliver Larkin, January 14, 1848, in Thomas Oliver Larkin, The Larkin Papers: Personal, Business and Official Correspondence of Thomas Oliver Larkin, Merchant and United States Consul in California, edited by George P. Hammond (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, published for the Bancroft Library, 1951�V68), 11 volumes, volume 1, p. 118. With a Massachusetts background, Larkin had arrived in California as early as 1832 and traded with China, the Sandwich Islands and Mexico from Monterey; he was appointed US consul at Monterey in 1843. A biography of him gives a lively impression of political and economic developments in California from the 1820s; see Harlan Hague and David J. Langum, Thomas O. Larkin. A Life of Patriotism and Profit in Old California (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990).
75.
In C. V. Gillespie (San Francisco) to Larkin, March 6, 1848, Larkin Papers, volume 1, pp. 167�V168.
76.
Larry Schweikart and Lynne Pierson Doti, ��From Hard Money to Branch Banking: California Banking in the Gold Rush Economy,�� in A Golden State: Mining and Economic Development in Gold Rush California, edited by James Rawls and Richard
J. Orsi (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, in association with the California Historical Society, 1999), p. 215.
77.
Samuel J. Hastings (New York) to Larkin, January 14, 1848, Larkin Papers, volume. 1, p. 118.
78.
��Biographies�� [related to the Frederick W. Macondray Papers (1821�V1823, 1851�V 1880) at the California Historical Society]. See also Elizabeth Grubb Lampen, Th e Life of Captain Frederick William Macondray, 1803�V1862 (San Francisco[?]: E. G. Lampen, c. 1994).
79.
The House of Macondray was dissolved on June 12, 1852 and reconstituted with F.
W. Macondray and three other partners, R. S. Watson, T. G. Cary, and J. Minturn (Folder 2 of the Macondray Papers [BANC MSS 83/142] at the Bancroft Library). See also Circular dated June 12, 1852 in Heard II (Heard Family Business Records, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School, MS 766 1835�V 1892): Case LV-18 ��Correspondence, Unbound,�� f. 20, ��1850�V1854, Canton from Macondray & Co., San Francisco.�� The company was dissolved and reconstituted with different partners every few years.
80.
William Hunter, Th e ��Fan Kwae�� at Canton Before Treaty Days 1825�V1844 (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, Ltd., 1911 [1882]), pp. 42�V49, supplies moving accounts of generosity and graciousness shown by Howqua and other Chinese merchants toward American merchants and the pervasive contact among them. By the same token, we can see Americans coming to Howqua��s rescue. In 1858, when Howqua was squeezed by Mandarins in Guangzhou, Russell & Co. provided him with $200,000: N.W. Beckwith (Russell & Co., Hong Kong) to W. H. Forbes (Russell & Co., Shanghai), October 12, 1858 (Russell & Company Letter Book, Massachusetts Historical Society, Ms N-59.46; pp. 244�V247).
81.
Hunter also describes the contacts between Chinese and Americans on many levels�Xthe many kinds of Chinese with whom Americans came into contact: see Hunter, Fan Kwae, p. 35 for ��outside�� merchants. Nominally, outside merchants were only allowed to furnish foreigners with such items as clothing, umbrellas, straw hats, fans, shoes, and so on, but by using loopholes they were able to expand their realm of activities.
82.
Hunter, Fan Kwae, p. 102.
83.
Hunter, Fan Kwae, p. 102; Ball, Rambles, pp. 99, 108.
84.
Hongkong Register, September 28, 1848.
85.
Ball, Rambles, pp. 204, 208.
Chapter 2
1.
The Friend of China, January 6, 1849.
2.
The century between the 1830s and 1930s was a period of immense migration on a global scale. Over 160 million long-distance voyages can be counted from the 1840s to the 1920s. Over 55 million migrants moved from Europe and the Middle East to the Americas, along with three million from East Asia and India. Over 50 million migrants from South Asia and South China moved to Southeast Asia, Australia, and islands throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans, along with another fi ve million people from the Middle East and Europe. Another 48 million migrants traveled from North China, Russia, Korea, and Japan to Central Asia, Siberia, and Manchuria. All these migrations contributed to a significant redistribution of the world��s populations. See Adam McKeown, ��A World Made Many: Integration and Segregation in Global Migration, 1840 to 1940,�� in Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: India, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations fr om the 1830s to the 1930s, edited by Donna R. Garbaccia and Dirk Hoerder (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 42�V64.
