Coming Home to a Foreign Country: Xiamen and Returned Overseas Chinese, 1843–1938 9781501756207

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COMING HOME TO A FOREIGN COUNTRY

COMING HOME TO A FOREIGN COUNTRY Xiamen and Returned Overseas Chinese, 1843–1938 Ong Soon Keong

CORNELL EAST ASIA SERIES AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS  ITHACA AND LONDON

Number 207 in the Cornell East Asia Series  Copyright © 2021 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2021 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Ong, Soon Keong, 1969–­author. Title: Coming home to a foreign country : Xiamen and returned overseas Chinese, 1843–1938 / Ong Soon Keong. Description: Ithaca, New York : Cornell University Press, 2021. | Series: Cornell East Asia series ; Number 207 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020043624 (print) | LCCN 2020043625 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501756184 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501756207 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501756191 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Return mi­grants—­China—­Xiamen (Xiamen Shi) | Return Migration—­China—­Xiamen (Xiamen Shi)—­History. | Xiamen (Xiamen Shi, China)—­Emigration and immigration—­History. Classification: LCC DS797.26.X536 O64 2021 (print) | LCC DS797.26.X536 (ebook) | DDC 305.9/06910951245—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2020043624 LC ebook rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2020043625 Cover illustration: The Amoy Waterfront, collection of the Asian Civilisations Museum.

 To the memory of my parents and our native place

Contents

Mea­sures, Weights, and Currencies Acknowl­edgments

ix

Introduction

1

1.

xi

Defining Xiamen: Trade and Migration before the Opium War (1839–1842)

17

2.

Opening for Business: Xiamen as a Treaty Port

43

3.

Facilitating Migration: Xiamen as a Migration Hub

63

4.

Manipulating Identities: States and Opportunities in Xiamen

96

5.

Transforming Xiamen: Urban Reconstruction in the 1920s

127

6.

Making Home: Xiamen as Destination and Home

157

Conclusions

187

Bibliography Index

195 221

Mea­s ures, Weights, and Currencies

Mea­s ures 1. 1 li = approximately 1/3 mile 2. 6.6 mu = 1 acre 3. 1 zhang = 3.33 meters

Weights 1. 1 jin (catty) = 1.3158 pounds 2. 100 jin (catties) = 1 dan (picul) 3. 1 shi of rice = 138.75 jin = 182.6 pounds

Currencies 1. Haikwan tael was the unit of value used to reckon custom duties. 1 Haikwan tael = 37.7495 grams 2. 1 liang (tael) = 10 qian (mace) 10 qian = 100 fen (candareen) 100 fen = 1000 li (cash)

ix

Acknowl­e dgments

This book on the history of Chinese migration has a migration history of its own. My initial decision to study Chinese emigrants was made a­ fter a conversation with the eminent historian Hsu Cho-­yun in Honolulu, Hawaii; I took the embryonic idea to Ithaca, New York, where my mentor Sherman Cochran’s work on commercial networks and Shanghai inspired me to examine Chinese migration from the perspectives of its effects on the business environment and urban development of a Chinese city—­Xiamen. Research for the proj­ect crossed several national po­liti­cal borders, starting in the United States before progressing to Taiwan, China, and Singapore; while the revision of this manuscript began in Jacksonville, Florida, hit a roadblock in Columbia, Missouri, and was finalized only a­ fter I settled back in Singapore. The writing of this book was also a journey of self-­discovery. My f­amily was originally from the Heshan region in rural Xiamen, and they ­were part of the migration wave that moved from the island to Southeast Asia in the early twentieth ­century. ­After settling in Singapore for three generations, I returned “home” to investigate the circumstances and conditions that led to the exodus of my ­family and innumerable other Chinese. To be sure, my passage back to Xiamen was a circuitous one, and much like what I have documented in this book, my mobility and the opportunities to travel allowed for the accumulation of new social and cultural capital, and also opened up dif­fer­ent perspectives to understand the world around me, which inevitably changed the dynamics of my relationships with “home,” be it Singapore, Xiamen, or the United States. During my sojourn in the United States, I had the good fortune to know and work with an outstanding group of teachers at dif­fer­ent institutions who helped me grow as a person and an academic. At the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Daniel Kwok earned a permanent place in my heart with his quick wit and endless supply of personal and historical anecdotes. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-­ Champaign, I am particularly grateful to Harry Liebersohn who offered me sound advice and encouraged me to persevere when I was at a low point of my academic ­career. He has since become a trea­sured friend. At Cornell University, Sherman Cochran, ever so generous with his time and advice, stood ­behind my research right from the start. His academic excellence and effective pedagogy are what I am still striving to emulate. Eric Tagliacozzo introduced the fascinating world of Southeast Asian history to me and welcomed me so warmly to Ithaca with his kindness and guidance. Viranjini Munasinghe’s study on creolization in xi

xii

Acknowl­e dgments

the Ca­rib­bean spurred my interest in questions of ethnicity, identity, and cultural mixture, which I transplanted to the Southeast Asian context. As mentors, they provided support and encouragement more than they know. Besides the aforementioned, many friends and colleagues cheered me on and shared their wisdom at vari­ous stages of my study and c­ areer. My thanks go to all of them, especially Tracy Barrett, Michael Bednar, Dale Clifford, Jerritt Frank, Han Xiaorong, Han Xin, Hou Xiaojia, Amy Pozza Kardos, David Kenley, Peter Lavelle, Lee Seok Won, Masaki Matsubara, Suyapa Portillo, Qian Kun, N. Harry Rothschild, Robert Smale, Karen Thomas, and Kai Wang. During the course of my research, I benefitted greatly from the goodwill of Hsiung Ping-­chen and Lin Man-­houng in Taiwan, Ng Chin-­Keong and Wang Gungwu in Singapore, and Dai Yifeng, Shui Haigang, and Hong Puren in Xiamen. To them, I must express my deep and heartfelt gratitude. Many institutions and organ­izations contributed financial support during the research and writing of this work. A Biggerstaff Fellowship from the History Department and a Starr Fellowship from the East Asian Program at Cornell University helped fund my research in Singapore and Xiamen for a year, while a research grant from the Center for Chinese Studies supported my stay in Taiwan for two months. My current institution, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, provided a generous start-up grant for me to make short trips to libraries and archives in China, and a semester teaching relief that allowed me to focus on writing. I am also grateful to the following facilities and their staff for assisting me in acquiring source materials: in Singapore, the National University of Singapore Library, the National Library of Singapore, and the National Archives of Singapore; in Taiwan, the National Central Library, the Center for Chinese Studies, and the Academia Sinica; in China, the Xiamen University Library, the Xiamen Municipal Archives, and the Fujian Provincial Archives. At Cornell University Press, Mai Shaikhanuar-­Cota and Alexis Siemon have been the most encouraging and forgiving of editors, gracefully presiding over the transition from manuscript to book. Parts of chapter 6 originally appeared in Ong Soon Keong, “To Save Minnan, to Save Ourselves: The Southeast Asia Overseas Fujianese Home Village Salvation Movement,” in China on the Margins, ed. Sherman Cochran and Paul Pickowicz, 243–266 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), and in Ong Soon Keong, “Rebuilding Corridor, Preserving Prestige: Lim Boon Keng and Overseas Chinese-­China Relations,” China and Asia 2, no. 1 (2020): 134–61. To pursue my education in a faraway country was not an easy decision to make. My parents knew the value of education and their support of my endeavor never faltered even though it took so much longer than they anticipated. Sadly, they did not live to see the completion of this book, but their love has touched e­ very page of my writing. This book is dedicated to their memory.

COMING HOME TO A FOREIGN COUNTRY

Introduction

­ fter . . . ​Xiamen was officially opened as a treaty port, it once A exported the largest volume of tea in China. But since the trade in tea has slumped, so has its economy. Consequently, vast number of ­people began to migrate overseas, and Xiamen and the vari­ous ports of Nanyang became inextricably linked. Soon Xiamen was transformed into the “Nanyang resort” where overseas Chinese returned for rest and relaxation, and the “consumer center” for the ­whole of South Fujian. . . . ​All of [Xiamen’s] imports rely almost exclusively on [overseas Chinese from] Nanyang as their purchasers. It is thus easy to see how crucial overseas Chinese are to the commercial prosperity of Xiamen. No won­der Mr Lou Tongsun would remark: “Without Nanyang, we ­will not have the Xiamen of ­today.”1 —­Zhu Boneng, “An Analy­sis of the Reasons ­behind Xiamen’s Commercial Decline” (1935)

In an essay deliberating the reasons ­behind Xiamen’s waning fortunes during the ­Great Depression, the author Zhu Boneng attributed the port city’s susceptibility to regional economic downturn to the distinctiveness of its economy.2 According to Zhu, despite being a treaty port, Xiamen had over the years developed into a “consumer center” that served primarily overseas Chinese who came back with the money they made abroad “for rest and relaxation.” Xiamen’s economy thus was inextricably tied to the spending power of t­ hese emigrants, and its prosperity hinged on the economic well-­being of the Southeast Asian cities where they settled. When Southeast Asian cities flourished, so did Xiamen; but when their economies crashed during the ­Great Depression, Xiamen’s slumped as well. Notwithstanding some glaring factual errors, Zhu Boneng has astutely captured the peculiarities of Xiamen’s history during its treaty port era. Especially noteworthy are his observations that, first, Xiamen was transformed into a major migration hub and its emigrants became the mainstay of Xiamen’s economy and, second, the city’s economy was tied more to the economies of the wider transoceanic 1.  Nanyang, which literally translates to “southern ocean,” refers roughly to the region we ­today call Southeast Asia. 2.  Zhu Boneng, “Xiamen shangye shuailuo yuanyin de fenxi,” Shangye Yuebao 15, no. 8 (August 1935): 1. 1

2 Introduction

world than to China’s own national economy.3 Indeed, Zhu’s seemingly counterintuitive insights frame some of the major questions asked in this book: Why did Xiamen not develop into an industrial and trading center a la Shanghai a­ fter its opening as a treaty port? How did it facilitate the mass movement of p ­ eople in and out of the country? How w ­ ere Xiamen’s cityscape and urban development affected by its role in Chinese migration? Why did emigrants return to Xiamen, and how did foreign experience affect their views of and relationships with the city? To answer t­ hese questions, it is inevitable that we examine the development of Xiamen, the mobility and identity of the emigrants, and the intricate relationships between the two.

Xiamen and Chinese History Since the 1980s, the city government and local scholars in Xiamen have expended much effort to document the history of the port city, producing a large number of quality and impor­tant studies. Of par­tic­u­lar significance are the large-­scale collection and preservation of materials related to Xiamen’s education, foreign relations, economy, clan genealogies, stele inscriptions, and overseas Chinese investments.4 The city’s local historians have also compiled a host of “historical rec­ords” (zhi) on varied aspects of its development, including emigration, commerce, finance, food supply, transportation, municipal government, and urban development.5 Although largely nonacademic in nature, the wealth of information in t­ hese publications laid the foundation for academic studies like Zhou Zifeng’s Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu, 1900–1937 (A study of the urban 3.  Zhu Boneng’s estimation of Xiamen’s tea export is misleading. Even at its peak in the late nineteenth ­century, Xiamen’s export was only about one-­fourth that of Fuzhou, the other Fujianese city opened as a treaty port. See chapter 1. It is also incorrect to attribute the mass emigration of South Fujianese through Xiamen to the demise of the tea trade. Migration of Chinese through Xiamen had started much ­earlier and for vari­ous reasons. See chapter 2. 4.  He Bingzhong, ed., Xiamen beizhi huibian (Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi chubanshe, 2004); Xiamenshi danganju, Jindai Xiamen jiaoyu dangan ziliao (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1997); Xiamenshi danganju, Jindai Xiamen jingji dangan ziliao (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1997); Xiamenshi danganju, Jindai Xiamen shewai dangan ziliao (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1997); Lin Jinzhi and Zhuang Weiji, eds., Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiyeshi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1985); Zhuang Weiji and Zheng Shanyu, Quanzhou pudie huaqiao shiliao yu yanjiu (Beijing: Zhongguo Huaqiao chubanshe, 1998); Xiamen liangshiju, Xiamen liangshi zhi (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1989). 5.  Xiamen zongshanghui, Xiamen gongshang shishi (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1997); Xiamenshi difangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen shizhi (Beijing: Fangzhi chubanshe, 2004); Xiamenshi chengshi jianshezhi bianweihui, Xiamen chengshi jianshezhi (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1992); Xiamen shizhenzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen shizhengzhi (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1991); Xiamen jinrong zhi bianweihui, Xiamen jinrongzhi (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1989); Xiamen jiaotong zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen jiaotongzhi (Beijing: Renmin jiaotong chubanshe, 1989); Xiamen huaqiaozhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen huaqiaozhi (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1991).

Introduction

3

history of Xiamen, 1900–1937), a comprehensive analy­sis of the urban development of Xiamen during the Republican era.6 By contrast, despite being one of the very first treaty ports, Xiamen has not attracted its due attention from scholars writing in Western languages.7 One notable exception is Ng Chin-­keong’s excellent Trade and Society: The Amoy Network on the China Coast, 1683–1735. But while Ng masterfully reconstructs the Chinese coastal and maritime trading network centered on Amoy—­that is, Xiamen in the local dialect—in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, he too does not extend his study into Xiamen’s treaty port era. Scholars’ indifference to post‒ Opium War Xiamen might be attributed to the fact that Xiamen did not fully meet the preconceived image of a treaty port. The treaty ports that began dotting the Chinese coastline and major waterways from the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury on ­were, to be sure, a new “urban form” in China.8 As commercial entrepots forcibly opened to foreign trade by “unequal” treaties, treaty ports differed from traditional Chinese cities not only in that they ­were primarily oriented ­toward commerce but also ­because foreigners ­were able to exercise a certain degree of judicial and fiscal autonomy—­especially in the concession areas—­that was not allowed in other Chinese cities.9 For foreign officials, businessmen, missionaries, and adventurers, treaty ports ­were the beachheads in China where they could pursue their commercial activities and other agendas (well meaning or other­wise) unfettered by Chinese restrictions. For Chinese residents, treaty ports not only offered them new economic opportunities, they also provided a win­dow into the world of Western religions, institutions, and culture, since in addition to modern industries and banks, treaty ports ­housed an assortment of chambers of commerce, newspapers, publishers, churches, and even race courses and dance halls. With such “distinctly modern and cosmopolitan flavour,” it is no won­der that the historian R. H. Tawney would memorably liken the treaty ports to a modern fringe stitched onto the hem of an ancient garment.10 And scholars have also tended to look to the treaty ports for evidence of China’s modern  6. Zhou Zifeng, Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 2005).  7. Ng Chin-­ keong, Trade and Society: The Amoy Network on the China Coast, 1683–1735 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1983). Another work is James A. Cook’s 1998 dissertation, “Bridges to Modernity: Xiamen, Overseas Chinese, and Southeast Coastal Modernization” (PhD diss., University of California at San Diego, 1998).   8.  Joseph Esherick, “Modernity and nation in the Chinese city,” in Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950, ed. Joseph W. Esherick (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 4. Appearing a­ fter the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) with five, the number of treaty ports increased rapidly as Western powers and then Japan aggressively leveraged their military might against the depleted Qing dynasty to further their economic interests in China. As more “unequal” treaties ­were signed, more than eighty treaty ports dotted the coastline and major waterways of the country by 1911.  9. Ibid., 2. 10.  Ibid.; Richard Tawney, Land and ­Labor in China (New York: Octagon Books, 1964), 13.

4 Introduction

transformation against the backdrop of a traditional hinterland or proof that Western imperialism truncated Chinese sovereignty and reduced the country to a semicolonial state. Shanghai—­with its two concession areas (the French Concession and International Settlement), highly commercialized and industrialized economy, and modern lifestyle—­naturally became the quin­tes­sen­tial treaty port that attracted the lion’s share of scholarly attention. But not all treaty ports ­were the same. While Xiamen might have ­housed the only other international settlement outside Shanghai, the number and wealth of foreigners in residence never reached the critical height to dictate the fortune of the port city. And as we ­shall see, even though the British had high hopes for Xiamen as a trading port, foreign trade through the port dwindled before the end of the nineteenth ­century despite a promising start. Xiamen also did not develop large-­scale industries—­compared with Shanghai’s six thousand factories, Xiamen only had a paltry eighty by the 1930s. It is thus understandable that scholars interested in issues regarding modernization and Western “impact” on China would overlook Xiamen. However, this is not to say that Xiamen remained stagnant and “backward” during its treaty port era. As a ­matter of fact, Xiamen underwent a phase of rapid urbanization and growth such that by the 1920s, its land prices and workers’ wages ­were among the highest in the country. The prosperity of Xiamen even led observers to compare it to Shanghai and nicknamed it “­Little Shanghai.”11 If not through foreign trade and industrialization, how did Xiamen benefit from its treaty port status to prosper? To be sure, the opening of Xiamen as a treaty port embedded it in the transoceanic network spanning South China and Southeast Asia that the British imperial power created. However, with a relatively small and underdeveloped hinterland, Xiamen had ­little to offer the world except for a vast number of South Fujianese, who had been impoverished and unsettled by long years of overpopulation, destitution, and social and po­liti­cal unrest. Hence, during the treaty port era, Xiamen flourished into the regional migration hub for South Fujianese, channeling a ­great number of them—­almost 390,000 between 1843 and 1890—­from villages in South Fujian to Eu­ro­pean colonies in Southeast Asia and beyond.12 The example of Xiamen thus testifies to the limitations of conforming the treaty ports to prescribed normative trajectories of change. It is true that along with the other treaty ports, Xiamen was one of the first places in China to open to Western influence. Nonetheless, its legacy lies not in it being a beachhead for Western imperialism but more in its expanded function as the egress for Chinese extending their fields of activities beyond China. The story of Xiamen’s post‒Opium War 11.  See chapter 5. 12. Dai Yifeng, “Minnan haiwai yimin yu jindai Xiamen xingshuai,” Ershiyi shiji, no. 35 (June 1996): 47.

Introduction

5

development thus cannot simply be told as the history of one place or understood within the context of Chinese national history alone. Rather, we need to situate it at the intersection of Chinese history and the history of Chinese migration, that is, paying attention to how pro­cesses and relationships that have transcended the borders of China s­ haped the history of Xiamen on the one hand and including the contributions of traditionally marginalized ­people—­the overseas Chinese— to Xiamen and China on the other. In a way, Xiamen forces us to examine Chinese history and modernity beyond the bound­aries of geopo­liti­cal China.

Xiamen and Migration Within the small but growing field of Chinese migration studies, Xiamen has also not been given its deserved attention. This is due mainly to the fact that scholars of Chinese migration have conventionally submitted to a “dichotomous homeland-­hostland discourse”; that is, confining themselves to a narrow and oftentimes isolated focus on ­either the emigrants’ geo­graph­i­cal origins or their places of settlement.13 Since Xiamen was not the typical native village where emigrants originated nor the foreign land where they settled, it is not surprising that it has been con­ve­niently overlooked. To be sure, ­there are a small number of works on returned Chinese emigrants in Xiamen, such as James A. Cook’s dissertation on the impact of overseas Chinese on the city’s modernization and the encyclopedic Xiamen Huaqiaozhi (Rec­ords of Xiamen’s Chinese sojourners), a careful compilation of information on Xiamen’s overseas Chinese. But t­ hese works have largely taken for granted that Xiamen was the native place of their subjects when in fact many of them hailed from surrounding mi­grant regions in South Fujian, and they thus failed to recognize the difference between Xiamen and the hinterland, and the unique role the port city played in the migration pro­cess.14 To include Xiamen in the g­ rand narrative of Chinese migration and to make such inclusion meaningful and necessary, it is essential that we reexamine our approaches to the study of the overseas Chinese. In truth, the bipolar homeland-­hostland approach has come ­under scrutiny in recent years, most specifically by Adam Mckeown, who argues that this type of unilateral perspective would only yield disparate and even competing narratives of Chinese mi­grants, which could not “produce a coherent pa­norama of the networks 13.  Elizabeth Sinn, “Moving Bones: Hong Kong’s Role as an ‘In-­between’ Place in the Chinese Diaspora,” in Cities in Motion, ed. Sherman Cochran and David Strand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 248. 14. Cook, “Bridges to Modernity”; Xiamen huaqiaozhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen huaqiaozhi. For a critique of Cook’s limitations, see Michael Williams, Returning Home with Glory: Chinese Villages around the Pacific, 1849 to 1949 (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2018), 29, 196.

6 Introduction

and pro­cesses of Chinese migration” even when taken together.15 Regrettably, the disjuncture between the homeland and hostlands was further exacerbated with the rise of transnational and cultural studies, as scholars began demanding the “decentering” of China or even its omission in the study of the overseas Chinese.16 The real challenge for students of the Chinese émigré then is to buck the trend and to bridge the divide between the homeland and hostland perspectives so as to have a more coherent and comprehensive understanding of the pro­cess of Chinese migration. In his groundbreaking work, the eminent Chinese historian Philip Kuhn provides us with an inspiring example of how this could be accomplished by emphasizing the enduring connections between the Chinese soil and Chinese emigrants worldwide.17 This is not to say that Kuhn has reverted to the familiar assumption of a primordial tie between the emigrants and China; rather, he proposes that emigrants ­were still tied to the homeland b ­ ecause such attachment was crucial to their survival and success overseas. Kuhn observes that emigrants brought skills and resources from their native places that they then used to create occupational niches in their settlements abroad. For Kuhn, this extension of the emigrants’ old environment overseas created a “corridor” that not only kept the emigrants in a meaningful relationship with the home areas but also facilitated the circulation of money, goods, and information. In this way, homeland and hostlands are tightly and purposefully interconnected, and it becomes imperative again to look at China when studying the overseas Chinese. More recently, Michael Williams has argued even more forcefully for “qiaoxiang (mi­grant region) perspectives” when studying Chinese migration, one that centers on the home villages or districts of the emigrants.18 According to Williams, previous studies based on such concepts as nation-­state, diaspora, or even transnationalism suffer from similar limitations in that they tend “to focus on movement to and outcomes in a specific location,” especially the land of settlement.19 Consequently, vari­ous actors, such as returnees and t­ hose who remained in the qiaoxiang, and certain actions or choices, including continuing links with places of origins and motivations not centered on one-­way migration and settlement, are ignored.20 Williams thus proposes a qiaoxiang perspective that emphasizes the analy­sis of qiaoxiang links and “qiaoxiang-­related motivations”—­for example, 15.  Adam Mckeown, “Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842–1949,” Journal of Asian Studies 58, no. 2 (1999): 307. 16.  See the vari­ous articles by Ien Ang and Shu-­mei Shih for example. 17.  Philip Kuhn, Chinese among O ­ thers: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). 18. Williams, Returning Home with Glory, 200. 19.  Ibid., 194. 20.  Ibid., 194–95.

Introduction

7

how emigrants affected f­ amily life and local economy and society on the one hand and how f­ amily, prestige, motivations, and income affected emigrants’ actions and choices in the destinations on the other.21 For Williams, such a perspective widens the context of Chinese migration history and allows us to understand the emigrants’ settlement or return as not just a response to destination policies or discriminations but also a conscious choice they made “for reasons associated with their qiaoxiang links.”22 Kuhn’s and Williams’s works are invaluable in that they allow us to bring together both ends of the migration pro­cess into a meaningful dialogue; moreover, Kuhn’s emphasis on the values of the cultural and historical capital emigrants acquired from their native places and Williams’s focus on the returnees and the agency of the emigrants are also perspectives explored in this book. Nonetheless, their schemes still do not take into account the places in between, especially the transition hubs. As the historian Elizabeth Sinn reminds us, migration “is seldom a ­simple, direct pro­cess of moving from Place A to Place B” but rather “involves frequent transits and detours, zigzags and crisscrosses, with mi­grants often ­going from locality to locality before fi­nally settling down.”23 Migration hubs thus play an impor­tant role in deciding the trajectory of the migration pro­cess and the contour of Chinese dispersal. The lacuna in both Kuhn’s and William’s works is filled by Sinn in her own study on Hong Kong.24 According to Sinn, Hong Kong was the migration hub par excellence. Although it did not send any emigrants of its own, Hong Kong witnessed the constant coming and g­ oing of persons between its hinterlands in the Pearl River delta region and California, across the Pacific, and was soon transformed from “a small-­scale entrepot of goods into a large-­scale entrepot of ­people.”25 The increased cross-­Pacific traffic not only led to the growth of shipping activities in the British colony but also spurred the formation of a “corridor” where ­people, letters, money, goods, and even the dead flowed. As Sinn sees it, Hong Kong was not simply the beneficiary of ­human movements. Possessing both centripetal and centrifugal forces, Hong Kong was central in determining the map of Chinese migration; or in Philip Kuhn’s imagery, Hong Kong was the nexus of “hundreds of thousands of ‘corridors’ ” that reached back to hometowns in China while extending to destination countries around the world.26

21.  Ibid., 31, 196. 22.  Ibid., 198. 23.  Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossings: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 9. 24. Ibid. 25.  Ibid., 90. 26.  Ibid., 136.

8 Introduction

Sinn coins a new term, “in-­between place,” to describe migration hubs like Hong Kong and to accentuate the sense of mobility they embody.27 Although Sinn recognizes that locations such as San Francisco, Singapore, Bangkok, and Sydney might also qualify as in-­between places, she has curiously overlooked the fact that ­there could be other in-­between places in China. This book argues that Xiamen was another such in-­between place. As a m ­ atter of fact, in the nineteenth ­century, Xiamen shared many similarities with Hong Kong: Both w ­ ere islands located at the mouths of busy and prosperous rivers (the Jiulong River and the Pearl River) with populous hinterlands; both possessed deep and sheltered harbors and w ­ ere strategically located along coastal and oceanic trade routes;28 and as colonial port and treaty port, Hong Kong and Xiamen existed at the margins of the Chinese empire and ­were thus less fettered by imperial regulations. More importantly, both became the embarkation point of choice for emigrants wanting to leave China and ­were also their first stop in China on their return home.29 For South Fujianese in search of a brighter f­uture abroad, Xiamen provided them with the resources and mechanism to leave China. At the same time, the city also furnished emigrants with a variety of means to maintain ties to their home villages. Products from South Fujian, or Minnan, such as joss sticks, paper, hemp bags, Dehua porcelain, and oolong tea (a Fujianese favorite), moved through Xiamen’s port into the welcoming hands of overseas Fujianese; in return, messages, letters, and remittances from afar w ­ ere funneled through Xiamen before they w ­ ere disseminated to their grateful recipients in the hinterlands. For many of the returned overseas Fujianese who made it abroad and looked to s­ ettle back in China, Xiamen became the destination of choice b ­ ecause of its proximity to their home villages and the relative safety, urban con­ve­niences, and economic opportunities it offered. For Xiamen, the impacts of overseas migration on its development ­were many. It is true that traditionally Chinese emigration had followed trade routes b ­ ecause ­there was money to be made at the destinations.30 What has often been overlooked is the fact that ­there was also money to be made in almost ­every step of the migration pro­cess. In Xiamen, the movement of ­people spurred the growth of a host of migration-­related industries, including passenger shipping, lodging, remittances, lighterage, and the semilegal “space dividing” on steamship decks. In addition, returned overseas Chinese also made significant contributions to the city’s economy, since the majority of Xiamen’s businesses ­were e­ ither financed by over27.  Ibid., 9. 28.  Ibid., 12. 29.  Ibid., 301. 30.  Wang Gungwu, The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Introduction

9

seas Fujianese (according to one estimate, at least 60–70 ­percent31) or established to cater to the needs of returned mi­grants with extra cash to spend.32 The most impor­tant public utilities in the city—­the ­water supply, electric light, and telephone companies—­were entirely owned and managed by overseas Chinese. In addition, with overseas funds pouring in to pave roads and erect buildings, overseas Chinese visions also helped shape Xiamen’s urban landscape and influenced its city life. And to meet the needs of mobile Chinese, Xiamen was transformed into a consumer city, and its imports always outstripped its exports. However, the unfavorable trade balance had minimal adverse effect on Xiamen, as overseas remittances ­were usually more than enough to offset the difference. This embeddedness in the Chinese migration network that Xiamen helped to create and define gives credence to the bold remark in the epigraph that without Southeast Asia (more specifically, the overseas Chinese from Southeast Asia), Xiamen would not have developed and prospered.

Emigrants and Home In a thought-­provoking new book on the overseas Chinese, Shelly Chan poses an impor­tant but hitherto unasked question: How did Chinese migration change China?33 For Chan, even though overseas Chinese have been con­ve­niently marginalized in Chinese history, they played a part in framing Chinese modernity and the pro­cesses of nation building in China. To demonstrate her claim, Chan argues for a temporal approach to Chinese migration. Specifically, she sees Chinese migration as a proliferation of “diaspora times”; and when t­ hese diaspora times intersected with other major historical trajectories, “diaspora moments” emerged. According to Chan, as po­liti­cal leaders and Chinese institutions ­were forced to respond to ­these diaspora moments, resulting in long-­term consequences, Chinese migration had decisively affected and changed modern China.34 Contrary to Chan, whose focus is on overseas Chinese participation in Chinese history and the narrative of the nation, this book is more concerned with the material contributions of returned overseas Chinese to the transformation of one city. H ­ ere, I tell the story of Xiamen and the Chinese who migrated out of China 31.  George L. Hicks, ed., Overseas Chinese Remittances from Southeast Asia, 1910–1940 (Singapore: Select Books, 1993), 245. 32.  Dai Yifeng, Quyuxing jingji fazhan yu shehui bianqian: Yi jindai Fujian diqu wei zhongxin (Changsha, Hunan: Yuelu shushe, 2004), 314–27. 33.  Shelly Chan, Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 34.  Ong Soon Keong, review of Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration, by Shelly Chan, China Review 19, no. 3 (2019): 176–79.

10 Introduction

through its port and then returned to participate in the city’s economic revitalization, educational advancement, and urban reconstruction. Compared to outward migration, the role of returned overseas Chinese is a much less studied topic in Chinese migration studies, and the reasons are twofold: Firstly, b ­ ecause the transplantations of Chinese from their native homes to foreign lands are often considered a dramatic and even traumatic experience, scholars are thus more concerned with why they w ­ ere pushed out of China and how they adapted to their new environments than with their less impressive return. Secondly, b ­ ecause many emigrants left China due to economic hardships at home and w ­ ere largely engaged in backbreaking jobs with meager pay abroad, the common impression is that most emigrants ­were too poor to ever return to China. For example, Siah U Chin, an early emigrant who arrived in Singapore not long a­ fter its founding, lamented that only one or two out of ten of his fellow Chinese emigrants w ­ ere able to return home ­after three or four years as originally planned, and a significant number of them ended up toiling for de­cades in the British colony without ever returning.35 While Siah U Chin might have correctly depicted the situations of Chinese emigrants in the mid-­nineteenth ­century, he certainly did not foresee that the advent of the steamship would make travel between China and Southeast Asia so easy and eco­nom­ical that a return trip, or even multiple voyages, would become a real­ity for the everyman. Data from the Chinese Maritime Customs Ser­v ice and other administrative reports confirm large-­scale to-­and-­fro movements of p ­ eople between Xiamen and Southeast Asia from the late nineteenth c­ entury onward. In 1890, for example, 54,085 persons departed for Southeast Asia via Xiamen while 35,964 returned to it. The same figures for 1900 ­were 90,358 and 26,225; for 1910, 80,071 and 14,590; and for 1920, 62,419 and 37,693.36 Between 1873 and 1939, the Japa­nese scholar Kaoru Sugihara estimates, the percentage of total emigrants returning to China was 80 ­percent.37 The sheer size of returned overseas Chinese in itself makes them a worthy subject of study. Return needs to be taken seriously as well ­because not only is it an integral part of the Chinese emigrants’ migration experience; it is also an impor­tant ele­ ment in the migration process—­return makes the perpetuation of further migration pos­si­ble since returnees provide useful information regarding destination countries and even help lead aspiring emigrants abroad (see chapter 3).38 More35.  Siah U Chin, “The Chinese in Singapore, No. II: General Sketch of the Numbers, Tribes, and Vocations of the Chinese in Singapore,” Journal of the Indian Archipelago, no. 2 (1848): 285. 36.  Kaoru Sugihara, “Patterns of Chinese Emigration to Southeast Asia, 1869–1939,” in Japan, China, and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850–1949, ed. Kaoru Sugihara (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 247–50. 37.  Ibid., 245. 38.  Lynellyn D. Long and Ellen Oxfeld, eds., Coming Home? Refugees, Mi­grants, and T ­ hose Who Stayed ­Behind (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 2–3.

