Leaving China

As we saw last week, even before Emancipation agents of the British East India Company (at that time, to all intents and purposes, the ruler of much of the Indian sub continent) suggested recruiting labour and organised the first failed attempt at Chinese immigration in Trinidad.

There were a couple of short-lived experiments with European labour promised high wages that did not materialise when workers arrived in Trinidad. Many, if not most of the Europeans sickened and died from fever; those who survived left the estates. In 1846 219 Portuguese workers arrived; they, too, left the estates as soon as they were able and became small shopkeepers. By this time planters and the Colonial administration were once more looking East to the British spheres of influence for labour accustomed to working in the fields in a tropical, or sub tropical climate

And so, in 1859, fifty years (give or take a year or three) after the first Chinese immigrants set foot in Trinidad in 1806 – and, for the most part, left a few years later – and after much wrangling between the Colonial Office in London, the Governor and planters in Trinidad and British agents in the Far East, a second ship carrying Chinese immigrants destined for work on the estates, arrived in Port-of-Spain.

Most of us know already, that on May 30, 1845 the Fatel Razack arrived here bearing 227 East Indian immigrants. Although as early as 1843 the authorities agreed in principal to recruit Chinese labour, another ten years were to pass before, in 1853, 143 Chinese workers aboard the “Lady Flora Hastings” and the “Australia” sailed from Shantou (Swatow) bound for Trinidad.

But before we follow the ships carrying Chinese indentured labour from China to Trinidad, let’s see why Chinese men — and some women — chose to leave their native land to work in a country half a world away? And unlike the first Chinese immigrants, why they stayed, settled and sent home for wives?

To answer those questions let’s take a brief look at China in the 1840’s, 50’s and 60’s . . .

For centuries Imperial laws banned any and all emigration from “The Middle Kingdom”(as the Chinese called the Empire at that time). However, officials in the south-east of China turned a blind eye to emigration quoting, meanwhile, the old Chinese proverb, “the mountain is high and the Emperor is far away.” In fact emigration was almost a time-honoured tradition in south-east China, in Hong Kong and the Pearl River delta, in Guanzhou (Canton), Xiamen (Amoy) and Shantou (Swatow).

Men went to work in Java, Indonesia, Malaya, but they had no intention of staying; they aimed to return home with enough money saved to set up in business, of one kind or another, to marry (if they weren’t married already) to provide for their wives, to educate their children. It’s possible none of the first immigrants had any intention of staying permanently in Trinidad, — which may explain why they left so soon. It’s likely they very soon realised they couldn’t save enough money working here to set up in business when they got back to China.

That was in 1806. However, many of those who came to Trinidad in the 1850’s and 60’s were refugees with little thought of returning to China in the foreseeable future. The Chinese who came as indentured labourers in the mid Nineteenth Century were fleeing from the terrors of war, clan feuds, riots – of what amounted to anarchy.

The troubles began when the Chinese Imperial government, determined to stamp out opium smoking that was slowly but surely destroying the population, confiscated the East India Company’s opium warehouse in Guangzhou. But the British weren’t having that. The East India Company paid for the silks, the tea, the luxury items produced in China that were the basis of a lucrative European trade, with opium grown in India.

The British sent warships to defend the East India Company’s business; the Chinese had no defence against modern warships and modern weapons, the war was lost almost before it began. China was forced to pay for daring to interfere with British trade, obliged to open five ports along the South East coast, and to cede Hong Kong to the British.

A second “Opium” war broke out in 1856 when Guangzhou police boarded the British vessel “Arrow” and charged the crew with smuggling. That was all the excuse the British needed to launch another attack, and, having vastly superior weapons, to defeat the Chinese, wringing more trading rights out of the Imperial Government, and forced them to allow Christian missionaries free access to the interior of China.

Chaos reigned in south-east China (and elsewhere) when, in 1850, the Taiping Rebellion broke out. Hung Xiuquan, a village schoolteacher and Christian convert, proclaimed himself the Younger Brother of Jesus Christ, sent by God to overthrow the Manchus, destroy demons and establish the Kingdom of Heaven, the ‘Taiping’ (ironically, ‘Great Peace’) on earth. The 15-year rebellion was, to all intents and purposes, a civil war in which between 20 and 30 million Chinese lost their lives.

To make matters worse, an environmental disaster — drought — added to the people’s miseries. In places whole villages were devastated, the crops ruined, the animals slaughtered or stolen by marauding bands of ‘soldiers’ (of one side or the other), the houses destroyed.

The British set up recruiting centres in Hong Kong, Canton, Amoy and Swatow, offering contracts to men willing to emigrate to work as agricultural labourers in the West Indies. British agents liased with Chinese authorities to recruit labour, Christian missionaries helped to recruit others. The US, Peru, Cuba and other American countries, also in search of labour, employed paid professional recruiters (known as ‘crimps’) who used fraud, trickery, threats – even kidnapping to fill their quota of emigrants. The British had strict rules against using ‘crimps’, rules that, Dr Walter Look Lai notes “were not always successful.”

The voyage from South China to Trinidad was not all trouble-free sailing, however. Agents were warned the Fukienese despised the rowdy Cantonese, partly because they spoke a different language, and partly due to the notorious Cantonese clan feuds. In 1862 fierce fighting broke out between emigrant passengers from Fukien and the Cantonese emigrants aboard the “Maggie Miller/Wanata” during the passage to Trinidad.

The British tried to encourage women — widows whose husbands were killed in riots and civil wars — and whole families as well as single men to emigrate. Missionaries were particularly helpful in bringing the dispossessed to recruiting agencies. The British encouraged family emigration, offering a bonus of $20 to any emigrant accompanied by his wife (and, presumably, children, if any).

Yet it seems most Chinese, however desperate preferred ‘the devil they know to the one they don’t.’ In the British Caribbean only 2669 Chinese labourers came to work on estates between 1859 and 66 – the years of contract/indenture Chinese labour on the plantations of Trinidad...

Next week. The Plantation, indenture contracts, half-free, half slave

annehilton@rave-tt.net