1892: The Cleanness of Shops in Chicago's Chinatown
Dec 8 2004
Dec 8 2004Historical descriptions of Chicago contain several comments about the cleanliness of its Chinese restaurants and the neatness of its Chinese shops. Here is one:
"One recognizes Chinatown [on Clark Street] by the curious signs over the shops. The Chinese are industrious and economical and peaceable - never molest anybody who lets them alone. . . In a typical Chinese shop, all is scrupulously neat and clean. It seems as if, by some magic, the smoky, dusty atmosphere of Chicago had been excluded from this unique interior, which looks like the inside of a bric-a-brac cabinet, with bright colors, tinsel and shining metals. On the walls are colored photographs, showing the proprietors beautifully dressed in dove-colored garments. In a kind of shrine stands a “Joss table” or altar, with what is probably a Confucian text hanging over it, and lying on it some opium pipes. In a room behind the shop a “fan-tan” game is going on upon a straw-matted table, around which gather interested Celestials three deep. In the shop is a freshly opened importation, barrels and boxes of Chinese delicacies, pickled fish of various kinds, with the pungent odor which belongs to that kind of food the world round and the seas over. The men are clothed in Chinese fashion - great, broad cloaks, loose trousers, felt-soled shoes, etc. -- but in American felt hats."
Joseph Kirkland, “Among the Poor of Chicago,” Scribner’s Magazine, vol. 12, no. 1, p. 8, 1892. The author, an expert on poverty,
was highly critical of living conditions among other poor Chicagoans -- for instance, Italian-Americans. He treats the Chinese-American community as an exception.
RESEARCH: BEFORE 1900 美州中部華人歴史: 1900 以前Here we present the results of research into Chinese-American and Chinese-Canadian history in the interior of North America, between the East and West Coasts. The coastal regions have been well studied by historians of Chinese America; the region in between has not.
This page covers the period from the first arrival of Chinese in the Midwest to the end of the 19th century. It was a time of poverty, hard labor, legal disability, bullying by non-Chinese, and in spite of all this, progress. For the 20th century, click on RESEARCH 1900-1949.
This is not meant to be a timeline, by the way. We are simply putting the results of our own and others' new research on Midwestern Chinese into chronological order. Many important facts and events are omitted, and we have included some facts and events that may be unimportant but are -- to us -- fascinating.
Chinese-American Museum of Chicago (CAMOC)
Raymond B. & Jean T. Lee Center
Celebrating the Chinese-American cultural heritage of the Midwest
1869: The First Californian Chinese in Chicago Dec 5 2004, revised Feb 28 2005
Some books and articles suggest that the first Chinese to settle in Chicago were three brothers named Moy, said to have arrived in 1878. And yet Chinese individuals did visit and stay in Chicago before that. Aside from the above-mentioned John Dorming, Charley Pang, and Ah Mei, a good many laundrymen set up shop in the city from 1872 onward. Most came via the new transcontinental railroad that was completed in 1869. The same year saw the arrival of one of the earliest visitors from the West Coast: Choy Chew, described as a merchant, who gave a speech to a Chicago (businessman's?) group. Modern readers may find that the speech, as reported in Scientific American, is overly ingratiating. But, as the magazine's writer implies, the speech does show that Choy Chew was a talented linguist as well as a merchant of sufficient stature to be invited to give a speech at a European-American banquet.
A later article in Harper's Weekly (Sept 4, 1869, page 574) states that Choy Chew was a San Franciscan. After visiting Chicago with a fellow merchant, Sing Man, he traveled onward to New York. Local businessmen there regarded the two as "representatives of Chinese industry and commerce" and may well have invited them to give more speeches.
"A Chinaman on the Chinese Question
"Whatever may be the average intellect of the Chinese, there can be no doubt of the intellect of the man who made the following speech. The remarks were delivered by Choy Chew, a Chinese merchant at a recent banquet in Chicago:
" 'Eleven years ago I came from my home to seek my fortune in your great Republic. I landed on the golden shore of California, utterly ignorant of your language, unknown to any of your people, a stranger to your customs and laws, and in the minds of some an intruder -- one of that race whose presence is deemed a positive injury to the public prosperity. But gentlemen, I found both kindness and justice. I found that above the prejudice that had been formed against us, that the hand of friendship was extended to the people of every nation, and that even Chinamen must live, be happy, successful and respected in 'free America." I gathered knowledge in your public schools; I learned to speak as you do; and, gentlemen, I rejoice that it is so; that I have been able to cross this vast continent without the aid of an interpreter; that here in the heart of the United States I can speak to you in your own familiar speech, and tell you how much, how very much, I appreciate your hospitality; how grateful I feel for the privileges and advantages I have enjoyed in your glorious country; and how earnestly I hope that your example of enterprise, energy, vitality, and national generosity may be seen and understood, as I see and understand it, by our Government ...
" ' We trust our visit, gentlemen, may be productive of good results to all of us; that the two great countries, East and West, China and America, may be found forever together in friendship, and that a Chinaman in America, or an American in China, may find like protection and like consideration in their search for happiness and wealth.' "
Scientific American, new series, vol. 21, no. 9, p. 131 (August 28, 1869)
1890: The Rapid Rise of Chinese Laundries 衣裳舘的興起 Dec 11 2004
Dec 11 2004This cartoon, by E.W. Kemble, appeared in Century Magazine in 1890 (vol. 40, no. 1, p. 480). It is interesting as a double ethnic joke or insult: Chinese writing is presented as being amusingly incomprehensible and the Irish couple, with stage Irish accents and comical appearances, is shown as being laughably ignorant of both Chinese characters and Western musical notation. Mary asks "And what do the notes be, Andy?" Andy replies "I can't tell thim off, but if I had me flute I c'u'd play thim."
Although published in New York, the magazine had a national readership. In 1890, the editors clearly expected that most of its readers would be familiar with Chinese laundries, showing that Chinese-Americans had already occupied that economic niche in much of the country.
In Chicago, the first Chinese laundry did not appear until 1872, but by 1890 there were 263 such laundries, in competition with a roughly equal number of laundry establishments run by English- and German-Americans. Irish-Americans, at least in Chicago, rarely entered the laundry business.
