On Again, Off Again Piracy in Southern China. "Oh isn't it cute that people in Hong Kong live on boats?"
Yes, this really does tie in with later events during the California gold rush, and just a little on current events but it's at the end and you can skip it if you want.
Greetings! Welcome back for your weekly Asian Studies fix.
With this, I like to think we are back where I want to be, a week or two ahead of schedule, producing what I hope are short, interesting pieces on Chinese history, Chinese American history, and Asian history and culture.
Early last October, five months ago, a friend of mine, a retired museum curator, historian, and historical wargamer, asked me if there were any Chinese tong wars in the old American west that were large enough to make a decent table top wargame using miniature figures. I said I thought there were and went home and did some quick research trying to recheck the basic facts. When I did, I discovered that what some historians referred to as “America’s first tong war,” an event that took place in California in 1856 during the Gold Rush, was not a tong war at all. It was instead an ethnic conflict between two Chinese sub-groups known as the Hakka Chinese and the Cantonese Chinese. And the fight was not between two “tongs,” the tongs being sworn brotherhoods of Chinese men, but instead between two “Chinese companies.” These “Chinese companies” were organizations run by the Chinese merchants already in the USA. Chinese laborers who came to the USA at the time were basically enrolled in one of these organizations either upon arrival or prior to departure from China whether they wished to be or not. The exact “Chinese company” that they were enrolled in depended on their place of origin in China for the Cantonese Chinese with the Hakka Chinese being enrolled in the Chinese Company for the Hakka people. And some of these organizations were behind the fighting in 1856. To make it even stranger, the 1856 “first American tong war” was actually the second large conflict of this type, the first having taken place in 1854, also in California, also in the Gold Rush, and basically involved fighting among the same organizations. 1
And ever since, I have been digging into this more and more, deeper and deeper, trying to determine what exactly happened and what caused it, and sharing some of what I learned here, especially if it’s interesting. You should be able to read about it in the archives, and if you cannot, contact me and I will try to send you either links or copies of what I wrote.
And ultimately a lot of the broad pattern of what happened in California in the mid-19th Century Gold Rush between Chinese then, had connections to what Chinese were doing back home in the Pearl River Delta, the region known as Guanghzhou (Canton) and later Hong Kong. The demographics of Chinese American migration to California in the mid-19th Century was connected in part to settlement patterns that stemmed from the major problems the region had with piracy a couple centuries earlier in the 17th Century. So I wrote about that a bit too and promised to write more. 2
Therefore, today I return to the topic of Chinese piracy in the Pearl River Delta. Please share, like, or comment on the post. I really do want to hear what people think of my writing especially as I move ahead making changes. If you really want to flatter me, consider a paid subscription.
And while one of my goals in this publication has been to avoid any talk of politics and especially Donald Trump, due to what I consder a national state of emergency, I am compelled to share but decided to do so as a separate post which you should receive Tuesday at 5:00pm. They will be clearly labelled, and you can skip them if you prefer. But please look them over if you can,and share them if you wish. I am still working out the best way to share such things, and this might not be it. We will see.
Thursday at 5:00pm will be a non-political short piece sharing a quick thought or piece of media.
As always, thanks for stopping by and reading this publication.
Aberdeen Harbor in Hong Kong in the 1950s. The bulk of these boats housed families who eked out a living any way they could. Today in Hong Kong and the surrounding region there are very few families still living on boats, and scenes like this have largely disappeared. Source: the Business Insider article linked below.
Many people know that there are or that there were until recently large numbers of people in Hong Kong and the surrounding region who lived on boats. Yes, instead of houses they lived on boats. It sounds quaint and wonderful. Very exotic.
In fact, there’s a 1982 Chuck Norris movie called “Forced Vengeance” where his character, Josh Randall, lives in Hong Kong in a cozy but exotic looking Chinese junk in the harbor with his beautiful blonde wife and cheerful Chinese neighbors who don’t speak English while working as a bouncer / trouble shooter for one of Hong Kong’s many casinos. I loved it, although admittedly at that point in my life any Chuck Norris movie thrilled me, especially if set in Hong Kong or the far east, a place I wanted to see someday. It was only later that I learned that not only did Hong Kong have no legal casinos at the time (they were and are all in nearby Macao, a legally distinct city with different laws) but living in a boat like that was a little bit like living in a slum. 3
Yes, a slum. While historically many people in China have lived on boats, it almost never was entirely by choice. People lived on boats mostly because they could not afford to buy or rent a house and go home in the evening and spend time living off the boat. And it wasn’t safe in the event of a typhoon or major storm, not to mention the whole pirate issue but more on that later. It was a little bit like all those sad people who are forced to live in their cars today, homeless, and on the periphery of both the law and society.
