Sydney’s first fortune seekers sent Aussie gold to fund revolutionaries fighting China’s dynastic rule

As 865,000 Australians who claimed Chinese ancestry in the 2011 Census prepare to celebrate Chinese New Year this weekend, Sydney’s first Chinese migrant, carpenter Ahuto, arrived as a free settler in 1803.

Chinese migrant Mei Quong Tart with wife Margaret Scarlett and five of their six children.

Xin Jin Shan, or new gold mountain, was the name given to Australia as reports of gold riches reached China in the 1850s, encouraging 38,000 Chinese to join migrant fortune seekers by 1863.

Paving their way was Bathurst storekeeper Loong Hung Pung, also known as Koong Loong, credited with founding the brotherhood that helped propel generations of Chinese-Australian success stories.

And while Melbourne-based property developer Chen Guo Jing last year told a Hong Kong television audience that “Australia would not survive” without Chinese migrants, gold rush ethics also influenced modern China, as immigrants funded revolutionaries intent on toppling the hierarchical Manchu dynasty. In its place they wanted a fraternal, egalitarian society similar to the one they enjoyed in Australia.

As some 865,000 Australians who claimed Chinese ancestry in the 2011 Census prepare to celebrate Chinese New Year this weekend, Sydney’s first Chinese migrant, carpenter Ahuto, arrived as a free settler in 1803. Another carpenter, Mak Sai Ying, or John Pong Shying, arrived by 1818, opening Parramatta’s Lion Inn in 1829.

Resentment flared into racism when more than 3000 men from Fujian province, some of them kidnapped, arrived in NSW between 1848 and 1853 as indentured labourers, replacing cheap convict labour as British convict transportation slowed.

Loong joined the “new” gold rush to arrive in Sydney in 1858, immediately moving to Bathurst where he set up a “credit-ticket” system to fund migration to Australian goldfields. Sometimes criticised as another indentured labour scheme, Chinese businessmen in Australia lent money to Chinese labourers to fund travel to Australia, where they were expected to repay the debts from their Australian earnings. A nominated headman went to China to collect and travel with those lent money.

Future barrister John Fitzgerald, who grew up at Lime Kilns near Bathurst, wrote that Loong’s store bought gold from miners. On visits to the store as a schoolboy, Fitzgerald noted that Loong rarely served customers.

Instead he sat “on a kind of high chair ... to overlook the whole length of the weatherboard store,” Fitzgerald wrote. “He was a man of fine features ... a high forehead, surmounted by a silk embroidered cap, from which a long pig-tail escaped down his back over his embroidered robe ... and a long tuft of beard on the chin. The expression of his face betokened extreme benevolence.”

Loong was identified as founder of Yee Hing secret societies on NSW goldfields in the 1860s, which also helped Chinese immigrants establish businesses. Newspapers noted that his death in 1874 “created no little commotion among his countrymen. The deceased had been in business for many years in Bathurst ... had accumulated a considerable sum of money and was altogether much respected among his brother celestials.”

Chinese migrant Mei Quong Tart with wife Margaret Scarlett and five of their six children.

By the 1890s Chinese settlers were established as tobacco farmers, storekeepers, drapers and market gardeners. One settler, flamboyant Sydney tea merchant Mei Quong Tart, arrived in 1859 with his uncle to transport goldfield migrants. He and his wife, Margaret Scarlett, went on to build a business empire.

Expatriate Chinese were likely to fund anti-Manchu revolutionaries, with the mismanagement of money sent from the goldfields encouraging Australian-born Chinese to return to join revolutionary efforts.

Among them were John See and his son James. John had a business in Sussex St, Sydney before opening Tse & Co general store at Grafton. His next shop was at Tingha, a tin-mining town near Inverell where four of the five general stores were Chinese-run.

The family returned to Hong Kong in 1887, where James, then known as Tse Tsan Tai, helped found Furen Wenshe, or Literary Society for the Promotion of Benevolence, which merged with revolutionary Sun Yat-sen’s Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society) in 1895. Tse, who co-founded the South China Morning Post newspaper in 1903, became a strategist and fundraiser in the Xingzhonghui’s 1895 and 1900 uprisings

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AUSTRALIAN CHINESE WHO HAVE MADE A MARK

THE success of real estate agent L.J. Hooker, who began life as Leslie John Tingyou, and the Lee family’s, Bing Lee electronic outlets are well known.

Then there are the eminent medical identities: Shanghai-born Victor Chang performed Australia’s first heart transplant, and pioneering neurosurgeon Charles Teo, born in Sydney to Chinese-Singaporean migrants.

Paediatrician John Yu and rock musician Richard Clapton found examples of “ culture clash” in their Chinese heritage stories. In 1936 Yu’s mother smuggled Yu, then two, and older sister from Nanking in laundry baskets to join two uncles in Sydney. Yu’s maternal grandfather, Presbyterian missionary Joshua Young Wai, had left China in 1867 for Ballarat.

In Sydney, Yu’s uncles gave him cigarettes and whiskey from age 12, so he could learn to “drink like Australians and hold your liquor”.

Clapton’s mother, a hospital night nurse from Sydney who suffered mental illness, committed suicide when he was 10.

At her funeral he met his father, an Australian-Chinese surgeon who enrolled him at a Sydney boarding school, hoping he would also
become a doctor.

Originally published as Sydney’s first fortune seekers sent Aussie gold to fund revolutionaries fighting China’s dynastic rule