UPDATE -Factoids about "California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong," lessons from "Pacific Crossing," by Elizabeth Sinn.
May 10, update. This project is basically a labor of love. However, I hope to both increase readership and income from it. It’s a struggle and a learning process. If you like what I am doing, please help me meet those goals. Share what I write here wherever you feel comfortable, this is to increase readership and consider a paid subscription. They are still on sale for half price. Meantime I struggle between saying between charging for the writing and giving it away for free. My new plan is that paid subscribers will get pieces when they are written, and free subscribers will get a preview and then the full piece probably 10 days to two weeks later. This piece was sent out on April 13 with just a preview, and the bulk of the piece not available to free subscribers, but I think there’s good stuff here that I would like more people to know. So I am sending it out with the full thing available to free subscribers. Tomorrow, the regular piece will come out (it will be on Chinese-American newspapers of the 1850s) but free subscribers will get a preview and then have to wait to read the whole thing. Thanks. Peace, Stay Safe, thanks for reading my publication.
Greetings,
Welcome back for your weekly Asian Studies fix. As stated, I have recently begun adding content for paid subscribers only, If this is a problem for you but you still wish to read every singe word of this publication, please reach out to me. If I recently added you thinking you would like this, you have been comped for a while. But for this reason, only the first half of this week’s column is available to non-paying subscribers. I did try to make sure there was interesting stuff there.
The current schedule is Sundays 5pm EST, I offer a brief Chinese, Chinese American, or Asian history or culture related essay or column, Thursday same time, I offer a shorter piece related to some videos or some media content of some type Although I originally intended this as a “no politics, Trump-free zone,” due to the recent craziness of the past two or three months, I have been throwing out my thoughts on current events and politics on Tuesdays.
As always, thanks for stopping by.
A small coastal town called San Francisco grew almost 80 times in population as fortune seekers following the discovery of gold rushed in. Among them were a very large number of people from China, the first large scale presence of people from this nation, and probably the Asian continent, in the USA. 1 And the story of the Chinese in nineteenth century America is fascinating with not just the interactions between Chinese and Western institutions and people, but also the adaptation of Chinese culture and institutions in a new country.
Therefore, since the beginning of this column over a year ago, I have been writing about the Chinese who came to Califorian and San Francisco during the Gold Rush of 1849. A couple months ago, I ordered a book in the mail. Entitled “Pacific Crossing, California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong,” it was published by Hong Kong University Press in 2013 and focuses on the subject of the California gold rush, but from the viewpoint of a historian focusing on Hong Kong and its history/ Therefore, it tells just how important the California gold rush was not just to the individuals who left for California either via or from Hong Kong, but also the Chinese and Western merchants who shipped or purchased supplies sent from Hong Kong to California during the gold rush. And it’s a fascinating subject. For instance, who would have thought that a great deal of the granite, of all things, used in construction in San Francisco was shipped to California from Hong Kong by sailing ship? This trade began in 1852 and continued into the 1870s and in some cases not only could a person in San Francisco order granite shipped to him or her from mines in Hong Kong, yes, there were granite mines in Hong Kong at the time, but the granite would arrive, per contract, with Chinese workers ready to build the purchaser a building with said granite. ( Sinn, p. 142, 147-149) I mean there’s a lot of amazing stuff here.
This week’s column is going to be a smattering of fascinating things I have learned on that subject from the book. Most don’t really qualify for a full column on their own, and they don’t really pose too many interesting questions on their own, but they are often fascinating. Therefore, this is going to be a “Did you know . . ? Interesting facts about history,” type column.
I usually hate those superficial, smarmy things, and prefer something with some depth and analysis, some perspective, interpretation, pattern seeking, but here it is. Not only that, I am going to be citing a lot of Wikipedia, another pet peeve of mine. 2 So here it is.
“Did you know . . ?”
Did you know??? Interesting facts about early Hong Kong and the California Gold Rush of 1849.
“Did you know . . ?”
Mid-Nineteenth Century World Trade Review
Page 1.
A few events.