3.
Hongkong Register, January 23, 1849; for McConnell, Heyl and Winslow, see, ��Residents in Hongkong, 1848�� in 1848 Almanack.
4.
Inglis��s resignation letter, May 21, 1849, enclosed in Bonham to Grey, May 24, 1849, # 56: CO 129/29. He returned quite quickly and resumed a long and suc-cessful career in the Hong Kong government. See G. B. Endacott, A.Biographical Sketchbook of Early Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005 [1962]), pp. 119�V120.
5.
Holdforth applied for ten months�� leave in March 1850 (Bonham to Grey, March 12, 1850 #25: CO 129/32). He was alleged to have come to Hong Kong to elude justice in Australia for horse selling. In Hong Kong, he first secured a junior clerk-ship and was later offered the post of coroner in place of the popular voluntary sheriff, Edward Farncomb, who had opposed certain government measures. Next he was made sheriff. In that post, he managed to get the long-serving government auc-tioneer, Charles Markwick, dismissed from his position in favor of the more pliable George Duddell, and together they proceeded to work hand and glove, knocking lots down cheaply to themselves and reselling them at a profit. When he fi nally departed for California, he was so fearful of being arrested that he hid himself in the bowels of the ship. See Patricia Lim, Forgotten Souls: A Social History of the Hong Kong Cemetery (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), pp..140, 190. In
California, he was brought before the Supreme Court of San Francisco for unlaw-fully taking and retaining the proceeds of goods shipped from China by a Chinese merchant Cumloong (Alta California, July 17, 1851). He also brought a number of suits related to land sales and mortgages (Sacramento Daily Union, May 11, August 3, August 8, 1858). Having subscribed to stocks of several gold companies, he did not pay up (Sacramental Daily Union, November 27, 1860, Alta California, July 29, 1864).
6. Bonham to Grey, April 2, 1850, ��Blue Book for 1849 and Reports Generally on the Contents��: #25, CO 129/32.
7. The Friend of China, December 19, 1849.
8. William Speer, The Oldest and Newest Empire: China and the United States (Hartford, CT: S. S. Scranton and Co., 1870), p. 486.
9. Alta California, May 9, 1851.
10. Eitel, Europe in China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1895]), p..273.
11. Eitel, Europe in China, p..274.
12. Elizabeth Sinn, ��Emigration from Hong Kong before 1941: General Trends,�� in Emigration from Hong Kong, edited by Ronald Skeldon (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1995), p. 21.
13. Speer, The Oldest and the Newest Empire, p. 487.
14. Henry Anthon Jr., Vice-Consul to Peter Parker, March 25, 1852. American Diplomatic and Public Papers, Series I, vol. 17, p. 151.
15. Alta California, June 28, 1854, reprinted in The Friend of China, August 23, 1854.
16. Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882�V1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 18�V25. In Yuk Ow, Him Mark Lai, and P. Choy, A History of the Sam Yup Benevolent Association in the United States 1850�V 1974 �Ȭ��T���`�|�]²�v (San Francisco: Sam Yup Benevolent Association, 1975), pp. 55�V57, the authors try hard to reconcile the contradiction between accounts of the prosperity and productivity of the three counties and the despera-tion that forced people to leave the region in the mid-nineteenth century.
17. See Felipe Fernandez Armesto (ed.), The Global Opportunity (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995) for descriptions of Chinese ships and migration in earlier centuries. For an overview of Chinese emigration, see Lynn Pan (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999); Philip Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefi eld, 2008).
18. W. Loomis, ��The Chinese Six Companies,�� The Overland Monthly, vol. 1 (September 1868), pp. 221�V227. Loomis is not entirely clear on the composition of the companies, which had undergone a number of reorganizations since their first inception. Fong Kum Ngon, ��The Chinese Six Companies,�� Overland Monthly,
vol. 23, no. 4 (May 1894), pp. 518�V528, provides a contemporary Chinese view on the institution. See also Liu Boji, (Liu Pei-ch��i) �B�B��, Meiguo Huaqiao shi����ع��v [History of overseas Chinese in America] (Taibei: Li Ming Cultural Publishers, 1976), pp. 150�V166. For a more scholarly study of the Six Companies, see Qin Yucheng, The Diplomacy of Nationalism: The Six Companies and China��s Policy Toward Exclusion (Honolulu: University of Hawai��i Press, 2009).