1874: The First Use of the Terms "Chinatown" and Chinaman?" Feb 13 2005, revised Oct 28 2005
As far as we can find, the term "Chinatown" or "China Town" is American in origin. According to what historian Anthony Lee tells us, it was already used in local San Francisco publications in the 1850s. Yet the term was not widely known outside California until twenty years later. One of its first appearances in a national publication was in an article by General George Custer of Little Bighorn fame, published by him in The Galaxy Magazine in 1874. In it he quotes a letter written to him by one California Joe, who described his arrival back in Sacramento and how eventually he "slid out across to chinatown and they smelt like a kiowa camp in august with plenty buffalo meat around ..."
The term appeared again a few times in 1875 and 1876 -- for instance, in 1875 in an article in Scribner's Monthly and in 1876 in the Chicago Tribune (referring to the Chinese district of Virginia City, Nevada) -- and rapidly gained in popularity after that. By 1890, it was used in thousands of articles and books per year.
We do not know whether the term came into California English from some other language. One possibility is Malay, which frequently uses terms like Kota China and Kampung Tionghoa (both meaning China Town) and where many Chinese miners worked in the 19th century. Another possibility is one of the Chinese languages or dialects -- Cantonese, Taishanese, Chaozhounese, Minnanese, Hakkanese. We are still looking for early Chinese newspapers or other documents that might refer to overseas Chinese communities as Chinatowns.
The term was not regularly used to refer to the Chinese community in Chicago until the 20th century. Before 1890, the earliest such community, the one around Clark and Van Buren, was rarely if ever called ":Chinatown" in contemporary newspapers.
"Chinaman" also may be American in origin. The first use cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is in a letter by the Bostonian intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in his Letters and Society, 1854. Emerson did not use it in a pejorative way. However, this is much later than "China-man" as used by the English sea captain John Meares in 1789 (see above).
Anthony Lee teaches in the Program in American Studies, Department of Art History, Holyoke College
G.A. Custer, "Life on the Plains," The Galaxy, vol 18, no 4, p 471; Thomas J. Vivian, "John Chinaman in San Francisco," Scribner's Monthly, vol 12, no 6, pp 865, etc.; Chicago Daily Tribune, Mar 4 1876, p 3
1880: Comparing Japanese and Chinese Students at U.S. Universities Dec 28 2004
Dec 28 2004There were 70 Japanese and 108 Chinese in American universities in 1880, compared with a dozen Japanese and just about no Chinese in European universities.
The Japanese students were mostly privately financed and unsupervised, while the great majority of Chinese students were financed by the imperial government and supervised by government representatives. However, the supervisors did not attempt to dictate what the students studied: "in the selection of his studies, great liberty is allowed each student."
The key figure in persuading the Chinese government to pay the students' expenses was Yung Wing
who had graduated from Yale in 1850. Originally from Nanping in Xiangshan [now Zhongshan] county, Guangdong province, Yung was not only a pioneering overseas student himself but a good judge of talent. Many of the students he hand-picked for his American high school and university program were to become leaders in China's drive to modernization. The first group arrived in 1872. Most or all of that group were from Guangdong.
Charles Thwing noted in 1880 that Yung Wing's students were doing well. Unlike their Japanese peers, who wore western-style clothes "in excellent taste," the typical Chinese student "still braids his cue [pigtail] and wears his loose trowsers and blouse." He also "learns the English language with greater ease, and uses it with greater facility, while the [Japanese student], after a residence of even five or six years, experiences, in the case of not a few individuals, difficulty in conducting an ordinary conversation. Both [Chinese and Japanese] manifest much deference to authority, and are models of decorum and politeness. The Japanese belong relatively to a higher caste; the majority of the Chinese students are from the middle class of the empire."
In reality, however, the Chinese students had also begun to wear western clothes, date western girls, and absorb anti-imperial notions. The Qing government ordered all of them back to China in 1881. As the New York Times (July 3, 1881) commented, "It is unreasonable to suppose that the bright young men like those educated in the U.S. at the cost of the Chinese government should content themselves with absorbing the principles of engineering, mathematics and other sciences remaining, meanwhile, wholly irresponsive to the political and social influences by which they are surrounded. China cannot borrow our learning, our science, and our material forms of industry without importing with them the virus of political rebellion. Therefore she will have none of these things."
No more Chinese government-funded students were to come to America until 1909, when the U.S. government decided that the Boxer Indemnity -- the penalty payments exacted from the Qing government after the Boxer Rebellion of 1902 -- should be used for educating Chinese students. Many hundreds came after that. In the Midwest, these attended most of the universities mentioned in the immigration records analyzed by Christoff (see below, "Early Interracial Marriages") -- the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Lake Forest Academy, the Armour Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology), North Central College, the Lewis Institute, the University of Illinois, Valparaiso University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan, Hope College in Michigan, Garrett Biblical Institute, Taylor University in Indiana, Purdue University, and others.
All of the pre-1881 government-funded students probably passed through Chicago on the way to the East Coast schools and universities where Yung Wing had arranged for them to study. None of them is known to have stayed in the Midwest. But what about other, privately-funded or missionary-funded students, before or after 1881? We know that such students existed between 1881 and 1909 -- a famous example is Charlie Soong (Song Yaoru), the father of the sisters who married Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, who graduated from Tennessee's Vanderbilt University in 1885-6. But we do not have data showing that privately-funded students studied in the Midwestern states in pre-Boxer Indemnity times.
Current research in the Immigration Service's archives, which contain a great deal of historical data on Chinese students at Midwestern universities, should tell us about any who came before 1909. Stay tuned ... Yes! Drs. Mary Stone and Ida Kahn, both of them Chinese from China, studied at the U. of Michigan in the early 1890s.
T. K. Chu Symposium, 150 years of Chinese Students in America, Harvard China Review, 2002
www.cie-gnyc.org/newsletter/ 150_years_chinese_students.pdf
Ko Kun-hua, Collected Writings, ed. by Zhang Hongsheng (Jiangsu Guji Publishers, Nanjing, 2000) [in Chinese]
Charles F. Thwing "Chinese and Japanese Students in America," Scribner's Monthly, 1880, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp 450-3.
Another important academic link was provided by Ko Kun-hua, who in 1879 was hired by Harvard University to teach Chinese to American students. He was supported by a fund organized by Francis Knight, a Boston businessman who thought that young Americans needed to know Chinese in order to do business in China. As Anhui native who had worked for the British and American consulates in Ningbo and Shanghai, Ko already knew some English and was a good traditionally-trained scholar. He arrived in Cambridge with his wife, five children, two servants, and an interpreter, to teach at the then-princely salary of.$200 per month. He seems to have fitted in well at Harvard where he joined local poetry clubs and made friends with European-American intellectuals. Ko died of flu in 1882 but before his death at least one student from Yung Wing's program, a Zhejiang native named Ting Sung-ki, had come to Harvard to study with him.