January 24, 1848 - Discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California. This was almost exactly seven years after Hong Kong island was turned over to the British and approximately five years after Hong Kong became a British colony.
In 1847, the population of San Francisco was just 459 people (not a typo, four hundred and fifty nine individuals).
Between 1849, after the discovery of gold became known, and 1851, over 1,000 ships visited San Francisco bringing both goods and people. The people came from Mexico, Chile, Europe, Turkey, Australia, and, yes, China. In 1852, the population of San Francisco was 36,154, almost 80 times bigger. (My calculator says about 78.76 times bigger.)
That’s a big change. Lots of chaos, lots of excitement, lots of demand for lots of goods to be bought, sold, and traded, and a lot of these goods came from Hong Kong and China, an event that is very well described in this book. This also produced a major change in the world’s trading and shipping patterns as there had not been widespread trade from Asia to the USA prior to this.
“Did you know . . ?”
The first people who left Hong Kong to seek gold in California, the first “forty-niners,” were American.
Page 44-45
According to Sinn, the first people who left Hong Kong to seek gold in California were Americans. Among the foreign merchants, adventurers, and fortune seekers were many Americans and Sinn spends several pages describing this community.
On January 9, 1849, four American passengers booked passage on a British ship sailing for San Francisco called the “Richard and William” and arrived on March 20. Their names are recorded as “Captain Marvin,” a former captian of an opium smuggling ship (I have no idea if “Captain” was his given name, an assumed nickname, or a title that he was known as, but Sinn says his name was “Captain Marvin,” and she seems done her homework on these things.) William Heyl of the firm Drinker, Heyl, and Co, George Winslow, a livery stable-keeper, and W. H. McConnell, a tavern keeper.
Other Americans followed, of course.
One particularly interesting early gold rush fortune seeker who left Hong Kong for California was Charles Gordon Holdforth. Although he does not seem to have been an American, but instead came to Hong Kong from Australia allegedly trying to flee problems relating to the sale of some horses that he was involved in and that had gotten him in serious trouble, he then came to Hong Kong became an assistant magistrate of police and assistant coroner, got himself in trouble again for corruption and selling things he should not have sold in ways he should not have sold them, and then took a ten month leave from his government job to flee to California, allegedly hiding himself in the hull of the ship instead of waving good bye as he did, and then went to California, where, guess what, he got in a great deal of trouble of all kinds there as well and never returned to live in Australia or Asia. He seems to have been an example of why many in gold rush era California had a low opinion of Australians, as well as an example of why one needed to be wary of White people who had voluntarilly relocated themselves to exotic places like Hong Kong or San Francisco in the midst of the gold rush .
“Did you know . . ?”
Abolition of Slavery in Europe led to the rise of the Chinese “coolie” trade
Page 14 -
Slavery was largely abolished in Europe in the 1830s. 3 This led to a demand worldwide for new sources of inexpensive human labor and a rise in the Chinese “coolie” trade. 4
The first shipment of Chinese “coolies” was organized in 1845 by a French Merchant in Xiamen, a port in Fujian, and sent to the Island of Bourbon in the Indian Ocean 679 kilometers east of Madagascar on French ships. 5 To add some modern-day context, a large percentage of the overseas Chinese workers today are still from Fujian. Next time you find yourself at a Chinese restaurant in the USA, if you ask the workers where in China they come from, most will tell you Fujian.
African slavery was outlawed in Peru in 1836, and the first Chinese contract laborers, “coolies” if you will, were imported from Macao in 1847, with others coming from Xiamen in 1849. They were brought in to work on plantations and to work harvesting guano from seabirds, an important ingredient in fertilizer and explosives.
In May 1847, a ship with 800 people, many Chinese contract laborers among them, sailed from Xiamen to Havana, Cuba, and during the next year 150,000 more such people went there primarily to work on the plantations.
In 1850, long term contract laborers left Xiamen to work in the British East Indies and Caribbean.
The shipment of long-term contract laborers, aka “coolies,” continued for decades. It was during the California gold rush that Hong Kong became an emigrant port
“Did you know . . ?”
