06 Oct Chinese History
In 1864, just as Otago’s easy deposits of alluvial gold had been picked over, news broke of gold being found on the West Coast, which led to New Zealand’s second gold rush. Thousands of prospectors from Otago and Victoria (Australia) headed to the coast to try their luck at ‘picking the first fruit off the golden tree’. As Central Otago emptied, the merchants and shopkeepers left were in despair. Shops and bars became empty of customers, houses became tenantless, and revenue for the town of Dunedin dwindled.
William Tolmie, a Dalgety stock and station agent had the idea of writing to a Chinese merchant in Melbourne, who’d he met when working in Victoria. He wanted to know if Chinese miners in that state would want to come to Otago to try their luck in the already worked-over goldfields. The response was positive, on condition that the Cantonese miners were assured their lives and property would be protected. In 1865 Tomie put his idea to the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce, which it unanimously supported.
More assurances were made to the Chinese in Victoria, and on Christmas Eve, 1865, the first Chinese miners arrived in Otago. By the end of 1870, at least 2000 Chinese were in Otago, split between fields in central Otago and Blacks Hill and Clyde, Arrowtown and Lawrence.
The first chinese arrived at Blacks Diggings in 1868 – there were 40 here that year – and by 1872 90 Chinese and 252 European miners were at work. More Chinese followed.
They left behind clay pipes (certainly some were for opium – given the poppies that still flower in various parts of the village), remnants of old huts and water races.
In August 1876, the Blacks correspondent of the Dunstan Times complained that all the mining claims in the area had now been sold to Chinese miners. He acknowledged that they were ‘exceptionally honest and industrious’ and deserved their success, but complained about the ‘white man being driven from his old haunts’. The last straw for the writer was that a group of Chinese had purchased the 30-mile Lauder Creek water race, which used galvanised pipes to carry its water across the Manuherikia River Gorge. Notable chinese businessman Choie Sew Hoy* was the buyer.
Many stayed only long enough to earn enough money to take home, butccsome stayed on until at least the 1920s, with the last generation of old timers recalling as a young boy, sharing food with an old Chinese miner using produce from his garden.
*Sew Hoy had many mining interests around Otago, you can read more about him in the excellent book Merchant, Miner, Mandarin, by Jenny Sew Hoy Agnew and Trevor Agnew.
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