1857: The First Chinese in St. Louis 踏足美州中部的第一個華人 Dec 29 2004, revised Feb 19 2007
Dec 29 2004, revised Feb 19 2007Until we read Goldsworthy's article (see above), we thought that St. Louis had been ahead of Chicago in getting its first Chinese resident. The following note, which was written two years ago, should now be corrected to take account of the facts that Gioldsworthy has discovered.
In her new book, Dr. Huping Lo of Missouri's Truman State University writes,
"In 1857, Alla Lee, a twenty-four-year-old native of Ningbo, China, seeking a better life, came to St. Louis, where he opened a small shop on North Tenth Street selling tea and coffee. As the first and probably the only Chinese there for a while, Alla Lee mingled mostly with immigrants from Northern Ireland and married an Irish woman. A decade later, Alla Lee was joined by several hundred of his countrymen from San Francisco and New York who were seeking jobs in mines and factories in and around St. Louis."
When she writes that "a decade later, Alla Lee was joined by several hundred of his countrymen," Dr. Lo probably means after 1869, when the completion of the transcontinental railroad brought the first Chinese to Chicago and other parts of the Midwest. But this does not affect St. Louis's claim to having had the earliest Chinese resident. Alla Lee may have come up the Mississippi from New Orleans. As other essays on this website show, he was not the only early Chinese-American to have an Irish wife.
Huping Lo, Chinese St. Louis: From Enclave to Cultural Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004).
Ca. 1880-1935: A Chinese Soldier in Nebraska Jan 06 2005
Jan 06 2005The state of Nebraska has at least two claims to fame among Chinese-Americans. First, in 1898 it hosted a world fair in which at least 177 Chinese participated (see Midwestern World Fairs). And second, it was the home of a truly remarkable Chinese immigrant, Edward Day Cohota.
Found as a 4 year-old stowaway on the American sailing ship Cohota en route from Shanghai to Massachusetts, he was adopted by the ship's captain, Silas Day, and named after Day and the ship itself. In 1864 he joined the Union Army and fought in several battles of the Civil War. He rejoined the Army after the War. After serving at various military posts in Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Illinois (at Fort Sheridan, in suburban Chicago), he settled at Fort Niobrara near Valentine, Nebraska. He and his Swedish-American wife, whom he married in 1883, had six children. He died in 1935, ninety years after leaving Shanghai.
In 1929, an article in the Rapid City Daily Journal paid tribute to him:
"It is not an uncommon thing to see a grand old gentleman at the national sanitarium standing uncovered and at attention at 'flag-down.' This refined, splendid looking old gentleman, who stands with such reverence and respect for the flag of his adopted country, is Edward Day Cohota, the only native-born Chinaman who went through the Civil War."
We now know that other Chinese fought in the American Civil War (1861-1865) too. There were at least sixty. None were Californians, a few were Southerners, and the rest lived on the East Coast. As far as we know, the only Chinese in the Midwest during the Civil War was Alla Lee in St. Louis (see above, 1857), and there is no evidence that he fought on either side..
For more information on Chinese in the Civil War, see Gordon Kwok's excellent web site, http://hometown.aol.com/gordonkwok/accsacw.html.
See also http://www.rootsweb.com/~necherry/Cohota.htm
After 1899: RESEARCH 1900-1949 (Latest entry July 13 2005)
1872-1915: How updated Jul 6, 2005
updated Jul 6, 2005 Chicago's Chinese Americans earned a living 早期移民的生計
The following data comes from a preliminary look through early Annual Directories of Chicago, as preserved on microfilm at Chicago's central Harold Washington Library. As will be seen, there are still many gaps in the data. But interesting patterns in local Chinese-American history are starting to come to light. We thought that we would present the data here now, with a warning that continuing research will not only fill some of the gaps but may show that some of our current conclusions are wrong.
Laundries Restaurants Stores Illinois Chinese (US Census) 1870-1 0 0 0 1
1872 1 0 0 -
1874-5 18 0 1 -
1876-7 27 0 0 -
1880 69 0 ? 209
1885 217 0 ? -
1890 263 0 4 740
1893 - 1 - -
1895 319 1 13 -
1900 247 2 18 1503
1901 - 7 - -
1903 - 23 - -
1905 261 39 19 -
1910 325 - 40 2103
1911 - 68 36 -
1912 - 78 - -
1915 456 118 52 -
1920 - - - 2776
The census was not at all complete. In 1883, a well-informed Chinese linguist named Charles Kee told a newspaper reporter that there were 700 Chinese in Chicago, including a single Chinese woman. In the mid-1920s, T. C. Fan found that there were about 4500 Chinese in Chicago -- many more than the total reported by the Census Bureau. One presumes that, then as now, illegal immigrants did not wish to be counted.
The directories did not begin listing Chinese stores separately until the late 1880s; before then, the only way to tell how many such stores existed would be to make a careful page-by-page search of each year's directory. The same is true of Chinese laundries before 1885 and Chinese restaurants before 1905, but here the search is easier because the directories have general sections for laundries and restaurants. Even without separate Chinese subsections, searching for Chinese names in these general sections is easy.
Most striking is that the sheer number of establishments providing work for Chinese increased rapidly and steadily from 1872 through 1915. This increase must have been matched by a steady expansion of Chicago's Chinese population. T.C. Fan was told by Chinatown residents in 1926 that the average laundry employed three men, and that the average restaurant and store employed nine. If this was true earlier, it would mean that in 1915 these three kinds of businesses together provided work (and presumably food and housing too) for about 3000 men.
The 1890 and 1900 totals are for China-born Chinese only; the Census did not list US-born Chinese.
Census data is from the U.S. Census website, http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056.html
Lakeside Annual Directories of the City of Chicago, 1876-1915. Microfilm copies in Harold Washington Library, Chicago.
Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb 9 1883. ProQuest Historical Newspapers on-line service, courtesy of Newberry Library, Chicago
See also Paul C. P. Siu, The Chinese Laundryman, New York: New York University Press, 1987
and Ting C. Fan, Chinese Residents in Chicago, PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1926
Credits: The research for this article was done by Ben Bronson and Chuimei Ho
1874: The First Chinese-Owned Business in Chicago Jan 10 2005
The Lakeside Annual Directory for 1874-5 contains this advertisement:
Chinaman's Tea House. Kwang Lee and Ah Hen Jackson, Proprietors. Dealers in all kinds of Teas, Coffees and Spices, 35 West Madison Street.