Introduction

11

over, return reflects the returnees’ par­tic­u­lar historical, social, and personal circumstances, and their actions back in China have real po­liti­cal, social, and economic consequences for themselves and for ­those who do not move.39 Return thus provides a unique win­dow for us to investigate the emigrants’ relationship with the homeland (and the land of settlement) and their own value system and identity creation. Traditionally, the Chinese identity of the emigrants and their emotional attachment to China are never in question. This is ­because Chinese are not expected to ­settle in foreign lands since to leave China permanently would be to leave their duties as sons and subjects undone; hence, all good men must come home eventually. The traditional image of the Chinese emigrant thus is a sojourner who reluctantly leaves China but longs to return home and who adamantly keeps his Chinese identity, culture, and connections to China intact even ­after he has settled down abroad. This perception of Chinese emigrants as sojourners has spurred research on the overseas Chinese in two directions: the first, led by the late anthropologist Maurice Freedman, attempts to reconstruct mainland Chinese society through the study of overseas Chinese socie­ties;40 the second reaffirms Chinese emigrants’ enduring ties with China by exploring such topics as overseas Chinese remittances, economic investments, contributions and donations for disaster relief or philanthropic purposes, and participation in Chinese po­liti­cal movements and war efforts.41 All of t­ hese studies attest to the traditional conviction that emigrants are still attached to China emotionally, culturally, and po­liti­cally even though they are physically away. In a more extreme manifestation of this view, Philip Kuhn proclaims that since overseas Chinese are merely extending their home environment overseas through the corridors, they cannot even be considered as having “left home.”42 Contrary to Kuhn’s argument, this book insists that Chinese emigrants had in fact “left home.” I develop this position by reconsidering Chinese identity and the idea of “home” as evinced by the returned overseas Chinese in Xiamen.

39. Ibid. 40.  G. William Skinner, “Maurice Freedman, 1920–1975,” American Anthropologist 78, no.4 (December 1976): 871–85. 41.  Yen Ching-­hwang, The Overseas Chinese and the 1911 Revolution (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1976); Yoji Akashi, The Nanyang Chinese National Salvation Movement, 1937–1941 (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1970); Lin and Zhuang, Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiye shi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan; C. F. Yong, Tan Kah-­Kee: The Making of an Overseas Chinese Legend (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987); Hicks, Overseas Chinese Remittances. 42. Kuhn, Chinese among O ­ thers, 49.

12 Introduction

Identity The conventional view of Chinese identity, or Chineseness, as something innate, definite, and prescribed by China has already been called into question by scholars including Aihwa Ong, Ien Ang, Chris Vasantkumar, and Shelly Chan.43 ­Here I follow their lead in addressing Chinese identity as mobile, pro­cessual, and even manipulatable—­and as not “naturally” based on tradition and ancestry but constantly (re)in­ven­ted and (re)negotiated.44 I do not assume that Chinese emigrants could simply travel overseas and then return as still “pure” Chinese. Rather, the opportunity to travel out of their hometown and home country no doubt broadened the emigrants’ horizons and had a profound impact on their self-­identification and relationships with China. Many Chinese, for example, w ­ ere only able to come into social contact with fellow provincials, Chinese from other provinces, and foreigners ­because of their travels. ­These chance encounters with individuals who came from a dif­fer­ent location, spoke a dif­fer­ent language, or with dif­fer­ent physical traits at migration hubs like Xiamen, on board emigration ships, and in foreign countries inevitably made the emigrants more conscious of their own identity. In addition, as Chinese emigrants extended their stay overseas, it was increasingly common for them to acquire foreign nationality while abroad. Regardless of the reasons why overseas Chinese became “foreigners,” their new l­egal status inevitably changed the dynamics of their relations with China when they returned. When ­these overseas Chinese returned to Xiamen, they leveraged their nationality, knowledge, vision, and, if available, wealth to accomplish their objectives and to reap the most benefits for themselves. They would transmute between locals and foreigners, buy foreign protection (chapter 4), apply their Chinese identity (chapters 4 and 6), form transregional alliances (chapter 6), promote their own agendas (chapters 4 and 6), and redefine Xiamen’s cityscape (chapter 5). Surely, returned emigrants’ freedom to flexibly manipulate their identities was aided by the unique environment of Xiamen: firstly, as a trading port oriented more ­toward the oceanic front than continental China, Xiamen was a more open and fluid society less encumbered by Chinese state regulations; secondly, with multiple po­liti­cal powers (British, Japa­nese, Qing state, and Republican governments) vying for supremacy in the treaty port, returned emigrants could operate in the interstices of the vari­ous regimes; thirdly, b ­ ecause most returnees did not

43.  Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (New York: Routledge, 2001); Chris Vasantkumar, “What Is This ‘Chinese’ in Overseas Chinese? Sojourn Work and the Place of China’s Minority Nationalities in Extraterritorial Chinese-­ness,” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 2 (May 2012): 423–46; Chan, Diaspora’s Homeland. 44. Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese, 36.

Introduction

13

originally hail from Xiamen, they w ­ ere at liberty to forge their own relationship with the treaty port, especially in redefining it as “home.”

Home The ideal of returning home is a key theme in Chinese migration studies and has helped to propagate the familiar “sojourner discourse” in which emigrants are portrayed as never permanently severing ties with China while constantly longing to go back home again.45 But where is home? Home is overwhelmingly linked to the emigrant’s place of origin, especially his ­family ­house and his native village or, when relative to the foreign settlement, his home country. What about in-­ between places like Xiamen then? In truth, many of the South Fujianese studied in this book did not return to their hometowns in the hinterlands but resided in Xiamen instead, which, strictly speaking, was not the emigrants’ native places.46 Could Xiamen be considered the “home” of returned emigrants and not, as some scholars suggest, an auxiliary and subordinate abode to their original homes? Elizabeth Sinn, for example, has posited the existence of a “hierarchy of homes,” whereby the in-­between place Hong Kong was only the emigrants’ “second home” or “substitute home” in contrast to their primary home.47 This is to say, t­ here can only be one true home for the emigrants; any other place of residence is at best a surrogate of the original. The reason Sinn sees a “hierarchy of home” is due essentially to the common impulse to associate home singularly with an emigrant’s birthplace or native place as mentioned above. But to maintain home as rooted to a par­tic­u­lar geo­graph­i­ cal location risks reaffirming the original “home” as the only source of an emigrant’s identity and meaning in the world, which would negate our proposition in the previous section that identity is fluid and constructed. It is thus imperative that if we w ­ ere to better understand the subjectivity of emigrants and the reasons and motives b ­ ehind them settling instead in Xiamen, we need to reassess the meaning of home and see the relationship emigrants have with home as not natu­ ral and predetermined. As an emigrant embarks on his journey, he leaves his natal home b ­ ehind. While away, home becomes a vestige of his memory and the target of his nostalgic longings. This desire for home propels the emigrant to find or create material and emotional anchors as he moves along his migratory paths.48 For the emigrant, 45. Kuhn, Chinese among O ­ thers, 49. 46.  Xiamen did send forth a small number of emigrants, but the returnees studied in this book mostly came from other parts of South Fujian. 47. Sinn, Pacific Crossings, 301, 304, 306. 48.  Paolo Boccagni, Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Mi­grants’ Everyday Lives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

14 Introduction

home becomes a multidimensional concept that invokes more than mere dwelling and ­house­hold but also encompasses feelings, practices, and/or a state of being.49 For the South Fujianese studied in this book, they had emigrated mainly to escape the poverty and sociopo­liti­cal chaos in their hometowns, and situations in China did not improve while they ­were away. Hence, they had ­little to look to materially in their hometowns even though they might still have had lingering sentimental and familial connections. For ­these emigrants, home was thus not about returning to the place of origin but rather what they could hope to attain at the places where they subsequently settled,50 or as Robert Ginsberg puts it in words strikingly similar to Stuart Hall’s view of identity, “home . . . ​not as where you are from, but where you are ­going.”51 For mi­grants on the move, home is significant to them more for the relationships it embodies and for the sense of comfort, stability, security, and control it evokes. To be sure, ­these sentiments are not grounded in a place but rather manifested through the activities that occur in the place.52 As the anthropologist Michael Jackson comments, “We often feel at home in the world when what we do has some effect and what we say carries some weight.”53 Hence, although it is true that South Fujian emigrants returned to Xiamen for its safety and con­ve­nience, they also endeavored to engage in vari­ous activities to make their worth felt in Xiamen and the port city home. Interestingly, home-­making happens not just overseas but also when the emigrant returns to China. For South Fujian emigrants, some of them returned to China not b ­ ecause of lingering sentimental and familial connections but b ­ ecause discrimination in the host socie­ties had made their stay overseas onerous and precarious (chapter 6). They thus longed for a safe and peaceable place where they could live or retire without fear of prejudice and harassment. But conditions in their native places ­were not congenial, which was why they had emigrated overseas in the first place. ­These returned emigrants thus banded together—­relying on the common bond they derived from the shared experience of living overseas54—­and used the money and experience they gained abroad to effect changes to the environment and living conditions of South Fujian. They participated in the suppression of bandits, 49.  Shelley Mallett, “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Lit­er­a­ture,” So­cio­log­i­cal Review 52, no.1 (February 2004): 62–89. 50.  Ibid., 77. 51.  Robert Ginsberg, “Meditations on Homeless and Being at Home,” in The Ethics of Homelessness: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. G. John M. Abbarno (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 35; Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. J. Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222–37. 52.  Mallett, “Understanding Home,” 80. 53.  Michael Jackson, At Home in the World, 123, cited in Mallett, “Understanding Home,” 80. 54.  Sara Ahmed, “Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (December 1999): 336.

Introduction

15

the improvement of infrastructure, the construction of new roads and ferroconcrete buildings, the expansion of transport ser­v ices, and the provision of public utilities. Not only could ­these returnees hope to create a haven in Xiamen and its environs that they could return to; their activism also made them feel that they mattered in Xiamen. ­Because of Xiamen’s treaty port status, and especially its fluid po­liti­cal situations and trade-­oriented economy, it presented many opportunities for the returned emigrants. As a m ­ atter of fact, for t­ hose who returned to Xiamen, “home” became a new field for their enterprise and opportunism. This is particularly true for ­those emigrants who had acquired foreign nationality abroad and had literally come back to China as a foreign country (chapter 4). T ­ hese “foreign Chinese” traveled freely along the corridor between settlements in Southeast Asia and South Fujian, which became their space of activities. But it was in the treaty port Xiamen where their “foreignness”/“nativeness” gave them even more autonomy, benefits, and influence than when they w ­ ere overseas—­they could leverage their foreign status for extraterritorial protection on the one hand and their local identity for economic gains on the other. Although ­these “foreign Chinese” could be found in all aspects of the economy in Xiamen, they ­were notorious for their engagement in vices, including gambling, opium smoking, and prostitution, and such illegal activities as ­human trafficking and secret socie­ties. Into the Republican era, Xiamen was also caught up in the urban reconstruction movement that swept across China. Wealthy overseas Chinese seized on the opportunity to invest in real estate, construction, and retail ser­v ices (chapter 5). Compared to their native places in the hinterland, the treaty port Xiamen was the more ideal place to invest their money and maximize their profits. But not all returned emigrants could regard Xiamen/China as home; nor w ­ ere they always made to feel at home in China. This is especially true of overseas Chinese whose corridors to their native place had long collapsed, such as the third-­ generation emigrant and natural-­born British subject Lim Boon Keng (chapter 6). Lim’s foreignness was exacerbated by the fact that he was also more proficient in Western language and culture than he was with China’s. Hence, despite Lim’s effort in retraining himself in the Chinese language and culture, and although he even returned to Xiamen to serve his fellow Chinese, he was not fully accepted by his peers in China as their equal. Lim’s case further testifies to the tenuous nature of the emigrants’ relationship with their home. This book examines the evolution of Xiamen and the undertakings of overseas Chinese in the treaty port ­after they returned. Or­gan­i­za­tion­ally, aside from this introduction and a conclusion, the main body of the book comprises six chapters, which could be further separated into two parts depending on the chapters’

16 Introduction

focus. The first part, containing chapters 1 to 3, addresses the history and development of Xiamen. Chapter 1 gives a general overview of trade and migration through the port of Xiamen from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, which set the stage for its development during its treaty port era. Chapter 2 explains the challenges foreign merchants faced in Xiamen and the reasons b ­ ehind the treaty port’s lackluster foreign trade. Chapter 3 analyzes Xiamen transformation into the in-­between place of Minnan and details the migration mechanisms and pro­ cesses through the port city. The second part includes chapters 4 to 6, and it centers attention on the returned overseas Chinese. Chapter 4 examines the multifaceted identities of returned emigrants in Xiamen during its treaty port era and how they manipulated their identities for their own benefits. Chapter 5 investigates how returned overseas Chinese investors used their money, knowledge, and vision to influence the urban reconstruction and cityscape of Xiamen in the early twentieth ­century. Chapter 6 looks at the decisions and purposes of two overseas Chinese to return to Xiamen—­a first-­generation emigrant to the Philippines, Li Qingquan, and a third-­generation overseas Chinese from Singapore, Lim Boon Keng. Their experiences reveal that the overseas Chinese relationship with the homeland was not natu­ral nor guaranteed, and they ­were not always successful in settling back in China. While the first part of the book showcases the central role Xiamen played in Chinese migration and the transformative impact migration had on the port city, the two themes of Chinese identity and the emigrants’ home are developed in the second part. By weaving together the relationships between emigrants and Xiamen—­a migration hub other than their native place or the land of settlement—­and highlighting the fluid and malleable nature of identity and even the concept of home, this study pushes the boundary of Chinese history beyond China to incorporate a transnational perspective—­that is, paying attention to how pro­cesses and relationships that have transcended the borders of China ­shaped the history of Xiamen—­ and complicates the familiar narrative of Chinese history by demonstrating the subjectivity of the emigrants and including the contributions of ­these traditionally marginalized p ­ eople to China. In this way, it situates itself at the intersection between overseas Chinese history and Chinese history (especially Chinese urban history) and, as such, provides an open and expansive view of the modernization of a Chinese city and a fresh perspective on the multifaceted relationships between the overseas Chinese and their homeland.

1 DEFINING XIAMEN Trade and Migration before the Opium War (1839–1842) The early treaty ports ­were not picked by chance, much less created de novo by the blessings of Eu­ro­pean trade. They ­were shrewdly chosen as points of entrance into the ave­nues of Chinese maritime trade which already existed. —­John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast (1953)

The signing of the Treaty of Nanjing signaled a de­cided shift in the balance of power between China and G ­ reat Britain in the latter’s f­ avor. But more than a military victory for the British, the treaty also positioned them better than ever to exploit the China market they had coveted for centuries. Not only did they gain a permanent foothold at the doorstep of China in Hong Kong, the British also ended the long-­standing “Canton system” (1757–1842) that many of them found frustratingly restrictive by opening up four more ports—­Shanghai, Ningbo, Fuzhou, and Xiamen—in addition to Canton (Guangzhou) for foreign trade. And as John King Fairbank reminded us, the new ports w ­ ere not indiscriminately chosen; nor w ­ ere they new markets established by and for the Eu­ro­pean trade.1 As a ­matter of fact, the British had consciously selected t­ hese ports not only b ­ ecause they ­were easily accessible from beyond China but also ­because they ­were where foreign merchants could “tap” the China market as close as pos­si­ble to where the action already was.2 Ningbo was the traditional base for trade between Zhejiang Province, cities in North China, and the coasts of Japan and K ­ orea; Shanghai, though small, was already a recognized port at the mouth of the Yangtze River; Fuzhou was the port for tributary trade with Ryukyu and Formosa; and Xiamen, the central focus of our study, was the center of an established and far-­reaching maritime 1.  John King Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 155. 2.  Rhoads Murphey, “The Treaty Ports and China’s Modernization,” in The Chinese City between Two Worlds, ed. Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), 18–19. 17

18 CHAPTER 1

trading network on the China coast that extended to Southeast Asia.3 The first half of this chapter thus examines the rise of Xiamen as a maritime trading center from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, culminating with its opening as a treaty port a­ fter the Opium War. While the British correctly identified Xiamen as the epicenter of commercial activities in South Fujian, they largely overlooked the fact that it was also, for centuries, the launch pad for lawful and clandestine travelers migrating to Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Xiamen’s opening as a treaty port further enhanced its position as a migration hub as an unpre­ce­dented number of South Fujianese found their way through Xiamen to venues overseas.4 By1930, no fewer than 1.7 million Chinese had left China through its port.5 ­There is no doubt that the Opium War and its aftermath triggered the mass migration of Chinese abroad. But unlike Hong Kong, whose function as an “in-­ between place” only came about ­after the British takeover, Xiamen was already well accustomed to the movement of p ­ eople, and its reputation as the embarkation point of South Fujian was also well known to potential mi­grants in the region. In the second half of this chapter, we look at the interplay between trade and migration in South Fujian and the migration routes of the Fujianese before the mid-1800s. As we s­ hall see, Xiamen and the Fujianese ­were well positioned to take advantage of the conditions and mechanisms that the treaty port era offered. And the continuation and expansion of migration through Xiamen deeply affected the port city’s commercial activities and determined its development in ways that ­were unforeseen by the British.

Trade Maritime Trade in South Fujian Contrary to the common impression of Chinese as “earthbound,” South Fujianese from ­today’s Xiamen, Zhangzhou, and Quanzhou areas have long garnered a repu3. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy, 155; Ng C., Trade and Society. 4.  It can be argued that 1842 represents a watershed in the history of Chinese overseas migration as the number of pre-1842 emigrants was “insignificant” compared to the large number of expatriates afterward. Lacking detailed statistics, we do not know the number of Fujianese emigrants before the Opium War, but we can still get a hint of the emigration trend by looking at genealogical rec­ords. The Zheng clan of Yongchun in Quanzhou, for example, recorded in its genealogy 976 members who left China from the late sixteenth c­ entury ­until the 1930s. Of them, only 65 left before the Opium War while the rest, or 93.34 ­percent of them, left a­ fter. The genealogy of the Wang clan of Taoyuan recorded a similar development. Of its recorded 498 emigrants, 97.55 ­percent left China between 1840 and 1930. See Zhuang Weiji and Zheng Shanyu, eds., Quanzhou pudie huaqiao shiliao yu yanjiu (Beijing: Zhongguo Huaqiao chubanshe, 1998), 6. 5.  Dai Y., “Minnan haiwai yimin yu jindai Xiamen xingshuai,” 49.

Defining Xiamen

19

tation as the preeminent “sea merchants” in the country.6 ­There ­were many reasons why ­these Hokkiens—as they refer to themselves in the local dialect overseas—­took to maritime trade, and the most fundamental one was necessity. Fujian’s topography was not particularly kind to ­those whose livelihood depended on working the land. With over 90 ­percent of the province mountainous, t­ here was l­ittle room left for river plains to grow grains. Farmers in Fujian thus faced a formidable challenge if they wanted to gain self-­sufficiency, and competition for arable land became a per­sis­tent source of vio­lence in the province. As one seventeenth-­century observer lamented, the hunger for land had led Fujianese peasants “to quarrel like dogs barking with bared teeth, and even to fight with and kill one another.”7 For ­those fortunate or power­ful enough to acquire a piece of land, they often found Fujian’s soil acidic, with many of its nutrients leached out, requiring much effort and heavy fertilization before it could be productive again. Regrettably, this was a luxury not many tillers could afford. L ­ ittle won­der rice was chronically in short supply in Fujian, and as early as the Song dynasty (960–1279), the province already had to rely on other provinces to supply the favorite southern staple. As one Song official confirmed in his memorial in the early thirteenth ­century: “The harvest in Fuzhou, Quanzhou, and Xinghua is normally poor. Even in years of good harvest the supply is exhausted within half a year. All watch for the merchants bringing in rice supplies from both North and South.”8 What is noteworthy is that since Fujian was girded by highlands on three sides, effectively cutting it off from its neighbors, interprovincial trade overland was difficult and expensive.9 The transport of rice thus had to be conducted along China’s coast. And as Fujian’s dependence on imported rice continued, the increasing coastal rice trade not only became an integral fixture of the province’s economy but also instilled in the ­people of Fujian a seaward and mercantile mind-­set.10 While it is true that Fujianese initially looked to the sea for reprieve, it is equally true that they soon found seaborne trade an attractive alternative to farming. The economic motivation ­behind their involvement in maritime activities was pithily captured in the now-­famous aphorism “[the p ­ eople of Fujian] viewed the seas as their paddies and built ships for profits.”11 Indeed, the inhabitants of Fujian  6. Wang G., Chinese Overseas; Lin Renchuan, Mingmo Qingchu siren haishang maoyi (Shanghai: Huadong shifandaxue chubanshe, 1987).  7. Quoted in Chang Pin-­tsun, “Chinese Maritime Trade: The Case of Sixteenth-­Century Fu-­ Chien” (PhD diss., Prince­ton University, 1983), 92.   8.  Cited in Hugh Clark, Community, Trade, and Networks: Southern Fujian Province from the Third to the Thirteenth ­Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 147. “North” ­here refers to the Yangtze valley, and “South” refers to Guangdong.  9. Evelyn Rawski, Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 60. Transportation cost by ­water could be as ­little as one-­fifth that of overland cost. 10.  Ibid., 146–47. 11.  Zhou Kai, Xiamen zhi (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1996), 136.

20 CHAPTER 1

had been the master shipbuilders of China since ancient times and had been constructing ships capable of cruising long distances up the coastline to the Korean peninsula and down to Indochina and the Malay peninsula.12 However, their maritime enterprise was largely contained during the first millennium AD due to a lack of state support and the fact that foreign trade was largely conducted in Chinese ports, with Indian, Persian, and l­ater Arab vessels ferrying in precious cargoes from Southeast Asia and beyond.13 This is to say, ­there was no need for Chinese merchants to venture overseas. Still, Hokkien merchants did venture southward to initiate ­limited trade with their Southeast Asian counter­parts by the eighth ­century and expanded their seaborne businesses ­after the collapse of the Tang dynasty at the beginning of the tenth c­ entury. But the “golden age of the Hokkien maritime trade” did not arrive ­until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries during the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279).14 In 1127, the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) invaded and took the Song capital of Kaifen, forcing the Song court to flee south and established a new capital at Hangzhou.15 Having lost a large expanse of taxable farm land in the North, the Southern Song court came to rely more on trade, especially foreign maritime trade, to fill its coffers. It designated the South Fujianese port of Quanzhou, or Marco Polo’s Zaiton, as the official port to receive foreign emissaries and the place where customs duties on foreign trade ­were to be collected.16 Although Quanzhou still received foreign merchants from more than thirty countries and regions, with imperial encouragement, Fujianese ships fanned out from the seaport to reach emporia in ­Korea, Champa, Annam, Java, and Sumatra, exporting Chinese textiles, pottery, tea, sugar, and other agricultural products and importing rice, timber, medicine, and vari­ous forest and marine goods.17 Quanzhou ­rose to become the center of maritime activities for Hokkien sea merchants, the most impor­tant seaport for China’s foreign trade, as well as the greatest shipbuilding center in the country.18 12.  Wang Gungwu, “Merchants without Empires: The Hokkien Sojourner Communities,” in China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 2003), 89. 13.  Wang G., “Patterns of Chinese Migration,” 9; Wang Gungwu, A Short History of the Nanyang Chinese (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 1959), 3. 14.  Wang G., “Patterns of Chinese Migration,” 17; James K. Chin, “Junk Trade, Business Networks, and Sojourning Communities,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 6, no. 2 (2010): 159. 15.  Wang G., “Patterns of Chinese Migration,” 15. 16.  Ng Chin-­keong, “The South Fukienese Junk Trade at Amoy from the 17th to Early 19th Centuries,” in Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th ­century, ed. E. B. Vermeer (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1990), 297. 17.  Lin Renchuan, “Fukien’s Private Sea Trade in the 16th and 17th centuries,” in Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th ­century, ed. E. B. Vermeer (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1990), 178; Chen Guodong, “Qingdai zhongye Xiamen de haishang maoyi (1727–1833 nian),” in Zhongguo haiyang fazhanshi lunwen ji, ed. Wu Jianxiong, vol. 4 (Taipei: Academic Sinica, 1991), 61–100; Lin R., Mingmo Qingchu siren haishang maoyi, 215–57. 18.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 11–12.

Defining Xiamen

21

Quanzhou continued to flourish ­under official patronage during the Southern Song and the succeeding Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), which was even more supportive of commercial and maritime activities than its Chinese pre­de­ ces­sor. As trade flourished, more and more coastal Hokkiens participated in all aspects of the maritime business, and they also became unrivaled in China in terms of nautical skills and shipbuilding technology. Kublai Khan (r. 1260–1294) was the direct beneficiary of their expertise, as his naval expeditions against Japan and Java in the late thirteenth ­century would not have been pos­si­ble without the help of the Hokkiens, who built and manned his war junks.19 The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) that drove the Mongols beyond the G ­ reat Wall and restored Chinese rule to China had a less favorable view of maritime trade. Zhu Yuanzhang (r. 1368–1398), the founding emperor of the Ming, de­cided to ban private trade with foreign merchants, which caused much frustration for the Fujianese sea merchants.20 But they received some respite during the reign of his son, Emperor Yongle (r. 1402–1424), who commissioned the g­ reat voyages of Zheng He (1371–1433). Sailing between 1405 and 1433, Zheng He made seven ocean expeditions, traveling all the way to Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, and as far as the east coast of Africa. But with the death of Yongle in 1424, the court withdrew its support for maritime expedition, and as soon as Zheng He returned from his last voyage in 1433, it ordered the coastal ­peoples to return to the land and again banned all foreign trade.21 The end of Ming sponsorship of maritime trade came at a time when the port of Quanzhou was falling into a steady decline. This was due in large part to the silting up of its harbor, caused mainly by ­human destruction of vegetation cover on the riverbanks and disrepair to its waterworks during the chaotic years of dynastic changeover.22 But as the historian Ng Chin-­keong reminds us, the decline of Quanzhou does not indicate the depression of South Fujianese maritime trade. On the contrary, “it signals the flourishing of private trade vis-­à-­v is the government restrictions.”23 Indeed, imperial ban had not been able to stop maritime trade altogether as the coastal ­peoples of Fujian ­were already accustomed to the commercial opportunities opened up by centuries of foreign trade. As early as the beginning of the Ming dynasty, many rural families in South Fujian had diversified from subsistence farming into growing cash crops like cotton, sugarcane, lychees, and longan, and also into ­house­hold handicraft industries, such as the production of cotton cloth, silk, and satin for the market.24 They needed a port 19.  Wang G., “Patterns of Chinese Migration,” 18. 20.  Ibid., 21. 21.  Ibid., 24. 22.  Lin R., “Fukien’s Private Sea Trade,” 169. 23.  Ng C., “South Fukienese Junk Trade,” 298. 24.  Lin R., “Fukien’s Private Sea Trade,” 165–66.

22 CHAPTER 1

to conduct trade, even if clandestinely. And Yue Gang (literally, “moon port,” ­today’s Haicheng) in Zhangzhou, a harbor remote from bureaucratic seats, r­ ose in place of Quanzhou to become the eminent seaport of South Fujian in the second half of the fifteenth ­century.25 To be sure, Yue Gang did not receive foreign traders like Quanzhou but served primarily as the embarkation port for native merchants who ventured overseas to trade in their own vessels.26 Private trade passing through the harbor was significant, with Japan, ­Korea, the Philippines, and the Indonesian archipelago being the favorite destinations of the Hokkien sea merchants. Take the Philippines for example: 110 ships with official permits set sail from Yue Gang to Manila yearly, with an unknown number crossing the sea illegally.27 Compared with official tribute trade, which mainly comprised luxury import items for Chinese elites, ­these private sea traders dealt mostly with raw material for the village handicraft industries and items for daily use by ordinary p ­ eople, such as wood, hides, umbrellas, straw mats, and so on.28 In 1567, in an attempt to rein in and regulate maritime trade, the Ming court elevated Yue Gang to an administrative seat and tried to impose prohibitions on its maritime activities. N ­ eedless to say, for a dynasty on the wane, the Ming government was unable to enforce any meaningful control over maritime trade. Nonetheless, for seafarers, it still meant ­there ­were more restrictions and more bureaucratic hoops to jump through if they ­were to embark from Yue Gang. It is no won­der many preferred an alternate and concealed harbor that was more congenial to their private and oftentimes illegal trade. This disposition to look for an unencumbered port opened the door for the rise of Xiamen as the region’s newest maritime center, ­under “a situation not dissimilar to that of the Quanzhou—­Yue Gang transition.”29

The Early History of Xiamen Before 1949, “Xiamen” referred to the island of Xiamen and its islet, Gulangyu. The Xiamen island is only approximately 110.8 square kilo­meters in size, while Gulangyu is significantly smaller with an area of only 0.67 square kilo­meters.30 Nonetheless, the channel between the two formed the main part of the inner harbor, which together with the outer harbor—­the passage between the outlying Wu Yu and Dadan Islands—­formed one of the best harbors in China.31 25.  Ng C., “South Fukienese Junk Trade,” 298. 26.  Ibid., 299. 27.  Lin R., “Fukien’s Private Sea Trade,” 179. 28.  Ibid., 176. 29.  Ng C., “South Fukienese Junk Trade,” 299. 30.  Zhou Z., Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu, 11. 31.  Wang Ermin, “Xiamen kaiguan zhi gangpu quhua,” Shihuo yuekan 4, no. 6 (1974): 228–29.