In 1868, the companies were roughly speaking as follows: the Sam Yup Association was formed mainly by natives of Nanhai, Shunde, and Panyu plus smaller numbers of natives of six other counties�XHuaxian, Sanshui, Qingyuan, Gaoyao, Gaoming, and Sihui; the Kong Chau Association was for natives of Xinhui and Heshan; the Hop Wo Association was formed by certain members of Taishan and natives of Enping and Kaiping; Yeung Wo was for natives of Xiangshan, Dongguan, and Zengcheng; Yan Wo mainly consisted of Hakka people from Eastern parts of the Delta. In the early 1850s, there were only Five Companies�Xthe Sam Yup Association, the Sze Yup Association (which split into the Ning Yeung, Kong Chau and Hop Wo), Yeung Wo and Yan Wo (Liu, Meiguo Huaqiao shi, p. 150).
Th e figures presented by Loomis are fairly comparable to those presented by the US federal government, based on San Francisco Custom records. According to the latter, 126,800 Chinese had arrived in San Francisco between 1848 and 1868: US Congress, Senate, ��Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, February 27, 1877��: US Congressional Serial Set Vol. 1734, Session Vol. No. 3, 44th Congress, 2nd Session. Senate Report 689 (1877), p. 1196, Appendix Q. Th e figures do not seem too precise: the 1849�V1851 figures are given as a round sum of 10,000.
Loomis��s figure for total arrivals is 106,800, but his article was published in September 1868, a year that saw 11,085 arrivals, so at best he could have included a fraction of that. In view of this, the discrepancy is not particularly great. Th e cause of the discrepancy could partly be the result of erroneous counting on both sides. Moreover, Loomis might have omitted those people who, though natives of the counties encompassed by the six companies, decided not to register with the company, and also people who did not belong to any of the localities encompassed by the Six Companies and who therefore were not eligible to join.
19. Zhongwai xinwen qiribao, April 8, 1871. Accounts of the experience of the labor-ers in Cuba were collected by a Chinese embassy sent in 1874 to inquire into their condition. See China Cuba Commission, Chinese Emigration: Report of the Commission Sent by China to Ascertain the Condition of Chinese in Cuba (Taibei: Cheng Wen Publishing Co., 1970; originally published by the Chinese Maritime Customs Press, 1876). See also Robert Irick, Ch��ing Policy toward the Coolie Trade,
1847�V1878 (Taibei: Chinese Materials Centre, 1982) for a very detailed study of the trade to Havana and Peru. For the Chinese in Peru, see Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolies in Peru 1849�V1876 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970).
20.
Persia Campbell Crawford, Chinese Coolie Immigration (London: P. S. King & Co., 1923) describes the kind of rhetoric that circulated at that time. See US Congress, Senate, ��Chinese Coolie Trade: Message of the President of the United States, Communicating, in Compliance with a Resolution of the House of Representatives, Information Recently Received in Reference to the Coolie Trade. May 26, 1860..�X Referred to the Committee on Commerce and Ordered to be Printed��: US Congressional Serial Set Vol. No. 1057, Session Vol. No. 13, 36th Congress, 1st Session, H. Exec. Doc. 88 (1860).
21.
Moon-ho Jung��s Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) gives a detailed and sophisticated account of how the ��cooly�� became a racialized and racializing fi gure in the United States, and was so twisted in the political rhetoric of the times that ��a stand against coolies�� was promoted as ��a stand for America, for freedom�� (p. 12).
22.
Bush to Webster, April 11, 1851: Despatches from US Consuls in Hong Kong, 1844�V1906.
23.
Bowring to William Molesworth, October 6, 1855: #147: CO 129/52, pp. 108�V114.
24.
Bowring to Edward B. Lytton, October 22, 1858: #141: CO 129/69, pp. 332�V336.
25.
