And Australia and California and the Pacific Ocean! The new citizen of the world won’t be able to comprehend how small our world was.
– Karl Marx to Joseph Weydenmeyer, 25 March 18521
The Royal BC Museum will open an exhibition, Gold Rush! El Dorado in BC, in May 2015. The nineteenth century Gold Rushes played a key role in shaping British Columbia and today’s Pacific World. Part of the exhibition will touch upon the personal stories of the individuals who joined the gold rushes around the Pacific. Gold rushes brought the first major Chinese settlers to Canada. This article provides a brief account of the Pacific crossings of the late eighteenth century that preceded the mass transnational migration of the gold rushes that started “the Pacific century,” and transformed the Pacific from a peripheral zone to “a nexus of world trade.”2
In 1757, the Qing emperor Chien-Lung banned maritime activities in general, and the only port for foreign trade was Canton, today’s Guangzhou City, the capital of Guangdong Province. In 1780, trade started between Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, Hong Kong, and Macao. British and American merchants shipped fur and lumber from Vancouver Island to Canton.
Among the early traders was John Meares (1756-1809), a British fur trader, who made the first of several voyages between the Pacific Northwest and Asia in 1786. According to his journal, in 1788 he sailed with 50 Chinese “handicraft-men” and sailors to Nootka Sound.3 It is believed that these Chinese workers helped build the sloop North West America. He established Nootka Sound as a base for the fur trade of the Pacific Northwest coast and traded between Guangzhou, Macao, and Nootka Sound.4
Meares’ journal is one of the earliest records of a Chinese presence in British Columbia.5 Some of the Chinese workers may have stayed and intermarried with First Nations, thus losing traces of ethnic characteristics over time. Others may have been taken to Central or South America by Spanish explorers who were also present on the Northwest coast. In any case, the transpacific trade continued. In the early nineteenth century, the North West Company, a fur trading company established in Montreal in 1779 and merged with the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821, shipped over a hundred thousand pounds of goods to Canton.
After its victory in the Opium War (1839-1842), Great Britain forced China to open five ports and cede Hong Kong Island in the Treaty of Nanking (1842). These changes affected the series of gold rushes in California (1848), Australia (1851), British Columbia (1858), New Zealand (1861) and Klondike (1896). Canton’s role as the exclusive port for foreign trade laid a foundation for spreading the news of gold mountains, pushing emigration and expanding trade in the pan-Pacific area. Along the very long Chinese coast, the Pearl River Delta (including Canton and its surrounding counties) became the major sending area of Chinese migrants. This densely populated area was ravaged by civil wars including the Taiping Rebellion, and natural catastrophes such as famine and flood, resulting in hardships and exacerbating poverty. At the same time, the opening of new ports allowed Hong Kong Island to rise quickly from a fishing village to a major port for oceanic trade.6
Goldseekers from many parts of Europe, the Americas and Asia followed the gold trail around the Pacific Rim. Even though only a few of the gold seekers became wealthy, the increased supply of gold stimulated global trade and investment and brought profits to some merchants engaged in the trans-Pacific trade.7 First-person accounts of Chinese goldseekers are rare, but the activities of merchants can be traced through material culture studies and archival research.
In the spring of 1858, news of gold in the Fraser Canyon transformed Fort Victoria from a quiet fur trade outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company into a booming town. Hop Kee & Co. of San Francisco played an instrumental role in the first wave of Chinese to Victoria. On June 24, 1858, it commissioned Allan Lowe & Co. to ship 300 Chinese men and 50 tons of merchandise to Victoria at the cost of $3500.8 Most men departed for the gold fields soon after arriving. Throughout the summer of 1858 and 1859 Chinese continued to arrive from the United States; by 1859 clipper ships were bringing hundreds of Chinese immigrants directly from Hong Kong.
Initially, unlike Californians, British Columbians were tolerant of the Chinese. Few whites perceived the Chinese as a threat to their wellbeing; some regarded them as useful or valuable members of the communities who shared the goal of making money, often providing useful services such as restaurants, laundries, and fresh vegetables and whose presence might lead to the growth of a profitable trans-Pacific trade.9 Under colonial rule the Chinese had access to legal protection.10 Even so, due to the discrimination the Chinese faced in California, three earliest Chinese merchants chose to purchase land at the edge of Fort Victoria across a ravine, a settlement pattern similar to their presence in the gold rush town of Barkerville. They soon set up stores, Tai Soong & Co., Kwong Lee & Co., and Yang Woo Sang & Co., and wooden huts as tenement houses for the labourers they had recruited in San Francisco and China. When Victoria was incorporated as a city in 1862, three hundred people, about six percent of the city’s total population, were Chinese.