We believe this to have been the first Chinese-owned business in the city and perhaps in Illinois. We would love to know who Kwang Lee and Ah Hen Jackson were. Chicago had many other tea and coffee dealers at that time. Although these other dealers' shops often had Chinese names, the dealers themselves all were European-
Americans.
1898: A Chinese Magician's Tragedy (and Triumph) in Omaha
魔術大師朱連魁來中部獻技Jan 13 2005
Jan 13 2005On August 1, 1898, during the World Fair in Omaha, a Chinese magician who would become famous suffered a personal tragedy. His 10 year-old son died without warning. Despite the tears in his eyes he gave his regular performance that day. "The hearts of the Chinese performers are filled with sorrow for the little athlete..." (1)
The magician was Ching Ling Foo, whose real name was Zhu Lianhui 朱连魁. In 1899 he was interviewed through an interpreter for a New York show-business newspaper. Zhu told the reporter that he had been born in Beijing in 1854. He had begun to study magic as an amateur while working for a large mercantile firm with branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and San Francisco. He did not turn professional until 1897 when, during a business trip to San Francisco, he agreed to join a group of Chinese performers who were going to the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha. This must have been when he adopted Ching Ling Foo as a stage name.
Zhu/Ching performed at the Exposition for several months. During that time he was noticed and signed up by an agent for New York's prestigious Vaudeville theater circuit, which featured magicians as well as actors, acrobats, and other performers. His growing fame protected him from the Immigration Service. "Shortly after the Omaha fair was over the authorities tried to have Ching and his company sent back to China under the Exclusion Act, but it was proven that he and his companions were artists and not laborers, and they were allowed to remain. Ching says he will remain in America for good, as he likes the country and the people very much." (2)
Zhu/Ching became an international star. He toured European and U.S cities many times over the next two decades. The great magician Houdini was a colleague and admirer. With reference to Zhu/Ching's magic acts, Houdini commented on the "subtle artistry that marks all the work of this super-magician." (3)
(1) Omaha Public Library: http://www.omaha.lib.ne.us/transmiss/bee/august1.html
(2) New York Dramatic Mirror, June 3, 1899; http://www.illusionata.com/mpt/view.php?id=73&type=articles
see also http://hk.geocities.com/chinesemagichistory/chinglingfoo
(3) Harry Houdini, The Miracle Mongers: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/mmong10.txt
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1896: Dr. Shi Meiyu comes from Michigan to Chicago Jan 17 2005
Jan 17 2005Shi Meiyu (English name Mary Stone) was born at Jiujiang in Jiangxi, eastern China, in 1873. She studied under Miss Gertrude Howe at a Methodist girl's school in Jiujiang and later accompanied Miss Howe to the United States where in 1892 she became a student in the medical department of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. After getting her MD degree in 1896, she went to Chicago to intern at hospitals there before returning to Jiujiang in the same year to establish the new Danforth Memorial Hospital in partnership with Dr. Kang Cheng 康成 (English name Ida Kahn).
Dr. Kang, Shi Meiyu's girlhood friend, graduated from the University of Michigan in the same year. The two were the first Chinese women to receive a medical degree in the United States. They may also have been the first Chinese women to graduate from a Midwestern university.
Dr. Shi in particular played a major role in the development of modern medicine in China. She founded and superintended two hospitals. Reading between the lines, she was an able administrator and fundraiser with excellent missionary connections in the U.S.
We hope eventually to discover which Chicago hospitals Dr. Shi worked at. She seems to have stayed in Chicago for less than a year.
http://www.umich.edu/~bhl/bhl/exhibits/UMChina/China/people/Stone.htm
1895: Just about Nobody Immigrates to the Midwest -- about 900 Chinese come to the West Coast and 900 transit to Latin America, while only 55 go on to the East Feb 11 2005
Feb 11 2005Another important on-line resource for American immigration studies is the website of the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild, which thus far has entered the passenger lists for 7000 ship arrivals in the United States during the 19th century. Most of the lists are for the 1880s and 1890s. The Exclusion Act of 1882 required ship captains to hand in special lists of Chinese passengers when arriving at U.S. ports. 1895 was the first year that all such lists had to include not only the passengers' names but the cities they were going to.
Altogether, the San Francisco immigration office allowed 922 Chinese to enter the U.S. in 1895. Most stated that they planned to stay in California, and only 55 of the 922 gave destinations east of the Rocky Mountains. 10 were going to the East Coast, 10 to Louisiana and Mississippi, 12 to the Midwest outside Illinois, and 23 to Illinois, in and around Chicago.
In 1895 San Francisco had a total of 40 ship arrivals from the Far East. Eight steamships took part, the White Star Line's ships Gaelic, Coptic, Belgic, and Oceanic, and the Pacific Mail Line's ships China, Peru, City of Peking, and City of Rio de Janeiro. Each needed about two months for the round trip and brought an average of about 25 US-bound Chinese along with another 25 in transit to Latin America.
Chinese did reach the Midwest by other routes in the 1890s. Judging by NARA's records of re-entry permits for Chinese residents, at least some entered the country by crossing the Canadian border in Minnesota or North Dakota and then making their way south by railroad to Chicago. And passengers who gave their destination as California did not necessarily stay there. Chinese migration from the West to the Midwest continued through the 1920s, spurred by racist violence in California, Washington, Wyoming, and other western states..
http://www.immigrantships.net. For an introduction to NARA's archives (which will be used in future notes on these Research pages), see Peggy Spitzer Christoff, Tracking the "Yellow Peril," (Rockport, Maine: The Picton Press, 2001)
SS China
1891: Early Immigrant Smuggling I: Julian Ralph's Investigation
記者饒爾夫研究早期偷渡移民 Feb 27 2005
Feb 27 2005Under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it was theoretically impossible for Chinese laborers (as distinguished from merchants, students, etc.) to enter the US. One way around the law was to use someone else's documents to establish citizenship. Books about Chinese-American history make frequent mention of these "paper sons."
The books say little or nothing, however, about two other ways by which working-class immigrants evaded the law. One was simply to sneak across the border. The other was to declare oneself to be a citizen upon arrival, whether or not one had papers. This forced immigration officials to take the would-be immigrant off his ship and to let a federal court decide. Surprisingly, most such decisions went in favor of the immigrant.