From Jacob P. Leese Papers in California Historical Society on Online Archive of California: ��Indenture of Ahine, Chinaman,�� http://www.oac.cdlib. org/ark:/13030/hb100000v8/?brand=oac4, viewed September 25, 2010; ��Indenture of Awye, Chinaman,�� http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ hb587003vc/?brand=oac4, viewed September 25, 2010; ��Indenture of Atu, Chinaman,�� http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/hb6z09n88s/?brand=oac4, viewed September 25,.2010.
26.
Historians talk about a ��credit ticket system�� by which prospective passengers paid only a percentage of the fare while the remainder was to be repaid after they reached California, but there is little detail about it. I do not purport to call the practice of obtaining credit for passage that I describe a ��system.��
27.
Letter to Governor Bigler, Sacramento Daily Union, May 8, 1852. The letter was written on behalf of the Chinese community to protest against Bigler��s attack on Chinese immigration. It was incidentally written by Tong Achick, a product of a missionary school in Hong Kong.
28.
Letter to Governor Bigler, Sacramento Daily Union, May 8, 1852.
29. Alta California, May 21, 1853. This point was crucial. The debate concerned whether Chinese could become US citizens; according to American law, ��any alien, being a free white person, may be admitted to become a citizen of the United States,�� so for anti-Chinese politicians it was important to show that Chinese were neither free nor white.
30. Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), especially ��Creating the Free Migrant,�� pp. 66�V89.
31. Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States, 1850�V 1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). However, as a pioneer study on this subject, his work is to be commended.
32. Th e Alta California records a number of Chinese passengers taking goods with them�Xfor example, on the ship Henrietta (Alta California, June 23, 1851); on the Brand (Alta California, February 20, 1852); Lightning (Alta California, February 22, 1852); some goods on the William Watson were consigned to Look and Yesing, both Chinese passengers on board (March 3, 1852).
33. Alta California, March 28, 1852.
34. Ou Tianji �Ϥ��k, Zhonghua Sanyi Ningyang Gangzhou Hehe Renhe Zhaoqing Keshang ba da huiguan lianhe Yanghe xinguan xu���ؤT���綧���{�X�M�H�M�F�y�ȰӤK�j�|�]�p�P���M�s�]�� (Greetings on the establishment of the new Yeung Wo premises presented by Eight Big huiguan ) [Zhonghua, Sam Yup, Ning Yeung, Kang Chau, Yop Wo, Yan Wo, Shiu Hing and Hak Sheung] in Jinshan chong jian Yanghe guanmiao gong jin zhengxinlu ���s���ض��M�]�q�u���x�H��
[Account of the reconstruction of the Yeung Wo huiguan in San Francisco, 1900].
35. Norman Assing��s letter to Bigler, Alta California, May 5, 1852.
36. Th e Margaretta 1851 took two consignments to Assing: three boxes of tea ($25) and salt, etc. ($426): Box 7, San Francisco Custom House Records (hereaft er, CA 169).
37. John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before San Francisco: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture 1776�V1882 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 86�V87; Ronald Riddle, Flying Dragons, Flowing Streams: Music in the Life of San Francisco��s Chinatown (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), p. 18.
38. Alta California, March 18, 1852.
39. Ow, Lai, and Choy, Sam Yup Benevolent Association, pp. 179�V80; Alta California, September 1, 1889.
40. Alta California, December 10, 1849.
41. Hubert Howe Bancroft , History of California (San Francisco: Th e History Company, 1890), 7 volumes, vol. 6, 1848�V1859, p. 185.
42.
Robinet to Meyer, February 3, 1852: Heard II, Vol. 541, ��W. M. Robinet Letters.�� This volume consists of outbound letters by W. M. Robinet, December 1850 to 1853, some in English and others in Spanish. A note on the volume indicates that it is not clear how this letter book ended up as part of the Augustine Heard & Co. Archive. William Robinet��s life as a maverick is nicely summed up in the China Mail of November 6, 1858. Much more has been written about the ships sailing for California from Europe and the East Coast of America. In fact, the literature, both primary and secondary, is massive. See, for instance, John Haskell Kemble, The Panama Route, 1848�V1869 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), and James P. Delgado, To California by Sea: A Maritime History of the California Gold Rush (Columbia, SC: University of South Caroline Press, 1996 [1990]). Unfortunately, there is almost no first-hand account of the voyages from China to California, Australia, and Canada by Chinese migrants themselves. In Bitter Strength, Barth cites accounts of European travelers, but they are fi lled with Eurocentric biases (see Barth, Bitter Strength, pp. 70�V71). For a brief but useful description of the new steerage passenger trade necessitated by mass trans-oceanic migration, see Bernard Ireland, History of Ships (London: Hamlyn, 1999), pp. 98�V99; and Marjory Harper, ��Pains, Perils and Pastimes: Emigrant Voyages in the Nineteenth Century,�� in Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, edited by David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press in association with the National Maritime Museum, 2004), pp..159�V172.