The leading Chinese merchants, Kwong Lee & Co. and Tai Soong & Co., made the city’s Chinatown an influential economic centre in the transpacific trade. By 1862, eleven Chinese companies were large enough to pay tax under a Trade License Ordinance. Kwong Lee & Co., as the largest company in Victoria second only to the Hudson’s Bay Co., was assessed at £6500, Tai Soong and Yan Woo Sang were assessed in the £2000-6000 range.11
The Kwong & Co. Lee advertisement provides clues to the historical transpacific connections between southeast Asia and British Columbia. Its principal offices highlight the key role of Canton and Hong Kong in the transpacific network. The ‘gold mountain trade’ reshaped a trans-Pacific network of migration and commerce. Hong-Kong-based scholar Elizabeth Sinn has identified Victoria (and later Vancouver), Hong Kong, Canton, San Francisco, and other Pacific ports as the “in-between places” within this growing network of ports that maintained a vibrant flow of people, goods, funds, ‘commercial intelligence,’ correspondence and even dead bodies and bones.12 Chinese migrants travelled back and forth across the Pacific through these ports that sometimes became their second homes.
Since 1858, Victoria had served as the major port between Canada and Asia and had the second largest Chinese population in North America.13 After the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885, Vancouver was established as its western terminus, and economic activities gradually shifted to Vancouver. Most of the Chinese population in Victoria worked as laundrymen, servants, barbers, tailors, cobblers, or other tradesmen, providing services to the Chinese miners, or as cooks, servants, market gardeners and washmen for the non-Chinese sector of the city of Victoria.
A few Chinese, however, benefitted from the booming trans-Pacific trade and Victoria’s Chinatown prospered. Throughout the 1860s, Kwong Lee and Tai Soong, while maintaining strong ties to Guongzhou, Hong Kong, and San Francisco, both quickly developed a network of subsidiaries and agencies in all the gold rush towns of BC.
The Kwong Lee & Co. advertisement further testifies to the role of Victoria, as an “in-between place,” in connecting the interior of British Columbia to the transpacific network. They made, sold, and delivered products and services. They operated transportation businesses, first with mules and later with wagons, up the Fraser Valley and into the Cariboo.14 Kwong Lee & Co. had stores in Yale, Lillooet, Quesnel Forks, Quesnel, and Barkerville by 1868.
The transpacific network enabled Chinese to contribute much to the building of British Columbia. In the 1860s and 1870s, besides mining, Chinese men also worked on many public projects such as erecting telegraph poles, constructing the 607 km Cariboo Wagon Road, building trails, digging canals, and reclaiming wastelands. Opportunities for Chinese labourers increased after an 1862 smallpox epidemic decimated the First Nations population. At this time, gold was discovered much further north in the Cariboo at Barkerville. Victoria’s Chinese merchants quickly took advantage of this new gold rush. By 1863 sixteen Chinese business were established including brothels, opium dens, and restaurants, and there were about four thousand Chinese in the Cariboo.
Lee Chong, manager of Kwong Lee & Co., was an early model of an intercultural personality, a popular Chinese merchant who was well known by the Western public as “Kwong Lee” even though he was not the owner. A British traveler described him as “a gentleman of most polite manners and very intelligent. Speaks English fluently in ordinary conversation. Free from Yankee twang and slang.”15 In August 1858 a newspaper correspondent reported that Lee Chong, “a well-known and respectable commission merchant,” had acted as a court interpreter when a Chinese man was charged with selling liquor to a native Indian.16 Lee Chong was one of the very few who was wealthy enough to have his family join him. On February 29, 1860, his wife and two children arrived in Victoria; Mrs. Lee Chong became the first Chinese woman to settle in Victoria.17 Because Lee Chong was known as Kwong Lee, some chronologies list the first Chinese Canadian woman as Mrs. Kwong Lee.
Lee Chong also represented the Chinese community before the government. On March 7, 1860, Lee Chong and two other Chinese merchants went to see Governor James Douglas after hearing of a suggestion to impose a poll tax on Chinese immigrants.18 When Governor Arthur Kennedy arrived in Victoria in April 1864, Lee Chong, Tong Kee and Chang Tsoo called on him to express concern about the fair treatment of the Chinese and the government’s plan to modify the colony’s free trade policy.19 According to Chinese Canadian historian Tung-Hai Lee, Chinese communities maintained a positive relationship with Governor Kennedy throughout his term.20
In the late nineteenth century, one of the main complaints against the Chinese presence was the perception that they were sojourners who contributed little to the local economy before moving on to another gold field or back to China. Yet, as the example of Lee Chong shows, for some the gold rush migration pattern of the Chinese, as historian Keir Reeves examines the case in Australia and New Zealand, paralleled that of Europeans’ settler communities along the Pacific Rim.21
The early Chinese travelers across the Pacific used their transpacific connections and developed the China-Canada trade. British Columbia sent lumber, coal and fish to China. British Columbia imported rice, sugar, opium and, after the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed, it carried silk and tea from China to eastern North America.22 The pioneer merchants helped write a significantly transformative chapter in transpacific and Chinese Canadian history and demonstrated that not all Chinese were labourers or sojourners.23 Many of these early migrants contributed to the building of British Columbia. The stories of their descendents growing in Canada’s oldest Chinatown were featured in a Royal BC Museum 2013 exhibition.