Defining Xiamen

23

Located off the littoral of Fujian Province and far removed from the traditional po­liti­cal and cultural center of China in the North (as shown in map 1), the early history of Xiamen was rather obscure. We know from archaeological evidence that the island was inhabited by aboriginal tribes during the Neolithic period and peopled by Han Chinese a­ fter the fall of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), when turmoil in North China sent refugees fleeing southward and onto the island.32 But it was only during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) that Xiamen was po­liti­cally incorporated into the Chinese empire. At that time, it was given the name “New City,” or Xin Cheng, and administered ­under the county of Nan’an.33 In the ensuing Song dynasty, it was renamed the “Island of Auspicious Grain,” or Jaihe yu, in appreciation of the bountiful paddies grown on the island, and it figured into the military strategy of the empire for the first time when the succeeding Mongol Yuan dynasty established a garrison post t­ here.34 The name Xiamen appeared only during the Ming dynasty, and it marked an impor­tant milestone in the island’s rise to prominence in the empire’s overall security considerations. Beginning in the thirteenth c­ entury and extending into the second half of the ­fourteenth ­century, “Japa­nese” pirates, or the infamous wokou, terrorized and wreaked havoc on China’s southeastern coast, posing a serious prob­lem for the central government.35 To prevent the coastal islands from becoming beachheads for t­ hese freebooters, the Ming court devised the unpre­ce­ dented plan of establishing military stations on offshore islands to serve as its first line of defense. B ­ ecause Xiamen was considered by Ming officials as the “throat” to Zhangzhou and Quanzhou Prefectures in South Fujian, a garrison unit, the “­Middle and Left Station,” or Zhongzuo suo, was positioned onto the island. In 1387, the twentieth year of the reign of the first Ming emperor, the court laid a plan to build a walled city on the island. The resulting Xiamen city was completed in 1394 and had a circumference of 425 zhang encircled by a wall almost 2 zhang high.36 The strategic importance of Xiamen was further elevated in the ­middle of the fifteenth ­century when the naval base at Wu Yu, an islet to its southeast, was moved to the more secure island.37 As we have noted, by the mid-­Ming, as a mea­sured attempt to curtail smuggling and also to meet the need of its shrinking coffers, the court allowed the partial

32.  Chen Juanying, “Xiamen diqu dazhi shiqi de faxian jiqi zhongyao yiyi,” in Xiamen Bowuguan shi zhounian chengguo wenji, ed. Xiamen bowuguan (Fuzhou: Fujian jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998), 11–17; Zhou Z., Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu, 11. 33.  See Xiamenshi difangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen shizhi, 1:21. 34.  Zhou K., Xiamen zhi, 13. 35.  While it is true that many of the pirates w ­ ere Japa­nese, perhaps more w ­ ere of Chinese origins. Lin R., Mingmo Qingchu siren haishang maoyi. 36.  Zhou K., Xiamen zhi, 35. 37.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 46; Zhou Z., Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu, 17.

24 CHAPTER 1

Beijing

C HI N A Shanghai FUJIAN

Wenzhou

Shaowu

N

Fuzhou

Tingzhou Yongchun Longyan

Putian

Anxi Quanzhou

Tong’an Zhangzhou

Xiamen

Haicheng

TA I WA N

Chaozhou

0 0

50 50

100

100 mi 150 km

MAP 1.  Xiamen and major cities in South Fujian. Map by Bill Nelson.

opening of Yue Gang in Zhangzhou for private maritime trade.38 To oversee vessels sailing to and from Yue Gang, a customs checkpoint was established on Xiamen,

38.  Hongwu, the first Ming emperor, was the first to propose the policy to ban all private maritime shipping in 1371. See Richard Von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Defining Xiamen

25

less than twenty miles offshore to the northeast of the port.39 As an island in the estuary of the Jiulong River, Xiamen was better situated than Yue Gang as a trading port and provided better protection against piracy. Moreover, b ­ ecause it was a nonadministrative city with few officials stationed on the island, it was f­ree of the bureaucratic formalities and constant governmental scrutiny that plagued Yue Gang, especially ­after the latter was elevated to the administrative status of a district in 1567.40 Hence, during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Xiamen slowly built up a reputation as a haven for smugglers and a favorite rendezvous point for outlaws and rebels—­all disreputable characters the island’s assigned military function was supposed to patrol and control.41 And when Yue Gang fell into disuse t­ oward the end of the Ming dynasty, it was inevitable that Xiamen replaced it as the preeminent maritime trading center in this part of the world.

From Military Outpost to Trading Center The transformation of Xiamen from a military outpost to a legitimate trading port would not be complete without Zheng Chenggong (1624–1662), better known as Koxinga in the West, who used it as the hub for his renegade maritime empire.42 To be sure, Koxinga did not create his own commercial base; rather, he inherited and expanded it. His ­father, Zheng Zhilong (1604–1661), originally from the minor port of Shijing in Nan’an County, had risen from a mere apprentice on board one of his ­uncle’s trading junks to become one of the biggest maritime traders through some clever alliances and opportunism.43 Freely transmuting between merchants and pirates, Zheng’s fleet of trading junks sailed along the coast of China and traversed the sea to Japa­nese and Southeast Asian ports to conduct honest business when pos­si­ble or to smuggle and pillage when such activities ­were deemed more rewarding. In 1626 and again in 1627, Zheng took advantage of a much-­weakened Ming dynasty to invade Xiamen, and in his second attempt he successfully defeated the government troops and claimed the island as his own.44 Just one year ­later however, Zheng exchanged Xiamen and his loyalty for official recognition from the Ming court and was awarded the position of Fujian’s 39.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 46. Lin Renchuan, Fujian duiwai maoyi yu haiguanshi (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1991), 121–24. 40.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 48. 41.  Cook, “Bridges to Modernity,” 33. 42.  Ng C., Trade and Society. For more on Koxinga and the Zheng regime, see Xing Hang, Conflict and Commerce in Maritime East Asia: The Zheng ­Family and the Shaping of the Modern World, c. 1620–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 43.  Leonard Blussé, “Minnan-­jen or Cosmopolitan? The Rise of Cheng Chih-­lung Alias Nicolas Iquan,” in Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. E. B. Vermeer (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1990), 245–64. 44.  Zhou K., Xiamen zhi, 529.

26 CHAPTER 1

military governor. Now with the backing of the Chinese government, Zheng was able to defeat and amalgamate the followers and assets of his rival trader-­pirates; by the 1630s, he became the undisputed king of the sea and had a virtual mono­poly over China’s maritime trade. “Ocean vessels could not set sail or come to China without obtaining Zheng’s banner,” so said an early Qing writer, “[and through the sale of banners] Zheng had acquired riches that could rival the entire country.”45 A timeserver par excellence, Zheng Zhilong again tried to sell his ser­vice to the invading Manchus when it was apparent that defending the Chinese regime would be a lost cause. His son Koxinga, however, stayed defiant. And a­ fter the elder Zheng followed the Manchus to Beijing, Koxinga took over his f­ ather’s remaining troops and maritime assets and established a resistant base in Xiamen in 1650.46 To announce his commitment to the deposed dynasty, he renamed Xiamen “the island that remembers the Ming,” or Siming zhou, and centered an elaborate trading network on the island, comprising five overland (shan lu) and five maritime trade routes (hai lu), to finance his costly anti-­Manchu ambitions.47 As the network’s chief financier, Koxinga’s administration would extend credit to trusted fellow Fujianese, who would then establish collection centers in Beijing, Shandong, Suzhou, and Hangzhou to purchase silk, textiles, tung oil, medicine, and other export merchandise on his behalf. ­These goods would then be transported clandestinely overland to Xiamen, where they would be distributed to Taiwan, Japan, and vari­ous Southeast Asian countries in Koxinga’s fleet of trading junks.48 As Koxinga’s fortune and military might grew, the Qing court tried to check his power by banning maritime trade in 1656 and resorting to the more extreme policy of coastal depopulation in 1661.49 ­These draconian mea­sures affected the lives of millions, especially the latter decree, which forcibly removed inhabitants of strategic coastal areas in five provinces inland about thirty li and burned their settlements to the ground.50 As the base for Koxinga’s re­sis­tance, coastal Fujian was particularly adversely affected by the depopulation policies: nineteen counties ­were slated for depopulation, an estimated 2.5 million mu of farmland was abandoned, and more than half of the forcibly relocated population died in the pro­cess.51 G. William Skinner has identified t­ hese mid-­seventeenth-­century imperial policies as the beginning of a period of decline—­a “dark age”—­for the en45.  Zou Yiming, Mingji yiwen, cited in Lin R., Fujian duiwai maoyi yu haiguanshi, 125. 46.  Zheng Zhilong was eventually executed by the Manchu in 1661. 47.  Zhou Z., Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu, 19. 48.  Nan Qi, “Taiwan Zhengshi wushang zhi yanjiu,” Taiwan yanjiu congkan 90 (1966): 43–51; Nie Denin, “Mingqing zhi ji Zhengshi jituan haishang moyi de zuzhi yu guanli,” Nanyang wenti yanjiu, no. 1 (1992): 98–105. 49.  Xu Xiaowang, ed., Fujian tongshi (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 2006), 4:476–78. 50.  G. William Skinner, “Presidential Address: The Structure of Chinese History,” Journal of Asian Studies 44, no. 2 (1985): 278; Xu X., Fujian tongshi, 4:477. 51.  Gu Hai, Xiamen gang (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 2001), 62.

Defining Xiamen

27

tire southeast coast macroregion, especially Fujian Province, which lasted ­until the 1840s.52 But Skinner has perhaps overemphasized the success of the Qing scorched-­earth policy in denying the Zheng regime of mainland resources, on the one hand, and underestimated the willingness of coastal merchants and even government functionaries to defy o ­ rders for survival or profits, on the other. Yu Yonghe, an early Qing official who wrote one of the first accounts of Koxinga, observed that the imperial sea bans actually made maritime trade even more lucrative for him, as foreign countries “could only rely on Koxinga to supply the Chinese goods they craved. Consequently, Koxinga solely reaped the benefits from maritime trade, and riches at his disposal w ­ ere ever more abundant.”53 ­Under Koxinga, Xiamen quickly became a major port of call for the numerous junks flying Koxinga’s flag and anyone interested in conducting trade with China. Vessels from the British East India Com­pany began to dock at Xiamen from 1676, and goods from Bandung, Siam, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian countries could be found trading in its markets.54 Braced with a brimful trea­sury and a formidable navy manned by experienced mari­ners, Koxinga put up a re­sis­tance that the Manchus found hard to crack. In 1661, as Qing forces closed in on Xiamen, Koxinga relocated the capital of his renegade regime to the relative safety of Taiwan ­after launching a daring attack and ousting the Dutch from the outlying island. Following Koxinga’s untimely death in 1662 at the age of only thirty-­eight, his son, and ­later his grand­sons, continued to supervise the resistant movement from their Taiwan stronghold. But Xiamen remained the crucial link to the mainland for the Zheng f­amily’s commercial empire and hence the focal point of contention between the centralizing Qing forces and the recalcitrant Fujianese loyalists for the next c­ ouple of de­cades. In 1680, imperial troops fi­nally drove the Zheng f­ amily out of Xiamen for good; three years ­later, u ­ nder the capable leadership of another Fujianese who had defected long before, Admiral Shi Lang, a former subordinate of Zheng Zhilong, the Manchus ultimately ­were able to crush the last band of re­sis­tance in the name of the fallen Ming dynasty and incorporate Taiwan into the empire.

Xiamen a­ fter 1683 With the w ­ hole of China now unified, the Qing court sought to strengthen its control over the southeast coast and lavished a disproportionate amount of attention 52.  Skinner, “Presidential Address,” 278–79. 53.  Yu Yonghe, “Weizheng yishi,” cited in Feng Lijun, “Qingchu qianhai yu zhengshi shili kongzhi xia de Xiamen haiwai maoyi,” Nanyang wenti yanjiu, no. 4 (2000): 88. 54.  Dai Yifeng, “Xiamen yu Zhongguo jindaihua,” in Quyuxing jingji fazhan yu shehui bianqian: Yi jindai Fujian diqu wei zhongxin (Changsha, Hunan: Yuelu shushe, 2004), 299.

28 CHAPTER 1

on the tiny island of Xiamen. In 1683, Emperor Kangxi relocated the headquarters of the Fujian army to Xiamen and posted a naval commander ­there to keep a watchful eye on Taiwan.55 In addition, the Manchus knew well the exceptional skills the Fujianese possessed as sailors and naval officers, and successive Qing emperors ­were willing to bend the traditional “rule of avoidance” to retain the ser­vice of Fujianese naval officers in their home province.56 Despite frequent reports that Fujianese officials had given “improper” protection and patronage to their fellow provincials, Qing emperors continued to tolerate them simply ­because no other group could surpass them in providing the empire’s maritime security.57 The Qing leadership also took a cautious but calculated approach ­toward resuming junk trade in Xiamen. To be sure, just like their Confucian pre­de­ces­sor, the Manchus saw trade as a pos­si­ble disruptive force to social order; at the same time, they ­were well aware that the livelihoods of millions along the coast depended on the sea, and to allow maritime trade u ­ nder state stewardship would be conducive to coastal security.58 Hence, just one year ­after Taiwan capitulated, Emperor Kangxi rescinded the sea ban and ordered the establishment of the first maritime customs at Xiamen—­followed by three more in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Guangdong Provinces—to regulate and tax trade.59 ­Needless to say, this act upgraded the former rebel base to a legitimate maritime center of the Qing empire, and Xiamen became the only designated port in Fujian for junk trade with Southeast Asia. An unforeseen consequence of the Qing’s scorched-­earth policies during its war years with the Zhengs was that many desperate Fujianese turned to smuggling or g­ oing overseas to trade just to survive. When the maritime ban was lifted in 1684, ­these Fujianese merchants used their maritime expertise to grasp new opportunities to enrich themselves, while their activities also restored Xiamen as the key center for coastal and maritime trade in Fujian.60 As vividly described in the Xiamen zhi (Xiamen gazetteer): ­ fter the rescission of the ban on maritime trade, trading vessels of ChiA nese and foreign origins have congregated at the port of Xiamen. The profits from merchandise of the sea w ­ ere enough to enrich the government coffers and support the livelihood of the p ­ eople. . . . ​[Xiamen’s] traders see seafaring as the path to wealth. . . . ​Several times a year, they headed north to Ningbo, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Jinzhou; south to 55.  Zhou K., Xiamen zhi, 23; Shi Lang held this position from 1681 to 1696. 56.  Originating in the sixth ­century and followed by successive Chinese governments, the “rule of avoidance” prohibited local officials from serving in their places of origin so that they would not be influenced by ­family and friends. 57.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 202. 58.  Huang Guosheng, Dongnan Sisheng Haiguan (Fujian: Fujian Renmin Chubanshe, 2000). 59. Ibid. 60.  Ng C., “South Fukienese Junk Trade,” 304.

Defining Xiamen

29

Guangdong, and opposite to Taiwan or set sail to Luzon, Sulu, and Batavia in the winter and return in the summer. Returns on trade could reach several to dozens of times the initial investments.61 Indeed, in a few de­cades ­after the resumption of ­legal trade, Xiamen flourished as the center of an intricate and multilayered coastal trading network—­which the historian Ng Chin-­keong has aptly dubbed the “Amoy (Xiamen) network”—­that reached as far as Manchuria in the North, Macao in the South, and even extended beyond the Chinese empire.62 Of par­tic­u­lar importance to the blooming of Xiamen was its trade with Taiwan and Southeast Asia. TA I WA N

­ fter the Zheng regime surrendered, the Qing court had initially wanted to abanA don Taiwan, deeming it a barren wasteland beyond the pale of civilization unworthy of the money needed to defend it.63 The newly acquired island was preserved only ­after Admiral Shi Lang revealed to the court that besides being a “strategic territory,” Taiwan was also “a bountifully fertile piece of land” that was full of wildlife and rich in natu­ral resources.64 In truth, ­because of land scarcity in their own province, Fujianese farmers had spilled over to grow rice on Taiwan since the late Ming. Rice production was abundant enough that when the Zhengs ruled over the island, they used it “as the supply base for the re­sis­tance force and the ‘granary’ of the Quan-­Zhang region.”65 ­After 1684, Taiwan continued to supply the staple to rice-­deficient South Fujian through Xiamen, as it was the only ­legal access for junks sailing to and from Taiwan. By the Qianlong reign (1735–1796), between 800,000 to 900,000 shi of rice ­were shipped out of Taiwan annually.66 Besides rice, Taiwan shipped out an even larger volume of sugar, which was grown primarily for export. It was recorded in a Taiwan gazette that in the beginning of the eigh­teenth ­century, at least five hundred to seven hundred sugar-­carrying junks of 70 to 140 tons set sail from Taiwan to Xiamen each year.67 From Xiamen, sugar was then transshipped to Suzhou, Shanghai, Ningbo, and Zhenjiang, and as far north as Tianjin.68 Taiwan also sent to Xiamen native products like sweet potatoes, indigo, beans, and venison, which together with Fujian local products, such as earthenware, tea, 61.  Zhou K., Xiamen zhi, 509, 512. 62.  Ng C., Trade and Society. 63.  Jinhua Emma Teng, “Taiwan in the Chinese Imagination, 17th–19th centuries,” Asia-­Pacific Journal 5, no. 6 (June 2007): 1. 64. Ibid. 65.  Ng C., “South Fukienese Junk Trade,” 305. 66.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 117. 67.  Ng C., “South Fukienese Junk Trade,” 305–6. 68.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 133–34.

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tobacco, fruits, medicinal herbs, and paper, w ­ ere traded by Hokkien merchants northward to Ningbo, Shanghai, Jiaozhou (in Shandong), and Tianjin, and southward to Chaozhou, Canton, and Macau. Thus an integrated coastal trading network that radiated out from Xiamen in three directions—­north, south, and east (to Taiwan)—­was developed on the back of the expansion of crash crop cultivation in Taiwan. On their trips back from the Chinese coastal ports, Hokkien merchants also brought back an array of merchandise, including “black cloth, gauze and satin, silk, hats, animal grease, ham and wine from Suzhou; silk gauze, cotton-­silk, crepe silk, handkerchief and woollen yarn from Zhejiang; cotton and straw matting from Ningpo; pongee, white wax, purple dye, medicinal herbs, wheat, beans, salt, meat, red dates, walnuts, and dried persimmons from Shandong; and medicinal herbs, melon-­seeds, hazel-­nuts, sea-­slugs, silver-­fish, and dried mussels from Manchuria.”69 This amalgamation of goods in the port, in addition to Fujian’s own products, formed the foundation for Xiamen’s maritime trade with Southeast Asia. S O UT HEA S T A S I A

The Hokkiens had been trading with Luzon and Malaya and Java in the far south for centuries before the rise of Xiamen. In truth, Hokkien trade with Southeast Asia had never actually ceased despite occasional governmental restrictions in China and abroad. And ­after Eu­ro­pe­ans arrived and established footholds in Southeast Asia from the late sixteenth c­ entury onward—­the Spaniards arriving to the Philippines in 1511 and seizing Manila in 1571, the Dutch reaching Java in 1596 and founding Batavia in 1619—­Hokkien trade with Southeast Asia expanded significantly. In the early years of Batavia, Chinese junk trade with the Dutch colony was unimpressive. The historian Leonard Blussé estimated that on average, only five junks visited Batavia annually before 1680.70 The main reason for the ­limited trade was of course the disruptive po­liti­cal unrest during the Ming-­Qing changeover. And a­ fter Koxinga took over Xiamen and monopolized maritime trade from China, trade with Batavia was further restricted as Koxinga was more interested in trade with Japan, the Dutch East India Com­pany in Taiwan, and Indochina. ­Needless to say, ­after Koxinga forcefully expelled the Dutch from Taiwan, the Chinese relationship with the Dutch soured, and junk trade with Batavia stagnated u ­ ntil the Zheng regime capitulated. In 1686, eight junks from Xiamen arrived in Batavia together with three more from other ports in China. Thereafter u ­ ntil 1740, Batavia’s junk trade with China swelled, averaging about twenty junks reaching the Dutch colony annually. A ­ fter 69.  Ibid., 136. 70.  Leonard Blussé, Strange Com­pany: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo W ­ omen, and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Foris, 1986), 115.

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1740, ­because of competition from the British in Southeast Asia and the Dutch East India Com­pany’s own failed policies, Batavia’s junk trade in general stagnated and eventually decline.71 Even so, the number of “green-­headed” Hokkien junks from Xiamen arriving in Batavia remained fairly stable throughout the eigh­teenth ­century. When the Spaniards arrived in Manila in 1570, they discovered that the Chinese had long traded in this part of the Philippines.72 They soon found ­these traders from South Fujian to be invaluable partners during the two and a half centuries of Manila-­Acapulco galleon trade. Beginning in 1565, Spanish trading ships, the so-­called Manila galleons, began ferrying New World silver from Mexico to the Philippines in exchange for prized Chinese goods, such as porcelain, silk, spices, and carved ivory. But instead of sailing to the China coast to trade—­ and hence having to deal with myriad restrictions and harassments by Chinese government officials—­Spanish merchants waited in Manila for Chinese junks to cruise in with the goods that they would then transship to Mexico.73 Participation as intermediaries in the Manila galleon trade was so lucrative for the Hokkien sea traders that neither Spanish massacres of Chinese in Manila nor Chinese imperial ban on maritime trade could arrest their fervor. From the 1570s ­until the fall of the Ming, twenty to forty junks visited Manila annually. Junk trade with Manila slumped for three de­cades ­after Koxinga became the master of the South China Sea. But not surprisingly, the South Fujian‒Manila junk trade revived ­after the Qing conquered Taiwan and restored peace to the southeast coast of China. Barely two years ­after Kangxi rescinded the sea ban, more than twenty-­seven junks called at Manila; the Hokkien junk trade reached its peak when forty-­three junks arrived at Manila in 1709.74 By the eigh­teenth c­ entury, ­there ­were over one thousand junks from Xiamen coasting to Taiwan and vari­ous Chinese ports and another sixty to seventy specializing in trade with Southeast Asia.75 Contrary to popu­lar misconception, this bustling indigenous overseas trade was not adversely affected by Emperor Qianlong’s 1757 decree, which closed all ports other than Canton to Western—­ especially British—­ships. Xiamen’s merchants embarked for Southeast Asia unabated, and ocean junks from Luzon, Batavia, Siam, and Sulu continued to call at the seaport uninterrupted.76 Commerce in Xiamen was so prosperous and its 71. Ibid. 72.  Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in the Philippines,1850–1898 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 3. 73.  Ibid., 4. 74.  Chin, “Junk Trade,” 191. 75.  Chen G., “Qingdai zhongye Xiamen de haishang maoyi”; Akira Matsura, “Qingdai Fujian de haiwai maoyi,” trans. Zheng Zhenman, Zhongguo shehui jingjishi yanjiu, no. 1 (1986): 103. 76.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 59.

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merchants so wealthy that it won the distinction with its moniker the “city of silver” and was even considered by Liang Zhangju (1775–1849), who spent some years of his youth in Xiamen, the finest city in the South.77 By the turn of the nineteenth ­century, the vigor of Xiamen as a trading center began to dissipate. According to Ng Chin-­keong, this was due to a combination of ­factors, including challenges from new trading ports (like Shanghai) and other maritime trading groups (like the Cantonese and the Teochews), rampant smuggling activities that led to the decline of the Xiamen-­Taiwan trade, and the inherent weakness of the Xiamen trading system itself, such as the inability of Xiamen’s merchants to pool their capital and efforts in a more efficient and competitive manner.78 Yet Xiamen’s maritime trade never entered the “dark age” as Skinner posited: When H. Hamilton Lindsay, a supercargo for the British East India Com­ pany, visited Xiamen in 1832 during his survey of Chinese ports, he reported that he “daily saw from ten to twenty large junks of from 300 to 500 tons burthen enter the harbor, laden with rice and sugar.”79 His famous translator, Rev. Charles Gutzlaff, was also impressed with what he saw: “The city is very extensive, and contains at least two hundred thousand inhabitants. All its streets are narrow, the ­temples numerous, and a few large ­houses owned by wealthy merchants. Its excellent harbor has made it, from time immemorial, one of the greatest emporiums of the empire, and one of the most impor­tant markets of Asia.”80 The British ­were rightfully optimistic when they chose Xiamen as one of the new treaty ports in 1842.

Migration Migration before 1843 The history of Hokkien migration parallels that of its trade, since “migration [always] follows trade routes.”81 We know that the maritime activities of Hokkien sea merchants burgeoned in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and t­ here was evidence that during this time, they ­were already sojourning overseas—­some stayed just for the winter (aptly called “staying the winter,” or zhudong) while 77.  Zhou K., Xiamen zhi, 508; Liang Zhangju, Tuian Suibi (Yangzhou: Jiangsu guangling guji ke yin she, 1995), 2b. 78.  Ng C., “South Fukienese Junk Trade,” 309–16. 79.  Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, Letter to the Honorable Viscount Palmerston on British Relations with China (London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street, 1836), 15. 80.  Charles Gutzlaff, Journal of Three Voyages along the Coast of China in 1831, 1832, & 1833, with notices of Siam, Corea, and the Loo-­choo Islands (London: Frederick Westley and A. H. Davis, 1834), 173. 81. Kuhn, Chinese among O ­ thers, 8.

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­ thers resided for years or even de­cades before returning to their native place. The o decision to sojourn could be borne out of necessity, such as ­those who had to wait through the winter for the southwesterly summer monsoon to arrive (around April) to bring them back to China or t­ hose who stayed on for a year or two ­because their goods ­were not moved in time or they had debt still to be collected. Still ­others extended their stay as a calculated move to take advantage of commercial and sometimes po­liti­cal opportunities in the host land. One famous example of the latter choice was the Quanzhou merchant Wang Yuanmao, who went to Champa (south Vietnam) in the late twelfth ­century. ­Because he was fluent in Cham, Wang became a close associate of the king and even married a Champa princess. He stayed in Champa for ten years and returned to Quanzhou with wealth worth a million strings of copper coins.82 The number of Hokkiens participating in overseas trade continued to grow over the centuries, and by the Ming dynasty, the imperial policy of banning overseas travel for all Chinese had the unexpected effect of creating more stable overseas Chinese communities since sojourners who could not return to China immediately ­were forced to prolong their stay in­def­initely.83 By the late sixteenth ­century, overseas Hokkien communities could be found in Nagasaki, Manila, Banten, Batavia, and Malacca, but they ­were prob­ably still small, with no more than a few hundred members each.84 Chinese maritime trade and settlement overseas greatly expanded ­after Eu­ro­ pean colonists appeared in Southeast Asian ­waters. To the early Eu­ro­pean colonists, the Chinese w ­ ere invaluable collaborators who not only acted as the intermediaries in their trade with China but also helped them extract wealth from the indigenous populations. This close relationship with the colonial rulers allowed many Chinese merchants to become prosperous, and they ­were keen to follow on the heels of Eu­ro­pean advances; or as Wang Gungwu characterizes, “It could almost be said that Chinese trade followed Eu­ro­pean flags.”85 By this time, besides Chinese merchants, artisans, laborers, and even farmers too moved to Southeast Asian colonies to ser­v ice the Eu­ro­pean city dwellers and their fellow Chinese sojourners. MA N I L A

Manila was a good example of how the economic opportunities generated by Eu­ro­pean presence had enticed to the colony a continuous stream of Chinese 82.  Chin, “Junk Trade,” 161. 83.  Wang G., “Merchants without Empires,” 94. 84.  James Chin, “Merchants and Other Sojourners: The Hokkien Overseas, 1570–1760” (PhD diss., University of Hong Kong, 1998), 9; Wang G., “Merchants without Empires,” 96. 85.  Wang G., Short History, 25

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emigrants that even bloodshed could not stop. Before the Spanish conquerors arrived in 1570, ­there ­were only about 150 Chinese residing in Manila. In less than two de­cades a­ fter its conversion into a Spanish settlement, the Chinese population in the city r­ ose to 10,000; and by 1603, the Spanish authorities estimated that ­there ­were between 24,000 and 30,000 Chinese u ­ nder their watch, outnumbering the population of Spaniards and Mexicans in the Philippines by more than twenty times.86 But it was in this fateful year of 1603 that the first Spanish massacre of the Chinese occurred. The tragedy happened b ­ ecause the Spaniards w ­ ere fearful of an impending invasion from China ­after three Chinese government officials visited Manila looking for a mountain of gold. As the Spaniards armed themselves, the Chinese in the city revolted, thinking that they w ­ ere planning a preventive massacre. The Spaniards suppressed the rebellion and proceeded to kill the Chinese in Manila, reducing the entire Manila Chinese population by 20,000.87 But such drastic mea­ sures ­were not enough to deter the Chinese from returning to Manila, and they came back in greater number and astonishing speed. In less than three de­cades, the number of Chinese in Manila had apparently grown to the point that when a second massacre befell them in 1639, another 20,000 or more Chinese ­were killed while ­those spared numbered fewer than 10,000.88 The 1603 massacre was the first of six massacres (the other five happened in 1639, 1662, 1696, 1762, and 1820) the Spaniards carried out against the Chinese whenever they felt threatened, and they also conducted several expulsions of Chinese emigrants to try to limit their numbers within manageable range.89 In the early seventeenth ­century, the royal order from Spain was to limit the number of Chinese to 6,000, but that number was never strictly adhered to. Despite the massacres and occasional halfhearted expulsions, the Chinese population in the Philippines still averaged 20,000, of which about half lived in the Manila area.90 ­Because the Chinese presence was essential to the prosperity of the colony, the Spaniards in the Philippines could not keep them away, regardless of how dangerous they believed they might become. The majority of Chinese in the Philippines came from the Xiamen vicinity of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou. Quanzhou natives ­were mostly merchants and businessmen, and their involvement in the China-­Manila junk trade, e­ ither directly or indirectly, was crucial to the success of the Manila galleon trade. ­Those from Zhangzhou, on the other hand, ­were poorer and ­were more likely to perform lower-­income jobs like farmers, carpen86. Wickberg, Chinese in Philippine Life, 6; Chin, “Junk Trade,” 188–89. 87. Wickberg, Chinese in Philippine Life, 10. 88.  Ibid., 11. 89.  Zeng Shaocong, Piaobo yu genzhi: dangdai dongnanya huaren zuqun guanxi yanjiu (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2004), 196–97. 90. Wickberg, Chinese in Philippine Life, 11.

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ter, tailors, boatmen, fishermen, cooks, stonemasons, laborers, and so on in the Philippines.91 However, they came to provide so many dif­fer­ent kinds of ser­ vices in Manila that the Spaniards soon found them to be indispensable. On the eve of the Opium War, ­there ­were around 11,575 Chinese in the Philippines.92 BATAVI A

Like Manila, Batavia was already home to a small Chinese community when the Dutch arrived in 1596. And like in Manila, as the Dutch ­were building up the urban settlement of Batavia from scratch, they too preferred the ser­v ices of the Chinese to the natives as they deemed the Chinese more hardworking and more skilled in construction. The Dutch authority thus pursued a policy of encouraging the immigration of Chinese workers to Batavia, especially, carpenters, lumbermen, and fishermen.93 In 1622, they even took the extreme mea­sure of sailing up the coast of Fujian to kidnap unwary Hokkiens to their Southeast Asian colony, a testament to the value placed on Chinese ­labor. But what was to affect the Chinese population of Batavia even more was the rise of junk trade between Xiamen and Batavia. As intermediary in the China trade, Hokkien junks ferried in the lucrative silk and porcelain that Batavia’s Eu­ ro­pean merchants reexported to Eu­rope. Besides goods, a significant number of Hokkien merchants, petty traders, and peasants accompanied the junks to Batavia, where they stayed and swelled the ranks of the Chinese community. Not surprisingly, the Chinese who went to Batavia came predominantly from the Zhangzhou and Quanzhou areas around Xiamen. In the 1630s, the Chinese population increased by a thousand Hokkiens e­ very year.94 The Chinese population in Batavia continued to grow ­until 1644, when turmoil in China disrupted the Hokkien junk trade. The sojourning community even shrunk ­after the Qing court instituted the draconian coastal depopulation policy in 1661 but regained its trend of growth a­ fter 1684, when overseas trade was again permitted. In 1691, the Chinese in Batavia numbered 5,668, and that number grew to 12,872 in 1730.95 The Chinese community suffered another setback in 1740 with the infamous Batavia massacre, when almost all the Chinese in the city ­were killed.96 Nonetheless, since Emperor Qianlong de­cided not to sanction the Dutch in Batavia, junk trade soon resumed, which brought in new Hokkiens to 91.  Lucille Chia, “The Butcher, the Baker, and the Carpenter: Chinese Sojourners in the Spanish Philippines and Their Impact on Southern Fujian (Sixteenth‒Eigh­teenth Centuries),” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, no. 4 (2006): 515–22. 92. Wickberg, Chinese in Philippine Life, 53. 93. Blussé, Strange Com­pany, 78; Chin, “Merchants and Other Sojourners,” 172–74. 94.  Chin, “Merchants and Other Sojourners,” 178. 95.  Ibid., 187. 96.  Ibid., 203; Blussé, Strange Com­pany, 94–95.

