chinese influences
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, but some 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.
By far the most comprehensive history of the Chinese in New Zealand is James Ng’s Windows on a Chinese Past, a 4 volume opus available for view at the Alexandra public library.
ABOVE: The rev. don and miners in central otago. Don had limited success as a missionary and baptised only about 20 Chinese, a quarter of whom were converted by others. He was careful of the image he presented to Europeans, but to Chinese he displayed an uncompromising, overbearing attitude, and betrayed confidences in his prolific writings. The Chinese leadership in Otago and Southland, and at first the majority of the Chinese, appear to have ignored or spurned Don. In later years attitudes softened on both sides, but the Presbyterian mission never achieved integration with the Chinese community.
Don’s writings form the chief source of our knowledge of the New Zealand Chinese in this period. His three surviving diaries, loose papers, numerous articles and reports of his annual tours and second trip to China, the unique bilingual roll of Chinese in New Zealand from 1883 to 1913, and his wonderful collection of photographs combine to form a cache of information about the Chinese gold-seekers of last century unmatched in any other country.
middle: choie sew hoy, right, the 1876 mining application for brandy hill, blacks.
There is documentation of a couple of Chinese market gardens in Ophir at the end of the 1890s, one in Booth Road, and of a store in Ophir run by Yip Shing as late as 1906, and possibly longer.
the sinking of the ventnor
Chinese who came to work in Aotearoa some 150 years ago faced harsh working conditions that they knew very well might kill them. As well as physical and emotional hardship (racism against Chinese was rife in those days, as it is now), they also faced the very real threat of spiritual annihilation.
My predecessors believed that if they did not return home to their villages in Southern China, they would forever be doomed to wander as ‘hungry ghosts’ – spirits without a home nor the sustenance and companionship provided by their descendants. They also would be unable to fulfil their spiritual duty to look after the village.
These beliefs led to the formation of cooperative societies among Chinese migrants, most notably Cheong Shing Tong, based in Stafford St in Dunedin and led by prominent Dunedin businessman Choie Sew Hoy. The goal of these groups was to look after poor and elderly Chinese and to assist them to return to China.
Many workers paid subscriptions which were a kind of insurance for the afterlife: if they died before they could return, Cheong Shing Tong would undertake to return their bones to their home villages.
Eventually subscriptions allowed the chartering of special ‘coffin ships’. The first ship, carrying 230 remains, successfully arrived in Guangdong in 1883.
In 1901, resources allowed the chartering of a second ship. Newspapers of the day goggled breathlessly at the scenes when teams of Chinese on the West Coast, Southland and Wellington dug up graves, the locations of which had been carefully recorded as they were filled.
By the accounts of Western journalists, it was a precise and careful operation. Soil was sifted so no bone was left behind and the remains carefully cleaned and wrapped in cloth and laid in small kauri boxes.
Choie Sew Hoy himself died during this gathering process and his body, in a fine rimu coffin, made the total of 499 remains.
On Sunday 26th October 1902, the SS Ventnor left Wellington in bright sunlight. The ship also carried an English crew, some Westport coal, and elderly Chinese as ‘coffin attendants’. But disaster struck shortly after noon on Monday when the Ventnor hit a submerged rock off Cape Egmont.
The captain made a decision to sail on instead of stopping for repairs – a decision he would soon pay for with his life. Too late, the ship tried to make it into the Hokianga port, sinking just outside the harbour. The Chinese community immediately chartered another ship to try to salvage the remains – but to no avail.
The Ventnor was entombed in dark and turbulent water, too deep for the technology of the day to reach. Sew Hoy’s son, overcome with grief, was said to have exclaimed ‘my poor father has died twice!’
Two lifeboats from the sunken SS Ventnor came ashore at Ōmāpere, above, and an empty one later washed up at Ahipara. Photo: Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections
But here the tragedy takes a turn. Over the years, as the ship fell apart, the tiny coffins were released and some made it to the shoreline around the Hokianga harbour, where members of Te Roroa and Te Rarawa iwi found them. Recognising the remains as someone’s treasured family, the bones were carefully buried in special places, with the locations and oral histories passed down through generations, and iwi members visiting to tend the graves until their real families arrived to claim them.
As people often do, the Chinese community in 1902 were too distraught to speak of their trauma. Over the generations, the memory of the Ventnordisaster was lost.
It took more than a century, but in 2007 Wong Liu Shueng, a descendant of New Zealand’s early Chinese community, heard of the remains from locals while doing research for a film-making course.
Thus began one of the most remarkable stories of single-minded determination to make things right. Wong gathered up the Chinese community and from 2008 onwards, along with other community leaders, organised a series of pilgrimages so that local Chinese could thank Northland iwi for their selfless care of our ancestors.
Documentary producer and Ventnor Project Group leader John Albert spent three years searching for the wreck.
He roped in charter boat owners John and Linda Pattinson in Opononi and underwater explorer Keith Gordon to help with the search.
The group eventually discovered the wreck in December 2012, confirming it was the SS Ventnor on a dive in January 2013. It lay 21km west of Hokianga Harbour, under 150 metres of water.