43.
Alta California, July 4, 1851.
44.
Alta California, July 22 and 26, 1851.
45.
Barth, Bitter Strength, pp. 74�V75.
46.
Crawford, Chinese Coolie Immigration, p. 105; Robert Schwendinger, Ocean of Bitter Dreams: Maritime Relations Between China and the United States, 1850�V 1915 (Tucson, AZ: Westernlore Press, 1988).
47.
Eitel, Europe in China, p. 273.
48.
See the captain��s account of the violence on the Duke of Portland in the Parliamentary Paper entitled ��Copies of any Recent Communications to or from the Foreign Offi ce, Colonial Office, Board of Trade, and Other Department of Her Majesty��s Government, on the Subject of Mortality on Board the Duke of Portland, or Any Other British Ships, Carrying Emigrants from China,�� reprinted in Great Britain. Parliament, House of Commons, British Parliamentary Papers: China (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1971) (hereaft er, BPP), 42 volumes, vol. 4, ��Chinese Emigration,�� pp. 424�V425; the case is also reported in ��Copies of Recent Communications to or from the Foreign Offi ce, Colonial Offi ce, Board of Trade, and Any Other Department of Her Majesty��s Government, on the Subject of
Mortality on Board British Ships Carrying Emigrants from China or India,�� in the same volume, pp. 459�V493.
49.
W. Lane Booker, British Consul at San Francisco, to the Earl of Malmesbury, July 3, 1858, enclosed in Foreign Office to Colonial Office, August 21, 1858: CO 129/70. Booker��s dispatch also includes the ��Memoranda of Rules�� observed on board several of the British ships�XMooresfort, Caribbean and Leonides�Xwhich are revealing.
50.
Alta California, May 9, 1851.
51.
The Friend of China, passim, 1851.
52.
Barth, Bitter Strength, pp. 60�V61.
53.
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, pp. 43�V49.
54.
US Congress, Senate, ��Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, Feb 27, 1877��: US Congressional Serial Set Volume 1734, Session Vol. No. 3, 44th Congress, 2nd Session. Senate Report 689, p. VII: ��Th e Chinese do not come to make their home in this country; their only purpose is to acquire what would be a competence in China and return there to enjoy it. While there is a constant and increasing incoming tide there is a constant outflow also, less in volume, of persons who have worked out specifi ed years of servitude and made money enough to live upon in China, and who sever their connection with this country.��
55.
China Mail, July 12, 1855; Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco 1850�V1943: A.Trans-Pacifi c Community (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 105.
56.
Mark O��Neill, ��Quiet Migrants Strike Gold at Last,�� South China Morning Post, February 14, 2002.
57.
For a very good description of the return of bones from New Zealand, see James Ng, Windows on a Chinese Past (Otago: Otago Heritage Books, 1993), 4 volumes, vol. 4, Chapter 1D, ��Burial Customs.��
58.
For the history of the Pacific Mail Steamship Co., see John Haskell Kemble, A.Hundred Years of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company (Newport, VA: Maritime Museum, 1950) and E. Mowbray Tate, TransPacific Steam: The Story of Steam Navigation from the Pacific Coast of North America to the Far East and the Antipodes 1867�V1941 (New York: Cornwall Books, 1986). A huge archive of the company is deposited at the Huntington Library, and I am especially indebted to Dan Lewis and Mario Einaudi for helping me to navigate through it.
59.
Eitel, Europe in China, p. 344.
60.
Caine to Newcastle, May 4, 1854 #11: CO 129/46.
61.
Hongkong Register, December 7, 1852.
62.
The Friend of China, August 7, 11, 14, 1852; November 20, 1852; January 12, 1853.
63.
The Friend of China, August 14, 1852.
64.
