Chinese immigration to Sydney (Chinese: ) dates back almost two hundred years, with Mak Sai Ying being the first recorded settler in Australia. The 2006 census showed that 221,995 people (5.39%) in Sydney reported Cantonese or Standard Chinese as the language they used at home. The suburbs of Burwood, Eastwood, Campsie and Rhodes have plurality Chinese populations.
Chinese immigration was seen as part of a solution for a labour shortage in New South Wales from 1828 onwards, though the scale of immigration remained low until later in the nineteenth century.NSW Records
What came to be known as the White Australia policy saw a series of restrictive legislation passed at both a state and later a federal level. The climate of fear and distrust eased somewhat from the 1950s onwards, and today Chinese communities form a vibrant and important part of Sydney's character.Shirley Fitzgerald, Red Tape Gold Scissors: the Story of Sydney's Chinese, second edition, Halstead Press, Sydney, 2008
Chinese immigration has increased continuously from the 1990s and today the Chinese are the third largest group among immigrants. Since the mid-1990s, migration has become less permanent than it used to be, and goes in more than one direction, a trend that pertains also to the Chinese. Students and academics are examples of this pattern. In 1990, Chinese settlers rarely returned permanently, but by 2002, the number of Hong Kong settlers leaving Australia for good equalled those arriving during that year.Abstracts Hugo Graeme: "Recent trends in Chinese migration to Australia", Paul Jones (University of Melbourne): "New Pathways or Old Trajectories? The Chinese Diaspora in Australia, 1985 to 2005". Papers presented at workshop on Chinese in the Pacific: Where to Now? The Australian National University, Canberra, 2007.
First arrivals to Sydney
The earliest documented Chinese settler was Mak Sai Ying, who arrived in 1818, and purchased land in Parramatta. He married an English woman; Sarah Thompson, in 1823, changed his name to John Shying, and by 1829 held the licence for a Parramatta public house, the Lion. He returned to China in 1832, but was back in Sydney five years later. Some of his children became furniture makers, and descendants live in Melbourne today.W Doyle, Research Papers, John Shying, 1815–1992, State Library of NSW, Mitchell Library manuscript 5857 This story of integrating while maintaining ties with China was repeated over and over in the nineteenth century. European immigrants often found the long trip 'home' a daunting prospect, but many Chinese did not feel so distant from old connections.
The shortage of labour that followed the ending of the convict system in the 1840s encouraged some tentative imports of so-called 'coolie' labour from China. The first large group arrived from Amoy (Xiamen) on the Nimrod, which docked at Henry Moore's wharf at Millers Point in October 1848, where about half of the 121 Chinese passengers disembarked. By 1852 more than 1500 had arrived. The intention was that they would work as indentured labourers on rural holdings, but some remained in Sydney and others escaped the isolation of the bush and returned to town. A five-year indenture meant very little once gold had been discovered, and the Chinese, like everyone else who caught gold fever, deserted their posts for the diggings.
Fear, disease and restriction
By early 1852 news of gold had reached southern China, and many men from Cantonese and Xiamen shippers arrived under a credit-ticket system, with fares to be paid once fortunes were made. Very few arrived on their own steam. Consequently, most Chinese immigrants were looking for gold in the gold fields of Australia as well as rural regions of Australia such as Wong Ah Sat. The first act designed to keep Chinese out was in place by 1861, but was repealed in 1867 in response to declining arrivals. New gold rushes and larger numbers led to tighter restrictions being reintroduced in 1881 and 1888.
Ironically it was not only the 'otherness' of the Chinese that fuelled racist responses to them, but also China's proximity. China was close enough to allow ships to arrive within the incubation period of certain diseases. Prince Henry Hospital was established at then isolated Little Bay, south of the city, in response to an outbreak of smallpox in 1881, accompanied by strident anti-Chinese sentiment. An isolation area for lepers existed there until the 1960s, and this most shunned of diseases was also associated with the Chinese.
Staying and going
But while many Chinese came, very few stayed. In 1880, for example, the Eastern and Australian Steamship Company made 19 trips between Sydney and Hong Kong, moving 2,564 people in and 2,569 back to China, leaving a deficit of five. Furthermore, large influxes of Chinese after February resulted from reduced movements during the Chinese New Year, a pattern that persists today. The constant movement in and out of the port of Sydney contributed to the city's economic growth. From the start of the gold rushes there were Chinese who understood that a more certain fortune, or at least a living, would be made in the city, by providing the incoming fortune seekers with a place to sleep, picks and shovels and bags of rice.
Officially there were 189 Chinese living in Sydney on census night in 1861, rising to 336 in 1871 and 1,321 in 1881. Most were men, though a few had managed to get permission to bring in their wives. Immigration arrangements often involved dense layers of obligation and sometimes extortion, and many Chinese who were unsuccessful in fortune-hunting were unable to go home. Menial jobs in Sydney sometimes allowed them to accumulate enough capital to return with honour, and to achieve this they were prepared to live very frugally.