In fact, one major reason that Hong Kong, Macao, and nearby cities do not have harbors full of families living in those wonderful looking junks is because there was a concerted effort by all political entities involved to help those people and get them off of the boats and living in decent housing on land.
A family in Hong Kong Aberdeen Harbor living on a boat probably in the 1950s. Source the Business Insider article linked below.
The people known as “the Tanka” among other names.
According to historian Dian H. Murray, people in China have been living this way since the third century B.C. (Murray, p. 13)
Historically the people who lived on these boats were considered a separate ethnic group by most foreign people, another sub-group of Chinese (basically) who spoke Cantonese (basically) but with a distinct accent, and were historically referred to as the “Tanka” (basically).
If you are wondering those “basically”s refer to the fact that there is a lot of debate about each of these statements. For instance, some say genetic testing indicates their ancestry is not actually Chinese, but instead they are descended from the Bai-Yue minority people but became assimilated and are now culturally and linguistically Chinese but not genetically Chinese. And as for being “Tanka,” well they are all “Tanka” —except of course for the “Hoklo” who are a different kind of people who lived on boats in the same region but who speak a variant of the Hokien or Fukinese dialect of Chinese instead of Cantonese. Some people call them “the Fuzhou Tanka.” And then, after the Communist takeover and the implementation of Communist policies such as all fishermen must pool their catch and earnings and share the profits equally in the 1950s, many Chinese fishermen from other areas of China decided at that time to take their fishing boats and head for Hong Kong where some of them were never able to get enough to buy houses on land and had to live in their boats with their families, and those people just do not fit in the whole “Tanka” and “Hoklo” paradigm at all.
But for our purposes it is probably good enough to remember that the “Tanka” are a Cantonese speaking sub-group of Chinese who live on boats almost their entire lives and are despised and looked down on by most of their land-dwelling neighbors. However, because they are looked down upon by their neighbors, the term “Tanka” has become seen as an ethnic slur. Therefore,, the government has tried very hard to make encourage people refer to them by terms that are considered more polite, and there are now at least six different words or terms to refer to the Cantonese speaking people in the Pearl River Basin region who are often but should not be referred to as “Tanka” because that is not a nice thing to call them. “Politely correct” altering of terms is not the most effective way to change attitudes even in Asia. Therefore, I have found, through the miracle of modern-day Wikipedia, six different names for these folks and some seem even worse. 4
This is a picture of a little boy pooping off the side of the boat sometime in the 1940s . Now he does not look too upset over this, but we are describing families living in crowded conditions on tiny wooden boats where their children have little chance for education or upward mobility. Source: University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee digital library: AGSL Digital Photo Archive - Asia and Middle East Hong Kong, little boy relieving himself off docked houseboat
Videos of life living in the harbors of Hong Kong
Future Plans for This Publication.
The goal is to have an essay or piece like this, about the same length and style, each Sunday evening at 5:00pm EST with a shorter media related piece released each Thursday at the same time. I will try to mix topics up. At the moment everything is free, but sometime soon paid content will be added. If paid content is an issue for you but you read this regularly and appreciate it, reach out to me. If you were recently added by me, expect a comp subscription for a while. If it doesn’t happen, reach out.
Thursday’s scheduled media piece is on a particularly unusual type of Sichuan cuisine that appeared in China in the 1950s or 1960s.
Next Sunday I expect to return to another installment in the series on how superhuman stunts are performed in Asian martial arts.
Any comments, suggestions, feel free to reach out.
As always, thanks for stopping by.
Bibliography
Murray, Dian H. 1987. “Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790-1810.” Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.
Footnotes
See:
If one wonders, #1 means something like “egg families.” #5 means something like “egg people group.”