The cargo consisted of 4,268 bags of rice, 65 cases of lard, 1 case of caps, 1.case of blank books, 1 case of stockings, 1 case of shoes, 1 case of fire crackers, 89 pieces of hewn granite. See certified invoice 10061 on the Ann Welsh: Box 14, CA 169.
65.
��The Chinese Companies,�� enclosed in ��Remarks of the Chinese Merchants of San Francisco Upon Governor Bigler��s Message�� (San Francisco: Printed at the Offi ce of the Oriental, January 1855), pp. 12, 13�V14. In justifying the formation of the huiguan, the merchants stated that one important service they provided was to facilitate debt collection: ��Great facilities are afforded for the collection of debts. Accounts are sent, if there be any doubt about their payment, to the agents at San Francisco. Here the people are constantly going and coming; debtors can be more easily reached; their circumstances are known; if they refuse to pay, complaint is made to our courts of law, they are arrested and the claim obtained.�� See also Speer, The Oldest and the Newest Empire, p. 562, which gives the Yeung Wo Association��s regulations regarding debt: ��Claims for debts, to avoid mistakes, must particularize the true name, surname, town and department of the debtor. The manager of the company shall give the claimant an acknowledgment, which shall be returned again when the money is paid. No claim can be presented for less than ten dollars. Claims presented through the company must, when afterward paid, bear the receipt of the company; else the debtor will not be allowed to return to China �K A creditor in returning to China must name an agent who will receive the payment of any sums due to him. Accounts sent from China for collection may be accepted by the company.��
A system later evolved by which Chinese wishing to leave California must first obtain a certificate from their respective huiguan to show that they had paid all their debts, including their membership fee; the certificate was then presented to the shipping company when they purchased tickets. Agreements were made between the Six Companies and shipping companies by which anyone without a certificate would not be allowed to buy a ticket. In late 1880, the California govern-ment tried to stop this practice but was not successful (Alta California, January 21, 1881).
66.
Kwang tye-loi sounds like the name of a firm rather than a personal name. It was customary for owners of firms to be known by their fi rm names.
67.
The Friend of China, January 12, 1853.
68.
The Friend of China, November 30, 1852.
69.
Canton Insurance Office, Hong Kong to Messrs. Turner & Co, September 8, 1852: Jardine, Matheson & Co. Archives ( JMA) C36 (Letters re Canton Insurance Office)/12 (Letters from Hong Kong), p. 113.
70.
Caine to Newcastle, May 4, 1854, #11: CO 129/46.
71.
Vessels that were discovered to be seriously leaking in 1852 and 1853 included the Ann Welsh, which sailed for San Francisco and returned to Hong Kong for repairs aft er clearing the harbor, and the Aurora, which was due for Australia. Hongkong Register, November 30, 1852, September 13, 1853.
Th e Melbourne Argus, August 28, 1854 (cited in Th e Friend of China, December 27, 1854) reported that 24 of the 214 Chinese sailing to Australia on the brig Onyx died. It had been agreed between the Chinese and the ship that rice, vegetable, and fish should be supplied by the owner of the ship. Though water was plentiful, the vegetables were rotten and the fish bad from the start. The voyage to Port Phillip took 123 days, and each of the passengers paid $70 for the passage. Th e condition of ships taking Western European emigrants to America and Australia in the middle of the nineteenth century were not much better. See Bernard Ireland, History of Ships (London: Hamlyn, 1999), pp. 98�V99 on the emigrant trade.
72.
Hongkong Register, April 4, 1854 and May 2, 1854.
73.
Hongkong Register, March 23, 1854.
74.
For the full text of the American Passengers�� Act, see The Friend of China, February 25, 1852.
75.
Hongkong Register, May 2, 1854.
76.
For example, the Libertad, which sailed from Hong Kong to San Francisco in 1854 carrying 560 passengers when the limit was 297. The Chinese were without water for the last six days of the voyage and 100 died�Xand the captain as well�Xbefore reaching the Golden Gate. Schwendinger, Ocean of Bitter Dreams, p. 67; see pp. 67�V68 for other cases. See also Barth, Bitter Strength, pp. 72�V73.
77.
Robinet to Meyer, February 3, 1852: Heard II, Vol. 541.
78.
Hongkong Register, March 30, 1852.
79.
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