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replenish the city’s depleted Chinese population. By 1750, the Chinese in Batavia numbered 12,255, comparable in size to the population on the eve of the massacre.97 Despite Dutch efforts to limit the number of Chinese, they found the inflow of Chinese hard to contain. By the turn of the nineteenth ­century, ­there ­were close to 40,000 Chinese in Batavia alone.98 TA I WA N

Unlike in Manila and Batavia, Hokkiens did not migrate to Taiwan to take advantage of Eu­ro­pean trade but to help open up the Chinese empire’s new frontier. ­Because the island was thought to be inhabited by cannibalistic savages and rife with deadly tropical diseases, very few Chinese had migrated to Taiwan before the Qing dynasty.99 By the end of the Dutch occupation in the mid-­seventeenth ­century, Taiwan only comprised 100,000 natives and 34,000 Chinese.100 The mass migration of Chinese into Taiwan only began ­after the Zheng ­family wrested control of the island from the Dutch. In 1661, Koxinga led several tens of thousands of his troops onto Taiwan and established it as his new re­sis­tance base. They w ­ ere soon joined by hundreds of thousands of peasants from Fujian and Guangdong, who crossed the Taiwan Strait illegally to join the rebel forces ­after refusing to obey the imperial order to move inland from their coastal homes. During the Zheng era in Taiwan, the number of Han Chinese prob­ably reached 150,000, of which the overwhelming majority ­were South Fujianese from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou.101 With the increased manpower, the Zheng regime was able to double the total land area ­under cultivation in Taiwan compared to that during Dutch rule.102 ­After the Qing reincorporated Taiwan into the empire, it prohibited the migration of Han Chinese to the island for fear that it might reemerge as an anti-­ Qing rebel base. Only itinerant merchants w ­ ere allowed to travel to Taiwan. However, the vast expanse of arable land in Taiwan had become well known to the coastal Chinese so that even imperial prohibition could not prevent them from illicitly relocating en masse to the island to clear frontier land and develop commercial agriculture. By 1700, almost 20 ­percent of the registered residents of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou had migrated to Taiwan;103 by 1732, the tenth year of   97.  Chin, “Merchants and Other Sojourners,” 203.  98. Ibid.   99.  Teng, “Taiwan in the Chinese imagination,” 1. 100.  Shao-­hsing Ch’en, “How the Chinese Came to Taiwan,” ­Free China Review 13 (February 1963): 35; John R. Shepherd, Statecraft and Po­liti­cal Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 7. 101.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 39–40. 102. Xu Xuexia, “MingZheng shiqi hanren zai taiwan de tuozhan,” Tainan wenhua, no. 18 (1984): 217. 103.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 40

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the reign of Yongzheng, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of mainlanders lived on the island.104 ­There is no question that the majority of Fujian emigrants to Taiwan ­were rural, poor p ­ eople from the Zhangzhou and Quanzhou areas.105 As we have noted, Fujian Province was particularly land poor. In 1766, the area of land u ­ nder cultivation was only 1.8 mu per person, well below the 4.0 mu required to sustain an individual. By 1840, land per capita ­under cultivation further decreased to 0.8 mu even though population had continued to increase.106 When the Qing dynasty began its mandate, Fujian Province had no more than 1.4 million inhabitants; a ­century ­later in 1753, the recorded population of Fujian ­rose to 4.7 million; that number continued to rise, and by the time the British men-­of-­war sailed into the Xiamen harbor, Fujian was home to close to 20 million p ­ eople.107 This dramatic rise in population put enormous pressure on the land, and emigration was a surefire way to relieve that pressure. Impoverished emigrants, once they managed to get to Taiwan, Manila, or Batavia, could easily survive working jobs in agriculture, ­labor, crafts, and trade, and remuneration was usually much higher than what they could get in their home villages. ­Those with enough ambition, acumen, and luck, could even hope to one day strike it rich. It thus seems that the driving forces ­behind the exodus of Fujianese fall neatly into the traditional “push” and “pull” ­factors used to explain emigration.108 But as Philip Kuhn has recently reminded us, “Rather than seeing population pressure as a prime mover ‘pushing’ ­people out of the country, we can view the crowded, commercially vibrant cores of early modern China as broad arenas of market relationships in which families learned to respond rationally and deliberately to commercial opportunities.”109 Indeed, the flourishing maritime trade from the sixteenth c­ entury on inspired a highly commercialized society and made the Hokkiens, as the British observed in the nineteenth ­century, more inclined than their peers from other provinces and districts to leave China for job opportunities overseas.110 C HA NG I NG S O C I E TY I N FU J I A N

One of the immediate outcomes of expanded private maritime trade from the sixteenth c­ entury on was the influx of silver into China. By the end of the c­ entury, 104.  Zhuang Guotu, “Haimao yu yimin hudong: 17–18 shiji minnanren yimin haiwai yuanyin fenxi,” Huaqiao huaren lishi yanjiu, no. 1 (2000): 36. 105.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 40. 106.  Guo Songyi, “Qingdai de renkou zengzhang he renkou liuqian,” Qingshi luncong, no. 5 (1984): 105; Zhuang, “Haimai yu yimin hudong,” 30. 107.  Xu X., Fujian Tongshi, 4:546. 108.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 41. 109. Kuhn, Chinese among O ­ thers, 51–52. 110. ­Great Britain Foreign Office, Correspondence with the Superintendent of British Trade in China upon the Subject of Emigration from that Country (London: Harrison, 1853), 10–11.

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a minimum of 3 million pesos, or 8 million kilograms of silver, w ­ ere flowing into China from Manila annually.111 As the end point of the Acapulco-­Manila-­Fujian trade, a significant amount of that silver stayed in the Zhangzhou and Quanzhou Prefectures, which not only created wealth among the Hokkiens but also stimulated the growth and monetization of the local economy. It is true that wealthy Hokkiens made their riches mostly through trade. Nonetheless, they would also invest in land despite its meager return b ­ ecause of the security and prestige associated with land acquisitions. This increased competition for land from the wealthy drove up land prices and made land owning further unattainable for ordinary peasants. The strong demand for land by the peasants, coupled with the increased profitability of cash crops, stimulated the reclamation and opening up of new land for cultivation.112 In Zhangzhou, for example, riverbanks and seaside areas ­were enclosed to create new arable land that was then converted into paddies or plantations for cash crops like sugarcane and tobacco.113 Tobacco, a crop introduced into China from Manila by a Hokkien merchant, became a major cash crop along the Fujian coast in the seventeenth ­century ­after tobacco smoking caught on fairly quickly among the Chinese population. The growing of sugarcane also proliferated in South Fujian (and ­later Taiwan) as Hokkien merchants found profitable markets for it in Japan, Manila, and other parts of Southeast Asia.114 Besides t­hese two major cash crops, fruits like oranges, longans, and lychees, local favorites that w ­ ere preserved and then sold in China and abroad, ­were grown throughout the province.115 The prevalence of cash crop cultivation inevitably put pressure on rice production and rice prices. But t­ hese prob­lems ­were ameliorated by, first, the opening of new land for rice cultivation as mentioned above and, second, the willingness of peasants to sell their harvests instead of keeping them for personal consumption.116 The latter was pos­si­ble ­because poorer peasants ­were satisfied with eating sweet potatoes as a substitute for their favorite staple, thus reducing their own demand for rice. Sweet potato, together with peanuts and maize, w ­ ere New World crops introduced into China via Fujian in the sixteenth c­ entury. Unlike rice, they did not need large amounts of ­water and could be grown easily in poorer soil and even hilly terrains.117 ­These new crops provided supplementary calories for the Fujianese, which not only eased their dependence on rice but also helped support 111. Rawski, Agricultural Change, 76. 112.  Ibid., 77. 113.  Ibid., 78, 73. 114.  Ibid., 66. 115.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 11; Rawski, Agricultural Change, 66. 116. Rawski, Agricultural Change, 51. 117.  Ho Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 186.

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a booming population that increased by more than tenfold over the course of two hundred years during the Qing dynasty. As population increase always outstripped land expansion, peasant families could not depend on the land but had to look beyond agriculture if they w ­ ere to improve their families’ fortunes. One way was to engage in handicraft production, ­either at home as a h ­ ouse­hold industry or to work for specialized workshops. The most common handicrafts made ­were cotton goods, which ­were sold in fairly large quantities. Interestingly, Fujian was ill suited to cotton cultivation. The cotton industry in the province had to rely on sea merchants to ferry in raw cotton from as far as Luzon, which was then spun and weaved into cotton goods for reexport.118 Similarly, Zhangzhou produced silk fabrics that w ­ ere sold nationally, but since local silk threads ­were of inferior quality, Fujian had to rely on the importation of raw silk from Huzhou for pro­cessing.119 The Hokkiens had made use of and benefited from the region’s central position in maritime trade to compete in the more traditional handicraft industries, like cloth and silk weaving. They also created a niche for themselves by utilizing material brought back from Southeast Asia by their fellow Hokkien traders, such as tortoiseshell, ivory, bone, and sandalwood, to make combs, cups, and other items for sale in the local and national markets.120 As Hokkiens became more engaged in maritime trade from the late Ming, an increasing number of local Fujianese also began to participate in commercial activities at home. Evelyn Rawski has noted the rapid increase in the number of periodic markets in Zhangzhou, which she argues is a testament of the ­people’s increased involvement in the new market economy stimulated by foreign trade.121 Another prevalent means whereby the peasants of Fujian adapted to land shortage was through the export of male ­labor.122 As Ng Chin-­keong observes, “Looking for new opportunities beyond the village horizon had become customary for the South Fujianese from the mid-­Ming.”123 Closer to home, they could go to district towns or prefectural cities to work as hired laborers or, a­ fter they acquired the necessary skills, serve as metalworkers, carpenters, tailors, and barbers.124 Still ­others began to learn the ropes of trade by working as shop assistants or peddlers of goods.125 In the seventeenth ­century, Fujianese ­were also reported to have traveled to Zhejiang Province and Chengdu and Chongqing in Sichuan Province to 118. Rawski, Agricultural Change, 74. 119. Ibid. 120.  Ibid., 73. 121.  Ibid., 69–71. 122. Kuhn, Chinese among O ­ thers, 14. 123.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 38. 124. Ibid. 125.  Ibid.; Kuhn, Chinese among ­Others, 14–15.

40 CHAPTER 1

engage in agriculture and trade.126 Of course, the furthest the Hokkiens traveled to improve their lot ­were destinations overseas. According to Xie Zhaozhe, a Fujian native during the late Ming, as many as half of the Fujianese population earned their living outside their home village.127 To be sure, during the Qing dynasty, “domestic population movements w ­ ere 128 even larger in scope than t­ hose overseas.” As Philip Kuhn observes, Chinese external migration was an overseas extension of a pro­cess that started within the country, and domestic movements trained and prepared Chinese to survive, or even thrive, overseas. In Kuhn’s words, “As communities adapted to land shortage through ­labor export and commerce, the southern coastal regions became a ­great school for emigrants by nurturing migration skills within the homeland itself. For millions of Chinese families, life had come to include commerce and mobility.”129 Internal and external migrations thus ­were aspects of the same social-­historical pro­cess. Indeed, the development of maritime trade during the three centuries before the Opium War geared the coastal Fujianese ­toward commerce and unbound them from the land. More importantly, peasants in the region ­were instilled with an awareness to use mobility—­the possibilities of g­ oing to the next district, prefectural cities, frontier Taiwan, or colonial cities in Southeast Asia—as strategies to maximize income not only for oneself but for the f­amily as well.130 Hence, when the era of mass emigration began, Fujianese w ­ ere not only better equipped to go overseas than Chinese from other provinces but more inclined to do so as well.

Migration as Business From the late Ming, Xiamen served as the chief port for Hokkien maritime activities, which stimulated the commercial growth of its hinterlands in Zhangzhou and Quanzhou and encouraged the movement of peasants from villages to urban centers, including Xiamen itself.131 Xiamen was also the meeting place for potential emigrants waiting to board one of the junks heading to an overseas destination. It was common practice for merchant junks to bring along immigrant passengers to augment their profit. In his 1727 memorial to Emperor Yongzheng, for example, Gao Qizhuo, governor-­general of Fujian and Zhejiang, deplored the 126.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 39. 127.  Xie Zhaozhe, Wu Zazhu, cited in Ng C., Trade and Society, 12. 128.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 38. 129. Kuhn, Chinese among ­Others, 52. 130. G. William Skinner, “Mobility Strategies in Late Imperial China: A Regional Systems Analy­sis,” in Regional Analy­sis, vol. 1 of Economic Systems, ed. Carol A. Smith (New York: Academia Press, 1976), 327–64. 131. Kuhn, Chinese among ­Others, 35.

Defining Xiamen

41

fact that junk captains would smuggle two to three hundred emigrants on top of their officially declared number of crew and merchants, and charged each of ­these illegal passengers—­who, in Gao’s view, had no intention of returning to China—­ upward of eight taels of silver for the voyage. According to Governor-­General Gao, so lucrative ­were such illegal activities that junks would only carry a moderate amount of goods but packed the decks with t­ hese no-­good loafers.132 One extreme and unfortunate example of such illegal transport of passengers was the merchant junk Tek Sing, which set sail from Xiamen to Batavia in 1822. The Tek Sing was a three-­masted oceangoing junk with typical Fujianese design: it had a flat-­belly, squared-­off bow brightly painted green (the official color of Xiamen junks) and stern rising high out of the ­water. It was also big, one of the largest of its kind: the Tek Sing was approximately fifty meters long, ten meters wide, and had a gross burden of well over a thousand tons.133 It was well suited to traverse the familiar trade routes between South China and Southeast Asia. When the Tek Sing departed Xiamen on January 14, 1822, its cargo holds w ­ ere already carefully loaded with over 300,000 pieces of porcelain and a cornucopia of merchandise, including teas, raw silk and nankeens, lacquerware, bamboo furniture, writing paper, umbrellas, vermillion, glass beads, Chinese pharmacopoeia, and so on.134 More significantly, besides its 200 crew members, in excess of 1,600 emigrants, including men, w ­ omen, and c­ hildren aged between six and seventy, crowded its decks.135 The Tek Sing thus set sail with a full belly of goods and over 1,800 ­people on board. Along its way to Batavia, the Tek Sing was joined by a smaller redheaded junk from Canton, which also had immigrants on board, but only 198 in total.136 As the two junks headed t­ oward Batavia, the captain of the Tek Sing made a fateful decision to deviate from the customary practice of hugging the coastline and stayed out in the ­middle of the ocean. It hit the Belvidere Reef as it neared Batavia and sunk. Of all the p ­ eople on board, fewer than two hundred w ­ ere saved by ships close to the wreck, while the rest, more than sixteen hundred of them, perished together with the Tek Sing.137 ­Because of the ­great loss of life with the sinking of the Tek Sing, some observers have memorably called it the “Titanic of the East.”138 But for the purposes of 132.  National Palace Museum, Yongzheng Zhupi Yuzhi (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1980), 46: 27a. 133.  Nigel Pickford and Michael Hatcher, The Legacy of Tek Sing: China’s Titanic; Its Tragedy and Its Trea­sure (Cambridge: Granta Editions, 2000), 13, 22. 134.  Ibid., 17–18. 135.  Ibid., 22. 136.  Ibid., 35. 137.  Ibid., 91. 138.  Mfame Team, “Tek Sing: The Titanic of the East,” Mfame (website), April 8, 2016, http://­ mfame​.­guru​/­tek​-­sing​-­the​-­titanic​-­of​-­the​-­east​/­.

42 CHAPTER 1

this book, the Tek Sing incident in the early nineteenth ­century fully illustrates the scale of the maritime trade conducted out of Xiamen at the time, the number of potential Hokkien immigrants who ­were ready to go abroad, and the fact that the South Fujian port was more than capable of organ­izing and sending them overseas. Xiamen, in many ways, was well positioned to assume its expanded role with its opening as a treaty port.

2 OPENING FOR BUSINESS Xiamen as a Treaty Port ­ fter the Opium War, we have opened up for trade a country so vast A “that all the mills of Lancashire could not make stocking stuff sufficient for one of its provinces.” —­Sir Henry Pottinger

In the port of Amoy (Xiamen), the Chinese Merchants transact to a ­great extent their own business, without having recourse to the Foreign Merchant as intermediary. They appreciate more and more the advantage of employing Foreign to Native craft, and they learn at the same time to dispense with Foreign assistance. —­China Maritime Customs, “Amoy Trade Report for the Year 1865”

It should come as no surprise that the British plenipotentiary in China, Sir Henry Pottinger, would be exceedingly optimistic with the prospects of commerce a­ fter the Opium War; ­after all, he was the one who negotiated the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, which effectively ended the long maligned Canton system that Western merchants believed was the obstacle that prevented them full access to the market of 300 million. But as the trade report of Xiamen in the epigraph reveals, Westerners did not necessarily have t­ hings their way even with the new treaty port system. It is true that the intensified trading activities of Western merchants ­after the Opium War did have a huge impact on the commerce of China, especially in the treaty ports themselves. Opium sale—­conspicuously not mentioned in the treaty that ended the Opium War—to China continued to increase till the end of the ­century; foreign steamers gradually displaced native junks as the preferred means of conveyance for coastal and maritime shipping; and new items like kerosene, flour, and matchsticks became essential parts of Chinese everyday life. But at the same time, the British w ­ ere not able to sell the Chinese as many manufactured goods as Pottinger anticipated, and even in areas where Western products ­were able to find a much more welcoming market, Western merchants ­were still dismayed that their profits had been seriously undermined by Chinese competitors. In Xiamen especially, Western merchants had found it to be a “particularly 43

44 CHAPTER 2

tough” market,1 and as the historian Rhoads Murphey observes, Chinese merchants ­were more than capable of meeting and beating the foreigners at the game of commerce on their home tuft.2

Xiamen as a Treaty Por t Xiamen was officially opened as a treaty port on November 2, 1843, a­ fter the arrival of its first British consul, Captain Henry Gribble, a week before. The British soon discovered that they might have overestimated the prosperity of Xiamen and overlooked the fact that the port was already in decline: in 1849, then British consul T. H. Layton reported that while Xiamen used to own 10 large and 243 small junks in the early 1830s; that number had since reduced to 83 in total ­after the opening of the port.3 Nonetheless, the original sanguinity they had with making inroads into the Xiamen market seemed to pan out initially: within two years of Xiamen’s opening, the British firms of Tait & Co. and Boyd & Co. both set up their merchant ­houses in the treaty port, and they ­were soon followed by over twenty other British concerns and a number of foreign firms from the United States, Germany, Spain, and Denmark. By 1850, more than thirty merchant ­houses had established a foothold in Xiamen, and their office buildings, ware­houses, and harbors crowded the small strip of land by the oceanfront directly opposite the islet of Gulangyu, which the British eventually acquired as its concession on the island. Owning more than two-­thirds of all foreign merchant h ­ ouses, the British dominated the foreign trade in Xiamen and increased their trade value through the port by six times in less than ten years (see t­ able 1). But British trade at Xiamen was not all smooth sailing even during this early period. The main articles of import ­were “Indian cotton, cotton twist, long cloths of En­glish and American manufacture, and opium,”4 but in their mad rush to exploit the Chinese market, foreign merchants, in Xiamen as in Shanghai and the other treaty ports, flooded the market with more goods than they could sell. As the American consul in Xiamen remarked in 1850, “the demand for cotton fabrics . . . ​seems to have suffered a permanent check, as well at this port as at Canton and Shanghai. Large slocks [sic] of American sheetings, shirtings, and drills have accumulated, which cannot be disposed of at remunerating prices.”5 Foreign mer1.  Reports on Trade, 1883, 5. Quoted in Cook, “Bridges to Modernity,” 80. 2.  Murphey, “Treaty Ports,” 35. 3.  T. H. Layton to Sir George Bonham, no. 2 (January 13, 1849), in FO 663/54. Cited in Ng C., “South Fukienese Junk Trade,” 314. 4.  Robert Fortune, Three Years’ Wandering in the Northern Provinces of China (London: J. Murray, 1847), 25. 5.  Jules Davids, American Diplomatic and Public Papers: The United States and China (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1979), series 1, 20:20–21.



Opening for Business

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­TABLE 1  Sino-­British Trade in Xiamen, 1843–1852 (unit: silver dollars) YEAR

IMPORTS

EXPORTS

TOTAL

1843–1844

372,272

58,209

380,481

1845

680,741

71,439

752,180

1846

775,085

38,938

814,023

1847

829,652

32,948

862,600

1848

381,949

67,467

449,416

1849

1,136,427

209,065

1,345,492

1850

1,049,180

220,167

1,269,347

1852

1,933,500

268,500

2,202,000

Note: It should be noted that the volume of trade in the ­table represented perhaps merely half of all trade ­going on as smuggling, particularly by foreign ships, was rampant at Xiamen. Stanley Fowler Wright, China’s Strug­gle for Tariff Autonomy, 1843–1938 (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1938), 57; John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 347–50. Source: Dai Yifeng, Quyuxing jingji fazhan yu shehui bianqian: Yi jindai Fujian diqu wei zhongxin (Changsha, Hunan: Yuelu shushe, 2004), 305.

chandise piled up in the city without an outlet, forcing some docked vessels to depart for other ports without even offloading their contents.6 Trade expansion was thus stifled in the 1850s and did not regain substantial development ­until a­ fter the Second Opium War (1856–1860).7 Figure 1 shows the amount of foreign trade passing though Xiamen from 1865 to 1911. As we can see, from around 1870 onward, ­there was a general increase in foreign import into the city, owing in large part to an increase in the consumption of opium and cotton piece goods and new products like kerosene oil, flour, matches, and metal.8

Cotton Besides opium, cotton and cotton products ­were the other major items perennially on Xiamen’s import list. As mentioned in chapter 1, the rural h ­ ouse­hold weaving industry proliferated in South Fujian during the mid-­Ming. But ­because Fujian Province was ill suited for cotton cultivation, Hokkien merchants had to travel as far as Luzon to procure the required raw material.9 In the early years of the treaty port, the raw cotton consumed in South Fujian was primarily native cotton from Shanghai and Ningbo. Indian cotton began to make incursions into Xiamen in 6.  Dai Yifeng, “Wukou tongshang shiqi de Fujian duiwai maoyi,” in Quyuxing jingji fazhan yu shehui bianqian, 375. 7. Ibid. 8.  Opium trade became l­egal at Xiamen when the Qing began taxing its import in 1858. See Li Gui, Yapian Shilue (Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1991). 9. Rawski, Agricultural Change, 74.

46 CHAPTER 2

16,000,000 14,000,000

Trade value

12,000,000 10,000,000 8,000,000 6,000,000 4,000,000 2,000,000 0 1860

1870

1880

1890 Year Export

1900

1910

1920

Import

FIGURE 1.  Xiamen’s foreign trade from 1865 to 1911 (unit: 1865–1867, taels; 1868 and a ­ fter, Haikwan taels) Source: Graph drawn from data in Xiamen shizhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, ed., Jindai Xiamen shehui jingji gaikuang (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1990), 430–33.

the 1860s, capturing a portion of the market with its relative low price. T ­ able 2 shows the amount of foreign cotton imported into Xiamen from 1865 to 1880. From the ­table, we can see that the quantity of foreign raw cotton imported into Xiamen fluctuated considerably. This was due to the fact that South Fujian weavers still preferred native cotton to foreign cotton, and the variation in native cotton production directly affected the amount of foreign cotton import.10 A case in point was when ­there was a cotton crop failure in Shanghai in 1875.11 In response, Xiamen merchants imported a larger quantity of foreign cotton (up from 3,406 piculs in 1875 to 17,417 piculs in 1876) to make up for the 9,561 piculs decrease in native cotton import during the affected year. ­After native cotton resumed its regular supply in 1877, foreign cotton import fell back to only 5,958 piculs that year. Another ­factor that directly affected the importation of foreign raw cotton was the price of foreign cotton yarn.12 When prices of En­glish (and ­later Indian) cotton yarn dropped, its importation increased and consequently demand for foreign raw cotton abated. In 1868, for example, the price of foreign cotton yarn dropped by nearly fifty dollars a bale, thus making it eco­nom­ical for Chinese 10.  China Maritime Customs (hereafter CMC), “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1877,” in Reports on Trade at the Treaty Ports, for the Year 1877 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1878), 183. 11.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1875,” in Reports on Trade at the Treaty Ports in China, for the Year 1875 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1876), 242. 12.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1877,” 183.



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­TABLE 2  Cotton Import into Xiamen, 1865–1880 (unit: piculs) YEAR

FOREIGN COTTON

NATIVE COTTON

FOREIGN COTTON YARN

1865

46,377

—­

3,936

1866

63,319

45,408

3,711

1867

82,082

36,631

7,271

1868

42,734

21,002

13,793

1869

10,900

24,250

10,235

1870

19,020

20,631

15,724

1871

37,683

24,874

17,940

1872

6,366

36,170

10,611

1873

10,367

42,113

14,658

1874

2,638

65,626

19,634

1875

3,406

35,090

26,108

1876

17,417

25,529

24,783

1877

5,958

39,394

33,223

1878

3,666

29,264

23,059

1879

15,192

29,204

24,354

1880

6,468

30,794

31,158

Source: China Maritime Customs, “Amoy Trade Report,” in Reports on Trade at the Treaty Ports in China (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs), vari­ous years. For native cotton imports for the years 1866, 1867, 1868, 1869, and 1871, see Liu Liangshan, “Jindai Xiamen duiwai maoyi fazhan yanjiu 1862–1911: Yi linian Xiamen haiguan maoyi tongji baogao wei zhongxin” (MA thesis, Xiamen University, 2008), 119.

weavers to buy ready-­made cotton yarn for their manufactures rather than making their own yarn from raw material. But it should be noted that the increase in cotton yarn importation was primarily at the expense of foreign cotton import and less so for native cotton. This was ­because regular Chinese buyers preferred a strong, wearing cloth; Chinese weavers thus had very l­imited use for fine but delicate En­glish yarn.13 Instead, they would import certain quantities of coarse quality Indian cotton (“Bombay No. 20”), which they then combined with locally produced native yarn—­the former was used for the warp and the latter for the woof—to manufacture a new type of native cloth that proved to be a “formidable rival . . . ​to the products of the Manchester looms.”14 Or as the En­glish mission to China from Blackburn, Lancashire conceded in 1896–1897, “No doubt the common shirtings are being superseded by native cloth woven by hand from imported yarn, and for this ­there seems no help.”15 13.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1878,” in Reports on Trade at the Treaty Ports, for the Year 1878 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1879), 237. 14.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1870,” in Reports on Trade at the Treaty Ports in China, for the Year 1870 (Shanghai: Printed at the Customs Press, 1871), 92. 15.  Blackburn Chamber of Commerce, Report of the Mission to China of the Blackburn Chamber of Commerce, 1896–7: F. S. A. Bourne’s Section (Blackburn: North-­east Lancashire Press, 1898), 36.

48 CHAPTER 2

The Chinese preference for cheap, durable clothing also explained the disappointing sales of manufactured cotton piece goods in Xiamen. From Xiamen’s opening as a treaty port ­until 1880, only three years—1875, 1877, and 1878—­ saw the import of cotton piece goods exceed 200,000 pieces;16 for most years, they fell below 150,000 pieces.17 George Hughes, who estimated that the population of Xiamen’s hinterland exceeded 4 million ­people, lamented the situation in his trade report of 1872: “During the most prosperous years for trade the importation of cotton piece goods has always appeared to me to be singularly small for what should be the wants of the population in this region, if we manufacture the article they require.”18 Hughes’s concluding remark was depressing but insightful. Indeed, the reasons En­glish cotton products did not sell as well in Xiamen was not b ­ ecause the Chinese ­were averse to new and foreign products; nor was it ­because they could not afford them. Rather, the Chinese did not take to En­glish cotton goods simply b ­ ecause they w ­ ere not what they required. Chinese peasants and workers needed coarse, strong cloth, and they found the En­glish manufacture to be too soft and delicate to withstand the harshness of their daily routine. The “neater, but less durable and far more expensive” machine-­made En­glish products ­were worn exclusively by Chinese “hong clerks, the bookkeepers and shop­keep­ers.”19 Moreover, when compared to native cloths, even though English-­ made cloths might be cheaper per unit by length, they ­were significantly more expensive per unit by weight since they ­were so finely made.20 Considering both durability and price, it is no small won­der then that money-­conscious Chinese in South Fujian would still prefer native cloths to foreign imports.

Flour Flour was another foreign import that found an amiable market in Xiamen. Xiamen’s imported flour came primarily from the United States. The Maritime Customs’ trade report of 1866 explained its popularity thus: “California flour . . . ​arrives ­here in considerable quantities by Steamers from Hong Kong. The Chinese use it principally in the manufacture of Vermicelli, which is much consumed in this and the surrounding country. In quality the California flour excels that of Amoy, and it is cheaper, so ­there is a very fair chance of the continuation and success of this 16.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1879,” in Reports on Trade at the Treaty Ports, for the Year 1879 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1880), 193. 17.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1872,” in Reports on Trade at the Treaty Ports in China, for the Years 1871–1872 (Shanghai: Imperial Maritime Customs Statistical Department, 1874), 175. 18. Ibid. 19.  Nathan A. Pelcovits, Old China Hands and the Foreign Office (New York: King’s Crown Press for American Institute of Pacific Relations, 1948), 17. 20.  Murphey, “Treaty Ports,” 28.