In 1890 Julian Ralph was assigned by Harper's Monthly to investigate the smuggling of Chinese into the US. After traveling to Canada and interviewing a large number of experts and participants, he concluded that several thousand illicit Chinese immigrants were entering the country each year.
Most came in from British Columbia. An average of 1910 new immigrants arrived in BC from China each year. According to Ralph's Canadian informants, "99 in 100 of these are intending to smuggle themselves over the US border."
Ralph goes on to say that "There is no part [of the US-Canada border from Montana on west] over which a Chinaman may not pass into our country without fear of hindrance; there are scarcely any parts of it where he may not walk boldly across it at high noon. Indeed, the same is measurably the case all along our northern boundary even upon the St. Lawrence north of our State, where smuggling has always been a means of livelihood whenever varying tariffs made it remunerative.
"The lawless practice does go on from one end of the border to the other. Chinamen at work in the forests beside the Columbia steal in by the Kootenay trail; others cross the St. Lawrence, others the plains and prairie, others the Great Lakes. Those who transport the Chinamen are all white men. The resident Chinese act as their confederates and as the agents of the smuggled men, but do no part of the actual smuggling ..."
According to Ralph, Chinese immigrants were also smuggled over the southern border. He quotes a recent expose showing that Chinese were landing at Guaymas [on the Gulf of Cortez), making their way by train to a point near the border, hiking through the Sonoran desert, and finally crossing to Tucson in Arizona. The dangers of the trip, still a favorite for illicit immigrants, were illustrated in a dramatic etching of a Chinese man dying of thirst in the desert.
Ralph goes on to note that there were other ways into the US that did not involve clandestine border crossing. In 1890, an average of 60 Chinese laborers per month were arriving by ship in San Francisco and claiming to be American citizens by birth. All of these had to be allowed to land, in order to permit an investigation of their claim in the federal courts.
A large proportion of these putatively illicit immigrants succeeded. "Less than twenty- five per cent, are sent back to China. The claimants of citizenship may be men who were once before laborers here, and who possess our violated pledges in the form of certificates; some may in reality be born citizens." Ralph estimated that about 1000 immigrants per year were entering the country in this way.
Julian Ralph, The Chinese Leak, Harpers Monthly, 1891, Vol 82: 515-525
1863: The Second Chinese in Chicago: A Confederate POW Feb 28 2005, updated Apr 25 2006
Civil War historian Gordon Kwock credits "Research work of Shaie Mei Deng Temple from New Orleans, Louisiana" for this wonderful item of information:
Pang Charley, Pvt. Co. G. 1st La Infantry En. ___ Federal Rolls of Prisoners of war. Captured near Chickamauga, Ga., Sept. 20, 1863. Forward to Military prison, Louisville, Ky., from Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 30, 1863. Transferred to Camp Douglas, Chicago,Ill. [in the city, about a mile south of the modern South Side Chinatown], Oct. 2 1863. Note: Co. G was named Orleans Light Guards Company.
[The National Parks Service's Civil War Soldiers website confirms that Company G of the 1st Louisiana Infantry Regiment did include a soldier named Charley Pang]
Kwock may have turned up the third Chinese in Chicago as well. He quotes another historian, Dr. Qingsong Zhang, as follows:
"Tsui Kuo Ying [崔國因], Chinese ambassador to the United States, wrote in his diary in 1891 that there was a Chinese named Ah Mei in Chicago. Ah Mei studied in a military school for several years and served in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War. After the war, he became an American citizen and was permitted to vote in important elections. The name and story has not been confirmed. However, it has been known that in 1865 there was a Chinese in Chicago who sent letters to relatives in China. Census also show that there was a Chinese in Chicago in 1870."
We do not know what is the source of Tsui Kuo Ying's statement "it has been known ..." and, in fact, we have not even seen the census record about the lone Chinese Chicagoan in 1870. But an 1865 date is plausible. By then, railroad travel from the East Coast, where there were already a good many Chinese, was easy, and there was much population movement in the U.S. at the end of the Civil War.
http://members.aol.com/gordonkwok/cacwpart26.html; http://members.aol.com/gordonkwok/cacwpart8.html
http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/soldiers.htm
Qingsong Zhang, article written for Jeanne T. Heidler and David S. Heidler's Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ABC/CLIO, 2000.
Research & writing by Ben Bronson and Chuimei Ho;
copyright 2004-2006 by the Chinatown Museum Foundation
1849 & 1882: Mythical American Chinese Restaurants Aug 30 2005
Aug 30 2005The Internet contains many references to a San Francisco Chinese restaurant named "Macao and Woosung," started by Norman Asing in the year of the California Gold Rush, 1849. The restaurant is said to have been the first of its kind in America and to have been such a success among European-Americans that it launched a fad for Chinese food that has lasted until modern times. Several websites go on to say that by 1882, Chinese restaurants were in most major American cities.
We do not think this is true. Norman Asing was indeed a real person. He became an important spokesman for Chinese rights in the 1850s and was a successful businessman who may have opened a restaurant along with his other ventures. However, that restaurant, even if it survived more than a year or two, certainly did not kick off any fad for Chinese food among non-Chinese diners. As late as 1885, the Board of Supervisors' detailed map of San Francisco's Chinatown shows several hundred general merchandise stores, ten barber shops, ten-odd laundries, a hundred-plus gambling halls, 17 opium dens, 69 Chinese brothels, 36 white brothels, 13 temples ("joss houses"), and a total of 13 restaurants [data & map from Farwell 1885]. Even if most of these restaurants served mainly white customers, and there is no reason to think they did, this hardly constitutes a popular fad.
In Chicago in 1882 we know of no indication that there were any Chinese restaurants at all. It was not until the very late 1880s that contemporary newspapers began to mention Chinese restaurants occasionally. All were in Chinatown on Clark Street and had a mainly Chinese clientele. The first to be noticed by the (white) compilers of Chicago's Annual Directories was a restaurant named Hung Far Lo, which opened its doors on Clark Street in 1893. Hung Far Lo may well have had some European-American customers. However, no fad was visible yet. Yearly issues of the Directory continued to list only one or two Chinese restaurants in Chicago down through the end of the century. There was still only one in 1900. But in 1901 there were seven and in 1905, thirty-nine. As shown elsewhere in this website, a boom in Midwestern Chinese restaurants had begun. Within a decade, one could find somewhat Americanized Chinese food in just about every medium-sized city in the region.