Chinatown in the Rocks
By the 1860s, Sydney's business directories listed Chinese premises, especially in The Rocks, with a concentration of Chinese shops, cook-shops and boarding houses on Lower George Street, close to the wharves. By 1870 there were also at least five furniture stores listed in this area, indicating more integrated economic activity. One of the largest was the workshop of Ah Toy, which not only manufactured cheap furniture but also filled orders for the up-market David Jones department store.
In 1878 an upsurge of violence against Chinese traders led them to petition the colonial government for protection from 'larrikins'. This anti-Chinese behaviour was linked to trade union meetings calling for a halt to immigration, where speakers had openly advocated violence. The unions opposed the low wages paid to Chinese workers by Chinese employers, but their solution was not to work for better pay and conditions, as some organised Chinese furniture workers urged, but to advocate exclusion. In November, the Seamen's Union struck against the Australian Steam Navigation Company's use of cheap Chinese labour. Several public rallies were held, and following a large anti-Chinese torchlight meeting in Hyde Park, a group of protesters decided to march on Parliament House to demand exclusion of the Chinese. A different group, reported by the police as numbering around 2,000, headed up Pitt Street to Bridge Street and thence to Ah Toy's furniture shop in Queen's Place (now Dalley Street). Here the mob attempted to torch the building, probably aware that many Chinese workers were asleep upstairs.
Chinese men were found living with 73 opium addicted Australian white women when Quong Tart surveyed the goldfields for opium addicts, and a lot of homeless women abused by husbands and prostitutes ran away and married Chinese men in Sydney after taking refuge in Chinese opium dens in gambling houses, Reverend Francis Hopkins said that 'A Chinaman's Anglo-Saxon wife is almost his God, a European's is his slave. This is the reason why so many girls transfer their affections to the almond-eyed Celestials.' when giving the reason why these women married Chinese men.
White men in Australia were afraid of the sexual and racial threats they thought came from Pacific islander and Asian men and it was written that the Chinaman "marries, or cohabits with the mean white woman, jostles and competes with the white man, and when it comes to labouring in the tropics, supplants him." in the Sydney Morning Herald, with interracial sex and prostitution booming in Northern Australia because of the racial sexual imbalance due to the fact that Australia hardly ever permitted the immigration of non-white women.
Around Melbourne's Little Bourke Street precinct and Sydney's Lower George Street grew majority Chinese male enclaves and in total in Australia there were 50,000 Chinese labourers and ministers by 1870, with opium dens being a standard thing found around the Chinese ghettos, the Chinese men were married by poor white women or serviced by poor white women prostitutes, who filled the missing female niche in the Chinese community and this led to condemnation of the white women as opium users and inflamed anti-Chinese sentiment.
A parliamentary commission was held regarding Sydney's Chinese gambling which brought white European women to testify on 14 December 1891, such as 27-year-old Minnie, who had long-term relationships with two Chinese men who treated her kindly after she engaged in "casual" sexual relations with multiple Chinese men.
Minnie ended up having sex with Chinese men after meeting them with friends who were also doing it, after she ran away from an abusive alcoholic husband when she was 16. Seven other women were interviewed besides Minnie, girls and women escaped a dangerous street life by taking sanctuary in the inner city and The Rocks with the Chinese, another woman interviewed was Hannah, who escaped her jailed brutal European husband to go live with a Chinese man, explaining that 'I thought it was better to have one man than be knocking about the streets with everybody', since the husband's 'people would not look after me', and Minnie said, 'I think fully half of them come to the Chinese when they have nowhere else to go', and she was asked 'Is it because the Chinese are kind to them?' she said 'That is the main thing, and for the sake of a home.'
Some of the European husbands and partners of the women tried forcing them to work as prostitutes to 'knock about the streets' and take the money they earned or were physically violent towards the women, which led the women to go to the Chinese who provided them with houses, Pauline explained "I would sooner live with a Chinaman than a white man. The Chinamen know how to treat a woman.' after her European husband tried to make her be a prostitute, a woman named Maud said 'he tries to please me, and I try to please him' and a woman named Adelaide loved and wanted to marry a young Chinese man but his father forced him to break off the relationship, another two women interviewed were Ellen A and Ellen B.
Some of these women still engaged in prostitution with multiple other Chinese men even after they formed a relationship with a single Chinese man, these women were proud of being wives of the Chinese and their well-maintained houses, saying they were 'clean and tidy' and the commissioners even said they were 'clean and even tastefully furnished', and Ellen B said 'You always see all the Chinese women's houses clean and comfortable', 'always plenty to eat and drink' and Minnie said she was 'living respectably with a Chinaman', the women also viewed non-white men of different races in a different light, saying that the 'dark' men like Lascars were different from the Chinese and Ellen B said 'there is not a girl with the Chinese that cares about a dark fellow.'