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new enterprise.”21 Indeed, Xiamen’s flour import showed a steady increase from the 1870s to the end of the ­century: Xiamen imported 1,081 piculs in 1873, 5,919 piculs in 1897, 14,943 piculs in 1885, and 98,898 piculs in 1898.22 Between 1899 and 1911, Xiamen imported the largest quantity of flour among the vari­ous treaty ports.23

Kerosene and Matches Kerosene and matches ­were two “modern” introductions that found significant success in Xiamen and China. The con­ve­nience and benefits of matches over ­earlier means of fire starting ­were easy for the everyman to appreciate. Matches from Eu­rope ­were first imported into Xiamen in the 1860s, and although the quantity imported gradually increased, it was still modest before 1880, never exceeding 50,000 grosses annually. A ­ fter 1880, the importation of matches experienced a sharp increase, reaching 174,902 grosses in 1885, three times the amount imported in 1879.24 Imports continued to rise thereafter: 270,279 grosses in 1887, 623,335 grosses in 1898, and 734,850 grosses in 1907.25 It is noteworthy that a­ fter the First Sino-­Japanese War in 1895, Japa­nese matches began to dominate the market in Xiamen, constituting over 98 ­percent of all items imported.26 Similarly, the sale of kerosene in Xiamen had a sluggish start a­ fter its introduction in the 1860s. The amount of kerosene imported in 1870 was only 153 gallons; and even though demand for American Standard Oil’s product gradually increased ­toward the end of the de­cade, import of kerosene still fell far short of 20,000 gallons a year.27 However, kerosene importation shot up a­ fter foreign merchants ­adopted more aggressive sale techniques in the 1880s—­they hired Chinese representatives to give away kerosene lamps (already filled with a sample supply of kerosene) to residents in Xiamen’s hinterland as a way to advertise and pop­ul­ar­ize the new fuel. Chinese users could then experience for themselves the

21.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1866,” in Reports on Trade at the Treaty Ports in China, for the Year 1866 (Shanghai: Printed at the Customs’ Press, 1867), 34. 22.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report,” vari­ous years. 23.  Xiamen liangshiju, Xiamen liangshi zhi, 43. 24.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1879”; CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1885,” in Returns of Trade and Trade Reports for the Year 1885 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1886). 25.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1887,” in Returns of Trade and Trade Reports for the Year 1887 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1888); CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1907,” in Returns of Trade and Trade Reports for the Year 1907 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1908). 26.  Liu Liangshan, “Jindai Xiamen duiwai maoyi fazhan yanjiu 1862–1911: Yi linian Xiamen haiguan maoyi tongji baogao wei zhongxin” (MA thesis, Xiamen University, 2008), 54. 27.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1870.”

50 CHAPTER 2

efficiency of the kerosene lamps, which burned only one-­sixth as much fuel as the traditional plant-­oil-­based lamps.28 The strategy apparently worked as kerosene import increased dramatically in the last two de­cades of the nineteenth c­ entury: in 1885, kerosene import totaled 125,280 gallons and reached 3.19 million gallons in 1905, representing a twenty-­ five-­times increase in twenty years.29 By the late nineteenth ­century, Standard Oil was no longer the sole supplier of kerosene in Xiamen. Rus­sian kerosene imported by an En­glish trading firm and Sumatran kerosene imported by the Dutch competed with US kerosene and even outsold it in the Xiamen market.30

Metal Xiamen imported a ­limited quantity of metal to support its vari­ous industries. Among metals, the most significant imports ­were lead and tin—­lead was used to manufacture the lead linings of the boxes in which tea was packed, while tin was primarily used to make the piece of metal sheen adhered to joss paper.31 As one might expect, as a packaging material for tea chests, the requirement for lead waxed and waned along with the fortune of tea export in the treaty port. When tea trade was flourishing, Xiamen consistently took in in excess of 10,000 piculs of lead annually; but as tea trade slumped ­after 1895, lead import fell to less than 2,000 piculs a year. Coincidentally, Xiamen also imported the greatest amount of tin before the First Sino-­Japanese War, reaching 10,000 piculs in a year but decreasing to 4,000 to 7,000 piculs thereafter.32 It is in­ter­est­ing to note that Xiamen also imported a significant amount of old iron (i.e., scrap metal sal­vaged from wreckage or condemned ships) from Singapore, Java, Siam, Manila, and Saigon, which was then reworked by local blacksmiths into agricultural and domestic implements.33 As H. E. Hobson, the commissioner of customs at Xiamen, insightfully noted: “The introduction of this material from a distance proves how keen the Natives are as money-­makers, how no opportunities likely to prove remunerative is missed; and again, as the same old material was imported almost entirely by steamers, to what low rates competition has reduced 28.  Liu L., “Jindai Xiamen duiwai maoyi fazhan yanjiu,” 55. 29.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1885”; CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1907.” 30.  Sherman Cochran, Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japa­nese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 25. In 1898, for example, a total of 2,657,126 gallons of kerosene was imported into Xiamen. Only 580,090 gallons came from Standard Oil, while the rest w ­ ere Rus­sian and Sumatran kerosene. CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1898,” in Returns of Trade and Trade Reports for the Year 1898 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1899). 31.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1870.” 32.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report,” vari­ous years. 33.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1879,” 195.



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freights in the Eastern seas. Twenty years back such freight would have been rejected as hardly fit for a venerable Siam ship or a converted junk, much less for a steamer.”34 Two points to take away from our short descriptions of Xiamen’s foreign trade and imports follow. First, while the proliferation of foreign imports seems to vindicate the common impression of the treaty ports as sites for foreign economic exploitation in China, Xiamen certainly was not the dumping ground for Western industrial products. As we have seen, Xiamen’s merchants and consumers ­were active participants in foreign trade. They took advantage of selective foreign introductions to improve their lives or finances but willfully rejected t­ hose they deemed unsatisfactory. Second, the Western commercial community in Xiamen had not been able to reap the full benefit of the growing Chinese taste for foreign goods and expand their influence in the treaty port as anticipated. This observation is supported by the fact that Westerners’ influence and presence in the treaty port had shrunk over time. In 1880, ­there ­were only 24 foreign firms left in Xiamen, far outnumbered by Chinese ­wholesale ­houses, of which ­there ­were 183.35 Not surprisingly, the reason foreign merchants in Xiamen w ­ ere stifled was b ­ ecause of fierce competition from their Chinese counter­parts.

Competition from Chinese Merchants In contrast to Shanghai, where Chinese-­foreigner collaboration in business ventures was not uncommon, Xiamen’s Chinese merchants had a much more rivalrous relationship with foreign merchants, tending to circumvent and undermine the newcomers’ involvement in the city’s trade to reap the benefits for themselves.36 Foreign merchants might have come to Xiamen with merchandise and money, but they w ­ ere nonetheless dependent on the Chinese to distribute their goods to the port city’s hinterland—­which “embrace[d] an area of about 15,100 square miles, containing 20 prefectural, sub-­prefectural, and district cities, innumerable towns, and literally thousands of villages and hamlets,” and a population of over 4 million ­people in the second half of the nineteenth c­ entury.37 To facilitate trade, foreign merchant ­houses would allow their Chinese partners to acquire merchandise from them on credit, with the expectation that the 34. Ibid. 35.  Cecil A. V. Bowra, “Amoy,” in Twentieth ­Century Impressions of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Other Treaty Ports of China, ed. Arnold Wright (London: Llyod’s Greater Britain, 1908), 820. 36.  For examples of Sino-­foreign collaborations in businesses in Shanghai, see K. C. Liu, Anglo-­ British Steamships Rivalry in China, 1862–1874 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 37.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1872,” 175.

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money owed would be repaid with a commission a­ fter an agreed period, usually three months. In 1872, when foreign merchants de­cided to curtail the system of credit, their Chinese buyers put up passive re­sis­tance by buying from them just enough to satisfy their immediate needs. For the rest of their business, t­hese Chinese merchants would make trips to Hong Kong to buy their supplies at cash prices and import them in small parcels back to Xiamen, thus bypassing Xiamen’s foreign merchants as intermediaries.38 Only ­after foreign merchant h ­ ouses ­were forced to reinstate the credit system did Chinese merchants resume buying from them. Through their actions, Xiamen’s merchants made a strong statement that they ­were equals—or might even have the upper hand—in their business relationships with foreigners in the treaty port. That Chinese merchants could stand up against the incursion of the better-­funded Westerners owed a g­ reat deal to their business acumen, their correct reading of the evolving trading environment of China, a successful traditional network they could call on, and, ironically, the conversion from junk traffic to modern steamship.

Steamships With a deep harbor and easy access, Xiamen became a regular port of call for foreign ships ­after its opening as a treaty port. By the ­middle of the 1860s, ­there ­were already six steamers that formed a regular line between Hong Kong, Swatow (Shantou), Xiamen, and Fuzhou. In 1867, although ­there ­were still more junks than steamships entering Xiamen, steamships constituted more tonnage than junks for the first time; ­after 1874, steamships outstripped native junks in both number and tonnage, and the gap between the two continued to widen ­until 1886 when steamships constituted as high as 93 ­percent of the aggregate tonnage for that year.39 ­After 1880, at least seven major shipping companies—­including Douglas Lapraik & Co., Butterfield & Swire, the overseas Chinese-­owned Bun Hin, the Netherlands India Steamship Com­pany, the Glen line, the Blue Funnel line, and China’s own China Merchants’ Steamship Navigation Com­pany—­ provided steam vessels that connected Xiamen with its traditional trading partners along China’s coast, as well as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and colonial ports in Southeast Asia. ­There is no question that the steamship was one of the most impor­tant and successful foreign introductions to China during the treaty port era. While it is true that steamships caused the demise of the native junk shipping industry a­ fter they overtook native junks to become the preferred mode of transportation for 38.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1874,” in Reports on Trade at the Treaty Ports in China, for the Year 1874 (Shanghai: Imperial Maritime Customs Statistical Department, 1875), 148. 39.  Dai Y., Quyuxing jingji fazhan yu shehui bianqian, 331.



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trade and passengers in China, it is however impor­tant to note that Chinese merchants benefitted from the new technology as much as, if not more so, than Western merchants in China. Compared with traditional junks, Chinese merchants welcomed the increased speed, regularity, and safety that steamships offered; moreover, steamships also provided the additional security of maritime insurance, which Chinese merchants insisted on from the 1860s.40 So enamored with steamships ­were Xiamen’s merchants that in addition to long-­distant oceanic trade between Xiamen and vari­ous Eu­ro­pean countries and the United States, they also employed steamships in the coastal trade of native products. In 1880 alone, they made 159 charters for their trade with northern Chinese ports.41 As previously mentioned, competition among steamship companies had lowered freight rates so much that Xiamen’s merchants even found it remunerative to import scrap metal from Southeast Asia.42 This availability of cheap transportation gave them the flexibility to explore alternative sources of supply beyond Xiamen, especially from Hong Kong. A round-­trip ticket on a steam vessel to Hong Kong in 1870 was $15, a fare low enough for Xiamen’s merchants to consider it worthwhile to personally make their purchases in Hong Kong and accompany them back. Hence, even though the import of foreign goods into Xiamen continued to rise, foreign merchants frequently complained of the “falling off of trade” as the greater part of this business—­including the importation of cotton piece goods, tin, cotton yarn, and even opium, which used to be monopolized by foreign merchants—­had fallen into the hands of the Chinese.43

Opium The case of opium is particularly illuminating as it fully demonstrates the extent of the Chinese merchants’ trading networks and their resourcefulness in responding to changing politico-­economic situations. Jardine, Matheson & Co., the opium trading ­giant in China, had been selling opium along China’s coast since the 1820s. In 1852, the firm dispatched a permanent representative to Xiamen to drum up opium business at the port. But as Jardine’s agents quickly found out, Xiamen was already replete with opium that Chinese merchants had bought directly from dealers on Lintin Island near Canton. The agents also complained that Chinese opium dealers often undersold them, even occasionally “selling opium u ­ nder

40.  Commercial Report of Tientsin, 1862–64, cited in Yao Xianhao, Zhongguo jindai duiwai maoyishi ziliao, 1840–1895 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1962), 1407. 41.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1880,” in Reports on Trade at the Treaty Ports in China, for the Year 1880 (Shanghai: Imperial Maritime Customs Statistical Department, 1881), 216. 42.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1879,” 194. 43.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1870,” 84.

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Hong Kong rates.” And despite their best efforts, they repeatedly failed to “keep the Chinese out” of the opium trade.44 ­After the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), Xiamen’s foreign opium traders experienced a further setback when the local likin tax—­a tax on goods in transit—­ that was doubled in 1864 to help finance the retaking of Zhangzhou City from the Taiping rebels was never reverted.45 Consequently, likin duties w ­ ere disproportionately heavier at Xiamen than at, for example, the nearby port of Swatow, which had also been opened as a treaty port in 1858. In 1870, the likin tax for one chest (133.5 pounds) of opium was about 80 Haikwan taels at Xiamen, while that for the same amount at Swatow in Guangdong Province was less than 15 Haikwan taels. Consuming centers in Xiamen’s hinterland that erstwhile drew their supplies from the port city began to abandon it for places they could get the drug cheaper, even ­after transport cost had been factored in. For example, Zhangzhou City, merely 30 miles away and easily accessible by ­water, no longer bought from Xiamen but preferred instead to import its stock overland from Swatow, some 120 miles away.46 Swatow’s opium merchants not only cornered the markets in Xiamen’s hinterland; they also made inroads into the city itself. In 1874, of the 5,410.64 piculs of opium officially imported into Xiamen by foreign firms, only 2,370.09 piculs w ­ ere consumed locally while the rest had to be reexported to other ports, most notably Taiwan. Considering the fact that ­there ­were six hundred opium shops in Xiamen averaging more than fifty customers a day, the quantity of imported opium sold was thus vastly disproportionate to requirement.47 The rest of what Xiamen’s smokers puffed away that year, in the estimation of the customs ­house, was predominantly Swatow opium brought in clandestinely by Chinese merchants. Eu­ro­pean firms w ­ ere so depressed with the negative impact of the likin tax—­“a local deadweight which [clogged] the wheel of pro­gress,” as J. Alex Man, the acting commissioner of customs condemned—­that they gradually gave up the importation of opium into Xiamen.48 Besides opium, other foreign commodities could also be purchased a few miles inland of Xiamen at prices lower than what the port’s retail dealers asked for. Like44.  Cited in Hao Yen-­ping, The Commercial Revolution in Nineteenth-­Century China: The Rise of Sino-­Western Mercantile Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 193. 45.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1868,” in Reports on Trade at the Treaty Ports in China, for the Year 1868 (Shanghai: Printed at the Customs’ Press, 1869), 69. On October 14, 1864, remnants of the Taiping rebels came south ­after the fall of Nanjing and captured the city of Zhangzhou. Subsequently, the Chinese authorities raised the local likin tax in the name of helping to finance the imperial troops to oust the rebels. The Taiping rebels occupied Zhangzhou u ­ ntil April 16, 1865. Bowra, “Amoy,” 819. 46.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1870,” 97. 47.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1874,” 149; CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1870,” 87. 48.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1870,” 88. Citation from CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1867,” in Reports on Trade at the Treaty Ports in China, for the Year 1867 (Shanghai: Printed at the Customs’ Press, 1868), 72.



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wise, likin was the determining f­ actor. Swatow did not collect any likin on imported goods other than opium, and even Fuzhou had a much lower likin rate than Xiamen—­for example, while Xiamen charged 42 cents apiece for En­glish cotton drill in 1873, Fuzhou only charged 7 cents.49 The discrepancies in likin more than covered the expenses for the overland conveyance of goods, and despite their proximity to the island, districts immediately north and south of Xiamen acquired their supplies instead from Fuzhou and Swatow respectively. Xiamen’s foreign import was given a lifeline when the transit pass system—an arrangement whereby goods to be transported inland would pay no likin ­after a “half-­tariff duty” was collected at the port—­was resurrected in 1874.50 Chinese merchants ­were initially forbidden to acquire transit passes, but the prohibition was soon ignored.51 An increasingly large number of passes ­were issued to Chinese merchants who ­were mainly responsible for sending foreign goods into the interior. According to the Imperial Maritime Customs, by 1885, “The greater part of the Import trade and all the Export trade [in Xiamen], except the Tea business, are in the hands of Chinese, and, beyond godown rent and a few commissions, pay ­little to Foreign merchants.”52 Indeed, from the perspective of foreign merchants, the viability of the treaty port Xiamen as a place for trade lay largely in its export of tea. Cecil Bowra, who began serving as commissioner of customs at Xiamen in 1905, even divided the history of Xiamen’s foreign trade into three periods according to the fortune of its tea trade: the period of Xiamen tea, the period of Taiwan tea, and the period ­after the demise of the tea trade.53 ­Until the last de­ cade of the nineteenth ­century, tea was the single most impor­tant Chinese good exported through Xiamen.

Xiamen Export The Xiamen Tea Trade Xiamen has the distinction of being one of China’s oldest tea ports; as a ­matter of fact, the East India Com­pany bought its first batch of tea directly from Xiamen as early as 1689, and it was commonly believed that the En­glish word for “tea” had its origin in the Hokkien dialect.54 However, the island produced l­ ittle tea itself, 49.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1873,” in Reports on Trade at the Treaty Ports in China, for the Year 1873 (Shanghai: Printed at the Customs’ Press, 1874), 117. 50.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1874,” 162. 51.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1875,” 247. 52.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1885,” 194. 53.  Bowra, “Amoy,” 820. 54.  Ma Shi [H. B. Morse], Dongyindu gongsi duihua maoyi biannianshi (Guangzhou: Zhongshan daxue chubanshe, 1991), 1:9; Philip Wilson Pitcher, In and about Amoy: Some Historical and Other

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and it drew most of its export tea from the Longyan and Ningyang tea districts, less than one hundred miles to its northwest, and also from Anxi County in Quanzhou, origin of the famous Ti Kuan Yin, or “Iron Goddess” tea. Both regions ­were linked to the port by waterways, and their export tea, or “Xiamen tea,” could be sent down cheaply—­barring likin—in native junks. Between 1858 and 1864, Xiamen exported 4 to 7 million pounds of its tea annually; in 1877, the peak year of its local tea export, it shipped in excess of 12 million pounds to foreign countries (figure 2).55 However, a­ fter 1877, the export of Xiamen tea began to tail off gradually, u ­ ntil it averaged between 800,000 and 1.6 million pounds annually throughout 1897–1931.56 The main reason for this relatively short period of prosperity in tea trade was the continual deterioration in the quality of Xiamen tea and the dishonest packing of its merchants, resulting in a growing unsavory reputation among foreign buyers. Western merchants had long complained that the quality of Xiamen tea was “uniformly bad.”57 This was b ­ ecause the soil of Minnan’s tea plantations had long been exhausted, but growers ­were generally too poor to fertilize and rejuvenate the soil or to break new ground and plant new bushes.58 To make ­matters worse, Xiamen’s merchants resorted to deception for quick profits, mixing their tea with considerable quantities of inferior tea, broken yellow leaf, and spurious or “lie” dust to reduce their cost and defraud the buyer.59 Some even went to the extent of interspersing small pellets of “lie” dust stuck together with rice w ­ ater that even the most careful buyer, save from actually infusing the leaves, was unable to detect.60 The quality of Xiamen’s “congou” (gongfu) and “souchong” (xiaozhong) teas—­ fully fermented black teas preferred in Europe—­was so bad that G ­ reat Britain, the largest buyer of Chinese tea, shunned Xiamen in f­ avor of Fuzhou. Consequently, Xiamen produced mostly the half-­fermented “oolong” (wulong) variety and, besides the Straits Settlements, could only find a more tolerant market in the United States. In 1877, three-­quarters of all Xiamen tea produced ­were oolong, and almost 64 ­percent of them w ­ ere exported to the United States.61 This overFacts Connected with One of the First Open Ports in China (Shanghai: Methodist Publishing House in China, 1912), 2; Bowra, “Amoy,” 820. 55.  Bowra, “Amoy,” 820; Thomas Lyons, China Maritime Customs and China’s Trade Statistics, 1859–1948 (Trumansburg, NY: Willow Creek Press, 2003). 56. Lyons, China Maritime Customs, 110. 57.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1892–1901,” in Decennial Reports on the Trade, Navigation, Industries, Etc. of the Ports Open to Foreign Commerce in China and Corea and the Condition and Development of the Treaty Port Provinces, 1892–1901 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1904), 2:124. 58.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, for the Year 1883,” in Returns of Trade and Trade Reports for the Year 1883 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1884), 292. 59.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1874,” 156. 60.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1873,” 126. 61.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1877,” 281.



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250,000

Tea exports

200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000 0 1855 1860 1865 1870 1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900 1905 1910 Year Export excluding reexport

Reexport

Total

FIGURE 2.  Xiamen export and reexport of tea, 1862–1904 (unit: piculs; 1 picul = 133 pounds) Source: Spreadsheet “XMexpcmp,” in accompanying CD to Thomas P. Lyons, China Maritime Customs and China’s Trade Statistics, 1859–1948 (Trumansburg, NY: Willow Creek, 2003).

reliance on a sole variety of tea for a single market made Xiamen’s tea trade vulnerable to competition. By the 1860s, Japan had successfully mastered Chinese tea pro­cessing techniques and also began to export tea to the United States, thus coming into direct competition with Xiamen. Japa­nese cultivators had the backing of their government, which imposed only a light duty on tea and consequently helped keep the cost of operations down. To ensure the quality and freshness of their products, besides being more conscientious than their Chinese counter­parts in cultivating and pro­cessing tea leaves, Japa­nese growers also bypassed middlemen and sold their teas directly to foreign exporters, thus shortening the time needed for their teas to reach their US destinations. Moreover, Japa­nese cultivators ­were also more willing to adopt “the latest and best contrivances” to improve tea quality in contradistinction to Xiamen’s growers, who adamantly refused to make any changes to their “time-­worn methods” of tea preparation.62 Not surprisingly, Japa­nese tea quickly acquired the distinction as a finer alternative to Xiamen tea and rapidly made inroads into the US market at the expense of its Chinese rival: in the de­cade from 1881 to 1891, Japa­nese tea export to the United States nearly doubled while Xiamen export thither fell by more than 50 ­percent.63 ­After 1870, Taiwan tea also started to compete for the US market, and Taiwanese merchants’ success highlighted and even sped up the decay of the Xiamen tea 62.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1882–91,” in Decennial Reports on the Trade, Navigation, Industries, Etc. of the Ports Open to Foreign Commerce in China and Corea and the Condition and Development of the Treaty Port Provinces, 1882–1891 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1893), 2:498. 63. Ibid.

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trade. Tea was first grown in Taiwan during the reign of Emperor Jiaqing (1796– 1820), but only for local consumption. In 1865, Tait & Co., which had been trading camphor and opium in Taiwan, saw an opportunity in the island’s favorable climate and ample new land and began transplanting better-­quality tea from Anxi. To encourage Taiwanese farmers to plant tea, the British merchant h ­ ouse extended them credits with the stipulation that their harvests ­were to be consigned to the firm for export.64 As tea production in Taiwan flourished, Xiamen’s tea firms also established branches across the Taiwan Strait to collect tea for transport to Xiamen for pro­cessing, packaging, and reexport. Cheaper and more aromatic than Xiamen’s tea, the popularity of Taiwan’s tea grew rapidly, and it constituted an increasing proportion of Xiamen’s tea export: in 1870, Taiwanese tea accounted for only 8.4 ­percent of all tea exported through Xiamen; that figure increased to 47 ­percent in 1877 and 86 ­percent in 1894.65 As we can see in figure 2, from 1878 ­until 1894, the export of Taiwanese tea exceeded Xiamen tea e­ very year. The reexport of Taiwanese tea no doubt strengthened Xiamen’s position as a tea port. In 1879, Xiamen ranked only seventh among all treaty ports in terms of the quantity of tea exported, but when the amount of Taiwan tea it reexported was included in the calculation, it placed fourth, b ­ ehind only Fuzhou, Hankou, 66 and Jiujiang. The increased flow of tea through Xiamen also revitalized attendant industries to the tea trade, such as tea pro­cessing and packaging, and briefly boosted the port’s import as well, especially in lead, which was used to line tea chests. But the thriving tea trade in Xiamen could not hide the fact that Xiamen tea itself was “­dying,” ­after the expansion of tea cultivation in Taiwan drew capital and ­labor away from Xiamen, making it even more difficult for local cultivators to invest in improving the fertility of the soil and hence the quality of their product.67 The demand for and, consequently, the price of Xiamen tea fell to the point that it was “hardly worth the cost of shipment,” leading many local cultivators to simply abandon growing tea.68 ­After Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895, any Taiwanese tea that came into Xiamen for reexport was no longer considered the port’s “export” but instead a “foreign import”—­which explains the sharp spike in import and the concurrent dip in export we see in figures 1 and 2 ­after 1895. Colonial Taiwan continued to send tea abroad via Xiamen for about another de­ cade; by 1908, most Taiwanese tea was shipped directly to foreign countries without recourse to Xiamen.69 The only tea exported from the port henceforth was 64.  Li Jinming, Xiamen haiwai jiaotong (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1996), 87. 65.  Spreadsheet “XMexpcmp,” in accompanying CD to Lyons, China Maritime Customs. 66.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1880,” 226. 67.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1892–1901,” 2:124; CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1882– 1891,” 2:498. 68.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1882–1891,” 2:498. 69. Lyons, China Maritime Customs, 111.



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small quantities of the “pouchong” (baozhong) variety to the Straits Settlements for South Fujianese emigrants, who had retained a taste for their hometown tea.70 Xiamen’s tea trade totally collapsed and would not recover.

Domestic Trade Unlike Shanghai, which could draw tea, silk, vegetable oils, hides, wood oil, pig bristles, and other export goods that foreign buyers craved from the Yangzi basin and as far inland as Sichuan Province via the Yangzi River, Xiamen, with a much more ­limited hinterland circumscribed by the province’s mountain ranges, had very ­little to offer foreigners a­ fter its tea trade dis­appeared.71 Without tea, one foreign observer lamented, Xiamen was “the shadow of its former self.”72 However, this overemphasis on foreign trade only tells one side of the story. As a ­matter of fact, Xiamen’s domestic trade largely continued as it had before its opening as a treaty port. In Xiamen, by 1880, t­ here ­were forty-­two Chinese firms engaged in trade with the northern ports of China, especially Shanghai, Ningbo, and Niuzhuang, sending forth sugar, hemp bags, dried longan, and so forth and bringing back beans, bean cakes, rice, wheat, cotton, silk piece goods, medicine, and so on. Another six firms in Xiamen dealt specifically with ports in the South, such as Swatow and Canton.73 As in foreign trade, Xiamen’s domestic trade also declined in the 1860s but steadily increased ­after the 1870s. Domestic trade value increased from 2.8 million Haikwan taels in 1870 to 4.4 million Haikwan taels in 1875 to over 5 million Haikwan taels in 1879. From 1880 ­until the outbreak of the First Sino-­Japanese War in 1895, domestic trade hovered around 5 million Haikwan taels annually.74 Xiamen’s trade with Taiwan constituted a significant part of its domestic trade before the outlying island became a Japa­nese colony. In the 1880s, as high as 77 ­percent of the total tonnage of Xiamen’s junks was employed to carry cargo and a few passengers between Xiamen and Tainan in Taiwan.75 The main items that Xiamen imported from Taiwan ­were sugar, tea, and rice, while it exported to the island foreign manufactures like opium, cotton yarn, cotton piece goods, and native products including nankeen, paper, hemp bags, and tobacco.76 Xiamen’s trade with Taiwan suffered a sharp decline a­ fter Taiwan was colonized by 70.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1892–1901,” 2:124. 71.  For Shanghai, see Rhoads Murphey, Shanghai: Key to Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953); CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1892–1901,” 2:147. 72.  Bowra, “Amoy,” 820. 73.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1880,” 221. 74.  Dai Y., Quyuxing jingji fazhan yu shehui bianqian, 308. 75.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1882–1891,” 2:515. 76.  Dai Y., Quyuxing jingji fazhan yu shehui bianqian, 308.

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Japan, but its domestic trade remained vibrant as trade with northern ports like Shanghai, Tianjin, Yantai, and Niuzhuang strengthened.77

An Alternate Path to Prosperity Despite the challenges from Western merchants and their attempts to change the complexion of commerce with the treaty system, Xiamen’s merchants had more than held their own in the new era. They continued to participate in coastal trade with Chinese ports and even slowly dominated the import of foreign goods into the city. In other words, notwithstanding Xiamen’s reduction to a semicolonial port and its designated function as a beachhead for Western powers, it was still the Chinese who determined the development of Xiamen’s commerce. One illuminating example was ­after the tea trade collapsed, when Xiamen did not develop its manufacturing industry like Shanghai but followed its own path to prosperity. A comparison of the two treaty ports is revealing: whereas pre-1937 Shanghai boasted more than six thousand factories in its International Settlement and Chinese Municipality combined, Xiamen’s factories numbered less than eighty in the early 1930s, even including the ones that remained unmechanized.78 Xiamen thus was unable to find other sources of production to regain the rousing export trade it had enjoyed as the entrepot of Taiwanese tea. Of course, Xiamen’s own limitations largely accounted for its lackluster industrial development, but we must also not overlook the fact that its merchants ­were able to find a niche to make wealth without investing in modern industries, and that was to cater to the needs of Xiamen’s emigrants. Xiamen’s sugar, paper, vermicelli, dried fruits, earthenware, hemp sacks, paper umbrellas, and prepared tobacco had ­little demand in Western markets and ­were shipped instead to the Straits Settlements, Java, Manila, Siam, and Saigon, places where ­there ­were already a sizable number of overseas Hokkiens and thus ready markets for t­hese South Fujian products.79 On the other hand, Xiamen also imported an increasing amount of consumer goods to satisfy the needs of its denizens and a growing number of returned emigrants, including necessities like rice, flour, kerosene, and matches; exotic and luxurious edibles like shark’s fin, sea cucumber, bird’s nests, and ginseng; and, for t­ hose returned emigrants who retained a taste for products from their overseas settlements, dried fish and shrimp from the Straits Settlements.

77.  Ibid., 309. 78. Murphey, Shanghai, 168–69; Dai Y., Quyuxing jingji fazhan yu shehui bianqian, 339. 79.  See, for example, CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1877.”



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45,000 40,000 Trade amount

35,000 30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5000 0 1905

1910

1915

1920

1925 Year

Import

1930

1935

1940

Export

FIGURE 3.  Total foreign import and export through Xiamen, 1911–1936 (units: 1,000 yuan) Source: Graph drawn from t­able 3-11, in Zhou Zifeng, Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 2005), 90–91.

The business opportunities created from catering to the returned emigrants ­were so g­ reat that the city’s appetite for foreign import continued to grow through the early half of the twentieth ­century. To put ­things in perspective: Xiamen’s foreign export remained lackluster from the late nineteenth c­ entury through the Republican era, constituting less than 20 ­percent of Fujian Province’s total foreign export. However, the remarkable trend of importing more than it exported, which began shortly ­after its opening (see figure 1), not only continued but was exacerbated, dramatically widening the gap between the two from the end of World War I onward ­until the ­Great Depression set in. As figure 3 shows, at its most extreme in 1932, Xiamen’s foreign import was eleven times its export. The unfavorable trade balance notwithstanding, all indications suggest that the city continued to thrive, and the buying power of its denizens remained comparatively strong. Firstly, Xiamen’s strong demand for foreign imports drove the cost of staple goods up by 20 to 300 ­percent in the second de­cade of the twentieth c­ entury, causing living expenses in Xiamen to be significantly higher than its neighboring ports.80 In the following de­cade, commodities prices increased by another 30 to 50 ­percent or more. But fortunately for Xiamen’s workmen, their wages also noticeably grew in the 1920s and 1930s, at times commensurate with the rising cost

80.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1912–21,” in Decennial Reports on the Trade, Navigation, Industries, Etc. of the Ports Open to Foreign Commerce in China and Corea and the Condition and Development of the Treaty Port Provinces, 1912–1921 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1924), 2:165.