So we think that before 1890 in most parts of the U.S., the existence of Chinese restaurants is partly a myth. We even have our suspicions about the claimed antiquity of Chinese restaurants in San Francisco and New York. A few must have existed, aimed more or less exclusively at Chinese diners, as early as the 1850s or 1860s. However, as shown by the Board of Supervisors' map, such restaurants were not common before the last decade of the 19th century, and cannot have been a particularly important feature of Chinese-American life before then.
See Google entries for "Macao and Woosung" and "Norman Asing"
Also, Willard B. Farwell, The Chinese at Home and Abroad, San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft Co., 1885, page 118
Restaurants in San Francisco's Chinatown, 1885. The light orange color marks restaurants. The green and blue colors indicate Chinese and Caucasian brothels. Shops are tan-colored and temples are red.
(Click to enlarge)
Another newspaper article, presumably describing the same piece of land, states that plots 1-52 in Section 6 of the cemetery were purchased for $2392 by the Soon On Tong organization, with the help of Hip Lung (a grocer), Chow Tai (a druggist), and Sam Moi (a cigar manufacturer). This was a lot of money by 1892 standards. The Chinese community must have felt they had to pay it anyway because Rosehill was one of the few cemeteries in the city without religious restrictions on who could be buried there. Non-Christians, including Jews, were usually refused burial in Catholic and Protestant cemeteries of the day. Adding in the factor of racial prejudice, it was not easy for Chinese to be buried anywhere.
Thus Rosehill offered a solution to a serious problem. But the question is, what happened to the shrine and the land? A few weeks ago we walked over the area just west of the cemetery's north entrance. We did not find the slightest trace of even a Chinese grave marker, much less a granite and granolithic shrine fifteen feet high. We talked with two helpful Rosehill staff. They are certain that no such shrine has existed in recent decades, and most of the Chinese graves they know of are quite recent, dating to the 1990s.
The earliest Chinese grave we found at Rosehill was that of Mary Goo (1898-1920), wife of Tom Y. Chan. This is several years older than the grave of the well-known restaurateur Chin Foin in the south central part of the cemetery, which we once thought might be the oldest surviving Chinese grave in Chicago. Mary Goo's grave is not only older but close to the north gate, although to the east rather than to the west of it.
Could her grave mark the location of the former Chinese area at Rosehill? Possibly, although the surrounding graves tend to be Scandinavian and of a similar age. We prefer the hypothesis that the Tribune's reporters could tell east from west even back in 1892 and that the graves and shrine in the former Chinese burial area were removed at some point in the following 113 years.
We do not know why. We would be grateful for information or ideas on the subject.
Dec 26 news! Information has begun to come in. Jack Simpson has sent a Tribune article from 1926. It says that the remains of 412 Chinese had just been removed from Rosehill for shipment to (and reburial in) China. The removal seems to have been done with Chinese consent. According to one Louis Ding of 2312 S. Wentworth Ave, this happened every ten years. "If the dead Chinamen's relatives live here the bodies usually are left here, but if not their souls' happiness depends on internment in their native soil, he said."
But another Tribune article from 1944, sent by Andrea Stamm, suggests that the consent may have been forced. The article quotes the superintendent of the cemetery as saying that for the past quarter-century new Chinese burials had not been allowed. He also said that the cemetery had been buying graves back from Chinese and presumably digging up the bodies. Hence, it seems likely that the 1926 removals were a step in the cemetery's campaign to remove the former Chinese burial area entirely.
The reasons for the removal are discussed elsewhere on this website. It is enough here to say that the reasons were more or less purely racist
Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug 29 1892 p 1; Jan 21 1926, p 1; Aug 29 1944, p 26.
Information credits go to Jack Simpson (Newberry Library), Andrea Stamm (Northwestern U. Library) and Chuimei Ho (CAMOC)
1892: A Vanishing Cemetery 早期芝城華人墳場
In August of 1892, the inhabitants of the former Chinatown in Chicago's Loop held an elaborate ceremony to dedicate a new shrine built in the "Chinese burying-ground," in Rosehill Cemetery on the city's north side. The shrine was described by the Chicago Tribune as "a queer-looking affair, of a style of architecture little known in Chicago, and is built of granite and granolithic. It faces the east, and, from the base to the top of the ball, which surmounts the structure, it measures fifteen feet. It is eight feet broad and two feet thick ... At each end is a furnace in the form of an obelisk, about two feet square at the base and eight feet high ..." The shrine lay "just west of the north entrance to the cemetery" and "to the east of the 150 x 20 foot plot of land reserved by the Chinese for their dead."
East Gateway of Rosehill, 1870s
1889 The Clark Street Chinatown Reaches Maturity 芝城第一個唐人街 13 Dec 2005
13 Dec 2005First settled by Chinese in the mid-1870s, the area on Clark between Van Buren and Harrison had matured into a true Chinatown (although not usually called by that name) by the late 1880s. In 1889 a Tribune reporter noted that Clark and nearby streets had the following Chinese businesses: eight grocery stores. two drug stores, two butchers' shops, two barber shops, one cigar factory, three "ministers" (according to the reporter, former "Grand Masters" in "Masonic" [Hong Mun Society?] lodges), two artists who provided portraits for sending home to relatives in China, one unnamed restaurant, and three farmers whose farms (actually, market gardens) were on Milwaukee Avenue, in Hyde Park, and near Joliet.
The shop owned by Moy Dong Chew 梅宗周 (often called Hip Lung, which actually was the name of his store) at 323 Clark Street was said to be "by all odds the handsomest Chinese shop in the country, excepting one in San Francisco." Decorated with elaborate woodcarvings and rich draperies, the shop was furnished with carved ebony chairs and silver-plated tobacco pipes for use by customers. It sold silks, Chinese shoes (at $3,50 a pair), Chinese musical instruments, clothing, beautifully painted and carved silk fans, pickles, sausages, seaweed, vegetables, melons, gumbo, salt fish, squash, dried shrimps, tea, "and a hundred other articles." The picture below is of the second-ranked store, Bow Wow [or Wo] Fung, of which the senior owners were E. Wing and Moy Dong Chew. Both shops were kept "as neat and clean as a parlor."
The unnamed restaurant, owned by Lee Shing Hok and Lee Sing Mong, was in the basement at 329 Clark Street, under Bow Wow Fung. It may have been the first Chinese restaurant, as distinguished from boarding house dining rooms, in Chicago. It had tables covered with white tablecloths, had knives and forks as well as chopsticks, and served "ducks, chickens, pork, berries, and all kinds of steaks." European-American customers were welcome as long as they came to eat rather than to ridicule Chinese cooking and eating habits.