The Idea of sending Chinese laborers to California was actually discussed a bit before the 1849 gold rush.
Page 38
According to Sinn, the first American to arrive in Hong Kong and take up residence there was named Charles V. Gillespie. Born in 1810, Gillespie began travelling to Guangzhou in 1831 and when Hong Kong became British territory in 1841, he was the first American to live there, engaging in business and travelling between Guangzhou, Macao, and Hong Kong regularly. He had a brother who has served with the US Marines during the Mexican-American War in California, and had travelled there as early as 1847 to sell goods purchased in Asia, perhaps with the thought that the buyers in California would resell them to buyers in Mexico. He left Asia and settled in California before the discovery of gold and in March 6, 1848 wrote a letter to Thomas Larkin, prominent American businessman in California, saying the following:
Any number of [Chinese] mechanics, agriculturalists & servants can be obtained. They would be willing to sell their services for a certain period to pay for their passage across the Pacific. They would be valuable miners. The Chinese are a sober & industrious people, and if a large number could be introduced in California, landed property would increase in value fourfold. 6
Nothing, however, came from this proposal.
“Did you know . . ?”
Page XVII of the introduction
“Notes on Currencies and Weights”
In early 19th Century Hong Kong, Mexican and Spanish dollars were the common form of currency. They were of roughly equal value. Although American silver dollars were circulated, they were less valuable than the Mexican or Spanish dollars.
In 1873, the USA decided to circulate a “US Silver Trade Dollar” specially minted for the China market, but it was withdrawn in 1887.
Now some of you are thinking “what does this talk of currencies have to do with real history anyway?” Think about it. If you want to do something interesting, like start a business, take a trip, build an army, or so on, what’s the first thing you do? CHECK YOUR BUDGET, RIGHT? Which implies money, which implies currency, and while you are at it, you can learn a lot about a nation and its society and capabilities by taking a look at its banks and their style and currency.
Just last week, I had a question about if an 1849 Chinese contract said people were paid “X” number of dollars, what type of dollars were they paid in? It seems to have been Mexican silver dollars, and one can calculate and explore further from there.
The same section also says that until 1862, Hong Kong civil servants were paid in sterling, and after that a Hong Kong silver dollar was created.
Footnotes
Interestingly enough, the first confirmed Chinese person to come to the USA that I have been able to find so far. was a woman named “Along Moy.” She arrived in 1834, probably to New York City as that was where she first performed, having been brought there by a pair of presumably American merchants who thought that they would do well to bring a Chinese woman to the USA and have her perform in shows for audiences that had never seen a Chinese person, much less a Chinese woman. Part of the show was that she would eat with chopsticks, speak Chinese, and walk around with her tiny bound feet. None of these were things that 99% plus of the American population of the time had ever seen. Although this may sound demeaning to us today, standards were different then and such shows were considered very educational and something cultured people would want to see in the pre-interent, pre-photograph, pre-motion pictures and television age. (see Bogdan, Richard. 1990. “Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press.)
She was successful enough at this that she went to the White House where she met President Andrew Jackson.
See https://web.archive.org/web/20140905153235/http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/chinese/4.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afong_Moy
If you are going to use Wikipedia as a source of knowledge, whatever you do, look carefully at the footnotes? Do they come from a variety of sources? If so, what are these sources? Are they respected as neutral and unbiased? Take a look at the editing history. Has it been edited by a large group of people who seem to have no connection, ideological or otherwise with each other? Or is it, for example, a page that discusses some barely famous niche scholar or pop-singer who is the prime editor of their own page? If so, it may very well be biased. But if not, then keep reading,
As stated previously, be aware that at this time the term “coolie” was often applied, particularly in British sources, to inexpensive, human laborers often from India so if one reads about the British army travelling, for instance, to East Africa with lots of soldiers and “coolies” to carry goods, there is a good chance these laborers were from India, not China.
Sinn, page 1.
Sinn, p. 38. Sinn cites Larkin, the recipient’s, collected papers.