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of living, so by 1930, the average annual f­ amily income of the Xiamen worker was even higher than his counter­parts in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Fuzhou.81 Secondly, land prices in Xiamen ­were also one of the highest in the country. In the 1920s, the city underwent a series of urban renewals that led to land prices appreciating in value by several times. By 1930, Xiamen was the third costliest place to own a piece of land in China, ­behind only the two foreign concessions in Shanghai.82 Yet despite the high property prices, available land in Xiamen was quickly snatched up by investors and its international settlement, confined to the small rocky island of Gulangyu, was dotted with luxurious and imposing ­houses built and occupied by affluent Chinese. Xiamen became known as the residential district for China’s wealthiest.83 Unlike Shanghai, whose impressive growth was due chiefly to its booming foreign trade and the development of its manufacturing sector, Xiamen had neither. Instead, as we s­hall see in the next chapter, Xiamen benefited by serving as the migration hub for myriad Southern Fujianese and capitalizing on the wealth ­these emigrants brought back.84

81.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1922–­31,” in Decennial Reports on the Trade, Navigation, Industries, Etc. of the Ports Open to Foreign Commerce in China and Corea and the Condition and Development of the Treaty Port Provinces, 1922–1931 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1933), 2:146; Wang Zijian, “Zhongguo laogong sheng­huo chengdu,” Shehui kexue zazhi 2, no. 2 (June 1931): 237–38. According to Wang’s report, a Xiamen worker’s average annual ­family income in 1930 was 438.84 yuan, while that of Shanghai was 337.20 yuan; Guangzhou, 362.88 yuan; and Fuzhou, 263.88 yuan. 82.  Lin Chuancang, Fuzhou Xiamen dijia zhi yanjiu (Shanghai: Zhongguo dizheng yanjiu suo, 1936), 50. 83.  Lu Yan, “Xiamen yinxiang ji,” in Lu Yan sanwen xuanji, ed. Shen Shiheng (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 2004), 77–93. 84.  Dai Y., “Minnan haiwai yimin yu jindai Xiamen xingshuai,” 47–56.

3 FACILITATING MIGRATION Xiamen as a Migration Hub At pre­sent, as in the past, Amoy’s most impor­tant exports are the ­human adventurers ­going out to seek their fortune in colonial competition, and her most valuable imports are the experience and wealth brought back to this district by ­those who have earned success abroad. —­C. N. Holwill, 1931

C. N. Holwill, the commissioner of customs at Xiamen, did not exaggerate when he stated that the port city’s “most impor­tant exports” w ­ ere the Hokkiens it dispatched overseas and its “most valuable imports” w ­ ere “the experience and wealth” ­these emigrants brought back to the island and its environs.1 It is true that for much of the Qing dynasty, Xiamen had already served as the launch pad for lawful and clandestine travelers bound for Taiwan and Southeast Asia; nonetheless, its opening as a treaty port still represented a momentous shift and expansion in its functions as a migration hub for the Hokkiens. A ­ fter 1842, Xiamen provided an outlet for an unpre­ce­dented number of South Fujian emigrants to traditional ports in Southeast Asia and also new destinations around the world. And ­after modern transportation in steamships both shortened the distance and lowered the cost of travel, Xiamen also entertained a growing number of returnees who made the city the first stop in their homeward journey. Into the twentieth ­century, upward of 100,000 p ­ eople ­were moving through the port city annually. And it was this steady stream of travelers, as we s­ hall see, that sustained Xiamen as a seaport of significance in the early twentieth ­century. When Holwill penned his report in 1931, over 2 million Fujianese w ­ ere already living overseas, and in his estimation, they had accumulated upward of 2 billion dollars in wealth collectively.2 The remittances t­hese overseas Fujianese regularly 1.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1922–1931,” 152. 2.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1922–1931,” 145. In 1934, the estimated total number of overseas Chinese worldwide was 7,838,895. Considering the fact that in 1955, Fujianese constituted slightly more than 30 ­percent of the total overseas Chinese population, 2 million is a safe estimate for 63

64 CHAPTER 3

sent home through Xiamen and the investments the wealthier of them made t­ here contributed to “an abnormally large circulation of money” in the city, which helped bolster the buying power of its denizens and sustain their demand for Chinese and foreign goods—as we have seen in chapter 2.3 Hence, even in times of po­liti­cal disturbances or economic depressions, Xiamen’s foreign commissioner could still report a relatively “good market” and a comparatively higher standard of living than its surrounding cities and ports.4 Existing scholarship on Chinese emigration has emphasized—­and justifiably so—­the economic impacts migration had on the emigrants themselves and the families they left ­behind in China.5 But what have been conventionally overlooked are the transformative effects migration had on a city, especially one that witnessed the coming and g­ oing of a large number of p ­ eople. This chapter details the migration pro­cess and examines the development and evolvement of Xiamen as it catered to the needs of the emigrants: as a funnel city, Xiamen provided the institutions and mechanisms to attract potential emigrants from its hinterland and send them abroad through its ports; as a budding financial center, Xiamen ­housed a number of “letter offices” and modern banks to receive remittances from the emigrants, convert them into Chinese currency, and redistribute them to the designated recipients; as a regional metropolis, Xiamen became the place of choice for overseas Fujianese to invest their surplus money within China and the “home” for returnees who preferred the modern amenities, con­ve­nience, and safety of the treaty port to their rural villages in the hinterland.

“Selling of H ­ uman Piglets” Xiamen became known to the world as the depot for cheap Chinese hands when it was designated the first center in China for the disreputable trade in Chinese “coolies,” that is, indentured laborers u ­ nder contract to foreigners. When the treaty ports w ­ ere negotiated by the British, using them as bases to procure Chinese l­abor was perhaps not part of the original plan. However, a confluence of global events in the early nineteenth ­century, especially the abolishment of slavery and the increased extraction of raw materials in Eu­ro­pean colonies, led to widespread demand for cheap ­labor. Toilers ­were urgently needed in Cuba’s sugar the number of overseas Fujianese in the early 1930s. Sugihara, “Patterns of Chinese Emigration,” 246; Lin and Weiji, Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiyeshi ziliao xuanji, 29. 3.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1912–1921,” 165. 4.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1922–1931,” 143. 5.  See, for example, Chen Ta, Emigrant Communities in South China: A Study of Overseas Migration and Its Influence of Standards of Living and Social Change, ed. Bruno Lasker (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940).



Facilitating Migration

65

plantations and Peru’s guano islands to take the place of emancipated African slaves and required to work the mines and plantations of Southeast Asia to support the region’s rapidly expanding agricultural and industrial development. The British ­were, of course, aware of the Chinese imperial government’s aversion to its subjects traveling overseas and its l­egal sanction against emigration—­a crime the Qing court deemed serious enough to deserve capital punishment.6 But as plantation and mine ­owners clamored for a solution to their ­labor shortages, British merchants in China took advantage of their privileged positions to openly flout Chinese laws and to procure the highly sought-­after and lucrative commodity in the treaty ports. The coolie trade was inaugurated in June 1845 when the first shipment of 180 Chinese coolies departed Xiamen on French vessels to the Isle of Bourbon.7 ­There ­were varied reasons why foreign coolie brokers favored Xiamen as the site for their illicit activities. First of all, t­here was a plentiful supply of able-­bodied men in South Fujian. As we have noted, population pressure, land shortage, and inflation, especially in the staple rice, w ­ ere chronic prob­lems in nineteenth-­century Fujian. Consequently, a large number of young men disassociated themselves from the land and started to roam the countryside and cities looking for jobs. The British ­were also already familiar with South Fujianese as they had encountered them in Southeast Asia previously and held them in rather favorable regard. One of them described the Hokkiens as “well made, and sufficiently robust and strong for ordinary agricultural ­labor” and as “industrious and persevering” and thus particularly “well fitted for l­abor in the tropical regions.”8 Given the long tradition of maritime trade in the region, the British also believed that the Hokkiens ­were not disinclined to leave China for work overseas. But perhaps the most impor­ tant reason why Xiamen was preferred to the other treaty ports was the fact that it, unlike Fuzhou or Canton, was not the seat of the provincial government. T ­ here was thus less formality for foreigners to conform to and fewer power­ful Qing officials to contend with in the port. In addition, British merchants w ­ ere already established in Xiamen and knew well that local officials ­were generally indisposed to come into conflict with foreign authorities. They w ­ ere confident they could run their illicit trade with l­ittle interference if no serious offense was committed.9 Hence, even though coolie trade was unlawful on Chinese soil, it was not a back-­alley or confined operation in Xiamen. As a ­matter of fact, the trade was transacted principally by the two 6. ­Great Britain Foreign Office, Correspondence with the Superintendent, 10. 7.  Ibid., 9. 8.  Ibid., 11. 9.  Ibid., 20; Yen Ching-­Hwang, Coolies and Mandarins: China’s Protection of Overseas Chinese during the Late Ch’ing Period (1851–1911) (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1985), 42.

66 CHAPTER 3

largest British firms in the port, Messrs. Syme, Muir & Co. and Messrs. Tait & Co., and their clientele included buyers from the United States, G ­ reat Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal. Since they had the tacit support of foreign governments, the merchant firms w ­ ere so confident in their security that they made no effort to conceal their involvements in the disreputable trade.10 The Emigrant, a vessel belonging to Messrs. Tait & Co. and used as the depot for coolies awaiting shipment, was anchored in the Xiamen harbor for all to see, while Messrs. Syme, Muir & Co. built a shed for the same purpose right in front of the com­pany’s office building.11 The Chinese decried the coolie trade as the “selling of h ­ uman piglets” (mai zhuzai), and in many ways they ­were justified. When a ship came into port for a shipment of coolies, its order had to be fulfilled in a timely manner, so it could set sail on schedule and avoid having to pay a heavy demurrage. For this reason, the British suppliers’ main concern was to ensure that they could deliver the contracted number of coolies promptly—­who the coolies ­were, where they came from, and by what means they ­were procured w ­ ere inconsequential to them.12 The recruiting pro­cess thus was fraught with deceptions and abuses, and the coolies gathered w ­ ere treated more like slaves than the ­free l­abor they ­were supposed to be. British merchants would not bother themselves with the tedious pro­cess of recruiting coolies; instead, they delegated the task to a handful of head Chinese brokers—­normally English-­speaking Cantonese or returned Chinese from the Straits Settlements—­who would in turn commission a group of several hundred locals as subordinate brokers to do their biddings.13 ­These subordinate brokers ­were paid according to the number of men they could muster, and they would send their own lackeys to neighboring villages to hunt for potential coolies. Acting as tout, t­hese men would distribute handbills advertising job opportunities overseas and the terms of the contract to the poor and the idle in the villages and promise them food, lodging, and fifty cash a day if they came forward, regardless ­whether they ­were eventually accepted by the merchant firms in Xiamen or not.14 Acting as crimps, they would resort to underhanded methods to ensnare the unwilling and the unaware, including deceiving the jobless with work in the coastal ports, lending money to the poor at usurious rates, and setting up gambling traps to plunge the weak-­minded into debt. On top of ­these mea­sures, coolie crimps would even resort to outright kidnapping. Three to five of them would 10.  James Tait, owner of Messrs. Tait & Co., was concurrently the consul at Xiamen for Spain and Portugal and the vice-­consul for the Netherlands; he ­later also enlisted the American consul at Xiamen, Charles W. Bradley, as a partner in his firm. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 43–44. 11. ­Great Britain Foreign Office, Correspondence with the Superintendent, 37, 41. 12.  Ibid., 41. 13.  Ibid., 22. 14. Ibid.



Facilitating Migration

67

hide in secluded places like small villages, quite streets, and creeks along the seacoast, and when opportunities arouse, they would hustle passersby who walked alone to their com­pany’s coolie shed to be confined ­until they ­were sent abroad.15 Kidnapping by coolie crimps was so rampant in Xiamen that local officials had to issue a notice warning its residence to be aware of “bludgeon-­carriers” who clubbed victims on the head and sold them overseas. Travelers to Xiamen w ­ ere particularly warned to be careful at night.16 It was misdeeds like t­hese that led a con­temporary observer to regard coolie brokers and crimps as “men of the lowest pos­si­ble character.”17 The conditions of the “pig-­pens,” that is, the coolie sheds, w ­ ere generally dreadfully bad. Constructed to hold coolies awaiting expatriation, they w ­ ere built with bolted doors and no win­dows, thus obstructing ventilation and leading to humid conditions and constantly damp floors.18 Once incarcerated, the prospective coolie was not allowed to leave or communicate with anyone, and basic necessities like food, w ­ ater, and clothing w ­ ere usually insufficiently provisioned. If a coolie voiced his discontent, he would be immediately subdued by a round of beatings from the coolie broker or his lackeys.19 Guards constantly patrolled the building making escape nearly impossible, but one gritty inmate did manage to run away by crawling “through an opening in the w ­ ater closet.”20 ­Because it might take months for the coolie brokers to meet the quota of an order, coolies already retained had to be held u ­ ntil the horde could be shipped 21 off. Overcrowding in the “pig-­pens” thus was a perennial prob­lem. A British observer gave the following grisly description of a coolie shed in Xiamen: “The coolies ­were penned up in numbers from 10 to 12 in a wooden shed, like a slave barracoon, nearly naked, very filthy, and room only sufficient to lie; the space 120 by 24 feet with a bamboo floor near the roof; the number in all about 500.”22 And when they ­were about to be sent off, the coolies would be stripped naked, “stamped or painted with the letter C (California), P (Peru), or S (Sandwich Islands), on their breast, according to the destination for which they ­were intended.”23 It is without doubt that, throughout the pro­cess, coolie merchants and brokers regarded the coolies more as commodities and less as h ­ uman beings. Chinese coolies w ­ ere treated even more woefully on board coolie ships, leading some commentators to compare their voyages to the notorious ­Middle Passage 15. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 58–59. 16.  Xu X., Fujian tongshi, 5:58–59. 17. ­Great Britain Foreign Office, Correspondence with the Superintendent, 41. 18. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 59. 19.  Ibid., 60–62. 20. ­Great Britain Foreign Office, Correspondence with the Superintendent, 54 21.  Ibid., 57. 22.  Ibid., 28–29. 23.  Ibid., 4.

68 CHAPTER 3

of the African slave trade.24 ­Because the quantity of supplies coolie ships could carry was ­limited, shortages in food and ­water w ­ ere not uncommon during cross-­ Pacific voyages that usually took more than one hundred days. And since the captains and crews controlled the resources, Chinese coolies w ­ ere naturally left to suffer the consequences in times of scarcity. Many coolies had to endure extreme thirst and hunger during their voyages; some died consequently, and a number simply jumped overboard to put an early end to their ordeals.25 As was the case with coolie sheds, overcrowding on board ships was also cause for misery for the unwilling travelers. To maximize profits, coolie ships generally packed more passengers than they ­were legally allowed. Ship crews would allocate a ­little space for each coolie to live and sleep—­“sometimes less than two feet in width and five in length”26—­and the lack of physical space not only created distress for the coolies but also heightened tensions among them. Scuffles between coolies ­were common occurrences, and murder was not unheard of e­ ither.27 The blatant mistreatment of coolies by foreign ship captains and their crews put additional strains on the already volatile situations on board ships. Ship crews often flogged coolies, chained them to posts, and locked them in cages for the slightest infraction of their ­orders, or they simply meted out punishments wantonly to serve as a warning or as intimidation to the other coolies. Sometimes the ship crew’s gross cruelties provoked severe reactions from their charges. In 1852, ­after ten days out at sea, the captain of the Robert Browne, a US ship carry­ing 410 coolies from Xiamen to San Francisco, ordered his crew to cut off the queues of the coolies and scrubbed their bodies with hard brooms for reasons of hygiene. Finding the humiliation insufferable, the Chinese banded together to revolt against the crew and briefly seized the ship. The ship was forced to abandon its scheduled voyage and return to Xiamen even though the crew was able to regain control of it.28 The Robert Browne mutiny was certainly not an isolated incident. The scholar Wang Sing-wu counted at least forty-­two cases of mutinies by Chinese coolies from 1850 to 1872, of which seven w ­ ere on board ships that departed 29 from Xiamen. Some of ­these mutinies ­were successful, ­others ­were not, and all involved a significant loss of lives, mainly Chinese. 24.  A. D. Blue, “Chinese Emigration and the Deck Passenger Trade,” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 10 (1970): 83. 25. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 60–61; Cuba Commission, The Cuba Commission Report: A Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba; the Original English-­Language Text of 1876 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 13. 26.  “Mr Steere to Mr Bailey, the American Consul in Hong Kong,” in US Department of States, Papers Relating to Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1873), 1:207–8. 27. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 61. 28. ­Great Britain Foreign Office, Correspondence with the Superintendent, 2. 29.  Wang Sing-wu, The Organ­ization of Chinese Emigration, 1848–1888, with Special Reference to Chinese Migration to Australia (San Francisco: Chinese Material Center, 1978), 225–50.



Facilitating Migration

69

But the biggest killer of coolies during their voyages was still sickness.30 Tuberculosis and intestinal worms ­were common communicable diseases among the crowded passengers, and their feeble states, due to hunger, abuse, and, in some cases, opium smoking, also made them susceptible to diarrhea and dysentery.31 And with medi­cation and medical doctors not readily available on board ships, many of ­these diseases became fatal. Between vio­lence, sickness, suicide, and occasional accidents, the mortality rate of coolies in transit was unusually high. Between 1847 and 1857, British rec­ords indicated a 14 ­percent mortality rate during voyages—or over 25 ­percent if Chinese sources ­were to be believed.32 Xiamen’s role in the coolie trade was modest u ­ ntil 1850, as only several hundred coolies ­were shipped out through it each year. But thereafter, Xiamen’s coolie export increased sharply due to an upsurge in demand from Australia and Spanish Amer­i­ca (see ­table 3), and it overtook Canton as the largest coolie supplier in China.33 But as demands for coolies continued to rise—in 1852, when the British government wanted to contract one thousand coolies from Xiamen for Trinidad with the coolie firm Messrs. Turner and Co., it reported back that it was unable to supply them from Xiamen due to its backlog of ­orders for Cuba, which alone would take the firm sixteen months or more to fulfill34—­and abuses in the recruiting pro­cess, especially kidnapping, became more rampant, public sentiments in Xiamen against the coolie trade intensified. Xiamen residents’ ill feelings ­toward the sale of their fellow Fujianese w ­ ere planted as early as 1847 when sundry coolies held captive belowdecks in the emigrant vessel Sophie Frazier ­were left to die during a typhoon.35 Public resentments against the illicit trade grew as details of abuses, such as the one on board the Robert Browne, spread in the treaty port, and they fi­nally erupted into an anti-­coolie-­trade riot in November 1852. The catalyst for the riot was the intervention of Mr. Syme, a known British coolie merchant, for the release of his coolie broker, who had been beaten up by locals and detained by Chinese authorities for deceiving coolies.36 An angry crowd emboldened by placarded proclamations from the city’s gentry, merchants, and “Inhabitants of the Eigh­ teen Wards” gathered in front of Mr. Syme’s hong and attacked the premise, but was eventually repelled by gunfire from British marines.37 Order was restored to 30.  Ibid., 209. 31.  Ibid., 215–16. 32.  Ibid., 209–10. 33.  Tian Rukang, “1852 nian Xiamen renmin dui yingguo shanghang luemai huagong zuixing de fankang yundong,” in Zhongguo fanchuan maoyi he duiwai guanxishi yanjiu (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1987), 214–21. 34. ­Great Britain Foreign Office, Correspondence with the Superintendent, 19. 35. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy, 216. 36. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 48. 37. ­Great Britain Foreign Office, Correspondence with the Superintendent, 71–72.

70 CHAPTER 3

­TABLE 3  Coolie Emigration from Xiamen and Their Destinations, 1845–1853 YEAR

DESTINATION

1845

Bourbon Islands

180

1846

Bourbon Islands

200

1847

Cuba

640

1848

Sydney

120

1849

Sydney

150

1850

Sydney

406

1851

Sydney

1,478

Honolulu 1852

Sydney Honolulu Peru

1853 (January to March)

NO. OF COOLIES

199 1,077 101 404

Demerara

1,257

Cuba

2,442

California

410

Sydney

254

Peru

500

Demerara Cuba Total

320 2,123 12,261

Source: Wu Fengbin, Qiyue huagong shi (Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1988), 42–43.

the city ­after Xiamen officials stepped in to suppress the riot, but foreign merchants no longer deemed Xiamen congenial to their trade and subsequently relocated their activities elsewhere, most notably Macao. Xiamen’s history as a coolie center thus was brought to an early end, albeit coolie trade itself did not tail off ­until ­after 1874.38

The Migration Wave The fact that the coolie trade was initiated and determined by Eu­ro­pean firms and that Chinese coolies w ­ ere sent mainly to Eu­ro­pean colonies in the Amer­i­cas and Australia, left a particularly bad aftertaste on the Chinese minds as it was perceived to be another form of imperialist exploitation of China. Chinese intellectuals and latter-­day historians ­were engrossed by the immorality of the coolie trade and often understood Chinese emigration a­ fter the Opium War in terms of it. One unfortunate consequence of this obsession with the coolie trade, as Eliza38. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 122.



Facilitating Migration

71

beth Sinn poignantly notes, “is that the vari­ous nineteenth-­century emigration strands have been lumped together, their distinctions blurred.”39 Indeed in Xiamen, ­there was another or­ga­nized movement of Chinese laborers to Southeast Asia that must be separated and distinguished from the coolie trade. Not only was this strand of emigration entirely in Chinese hands; it was also on a much larger scale and lasted well beyond the coolie trade. More significantly, t­hese Xiamen mi­grant laborers w ­ ere voluntary travelers and not indentured like their coolie counter­parts.40 It is true that many Hokkiens ­were forced to emigrate due to poverty—an early twentieth-­century survey performed by the sociologist Chen Ta found that almost 70 ­percent of his interviewees departed China b ­ ecause of “economic pressure.”41 They thus had to borrow money from ­family members and relatives to pay for their passages or travel on the so-­called credit-­ticket systems. Depending on who extended the credit, we may identify two types of credit-­ticket system: In the first type, passengers traveled on board a ship without paying; they thus owed their passage money to the ship captain or the supercargo who chartered the ship. Upon arrival, they would be kept on board the ship ­until prospective employers paid their debts on their behalves before leading them ashore. In such cases, the emigrants w ­ ere not allowed to choose whom to work for or what kind of jobs they ­were to perform; nor w ­ ere the employers allowed to pick their men. Employers also had to pay a few dollars over the regular price of a passenger ticket to cover the losses the ship captain or supercargo might suffer when unpaid and unredeemed passengers jumped ship. Abuse of the unpaid emigrants, albeit not the norm, was not unheard of ­either. To protect their investments, ship captains sometimes would confine the emigrants belowdeck to prevent their escape, lock them up in houses—­the “coolie dens”—if they w ­ ere still not redeemed by employers ­after the ship departed, or forcibly ship them to another port the emigrants had not initially agreed on.42 The second type of credit-­ticket system, which Xiamen’s emigrants traveled predominantly ­under by the 1870s, had the passage money paid for by the agents or headmen who brought the emigrants on board the ship. Emigrants thus ­were technically paid passengers and w ­ ere ­free to leave the ship at the destination with 39.  Elizabeth Sinn, “The Gold Rush Passenger Trade and the History of Hong Kong, 1849–1867,” in British Ships in China Seas: 1700 to the Pre­sent Day, ed. Adrian Jarvis, Richard Harding, and Alston Kennerley (Liverpool: Society for Nautical Research and National Museums Liverpool, 2004), 129. 40. Ibid. 41.  Chen T., Emigrant Communities, 260. For more evidence, see Zheng Shanyu, Li Tianci, and Bai Xiaodong, “Quanzhou qiaoxiang zupu huaqiao chuguo shiliao poxi,” in Quanzhou pudie huaqiao shiliao yu yanjiu, ed. Zhuang Weiji and Zheng Shanyu (Beijing: Zhongguo Huaqiao chubanshe, 1998), 1095–115. 42.  Straits Settlements Legislative Council, Report of Committee appointed to consider and take evidence upon the condition of Chinese laborers in the Colony, CO 275/19, ccxliii.

72 CHAPTER 3

their headmen to look for employers, who would then reimburse the headmen. In both types of credit-­ticket system, the emigrants ­were obliged to work off their debt—­sometimes in as short as six months—­but they ­were still primarily ­free emigrants, and the fact that they w ­ ere voluntary and paying passengers made a huge difference in how they experienced their passages overseas.43 Compared to the indentured coolies, voluntary emigrants represented a much larger and longer strand of Fujianese emigration. Between 1845 and 1875, about 499,000 Chinese left China through the port of Xiamen—of ­these, no more than 13,000 w ­ ere forced ­labor u ­ nder the coolie trade (see ­tables 3 and 4). This prodigious outflow of Chinese from Xiamen continued ­until the outbreak of World War II in China, making Fujian Province second only to Guangdong Province as the major source for overseas Chinese. Equally impressive was the return flow of Chinese emigrants—of the 4.94 million Chinese who moved abroad through Xiamen from 1845 to 1940, 3.75 million returned to the port, thus reinforcing the argument that the majority of t­ hese w ­ ere in fact f­ ree emigrants and not forcibly enslaved. Instead of being forcibly ferried to the Amer­i­cas or Australia, the majority of Xiamen’s voluntary emigrants chose to go to Southeast Asia, especially the British colony of Singapore. Singapore was no stranger to the Hokkiens; in fact, Xiamen’s connection with the small island on the southern tip of peninsular Malaya predated its treaty port era. In 1819, Sir Stamford Raffles of the British East India Com­pany established Singapore as a ­free trading port, and the new colony quickly attracted the attention of merchants from all nations, including the Hokkiens. Before long, Xiamen sent its first trading junk to Singapore, which entered its harbor in February 1821, five months e­ arlier than the first China trade vessel from Eu­rope.44 Hokkien emigrants soon followed as it was common for junk o ­ wners or supercargoes to augment their profit—as we have seen in case of the fateful Tek Sing—by bringing along as many as 800 to 2,000 emigrants with their merchandise.45 Raffles’s flourishing colony accommodated a growing number of Xiamen emigrants, as was evident in the growing Chinese population on the island—3,317 in 1824, 10,767 in 1834, and 27,988 in 1849.46 However, a greater portion of the new arrivals ­were transshipped to British settlements in Malaya, where the official policy “was calculated to encourage the immigration of the Chinese,” and the plantations of Java and Sumatra, which had become particularly 43.  Sinn, “Gold Rush Passenger Trade,” 129. 44.  C. M. Turnbull, A History of Modern Singapore, 1819–2005 (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2009), 32 45. Lim How Seng, Xinjiapo huashe yu huashang (Singapore: Yazhou yanjiu xuehui, 1995), 89–90. 46.  Maurice Freedman, Chinese ­Family and Marriage in Singapore (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1957), 25.

1,344

2,697

4,157

2,421

2,594

2,019

5,791

2,585

3,162

3,233

4,294

1,928

4,048

2,885

6,066

1881

1882

1883

1884

1885

1886

1887

1888

1889

1890

1891

1892

1893

1894

1895

25,498

14,634

8,296

7,398

7,147

6,190

4,879

6,267

1,970

6,396

4,375

4,811

4,516

3,684

4,788

2,471

69,159

52,627

48,071

46,638

47,922

42,496

43,417

47,908

21,810

42,785

28,818

34,471

24,977

32,511

21,003

13,563

17,992

23,685

36,479

20,545

27,372

27,969

23,997

23,849

46,119

20,494

21,221

17,756

24,191

12,933

9,821

13,628

7,499

5,874

7,633

8,855

9,702

9,836

11,559

12,029

13,269

11,761

8,365

8,726

12,871

11,098

8,572

9,472

4,104

5,210

953

2,973

9,842

10,060

6,938

7,995

8,873

11,540

7,409

9,714

10,437

11,583

10,599

8,080

9,295

6,031

6,679

7,914

23,521

17,983

18,866

9,037

12,808

10,128

9,520

6,925

9,738

8,917

6,042

6,176

6,359

9,055

6,060

2,184

3,430

4,462

26,227

13,753

18,123

8,842

9,399

9,177

7,224

8,255

8,373

10,902

4,693

7,493

11,223

10,573

7,549

1,461

1,633

2,401

104,620

81,128

79,840

67,305

74,860

67,416

68,128

70,687

71,329

62,126

46,180

55,939

46,591

52,835

37,879

20,682

20,916

28,945

25,076

831

10,903

7,170

3,015

1,972

1880

3,919

6,539

4,908

2,039

1,353

15,734

5,736

4,876

1879

6,241

5,362

6,675

TO

1,579

6,750

4,931

FROM

1878

13,804

15,115

TO

25,357

6,107

5,206

FROM

1,002

TO

1,528

FROM

1877

TO

OTHER PORTS

1876

FROM

MANILA

499,000

TO

STRAITS SETTLEMENTS

1845– 1875

YEAR

HONG KONG

­TABLE 4  Chinese Passenger Traffic to and from Xiamen, 1845–1940 TOTAL

(continued)

70,670

55,045

72,740

46,845

50,856

51,331

44,973

49,911

63,871

47,506

40,726

41,643

50,529

35,270

31,450

23,591

19,730

23,095

21,608

16,985

239,000

FROM

TO

2,469

3,246

7,609

4,306

4,855

5,523

5,399

5,597

5,643

6,337

6,733

8,246

8,102

10,200

9,001

9,363

7,641

7,523

8,116

12,389

10,928

12,118

10,865

YEAR

1896

1897

1898

1899

1900

1901

1902

1903

1904

1905

1906

1907

1908

1909

1910

1911

1912

1913

1914

1915

1916

1917

1918

HONG

­TABLE 4 (continued)

19,217

21,208

19,873

15,870

12,986

16,971

18,351

19,590

18,366

15,092

16,464

17,267

16,490

16,887

19,871

21,717

22,439

24,430

26,860

26,646

23,660

23,297

12,845

FROM

KONG

33,983

48,139

65,011

29,465

50,011

65,446

91,807

81,375

73,510

41,963

46,920

73,191

67,512

53,729

70,000

69,093

76,896

68,829

79,263

54,711

47,115

35,130

52,801

TO

STRAITS

11,733

21,589

29,362

27,700

50,826

38,762

11,086

7,640

9,851

21,486

15,219

16,926

14,477

18,920

28,000

26,948

24,258

32,794

24,893

27,046

23,511

26,582

29,244

FROM

SETTLEMENTS

1,907

4,042

6,471

7,272

6,307

6,186

5,720

5,234

5,728

3,855

5,184

3,400

4,638

5,392

5,080

5,154

7,431

9,537

10,044

9,544

9,364

7,201

4,461

TO

MANILA

336

2,395

3,629

6,480

5,002

5,525

3,989

3,508

4,664

4,137

3,994

4,565

2,348

1,185

1,059

1,307

1,444

1,335

985

1,520

2,839

1,143

2,438

FROM

5,817

5,756

6,336

10,222

5,211

5,699

4,627

5,450

6,317

4,673

5,231

5,671

5,318

4,954

5,872

9,781

7,737

7,931

8,648

11,087

7,905

9,489

8,674

TO

OTHER

5,312

5,771

26,471

6,032

6,140

6,140

5,884

6,288

6,352

7,223

5,770

5,990

5,486

5,715

7,243

7,271

8,872

9,667

10,639

11,699

6,943

10,068

7,211

FROM

PORTS

52,572

70,055

88,746

59,348

69,645

84,854

109,795

101,422

94,556

60,691

65,437

90,508

84,201

70,412

86,595

89,625

97,463

91,820

102,810

79,648

71,993

55,066

68,405

TO

TOTAL

36,598

50,963

79,335

56,082

74,954

67,398

39,310

37,026

39,233

47,938

41,447

44,748

38,801

42,707

56,173

57,243

57,013

68,226

63,377

66,911

56,953

61,090

51,738

FROM

6,096

7,363

10,755

1923

1924

1925

10,728

13,225

11,131

12,377

13,314

12,065

2,696

2,648

389,063

1933

1934

1935

1936

1937

1938

1939

1940

Total

837,294

5,872

7,690

8,053

8,640

14,274

16,001

17,322

29,781

23,134

26,496

4,990

11,652

10,716

12,860

15,113

8,681

8,734

9,817

16,278

2,897,281

8,541

7,500

15,406

46,019

27,931

22,875

15,715

4,347

9,027

20,451

78,628

199,631

74,972

64,628

54,051

42,060

67,632

49,820

38,415

1,573,383

13,982

4,139

9,232

17,713

22,330

19,591

19,243

13,867

46,137

59,218

96,458

61,484

73,604

26,673

26,334

39,781

33,827

31,681

25,466

7,643

540,608

7,273

4,600

8,292

12,883

12,653

10,483

13,309

10,821

17,834

17,235

12,839

15,458

10,234

11,819

14,616

12,443

10,853

12,034

408,909

8,119

1,856

2,435

8,243

9,279

9,359

8,609

9,742

16,994

21,337

15,419

13,771

12,492

9,810

7,872

9,602

11,064

5,997

3,555

599,990

11,397

17,720

12,829

28,144

27,255

29,251

20,212

20,946

17,562

12,083

11,976

13,763

7,322

6,205

5,159

7,087

5,921

5,002

3,592

693,116

13,582

17,829

6,918

34,940

32,630

38,536

31,296

40,646

26,485

17,772

9,014

11,787

7,197

16,534

7,004

6,405

8,478

4,903

4,685

4,948,231

29,859

32,516

48,592

100,360

80,216

73,740

62,461

46,842

49,062

57,912

120,305

238,691

103,283

90,015

79,922

65,959

87,986

71,624

56,380

3,751,699

41,555

31,514

26,638

69,536

78,513

83,487

76,470

94,036

112,750

124,823

125,881

98,694

104,009

65,877

56,323

64,469

62,103

52,398

49,984

Source: For 1845–1875, Dai Yifeng, Quyuxing jingji fazhan yu shehui bianqian: Yi jindai Fujian diqu wei zhongxin (Changsha, Hunan: Yuelu shushe, 2004), 311; for 1876–1940, Xiamen shizhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Jindai Xiamen shehui jingji gaikuan (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1990), 436–47.