The first Chinese farms, each several acres in size, had just been established in 1888. All three raised Chinese vegetables from imported seeds -- turnips, pumpkins, summer squash, cabbage, foot-long string beans, snow peas, watermelons, "Chinese fruits," and nuts.
It is significant that five of the grocery stores – Kong Hop Long (291½ Clark), Ye Wah (293 Clark), Yoen Wah (315 Clark), Hong Fung (319 Clark), and Loy On (311 Clark) are not listed in the Lakeside Directories for these years. Either the canvassers for the directory publishers were careless or they did not have access to every business in Chinatown
Mary Goo's grave: the oldest one in Chicago?
Sep 23 2005, revised Dec 26 2005
1852: The First Chinese between the East & West Coasts? Jan 11 2006
Jan 11 2006The following story appeared in the Chicago Tribune on December 14, 1852
"The steamship Falcon lately brought to New Orleans a troupe of Chinese jugglers. The company consists of twenty persons, male and female, and their performances are said to be the most astonishing that have ever been witnessed on the American continent."
This is all we have been able to find so far, but we think it is quite possible that the troupe traveled up the Mississippi from New Orleans to theaters in St. Louis, which in those days was the largest American city in the region. It may even have come as far as Chicago, the Midwest's second city. We also think it is likely that at least some members of the troupe stayed in the U.S.: perhaps in the South, the Midwest, or the East Coast.
These visitors were not connected with the Mexican-Filipino fishing village of St. Malo that sprang up in the Mississippi Delta in the 1760s, and that was first publicized in the 19th century by the great essayist Lafcadio Hearn. Residents of the village spoke a Philippine language and were mostly former crew members of Spanish ships sailing between Acapulco and Manila. As was true of many specialized workers employed by the Spanish in the Philippines, some St. Malo people may well have been of Chinese descent.
http://www.filipinorecipeslink.com/cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?url=manilamen.html; L. Hearn, Harper’s Weekly, March 31, 1883.
1881: Mythical American Chinese Restaurants, Part 2 Feb 13 2006
Feb 13 2006The preceding article suggested that Chinese restaurants for non-Chinese were not early, at least in the U.S. More evidence comes from George F. Seward's pioneering book (1) on Chinese immigration, published in 1881. In an attempt to show that Chinese were not taking jobs away from European-Americans, Seward made an exhaustive study of Chinese employment in California. He found that the main occupations of Californian Chinese immigrants were railroad building, reclaiming swamp lands, mining, farming, and fruit culture. Each of those employed several thousand Chinese. As many as 3000 Chinese worked in laundries, about half in white-owned establishments and the rest in places they owned themselves. Perhaps 5000 worked as domestic servants, quite often as cooks in wealthy households. 3000 worked as cigar-makers, and almost a thousand in garment making, Several hundred worked in each of various kinds of manufacturing -- boots and shoes, coarse woolen cloth, jute bags, candles, and brooms. Other industries employed between 10 and 100 Chinese -- canneries for fruits and pickles and factories for hats and caps, lace and embroidery, glass, glue, leather, and gunpowder.
But Seward said nothing about Chinese restaurants, even though he was listing all businesses where Chinese competed with whites. This seems to show that Chinese restaurants in California in 1881 served mainly Chinese customers. And, as the Board of Supervisors' map (see above) shows, even Chinese restaurants aimed only at Chinese customers were not common in those days. There were not many in San Francisco. We know of no evidence that there were more elsewhere in California. The Chinese-American restaurant boom on the West Coast may not have begun more than a few years before 1901, the year it began in Chicago.
Other countries were much earlier. By 1890 Peru had many Chinese-owned restaurants that were patronized mostly by non-Chinese (2). In Australia such restaurants appeared forty years before that. The above picture, of John Alloo's Chinese Restaurant in the gold-mining district of Ballarat, dates to 1853. It is the earliest picture we know of that depicts a restaurant operated by Chinese for non-Chinese customers.
It is not clear, incidentally, that any overseas Chinese restaurant regularly served Chinese food to non-Chinese before the 1890s. In Peru and Australia, Chinese restaurateurs served only European-style food. And even in Singapore, with its older and much larger Chinese immigrant community, Chinese restaurants "were not in abundance ... a Chinese, Li Chung Chu, wrote in 1887 of the very few Cantonese and European restaurants. Feasting in wealthy Chinese homes was done in the gardens of private homes with Chinese food and European food." (3)
(1) George F Seward, Chinese Immigration in its Social and Economical Aspects. New York: Scribner's. 1881
(2) Theodore Child, Impressions of Peru, Harpers New Monthly Magazine, vol 82, no. 488, p 262. 1891.
(3) Wise, Michael. Travellers’ Tales of Old Singapore. Singapore : Times Book International, 1996, p 134
1883 Emma Lazarus Writes a Poem 04 Apr 2006
04 Apr 2006Lazarus, a New York Jew, had little or no contact with China or Chinese. And yet a famous poem she wrote in 1883, ironically a year after the Chinese Exclusion Act, still has the power to bring tears to the eyes of Chinese-Americans. Imagining that the Statue of Liberty could speak, Lazarus has her say:
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Her words are as meaningful now as 123 years ago. Most Chinese immigrants of that time were not homeless, wretched refuse of China's teeming shores. All had homes, and some were middle class in terms of income and social position in Chinese society. But the poem must have seemed relevant nonetheless. Over the years it has been committed to memory by many Chinese-Americans and by many other Americans as well.
芝加哥美洲華裔博物館
1858: The First Chinese Resident of Chicago: A Knife Thrower Apr 25 2006, revised Feb 19 2007
Terry Goldsworthy has made a discovery. The year 1858 saw not one but three Chinese living in Chicago. Plus, quite possibly, a Caucasian wife and a Kentucky-born daughter named SEF. The group must have visited Chicago before that and may well have resided there between 1858 and 1860. This makes them far and away the city’s earliest known Chinese residents, and little SEF the first Chinese girl born in the Midwest.
John Dorming, the father of SEF, was not what one might expect of an early Chinese immigrant in a raw and violent inland city. He seems not to have been a timid, low-profile refugee doing an inconspicuous job that needed no English. Instead he was a professional entertainer in night spots whose English was evidently good and who was ingenious enough to persuade a series of magistrates to arrest and fine his bar-owning attacker, not once but several times. The Tribune article describes him as “a quick-witted fellow, and not ill-natured.” One assumes that these qualities (perhaps along with his profession as a knife thrower) enabled him to get along in the rough-and-tumble saloons of pre-Fire Chicago.