Note: Passenger traffic shown ­here excludes ­those travelling to and from other ports in China.

8,143

4,639

1931

1932

9,839

4,369

1922

16,871

3,580

1921

1926

4,768

1920

1927

6,730

1919

76 CHAPTER 3

l­ abor hungry a­ fter the Dutch initiated a new “cultivation system” to create more wealth in its colony.47 In other words, even before Xiamen expanded its role as a treaty port, it had already formed crucial interlocking links with Singapore in creating a China‒Southeast Asia mi­grant cir­cuit. ­After ­Great Britain soundly defeated the Qing dynasty and extended its sphere of dominance to the South China Sea, ships flying British and Eu­ro­pean flags traversed the ­water between China and Southeast Asia with ­little interference. Hokkien emigrants traveled more freely and in greater volume from Xiamen to Singapore and beyond. Available data indicate that between 1876 and 1940, a ­little u ­ nder 60 ­percent of the 4.92 million departees from Xiamen headed to the Straits Settlements, making it the preferred port of disembarkation for Hokkien travelers. Only ­under extreme circumstances, such as during the global depressions in the early 1930s when the British colonial government imposed a quota on Chinese immigrants, did more Hokkiens decide to seek their fortune in the Philippines instead. The mass exodus of Hokkiens ­after 1875 may have validated the British preconceived notion that the teeming surplus population of South Fujian was most willing to go abroad for work.48 But the movement of over 70,000 ­people out of Xiamen annually was made pos­si­ble only b ­ ecause a host of migration-­related professions and businesses sprang up both in the port city and overseas destinations to form an interconnected network to move ­people across seas—or in Philip Kuhn’s vision, a corridor that stretched from the emigrants’ native places to their vari­ous settlements abroad, where ­people moved but stayed connected.49 In Xiamen, emigrant inn ­owners and ship brokers arranged for the emigrants’ departure, while the supercargoes and business o ­ wners in the receiving ports shepherded the new arrivals to plantations, mines, or other job destinations. In between, the headmen, or ketou, formed the most impor­tant link that tied the two ends together.

The Mechanism of Migration Headmen Xiamen’s emigrants came mainly from the rural villages of Fujian, with the prefectures of Quanzhou and Xinghua and the autonomous department of Yongchun sending forth the largest number.50 For a young emigrant from rural Fujian, the 47.  Citation from Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Malaya (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1967), 39. 48.  Straits Settlements Legislative Council, Report of Committee, ccxlii. 49. Kuhn, Chinese among O ­ thers, 49. 50.  Fujiansheng danganguan, Fujian huaqiao dangan shiliao (Beijing: Dangan chubanshe, 1990), 1:120.



Facilitating Migration

77

prospect of leaving China for work overseas, even with the promise of a better ­future, was still unnerving. He had prob­ably never traveled far from his own village and knew ­little of the language, customs, or working conditions of the land he aspired to. Even the passage to Xiamen, the port for embarkation, was a daunting task especially if he came from Xinghua or Fuzhou in the north and spoke a dif­ fer­ent dialect from the ­people of South Fujian. First-­time emigrants thus almost never traveled alone, and they required experienced hands to lead the way and show them the ropes. It was to meet the needs of t­ hese new emigrants, or xinke (new guests), that old-­timers, laoke (old guests), began to make the most of their knowledge, connections, and mobility to serve as professional headmen for prospective emigrants. Headmen ­were usually emigrants themselves who, on their trips back to their home villages, ­were cajoled by relatives, friends, and fellow villa­gers to bring along new emigrants when they returned overseas. They soon found money to be made in this pro­cess and abandoned their jobs abroad to become itinerant headmen full-­time. In the early twentieth ­century, ­there ­were as many as 1,100 headmen active in Xiamen, and an additional 800 in Swatow, and 200 in Hong Kong.51 The job of the headman was rather straightforward: he was to gather prospective emigrants, prepare the necessary paperwork for them, bring them to Xiamen, accompany them abroad, and help them find jobs overseas. However, his success depended on the extent of his social networks, which in turn was determined in large part by his trustworthiness and accountability. ­After all, young men ­were entrusting their lives and ­futures to the headmen, and being generally short of funds themselves, they needed business partners along the migration route to loan them money or extend them credits. The basis of any headman’s business thus was his hometown and native-­place ties. It was in his home village and nearby towns that he e­ ither personally or through intermediaries scouted for prospective emigrants, and he and his recruits usually knew each other before they entered into a business relationship.52 While in Xiamen awaiting departure, the headman would lodge his charges in “emigrant inns” owned by a proprietor from the same place of origin as him, who had already advanced him working capital or would do so in the ­future in exchange for the flow of business he would bring to the establishment. A headman’s ability to utilize and maintain his network ties varied greatly. A successful headman could bring along several hundred men on one trip, while the less capable ones could only muster five or six.53 Since one of the main reasons emigrants left China was to escape the economic hardship at home, many of them ­were too poor to pay for their own passage. In 51. Hicks, Overseas Chinese Remittances, 31. 52.  Ibid., 32. 53. Ibid.

78 CHAPTER 3

such cases, the headmen would pay for the passage on their behalf but expected their initial outlay to be reimbursed within a four-­month period ­after the emigrants found employment, during which time no interest was charged. If the emigrants w ­ ere unable to repay the money on time, they w ­ ere given another four months, but then an annual interest of 30 to 45 ­percent would be imposed.54 ­Table 5 shows the breakdown of the total expenses incurred by an emigrant from Fuqing County in Fuzhou to Singapore in 1914 as recorded by surveyors for the Japa­nese Bank of Taiwan. The costs documented h ­ ere ­were the amount prepaid by the headmen, and they made their profits by charging the emigrants two to three times what they actually paid out. Headmen also made a profit ­after they arrived at their destinations by charging potential employers several dollars over the passage rate for the ser­ vice of one of their recruits.55

Emigrant Inns Emigrant inns constituted the next level in the commercial hierarchy of the migration business. In the 1910s, t­ here ­were as many as 184 emigrant inns in Xiamen, lining the coast of the island near the harbor and spilling over onto the coast of Gulangyu across the channel. As we have mentioned, emigrant inns w ­ ere also embedded in the social network based on native-­place ties, and they visibly displayed their native-­place affiliation with door signs and flags that read “Fuqing Inn,” “Zhangzhou Inn,” and so on. At least 11 localities from around Xiamen ­were represented.56 Emigrant inns thus catered almost exclusively to the needs of emigrants that came from the same geo­graph­i­cal origin as their o ­ wners, providing the travelers with a bed to rest and, if meals ­were not provided, a kitchen to cook in while waiting for a Southeast Asia‒bound ship. A small number of inns though ­were less par­tic­u­lar about where their lodgers came from but ­were more concerned with where they ­were ­going. They seemingly had stronger ties to a specific destination, say Thailand or Singapore, and would only ­house departees heading in that direction. In ­either case, an emigrant inn would form a symbiotic and stable relationship with a number of selected headmen, two or three at least or as many as ten or more, depending on the resources of the inn. The emigrant inns’ basic revenue came from their primary function as lodges for travelers, for which they charged a fixed amount (for example, 1.20 yuan in

54. Ibid.,10. 55.  Straits Settlements Legislative Council, Report of Committee, ccliii. In the 1870s, headmen charged an employer $17 to $20 for a laborer when the passage rate he paid out was $13 to $14. 56. Hicks, Overseas Chinese Remittances, 28–30.



Facilitating Migration

79

­TABLE 5  Journey of a Recruited Emigrant, 1914–1940 DAY

JOURNEY

ITEM

July 1

Fuqing‒Fuzhou

pillow

1.50

(by foot)

grass mat

0.30

food

0.30

food and rent

1.50

sundries

0.30

sampan ­ride

0.10

fare to Xiamen

3.00

sampan ­ride

0.10

rent

1.20

food (2 days)

0.50

July 2 July 3 July 4 July 5

Staying in Fuzhou Boat r­ide to Xiamen Arriving in Xiamen Staying in Xiamen

sundries and boat fare

EXPENSES (YUAN)

0.40

July 6

Boat r­ide to Singapore

boat ticket

July 13

Arriving in Singapore

sundries on boat

1.00

sampan ­ride

0.15

July 14–15 Total

Staying in Singapore

rent and food

10.00

1.30 14.55

Source: George Hicks, ed., Overseas Chinese Remittances from Southeast Asia (Singapore: Select Books, 1993), 11.

the 1910s) per occupant regardless how many days they stayed.57 However, most inns provided additional ser­v ices from which they derived even greater profits. Firstly, inn o ­ wners ­were also moneylenders who not only loaned operating capital to headmen but also provided allowances to new emigrants at 10 to 15 ­percent interest. All debts would be settled once ­every four months, and since inn ­owners and their debtors belonged to the same social network, they usually did not require any collateral from them—if the headmen or emigrants failed to come forward to s­ ettle their debts, they knew how to find them.58 Some inns also doubled as exporters, shipping Fujianese favorites like pouchong tea and dried fruits to Southeast Asia for overseas Chinese who craved familiar hometown products. But emigrant inns’ largest profits prob­ably derived from the resale of steamship tickets that they acquired from shipping brokers. ­Because their lodgers ­were nearly obligated to buy from them, emigrant inns could move the tickets easily even ­after they hiked the ticket prices by 20 to 30 ­percent when sold to headmen or 30 to 35 ­percent when sold to individual emigrants.59 Operating an emigrant

57.  Ibid., 9. 58.  Ibid., 26. 59. Ibid.

80 CHAPTER 3

inn was thus a very lucrative endeavor, and the larger ones in Xiamen in the 1930s had working capital upward of 50,000 yuan.60

Shipping Brokers Shipping companies in Xiamen generally did not sell steamship tickets to passengers directly. Instead, they relied on Chinese intermediaries—­the shipping brokers—to reach out to emigrant inns, headmen, or emigrants.61 For ­every ticket sold, shipping brokers received a 5 ­percent commission from the shipping companies; it was also customary for them to add one or two dollars to the shipping companies’ asking price when they sold the tickets. This is to say, shipping brokers stood to reap handsome rewards as they ­were making money from both sides of the transaction. Moreover, b ­ ecause shipping companies normally did not require cash payment for the tickets and also gave their brokers short grace periods to ­settle their accounts, the more daring brokers sometimes purchased all the passenger tickets on a steamer and acted as the sole agent for that ship. In such cases, the rewards from ticket sales could be even more substantial. Given the large number of emigrants leaving Xiamen each year, shipping brokers could grow to considerable size. The Renji Com­pany, one of Xiamen’s largest shipping brokers, had working capital of 200,000 to 300,000 yuan at any one time. Ticket brokering thus was a highly prized business, and it was normally reserved for the shipping companies’ own compradors or the compradors’ friends and relatives.62 Before a steamship ticket reached an emigrant, it had already passed through the hands of shipping brokers, inn ­owners, and headmen. And with each change of hand, the price on the ticket was marked up, putting additional strain on the emigrants. During the G ­ reat Depression, for example, the Singapore government imposed restrictions on Chinese emigration, making travel to the British colony difficult and highly sought ­after. Consequently, shipping companies priced their tickets at 61 yuan each. Brokers in turn sold each ticket to inns for 81 yuan, and by the time it was sold to the emigrant, the same ticket cost 101 yuan, representing a 65 ­percent increase over the original price.63

Ships for the Emigrants The Hokkiens ­were of course capable of sailing to Southeast Asia in their native oceangoing junks, and they had been d ­ oing so for over a millennium before the 60.  Zhou Z., Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu, 73. 61.  Ibid., 75. 62. Hicks, Overseas Chinese Remittances, 24–25. 63.  Jiangsheng bao, 1934.10.4, cited in Zhou Z., Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu, 75.



Facilitating Migration

81

nineteenth ­century.64 Varying from 75 to 106 feet in length and with a carry­ing capacity ranging from 350 to 750 tons, Hokkien vessels could transport hundreds of emigrants on each voyage.65 However, as they ­were dependent on the monsoons, they could only put out to sea between December and April when the northeasterly wind would take them to their destinations in the South and had to wait ­until April or May for the reversal of the monsoon system before they could return to China in the summer. Wind-­powered junks thus w ­ ere restricted to one return voyage per year. Moreover, the passage from Xiamen to the Straits Settlements took between twenty and thirty days, making the journey a rather uncomfortable experience for the emigrants. From 1845 onward, Eu­ro­pean square-­rigged clippers also began to carry Chinese emigrants from South China to the Straits Settlements.66 ­Because they w ­ ere faster on the open sea, square-­riggers briefly surpassed native junks as the preferred mode of transportation for Hokkien emigrants to Singapore.67 But both types of sailing crafts quickly gave way a­ fter steamers also entered the fray of passenger transport. Steamships appeared in Xiamen with increasing frequency in the 1860s but initially only as participants in the China coastal trade, carry­ing native and foreign merchandise between treaty ports.68 In 1866, the China and Japan Steamship and Labuan Coal Com­pany began to connect Xiamen with overseas ports in Singapore, Labuan, and Manila by steamers. By the mid-1870s, the British Holt Com­pany’s Blue Funnel line also advanced into the passenger trade when its large oceangoing steamers, ­after taking aboard cargo in Shanghai, ­stopped by Xiamen to pick up emigrants to the Straits Settlements on their voyages back to London.69 Sailing vessels lost an even greater part of their share on the passenger trade a­ fter the establishment of the Bun Hin shipping concern by Singapore Chinese Khoo Tiong Poh (Qiu Zhongbo) in 1874, which specialized in freight and passenger transport between Xiamen, Swatow, and the Straits Settlements. ­Free from the vagaries of the wind, steamships could keep to a more predictable schedule and travel with more frequency than could sailing vessels. The improved speed of steamers shortened the time of travel to Southeast Asia to six or 64.  Chin, “Merchants and Other Sojourners,” 7–11. 65.  Blue, “Chinese Emigration,” 13. 66.  Square-­rigged vessels carry­ing Chinese emigrants w ­ ere first reported in the Singapore ­Free Press in 1845. 67.  Even though Fujianese seemed to prefer square-­rigged vessels when traveling to Singapore, according to the historian Cui Guiqiang, Chinese junks still dominated in terms of number and the total number of emigrants carried when emigrants from Guangdong Province and Hainan w ­ ere taken into account. Cui Guiqiang, Xingjiapo huaren—­cong kaibu dao jianguo (Singapore: Xinjiapo zongxianghuiguan lianhezonghui, 1994), 26. 68.  CMC, “Report on the Trade at the Port of Amoy for the Year 1865,” in Reports on the Trade at the Ports in China Open by Treaty to Foreign Trade for the Year 1865 (Shanghai: Printed at the Imperial Maritime Customs’ Press, 1866), 63. 69.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1874,” 161; CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1875,” 249.

82 CHAPTER 3

eight days and increased passenger safety by minimizing the perils of the sea.70 Hokkien emigrants gravitated to steamship travel with much gusto, and the strong and sustained demand for sea travel stimulated a rapid expansion in Xiamen’s passenger trade. A ­ fter the turn of the twentieth ­century, a prospective emigrant in Xiamen could choose among several shipping lines that plied the familiar routes between Xiamen and popu­lar destinations in Southeast Asia (­table 6). ­Under normal circumstances, he would not have to wait long in Xiamen for a r­ ide as steamships departed regularly and on fixed schedules in the months of February, March, September, and October and ­were capable of carry­ing at least one thousand passengers each trip.71 In addition, Chinese firms in the Straits Settlements also occasionally chartered steamers to Xiamen for the sole purpose of transporting Chinese laborers to the British colonies. In 1885, while fearful of the impending dwindling of the tea trade, the commissioner of customs at Xiamen, J. McLeavy Brown, was nonetheless relieved that “the large and increasing passenger trade ­will always make Amoy an impor­tant shipping port.”72 Brown’s assessment proved to be prophetic. As illustrated in figure 4, the unremitting flow of emigrants through Xiamen helped sustain a vibrant and growing shipping industry in the treaty port through the first four de­cades of the twentieth ­century, even ­after it had ceased to be an export port of any significance.

The Passage The first leg of an emigrant’s journey—­getting to Xiamen—­was usually quite straightforward as the port was well connected by waterways. It sat con­ve­niently at the mouth of the Jiulong River, whose two tributaries passed through well-­ known emigrant communities in Zhangzhou and Longyan Prefectures, including Shima, Haicheng, Changtai, and Longyan. Emigrants to the island’s north, in Nanan, Jinjiang, Quanzhou, Anxi, and Yongchun, could utilize the Jin River to reach the open sea before coasting down south to the Xiamen Bay. In 1898, the Qing court implemented the Inland Steam Navigation Regulations that allowed steam launches, Chinese and foreign, to ply the inland ­waters carry­ing passengers.73 Chinese travelers quickly took to the faster mode of transportation, and according to the commissioner of customs at Xiamen, “almost the ­whole of the [inland] passenger traffic has been absorbed by the steam-­launches.”74 In 1901, 70.  Straits Settlements Legislative Council, Report of Committee, 242. 71. Hicks, Overseas Chinese Remittances, 21. 72.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1885,” 294. 73.  Westel Woodbury Willoughby, Foreign Rights and Interests in China (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1927), 1:161–63. 74.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1892–1901,” 141.



Facilitating Migration

83

­TABLE 6  Shipping Companies Servicing Xiamen in the Early Twentieth ­Century SHIPPING COM­PANY OR AGENT

DESTINATIONS FROM XIAMEN

NO. OF VESSELS

Foo Chang Com­pany

Swatow, Hong Kong, Singapore

3

Ho Yuen Com­pany

Swatow, Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang

4

Yang Ho Com­pany

Swatow, Hong Kong, Singapore, Penang, Rangoon

3

Cha Hua Com­pany

Hong Kong, Singapore, Java, Japan

5

Hutchison-­Whampoa Com­pany

Hong Kong, Manila

1

Swire Com­pany

Hong Kong, Manila

3

Swatow, Hong Kong, Singapore

19

Source: George Hicks, ed., Overseas Chinese Remittances from Southeast Asia, 1910–1940 (Singapore: Select Books, 1993), 21–24.

3,000 Number/tonnage

2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500

0 94 –1

36

19

19

31

–1

93

5

0 93

5

–1

26

19

92

–1 21

19

–1 16

19

92

0

5 91

0

No. of emigrants (X1000)

–1 11

19

19

06

–1

91

5

0 19

01

–1

90

90

5

–1

96

18

–1

89

91

18

–1 86

18

89

0

5 88 –1

–1 18

76 18

81

88

0

0

Steamship tonnage (X10000)

FIGURE 4.  Relationship between numbers of emigrants and shipping tonnage Source: Graph drawn from data in t­able 2, in Dai Yifeng, “Minnan haiwai yimin yu jindai Xiamen xingshuai,” Ershiyi-­shiji, no. 35 (June 1996): 49.

t­ here ­were already twenty-­four steam launches in operation ­running regular routes between Xiamen and its surrounding countryside, and in just three years a­ fter the regulations came into force, they had already served over 2 million passengers. In Xiamen, emigrants stayed in one of the emigrant inns u ­ ntil a few hours before their steamship was scheduled to depart. They w ­ ere then led on board the ship by lightermen—or “double-­oarsmen” (shuangjiang) as the locals called them—­engaged by the inn o ­ wners. To be sure, t­ hese double-­oarsmen ­were products of necessity. ­Because Xiamen was abruptly opened by a treaty, its infrastructure could not keep up with the sharply increasing number of foreign clippers and steamers that sailed into its harbor. The ­limited number of docking berths in the wharf, for example, meant that a significant number of ships that arrived

84 CHAPTER 3

had to anchor a distance away from shore. Consequently, the industry of lighterage ser­v ice, built on an army of double-­oarsmen, came into being, transporting both cargo and passengers from the ships to shore, and vice versa. Double-­oarsmen ­were mi­grants too, and they came mostly from coastal villages in Tong’an County just to the north of Xiamen and belonged ­either to the Chen, the Wu, or the Ji clans. For them, Xiamen represented the end of their migratory journey, and they had come to partake in the port’s migration business by performing a supporting role. As the three most power­ful mi­grant clans in Xiamen, the Chen, Wu, and Ji each carved out a portion of the harbor and dominated the lighterage business within their sphere of influence. The Wu clan controlled the loading and unloading of oceangoing vessels, while the businesses from coastal steamers ­were divided between the Chens and the Jis.75 By 1934, ­there ­were over two thousand lighters in ser­v ice in Xiamen, of which the Wu clan controlled about half.76 To ensure that their lodgers could go on board the steamers without harassment, inn o ­ wners usually liaised with the Wu clan, who would send double-­ oarsmen to take the emigrants and their belongings to their ship. In addition, the Wu clan also formed a “Space-­dividers’ Union” and claimed the right of allocating to deck passengers their deck space on the steamers. In return for this “ser­ vice,” they charged the passengers one to two dollars each for “mat-­space-­money.”77 Conspicuously marked out with chalk, each deck space was roughly four feet by six and a half feet, and passengers w ­ ere to stay in their assigned space for the duration of the trip. Each passenger slept on the straw mats they spread out at night, which they then rolled up during the day so as not to obstruct the passageways.78 For new emigrants ­going overseas for the first time, the experience on board one of the modern steamers was a memorable one. To be sure, the relationship between Xiamen’s emigrants and the steamship was one between paying customers and ser­vice provider. And competition between steamship companies not only kept ticket prices consistently affordable but also ensured that the emigrants, even as deck passengers, could travel in relative comfort. Moreover, since t­ here ­were always more vessels to fill than ­there ­were emigrants to fill them, steamship decks might be full but not overly crowded.79 75.  Nakamura Takashi, “Xiamen zhi Taiwan jimin yu sandaxing,” in Zhongchun xiaozhi jiaoshou lunwenji, trans. Bian Fengkui (Taipei: Daoxiang chubanshe, 2002), 186. 76.  Jiangsheng bao, 1934.4.29, cited in Zhou Z., Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu, 254. 77. ­Great Britain Colonial Office, Monthly Review of Chinese Affairs, CO 273 (May 1936), 27; see also Zhou Z., Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu, 250. 78.  Oral interview of Pek Cheng ­Chuan, National Archives of Singapore, reference number A000027/08. In the 1980s, in an effort to preserve the country’s history, the National Archives of Singapore conducted oral interviews with the country’s pioneers; many of them, though advanced in age, still vividly recalled their passage experiences to Singapore in the early twentieth c­ entury. 79.  Straits Settlements Legislative Council, Report of Committee, ccxlii, cclx.



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In terms of ser­vice, ship captains would ensure that their passengers ­were provided with a plentiful supply of fresh ­water for the duration of the journey. Fortunately this provision was easily met since the passage from Xiamen to Singapore lasted only seven to fifteen days, including stops at Swatow and Hong Kong. Deck passengers ­were also provided with three meals a day, serving mainly rice and vegetables, but fish and meat w ­ ere occasionally on the menu as well. Given that the majority of the emigrants ­were generally underfed at home, having a full stomach throughout their trips overseas became a fondly remembered experience for many of them.80 Ong Ban Guan (Wang Wanyuan), a Fuqing native who traveled to Singapore via Xiamen in the 1920s at age fifteen, recalled sixty years l­ater that the food and living conditions on board the steamship ­were way better than what he had in China. At home, all he had to eat was porridge with sweet potatoes, but during his voyage, he could eat to his heart’s content cooked rice for all three meals daily. Similarly, Yap Ee Chian (Ye Yijian) lamented that his f­ amily could only afford porridge and salted and pickled vegetables for meals, and dried fish and dried shrimps ­were considered luxuries that they could have only occasionally. But on board the steamship to Singapore, he had a big bowl of rice and one bowl of vegetable soup for ­every meal.81 For ­those passengers with money to spare, they could buy extra food and drinks, such as sweet potatoes and duck porridge, from the food stalls run by the ship crews on the deck, or indulge in the plea­sure of opium smoking and gambling, similarly provided by the deckhands. For t­hose who desired a l­ittle more space and privacy, they could even rent one of the crewmember’s own cabins. In other words, the ­whole crew of the ship was financially invested in the deck passengers, and it was in their best interest to make the voyage a pleasant experience for their customers.82 To protect the health of the passengers and prevent the spread of infectious disease, the ship’s crew would spray the deck with disinfectants regularly. But with hundreds of ­people living in tight quarters, cleanliness was hard to maintain. Garbage piled up undisposed, and some passengers also had to endure the occasional vomit and urine that flowed into their deck spaces as the ship rolled across the ocean.83 The deck might be a boisterous place, but conflicts among passengers w ­ ere rare, since the space-­dividers made special efforts to group emigrants

80.  Oral interviews of Ong Ban Guan, Pek Cheng C ­ huan, and Tan Yan Huan, National Archives of Singapore, reference numbers A000187/05, A000027/08, A000075/10, respectively. 81.  Oral interviews of Ong Ban Guan and Yap Ee Chian, National Archives of Singapore, reference numbers A000187/05 and A000043, respectively. Hicks, Overseas Chinese Remittances, 46–47. 82.  Blue, “Chinese Emigration,” 88. 83. Oral interview of Chew Choo Keng, National Archives of Singapore, reference number A000045/24.

86 CHAPTER 3

from the same native place together and even separate groups of emigrants from dif­fer­ent native places on dif­fer­ent decks of the ship.84

Arrival Upon arrival at the port of disembarkation, the emigrants w ­ ere ushered off the steamer to a local inn that their headmen had already made arrangements with before the voyage. Emigrant inns at the destination ports formed the last link in the migration pro­cess. In Singapore, the main port of arrival for Xiamen’s emigrants, for example, t­ here ­were at least twenty-­nine such inns in the 1910s. Like their counter­parts in China, they w ­ ere embedded in the same native-­place network and served exclusively emigrants from the same province. Of the twenty-­nine inns in Singapore, seven catered to emigrants from Fujian, five to Canton emigrants, and eight to Swatow emigrants.85 Besides receiving the emigrants and providing them with accommodations, destination inns ­were also ­labor brokers and the first point of contact for employers looking for ­labor from China. When an employer in Singapore or the surrounding colonies informed an inn—­again, the working relationship was based on native-­place ties such that a Fujianese employer would only approach a Fujianese inn—of the number of laborers he required, the inn would e­ ither telegraph partner inns in China or instruct headmen working for it to proceed to China to recruit the laborers. Once the ship with emigrants arrived, the inn would send its staff to greet the headmen and their charges, arrange for their accommodations, and make the proper forward travel arrangements if necessary. If the landing port was the final destination, the headman would deliver the emigrants to their employers. From them, he got immediate payment for the cost incurred. But if the new emigrants arrived without ready employment, the inn and the headman would help them find jobs, and they would have to repay what was owed the headman or the inn within a fixed period. Any loan still outstanding ­after the headman returned to China would be collected on his behalf by his partner inn.86 British domination over the South China Sea ­after the Opium War created an integrated transoceanic sphere bustling with commercial activities. As steamships plied the familiar routes between the Taiwan Strait and the Strait of Malacca with increased regularity and reliability, Hokkiens also emigrated with greater number and ease than ever before. No doubt the well-­traveled shipping lanes connecting the two eminent sea ports of Xiamen and Singapore helped define the shape 84. Oral interview of Ong Ban Guan, National Archives of Singapore, reference number A000187/05. 85. Hicks, Overseas Chinese Remittances, 46–47. 86. Ibid.



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of the Fujianese dispersal, but as we have seen, it was the workings of enterprising Chinese in Xiamen and abroad, who, relying on their traditional native-­place ties and appropriating the new mode of transportation, fashioned a migration machinery that moved thousands of emigrants annually and allowed for the integration of a Hokkien work force into the ­labor market of Southeast Asia.87 Their ability to establish a transoceanic social network also allowed the Fujianese to develop far-­reaching and interconnected business ventures to cater to the needs of their dispersed provincials. None is more illuminating than the vast network of the remittance industry.