This alters our own picture of early Chinese immigration to the Midwest. Like most historians, we had always believed that Chinese began coming here after the transcontinental railroad was finished in 1869, fleeing racial violence in the West. True, we knew that Alla Lee came to St. Louis in 1857 and that various Chinese individuals like Edward Cohota and Yung Wing had found their way to the East and Gulf Coasts as early as the 1840s. But we had thought that the inland parts of the eastern U.S. were hostile and unattractive to early Asian immigrants.
Now, it seems, we must change our minds. The first Chinese in this region were not refugees. They came because they found opportunities here, because they were treated as equal under local law, and – judging from the tone of the Tribune article – because they were not unpopular with other ethnic groups. Moreover, they began coming early. Dorming and his associates may, as Goldsworthy suggests, not have arrived in the U.S. before 1852. However, the Tribune’s reporter seems not to have regarded it as extraordinary for three Chinese to be working in a saloon in the Third Ward. This hints that other Chinese, perhaps entertainers, had worked elsewhere in Chicago, and that Dorming may not have been the first Chinese to visit or live in this city.
We are pleased to present Goldsworthy’s new article on John Dorming and the company of Chinese jugglers who first came to Chicago in 1853. To read it, click here
Martial arts demonstration with knives, San Francisco, Arnold Genthe photograph, ca. 1900
1788 The First Chinese in North America? Nov 10 2006
Nov 10 2006Most historians agree that there must have been Chinese among the “Indios” (Filipinos) who often served on the crews of the Spanish ships – the so-called Manila galleons – that sailed annually between the Philippines and Mexico from the late 16th century onward. There must also have been Chinese crewmen on board British and American ships bringing tea, silk, and porcelain from China to the Atlantic coast of North America in the 18th century. In both cases, however, nothing definite is known about those Chinese. We do not know for sure that they actually existed.
More will be known once researchers have gone through crew lists of merchant ships preserved in British and American archives [1]. For now, however, the first identifiable Chinese individuals to reach this continent seem to have been two seamen who served with John Meares in his voyage to Vancouver Island in 1788-89, Affee (Ah Fei?) and Aehaw (Ah Ho?) [2]. The “Ah” prefix shows that both were ethnic Cantonese. They belonged to a group of 50 Chinese who had come with Meares from Guangzhou. Affee and Aehaw were assigned by Meares to help man a small ship, the North-West America, that had just been built on Vancouver, partly by Chinese carpenters. Its mission was to trade along the coast for sea otter furs and to take those for sale to China.
Meares had left Guangzhou with two British-built ships, the Felice and the Iphigenia. “The crews of these ships consisted of Europeans and China-men, with a larger proportion of the former. The Chinese were, on this occasion, shipped as an experiment: – they have generally been esteemed an hardy, and industrious, as well as ingenious race of people; they live on fish and rice, and, requiring but low wages, it was a matter also of oeconomical consideration to employ them; and during the whole of the voyage there was every reason to be satisfied with their services. – If hereafter trading posts should be established on the American coast, a colony of these men would be a very valuable acquisition.” [3]
These Chinese were skilled workers rather than mere coolies, and all were volunteers: “A much greater number of Chinese solicited to enter into this service than could be received; and so far did the spirit of enterprise influence them, that those we were under the necessity of refusing, gave the most unequivocal marks of mortification and disappointment. – From the many who offered themselves, fifty were selected, as fully sufficient for the purposes of the voyage: they were, as has been already observed, chiefly handicraft-men, of various kinds, with a small proportion of sailors who had been used to the junks which navigate every part of the Chinese seas.” [4]
It may seem surprising that there should have been so many volunteers at a time when China was prosperous and at peace. However, the inhabitants of the southern provinces already had a tradition of seeking their fortunes overseas, and the newly discovered Northwest Coast sea otters, with fur that was much more valuable in China than any other fur, offered a chance at fortunes that were truly worth seeking.
Some of the Chinese with Meares, including Affee and Aehaw, were captured by the Spanish warships Princessa and San Carlos, and forced to build fortifications and then to work in mines. [5] These may never have returned to China. Some may have married Indian women and settled down in the region that later became British Columbia, Washington State, and Oregon.
[2] Meares, Voyages, Appendix X.
[3] Meares, John. Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789 from China to the North West Coast of
America. London, 1790, page 2.
[4] Meares, ditto, page 3
[5] Meares, Voyages, Appendices I and X
Launching of the North West America, Nootka Sound, 1789
Note: As noted by several websites, including Wikipedia, Meares came to North America from the Portuguese settlement of Macao (Aomen), not from Canton (Guangzhou). It seems that Meares sailed under a Portuguese flag so as to evade the monopoly of the East India Company.
This bears on the question of the ethnicity of the fifty (not seventy) Chinese carpenters, smiths, and sailors who accompanied him to Vancouver Island. Meares does not say exactly where he hired them. But we know that at least two had Cantonese prefixes to their names, and it seems very likely that most if not all were speakers of one of the southern Guangdong dialects -- Guangzhou-Samyap (Sanyi), Zhongshan, and Taishan-Szeyap (Siyi), perhaps with a few Hakka (Kejia) and Teochiu (Chaozhou) speakers thrown in. One source claims that Meares brought Fujianese with him to North America. We know of no evidence for this.
Several other English ships sailing from East Asia to the Northwest Coast at that period also had Chinese workmen and crew aboard. A list of those ships is slated to be included here.
1853: The "Falcon" Chinese show up in Chicago Feb 19 2007
The researcher Terry Goldsworthy has tracked down more information relative to these Chinese jugglers, using data from the on-line archives of the Chicago Tribune. They appeared in Chicago in 1853, In his latest article, reproduced here in full, Goldsworthy suggests that
The troupe that performed in Chicago in July of 1853, having “been in the country nearly a year”, may be the “troupe of Chinese Jugglers” that the December 14th, 1852 issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune states was “lately brought to New Orleans” via the steamship Falcon. The “company” was comprised “of twenty persons, male and female” in New Orleans whereas, the “China Troupe” that performed in Chicago in 1853 was comprised of thirteen “brethren”.
We believe that Goldsworthy is right in connecting John Dorming and his companions (see below) with this 1853 troupe.