Connecting the Emigrants It is no secret that poor Chinese peasants became hired laborers overseas to help financially support the families they had left ­behind. ­After all, Chinese emigration may be considered an overseas extension of what G. William Skinner called the “mobility strategy,” where the ­family, as an economic unit, made the conscious decision for one or more of its members to pursue their “occupation calling away from home” so as to maximize the income for the entire f­amily.88 Continuing to take care of one’s f­ amily distantly was not just a moral ideal but also a real-­life obligation. However, compared with the sojourning merchants of the past, nineteenth-­ century emigrant laborers ­were tied down to their jobs in the plantations and mines and had fewer opportunities to return to China or the freedom to choose when they could travel. Hence, they had to find ways to send their hard-­earned money to their families in China without physically returning. The remittance industry arose wholly to meet this need and, of course, to benefit from it. In a vivid description of his fellow immigrants in Singapore, Siah U Chin, one of the British colony’s earliest Chinese settlers, left us with impor­tant observations regarding the earliest forms of remittance in the ­middle of the nineteenth c­ entury: During the past month, some of the Streets in the business quarter of Singapore w ­ ere occasionally densely crowded by Chinese. T ­ hese w ­ ere principally coolies from the Gambier and Pepper plantations, who had come into town for the purpose of sending their annual letters and remittances to their families in China by the Junks which w ­ ere leaving on 87.  Of course, the Fujianese ­were not the only Chinese who built and utilized social networks. The Teochews and Cantonese also formed far-­reaching migration networks. In general, such networks w ­ ere par­tic­u­lar in nature, but cross-­dialect group cooperation could also happen. 88.  Skinner, “Mobility Strategies,” 335. See also Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 107–12.

88 CHAPTER 3

their return voyage. ­These letters and monies are ­either entrusted to a comrade from the same part of China, who, fortunate enough to have accumulated a small competency, is about to revisit his native land; or they are delivered to a passenger with whom the remitter may be acquainted; or, lastly, they are confided to one of ­those men, to be found in almost ­every Junk, who make it a regular business to take charge of such remittances. Such persons are designated Seu Pé Ké, and come from all the dif­ fer­ent places of any importance from which emigrants are in the habit of repairing to the Straits. The remitter entrusts his money to the agent from his own part of the country, who for his trou­ble, e­ ither receives a commission of 10 per cent., if the money is to be carried in specie, or is allowed to invest it in goods, the profit or loss on which is his, as he must pay over in China the exact sum that has been delivered to him. ­These persons frequently for years exclusively pursue this business . . . ​­until they have realized sufficient to enable them to embark in more expensive pursuits.89 Not surprisingly, the most primitive way of remitting money back home was to entrust it to friends and fellow villa­gers the sender trusted on occasions when they ­were returning to China for short visits. But by the time Siah wrote his article in 1848, t­ here ­were already a considerable number of professional couriers who made it their business to carry remittances for immobile immigrants. ­These shuike, or “Seu Pé Ké” in Siah’s rendition, began as itinerant traders who peddled native goods between the China coast and Southeast Asia. They ­were familiar and welcome figures among the overseas Chinese communities since they brought to the immigrants hometown favorites like salted vegetables, dried fish, ham, and fresh and dried fruits.90 ­Because they traveled back to China regularly to replenish their stocks, they soon took on the added responsibility of delivering money for immigrants. The 10 ­percent premium they received on the remittances they carry not only added to their profits; the additional amount of cash at their disposal also helped them expand their import-­export trade. As Siah noted, once they had “realized sufficient,” shuike would venture into other pursuits, and one of their natu­ral offshoots was to also serve as a ketou, or headman.91 The more resourceful shuike/ketou might even invest in the establishment of emigrant inns, 89.  Siah U Chin, “Annual Remittances by Chinese Immigrants in Singapore to Their Families in China,” Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia 1 (1847): 35. 90.  Chen T., Emigrant Communities, 64. 91.  Shuike ­were couriers first and foremost, who might also venture into the recruiting business; on the other hand, ketou ­were recruiters who, on their trips, might also carry remittances and trade goods on the side. Even though they started out differently, they ended up performing similar functions. The terms shuike and ketou are thus commonly used synonymously in popu­lar discourse. Dai Yifeng, “Wangluo hua qiye yu qianru xing: jindai qiaopiju de zhidu jiangou (1850–1940),” Zhongguo shehui jingjishi yanjiu, no. 1 (2003): 70–71.



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which in addition to lodging emigrants and brokering steamship tickets reflected the roots of their proprietors by continuing to be involved in the trading of native goods and the ­handling of remittances. Exactly when specialized remittance agencies, the “letter offices” (minxinju or pixinju), came into existence is not clear, but like emigrant inns, the earliest letter offices ­were also ventures undertaken by resourceful shuike/ketou. A telling example of such occupational advancement from traveling courier and headman to settled business owner was Wang Shibei, founder of the Wang Shunxing Letter Office. Originally from Jinjiang, Wang Shibei came to Xiamen at the age of nineteen and began working on board junks sailing between the treaty port and Manila. As he became acquainted with emigrants heading to the Spanish colony, he was regularly asked to deliver letters and remittances on their behalf. Wang eventually quit his job as a deckhand to become a courier full-­time, charging a 2 ­percent premium on the remittances he bore. Wang achieved so much success that he soon brought his two sons to the Philippines and borrowed a space in a friend’s shop to establish the Wang Shunxing Letter Office.92 Another example of a courier’s success story was that of Guo Youping. Like Wang Shibei before him, Guo went to Manila when he was in his twenties and began his c­ areer as a recruiter-­courier, ­running emigrants to the Philippines and conveying goods, letters, and money back to Xiamen. In 1892, he opened his Tianyi Letter Office in his hometown of Longxi, with three branches in Manila, Anhai, and Xiamen.93 At its height during the early Republican period, Guo’s Tianyi Letter Office had thirty-­three branches, including twenty-­four in vari­ous parts of Southeast Asia.94 In the 1880s, ­there ­were already 8 letter offices in Xiamen and 12 in Swatow;95 overseas in Singapore, t­here ­were 49 offices altogether, of which 12 w ­ ere oper96 ated by overseas Fujianese. The number of letter offices surrounding the South China Sea increased rapidly in the early twentieth c­ entury: a Japa­nese survey of the Chinese remittance industry in 1914 reported over 200 letter offices in Singapore, more than 70 in Penang, and about 20 in Batavia; within China, Xiamen boasted around 70 offices, while Swatow had more than 60. In 1935, the number of letter offices in Xiamen reached its peak at 153, exceeding its closest rival Swatow by 87.97 92.  Dai Y., “Wangluo hua qiye yu qianru xing,” 71. 93.  The exact year of the Tianyi Letter Office’s establishment is in dispute; some believe it was founded in 1880. See ibid., 71. 94.  Zhongguo yinhang Quanzhou fenhang hangshi bianweihui, Minnan qiaopishi jishu (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1996), 175–77. 95.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1882–1891,” 519. 96.  Dai Y., “Wangluo hua qiye yu qianry xing,” 72. 97. Hicks, Overseas Chinese Remittances, 65–100; Chen T., Emigrant Communities, 80.

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The rapid expansion of the remittance industry in Xiamen was due in large part to the consistently large amount of money remitted by overseas Chinese through the port. From table 7, we can see that in the first fifteen years of the twentieth ­century, overseas remittances hovered between 17 and 20 million yuan. Remittances briefly dipped from 1916 to 1918 b ­ ecause of the First World War, which had begun two years prior and threatened the livelihoods of many overseas Chinese in the Eu­ro­pean colonies in Southeast Asia. Once the war ended, Southeast Asian economies quickly rebounded, and many overseas Chinese took advantage of the increased demand for Southeast Asian raw materials as Eu­ro­ pean countries rebuilt themselves to become wealthy. Overseas remittances to China not only recovered to prewar levels but grew. And ­after Xiamen commenced its urban reconstruction program in the 1920s, the upsurge in building proj­ects enticed a large amount of overseas investment, which accounted for the jump in remittances ­after 1924. Remittances again fell ­after 1932 b ­ ecause overseas Chinese ­TABLE 7  Annual Remittance to Xiamen (in yuan), 1905–1938 YEAR

REMITTANCE

YEAR

REMITTANCE

1905

18,900,000

1922

27,900,000

1906

18,300,000

1923

25,700,000

1907

17,600,000

1924

45,900,000

1908

17,800,000

1925

45,000,000

1909

20,000,000

1926

66,000,000

1910

21,600,000

1927

51,800,000

1911

17,800,000

1928

44,800,000

1912

19,100,000

1929

54,200,000

1913

17,600,000

1930

60,000,000

1914

17,200,000

1931

72,000,000

1915

18,500,000

1932

49,700,000

1916

15,000,000

1933

47,900,000

1917

12,800,000

1934

43,300,000

1918

11,800,000

1935

51,230,760

1919

18,900,000

1936

58,355,000

1920

19,200,000

1937

57,116,510

1921

44,000,000

1938

52,929,211

Note: According to C. F. Remer, the average value of a yuan, or Chinese dollar, between 1894 and 1901 is 0.5 US dollars. This value dropped to 0.46 between 1902 and 1913 and r­ose to 0.52 between 1913 and 1930. In the 1930s, the value of the Chinese dollar fell to $0.29. C. F. Remer, Foreign Investment in China (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968). Source: Figures for 1905–1934 taken from Wu Chengxi, “Xiamen huaqiao huikuan yu jinrong zuzhi,” Shehui kexue zazhi 8, no. 2 (1936): 202–3; 1935–1938 taken from Zheng Linkuan, Fujian huaqiao huikuan (Fuzhou: Fujiansheng zhengfu mishuchu tongjishi, 1940), 32.



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communities ­were hard hit by the ­Great Depression. Even so, overseas Fujianese still managed to remit 40 to 50 million yuan annually up to the Second Sino-­ Japanese War. Another reason we see a large number of letter offices was b ­ ecause many of them ­were small operations. The aforementioned Japa­nese survey found that nine out of ten letter offices ­were not exclusive remittance agencies but w ­ ere cooperatives that, in addition to h ­ andling remittances, also traded in agricultural produce, cotton textiles, and Western goods and conducted retail businesses. The same survey also revealed that only a small number of the letter offices had the financial means to set up and operate their own branches in China and Southeast Asia, and when they did, they ­were typically headquartered in China, like the aforementioned Tianyi Letter Office. The majority of letter offices ­were instead Southeast Asia based, and no more than 10 ­percent of them ­were capable of establishing a branch office.98 ­Because of their ­limited resources and small establishments, t­ hese letter offices could carry out transregional transactions only by forming lateral and extensive “associated branches” (lianhao) with partner agencies in Southeast Asia and China. When one of t­ hese Southeast Asian letter offices received a remittance from an emigrant, rather than passing the request through its own internal organ­ization, it instead sent it out to a partner agency in China, which would in turn dispatch the remittance to the recipient. Some partner agencies in China ­were actually joint ventures between Southeast Asian letter offices and Chinese partners, and profits would be shared between the two parties. But in most cases, the Southeast Asian offices simply remunerated their partners, paying them a commission of 10–17 yuan per 1,000 yuan remitted if their partners paid their own bills or 2–4 yuan if they bore the expenses in China as well.99 Usually, a remittance had to be relayed through several letter offices before it reached the beneficiary. The extensive, interconnected, and multilayered remittance network is represented schematically in figure 5.100 In practice, a remittance from Southeast Asia to Xiamen flowed as follows: The money to be remitted was ­either brought by the sender himself to a letter office or collected by a collecting agent. T ­ here, a letter was attached stating the amount of the remittance and the sender’s name, address, and occupation. The letter office then sent the money to the head office in Southeast Asia, where it was converted into Chinese currency and dispatched along with the letter to a primary letter office in Xiamen. The

 98. Hicks, Overseas Chinese Remittances, 69.  99. Ibid. 100.  Dai Y., “Wangluo hua qiye yu qianru xing,” 73.

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Southeast Asia Remitter

Branch

Branch

Agent

Southeast Asia remittance agency

Primary agent

Secondary agent

Tertiary agent

Recipient South China FIGURE 5.  Schematic repre­sen­ta­tion of remittance network Source: Adapted from Dai Yifeng, “Wangluo hua qiye yu qianru xing: jindai qiaopiju de zhidu jiangou (1850–1940),” Zhongguo shehui jingjishi yanjiu, no. 1 (2003): 73. Used with permission.

primary letter office might be a branch office of the Southeast Asia letter office or a China-­based letter office capable of accepting remittances from Southeast Asia. In the case of the latter, the primary letter office was usually one of the larger ones and might even have its own branches in Southeast Asia. If the primary letter office did not have the resources to send the remittance to the hinterland, it would entrust the responsibility to a secondary letter office that specialized in connecting the letter offices from Southeast Asia or the China coast with the hinterland. But even secondary letter offices might not want to take on the laborious task of door-­to-­door delivery; if so, it would then delegate the duty to a tertiary letter office. A ­ fter the remittance reached its intended recipient, the envelope, bearing the recipient’s name and address, was sent back with a receipt to the remitter via



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the reverse pro­cesses as proof of delivery.101 In the latter development, if the sender wanted to save on fees, he could choose to buy a “money order” from an overseas letter office and mail it home with his letter. Upon receiving the money order, his f­ amily could then proceed to a designated local letter office to redeem the money order. But if speed was the main concern, the sender could also request his remittance be sent telegraphically. In such case, no ­actual money was remitted, but a tele­gram was sent to a partner letter office in China advising it to dispatch the remittance.102 As small enterprises, the internal organ­ization of letter offices was rather ­simple. A letter office in Xiamen, for example, normally comprised a man­ag­er who was in charge of the office’s total operation, an accountant who was concurrently the cashier and bookkeeper, several clerks and apprentices in charge of paperwork and other miscellaneous tasks, and a courier responsible for delivering letters and remittances from Xiamen to rural villages.103 ­Because most mi­grants ­were illiterate and their f­ amily members in China w ­ ere mostly w ­ omen or the el­derly, an impor­tant function of letter offices and the couriers who performed the ­actual delivery was to read and write the accompanying letters for them. Hence, the ability to write, even just at the elementary level, was a prerequisite for the job as couriers, and their arrivals to the rural villages w ­ ere usually met with much excitement and hospitality.104 It was this tradition of personal ser­v ice, as one historian suggests, that helped explain the popularity and longevity of the letter offices even ­after public post offices and modern banks entered the fray of remittance ser­v ice in the twentieth ­century.105 Indeed, from the 1920s onward, foreign-­and overseas-­Chinese-­owned banks, such as the Bank of Amsterdam, the Bank of Taiwan, the Overseas Chinese Bank Corporation, and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, all established offices in Xiamen and ­were capable of ­handling large amounts of remittances. But they accounted for only 25–30 ­percent of the total Southeast Asian remittances between 1930 and 1937.106 The bulk of the remittance business—­money sent by ordinary emigrants—­remained in the hands of letter offices. No doubt the majority of remitters ­were ­humble and illiterate emigrants who relied on the letter offices to write their letters, but we need to also note that letter offices had responded to the 101.  Lynn Pan, ed., Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Chinese Heritage Center, 1998), 108. See also Chen T., Emigrant Communities, 78–82. 102.  Dai Y., “Wangluohua qiye yu qianruxing,” 74. 103.  Wu Chengxi, “Xiamen huaqiao huikuan yu jinrong zuzhi,” Shehui kexue zazhi 8, no. 2 (1936): 219. 104.  Dai Y., “Wangluohua qiye yu qianruxing,” 75. 105.  Leo Douw, in Pan, Encyclopedia, 108; Chen T., Emigrant Communities, 78–81. 106.  Xiamen jinrong zhi bianweihui, Xiamen jinrongzhi, 88–95.

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challenges by utilizing the facilities of the postal ser­vice and modern banks to improve their own ser­vices. A ­ fter a letter office in Southeast Asia received a certain number of remittances, it would send the emigrants’ homeward letters through the postal ser­vice to its partner letter offices in China. At the same time, it would also forward them the remittances using the ser­vices of modern banks. It was then up to their partner letter offices to hand deliver the letters and remittances to the recipients in the hinterlands. This is to say, instead of posing a serious threat to the relevance of traditional letter offices, the modern postal ser­vice and banks helped letter offices in China and Southeast Asia to become even more tightly knit.107 As the focal point of South Fujian that “provide[d] appropriate conditions allowing sojourners to leave and travel far and wide, while also furnishing them with a variety of means to maintain ties with the home village,” Xiamen performed functions comparable to Hong Kong and certainly also qualified as an in-­between place.108 Similarly, like Hong Kong, Xiamen was a “city in motion,” with a large circulation of p ­ eople moving through the island from its hinterlands, e­ ither on their way overseas or when returning to their natal home.109 But as we have seen in chapter 1, Xiamen’s role as an in-­between place predated its treaty port era; its opening as a treaty port and the changing global environment in the second half of the nineteenth c­ entury simply allowed Xiamen to expand its traditional functions in facilitating ­human movements. And in contrast to Hong Kong, where cross-­Pacific migrations created new ave­nues of trade and allowed the British colony to flourish into a trading and financial center, Xiamen became increasingly dependent on migration as its reputation as a trading center dissipated. This was in large part ­because migration itself was a big business and ­there was money to be made at ­every step of the migration pro­cess. Individuals and businesses in Xiamen found a niche where they could make money and even prosper and thus saw lesser need for foreign trade and industrial development. However, despite foreign merchants’ failure to capitalize on Xiamen’s new status, domestic trade remained vibrant in the port city as Chinese merchants quickly utilized modern transportation in steamships and insurance ser­vices on top of their traditional networks to further their business interests. Similarly, the business organ­izations of the migratory pro­cess, from Xiamen through the passages to destinations overseas, ­were all heavi­ly reliant on a combination of modern technology and traditional native-­place ties. In a sense, the example of Xiamen 107.  Dai Y., “Wangluohua qiye yu qianruxing,” 74. 108. Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 9. 109.  Sherman Cochran and David Strand, eds., Cities in Motion: Interior, Coast, and Diaspora in Transnational China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).



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supports Philip Kuhn’s proposition that the emigration corridor that stretched from China to settlements abroad was primarily built on native-­place ties.110 As crucial link in the emigration corridor, Xiamen held a special place in the hearts of emigrants who benefitted from the ser­vices it provided. And as we s­ hall see in the following chapters, Xiamen became the center of emigrant activities when they returned to China.

110. Kuhn, Chinese among O ­ thers, 49.

4 MANIPULATING IDENTITIES States and Opportunities in Xiamen A “corridor” is an extension of the mi­grant’s old environment. It is a channel of connections that keep the mi­grant in a meaningful relationship to the old country (or old village, lineage, or province). It may actually work against the development of a “myth of return,” or a longing to go home again, ­because in certain re­spects the mi­grant has never left home. He has preserved vari­ous modes of belonging (economic, cultural, and kinship) so that he remains oriented more firmly t­ oward the society of origin than to the society in which he is physically living. Maintaining corridors is the essence of sojourning. The mi­grant has not committed himself mentally or behaviorally to a permanent break with the old country, its culture, or its ­people. —­Philip Kuhn, Chinese among O ­ thers

In emphasizing international migration as an overseas extension of the domestic ­human flows in China, Philip Kuhn has unquestionably provided us with a new and complex understanding of the workings of Chinese migration over the longue durée.1 However, the China-­centeredness of Kuhn’s analy­sis is also palpable, as the emigrants’ homeward connections take pre­ce­dence over any non-­Chinese forces that might work against the overseas Chinese or their nuance interactions with foreign authorities. As a ­matter of fact, Kuhn’s proclamation that “the mi­ grant has never left home” shows shades of an e­ arlier generation of scholarship that emphasizes an enduring bond between overseas Chinese and the land they left b ­ ehind, which leads to the affirmation that emigrants are still “Chinese” regardless how far or for how many generations they have been removed from China. For scholars with such persuasions, it is inconceivable that overseas Chinese could be anything but Chinese. Kuhn’s insistence on the role native-­place ties played in determining the va­ri­ e­ties of migration experiences is enlightening, and our discussion in the previous chapter has largely corroborated the importance of native-­place ties in facili1. Kuhn, Chinese among O ­ thers, 49.

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tating Chinese emigration. Nonetheless, we must not overlook the fact that the opportunities to travel overseas—­including the voyages themselves—­were eye-­opening and life-­changing experiences for the myriad Hokkiens who spent most of their lives in rural South Fujian. It was during their journeys abroad that many of them for the first time visited Xiamen, saw a foreigner and interacted with fellow provincials at the regional metropolis, encountered Chinese from other parts of China who spoke unintelligible dialects on board the steamship, and experienced colonial regulations at the port of disembarkation.2 Of course we must not over emphasize the lasting impacts such perfunctory impressions had on the emigrants, but what is certain is that the world of the emigrants and their identities can no longer simply be l­ imited to or defined by their native place alone. In truth, the fact that Chinese emigrants had indeed “left home” was even more pronounced when they “returned home” to China, as some of them showcased their foreign nationalities, while ­others leveraged their comparative advantages as international entrepreneurs, millionaire philanthropists, or cosmopolitan intellectuals. This chapter examines the multifaceted identities of returned emigrants in Xiamen during its treaty port era through the lens of dif­fer­ent power regimes—­the Qing, ­Great Britain, Japan, and the Republic of China. For ­those emigrants who had acquired foreign nationality, they had literally returned home to China as a “foreign” country. But for returned overseas Chinese in general, Xiamen was “foreign” also b ­ ecause it was not entirely Chinese. As one of the few win­dows imperialist powers opened in China, it sat uncomfortably on the margins of the Chinese empire—­the Qing government saw its authorities truncated at the treaty port while imperialist powers (especially Britain and ­later Japan) established their consulates on the island and exerted dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal and economic influences on the denizens of the port city. In a sense, Xiamen was situated “in between” China and the world beyond, and the vari­ous contending po­liti­cal powers created a fluid environment in Xiamen that allowed returned overseas Chinese to leverage their “foreignness”—­and when necessary, their “nativeness”—in the interstices of the vari­ous governments for their own benefits. While the vari­ous states tried to identify, win over, and discipline the emigrants, what stood out, as we ­shall see, ­were the chameleonic nature of the overseas Chinese and their con­spic­uo ­ us lack of deep ideological commitment to any one par­tic­u­lar state.

2.  Oral interviews of Ong Ban Guan, Pek Cheng C ­ huan, and Tan Yan Huan, National Archives of Singapore, reference number A000187/05, A000027/08, and A000075/10, respectively.

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Contesting Jurisdiction—­Q ing versus ­G reat Britain Returning Chinese In 1858, when US admiral S. F. Du Pont suggested to Tan Tingxiang that it might be worthwhile for the Qing court to send consuls to the United States to look ­after its emigrants ­there, in part ­because a ­great number of them had crossed the Pacific but largely ­because many had literally struck gold in the New World, the governor-­general of Zhili scoffed at the idea: “The emperor’s wealth is beyond computation. Why should he care for t­ hose of his subjects who have left their home, or for the sands they have scraped together?”3 As a high-­ranking government official within the Qing bureaucracy, Tan Tingxiang’s derisive remarks w ­ ere a true reflection of the central government’s views of and attitudes t­ oward ­those who had voluntarily left China.4 For much of the Qing dynasty, the imperial court considered Chinese who had gone overseas as undesirable and potentially dangerous. This disdain for emigrants had both ideological and pragmatic roots. Ideologically, the Qing court subscribed to the Confucian order of ­things that privileged agricultural work over craft and trade. Hence, a dutiful subject was one who stayed at home and tilled the land. On the practical side, the Manchus inherited an empire that derived its wealth from taxable farmlands in the hinterland. Fiscal concerns determined that the state preferred settled farmers who could be registered and taxed to mobile merchants.5 ­Needless to say, Chinese who pursued their own financial interests outside the empire without any contribution to the imperial coffers ­were deemed by the court to be particularly objectionable. Moreover, in the Chinese idealized view of the world, China, the M ­ iddle Kingdom, was the epicenter of civilization by virtue of its po­liti­cal, cultural, and moral supremacy. It was unimaginable to the imperial court that any respectable Chinese subject would willingly leave China to enter the realms of barbarians. For ­those who did, they had abandoned their race and betrayed their culture, and it was foreseeable that they would conspire with foreigners or engage in seditious activities to the detriment of China. As a m ­ atter of fact, throughout the Qing dynasty, the state was fearful that Chinese emigrants might form rebellious forces 3.  W. A. P. Martin, A Cycle of Cathay; or China, South and North, with Personal Reminiscence (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1896), 160. 4.  During the Qing, the Zhili Province encompassed t­oday’s Beijing, Tianjin, and part of the provinces of Hebei, Liaonin, Henan, and Inner Mongolia. Among Qing’s eight regional governors-­ general, the post of the governor-­general of Zhili was the most impor­tant. It must be noted, however, that Qing officials in the coastal provinces, especially Fujian and Guangdong, apparently had much more positive views of the emigrants. See Kuhn, Chinese among ­Others. 5.  Ibid., 17–18.

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abroad. It was known that Koxinga’s re­sis­tance against the Manchu conquest enlisted the support of overseas Chinese, particularly ­those from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Siam.6 His impressive navy was also financed by profits from trade with Southeast Asia, partly carried out by overseas Chinese. ­After Koxinga’s re­ sis­tance succumbed, remnants of his troops dis­appeared into Southeast Asia to escape reprisal from the central government. Hence, as the state saw it, t­ hose who lived outside the empire must harbor subversive intentions. To prevent the foolhardier of its subjects from swelling the ranks of insurgents abroad, the Qing court had consistently banned overseas migration, albeit still allowing maritime trade through selected ports. In a series of edicts issued between 1656 and 1712, successive Qing emperors tightened the prohibition on immigration by decreeing overseas travel and residence a capital crime punishable by beheading.7 Yet despite l­egal sanctions, many Chinese, enticed by financial prospects abroad, w ­ ere prepared to go and stay overseas. As we have noted in chapter 1, Taiwan ­under Koxinga’s control was already integrated into the chain of Chinese trade and settlement. ­After the Qing annexed Taiwan, notwithstanding the government’s best efforts, it was unable to stop the continual flow of Fujianese heading for the extensive alluvial lowlands on the western coast of the island, where they developed rice and cane sugar production to be exported back to the mainland.8 At the same time, the long-­running trend of Fujianese merchants sailing to trading centers in Southeast Asia and Japan, such as Manila, Batavia, Malacca, and Nagasaki, where they settled down and formed merchant communities, continued unabated.9 In accordance with Qing laws, all overseas Chinese had committed a capital crime. However, rather than actively seeking their extradition for punishment, the increasingly Confucianized Qing court preferred to have nothing to do with ­these materialistic and disloyal deserters.10 No one exemplified this callous disregard for the overseas Chinese better than Emperor Qianlong, who, upon learning of the massacre of thousands of Chinese by the Dutch in Batavia, remarkably commented that t­ hese Chinese had deserted their ancestors and country for the sake of personal profits abroad; they thus deserved no sympathy from the imperial court!11 On the other hand, if t­hese offenders dared to return to China, they could still be held accountable for defying imperial o ­ rders. In 1749, Chen Yilao, a  6. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 19.  7. Ibid., 20.  8. Pan, Encyclopedia, 31.   9.  James Chin has studied Fujianese trade and the formation of overseas Fujianese communities in Southeast Asia and Japan from the sixteenth to the eigh­teenth centuries. See Chin, “Merchants and Other Sojourners.” 10. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 22. 11. Ibid.

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Longxi trader who had e­ arlier settled in Batavia and served the Dutch as a “Kapitan,” de­cided to retire to his native village with his riches and his foreign wife. While attempting to sneak back through Xiamen, he was detected and detained by the authorities. Chen’s case alarmed Emperor Qianlong, who took a personal interest in it and ordered Chen exiled and his property confiscated.12 ­Whether abandoned as undesirables or punished as criminals, overseas Chinese w ­ ere at the mercy of the Chinese state to mete out treatments it deemed fit. And prior to the mid-­nineteenth c­ entury, the Qing had f­ ree reign in dealing with or disciplining its emigrants; a­ fter all, in China or abroad, all Chinese ­were subjects of the Chinese empire as a ­matter of course. However, ­after its defeat in the Opium War, the Qing began to find the overseas Chinese agonizingly out of reach even ­after they had come back to China. This was especially so a­ fter it was forced to sign a series of unequal treaties in which the Qing acceded to the princi­ple of extraterritoriality, a right first demanded by the British and ­later also acquired by the United States, France, and Japan for their citizens in China. This treaty stipulation, which first appeared in the supplementary Treaty of the Bogue in 1843, disempowered the Chinese state from prosecuting foreigners accused of committing crimes in China; instead they w ­ ere to be handed over to their respective consuls, who would then judge them according to their own national laws. Although the push for implementing the princi­ple of extraterritoriality in China was to protect British citizens from the “barbaric” Chinese laws and judicial procedures, it was not meant to give foreigners unfair advantages in China. In theory, civilized Westerners in China had the burden of comporting themselves in an even more responsible manner.13 However, the benefits of having immunity from Chinese laws on Chinese soil w ­ ere plain for all to see, and t­hese included overseas Chinese who ­were natural-­born British subject or had become one through naturalization. Hence, even though the Qing never made it l­egal for its subjects to transfer their allegiance to foreign countries—as clearly emphasized by Prince Gong, prince regent to Emperor Tongzhi, in 1871—­this did not deter a section of returned overseas Chinese from registering with the British consulates as British subjects in China.14 According to the consul registers, Straits Chinese constituted a major portion of British subjects in Xiamen: In 1846, twenty-­seven of the fifty-­three registered British residents w ­ ere Chinese from British Malaya, 12.  Zhuang Guotu, Zhongguo fengjian zhengfu de huaqiao zhengce (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1989), 117; Ng Chin-­keong, “The Case of Chen I-­lao: Maritime Trade and Overseas Chinese in Ch’ing Policies, 1717–1754,” in Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in Asian Maritime trade, c. 1400–1750, ed. Roderich Ptak and Dietmar Rothermund (Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991), 373–99. 13.  R. Keith Schoppa, Revolution and Its Past: Identities and Change in Modern Chinese History (Upper ­Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006), 57; Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy, 212. 14.  FO230/84, cited in Peng Siqi, “Wanqing Minsheng yiji huamin guanxiaquan jiaoshe, 1842– 1911” (MA thesis, National Chengchi University, 2009), 105.

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who returned thence at the end of the trading season. The following year, thirty-­ five persons ­were registered, of whom sixteen w ­ ere Chinese. At the end of 1848, the British subjects pre­sent at Xiamen included thirteen British, four British Indians, and twenty-­six Chinese from the Straits Settlements. Straits Chinese outnumbered all other British subjects in Xiamen.15 Despite the threat of corporal punishment, overseas Chinese, by and large, still harbored hopes of eventually returning to China. Throughout the Qing dynasty, ­those with means continually tried to evade state surveillance to reenter China so as to re­unite with the ­family members they once left ­behind, to start their own families, or simply to retire. While it is true that an incident like Chen Yilao’s where a returned emigrant was actually apprehended and punished was rare, returnees ­were however constantly subjected to harassments and extortion by local government officials and functionaries and w ­ ere the easy targets of scams, thieveries, and robberies by unscrupulous townsfolk.16 As lawbreakers themselves, the normal ­legal channels for justice w ­ ere closed to ­these victims, and they typically had to suffer in silence. But with the establishment of foreign consulates in China, overseas Chinese found an alternative source of authority to help redress their grievances in China. An incident in 1847 involving Lee Shun Fah (Li Shunfa), a Straits-­born Chinese, fully demonstrates how British intervention could positively affect the fate of overseas Chinese ­under duress in China. ­Earlier in 1846, Lee Shun Fah, who had been trading between the Straits Settlements and Xiamen, chartered a ship—­the Sophie Frazier—at the behest of his cousin Li Xinying to ferry merchandises to Singapore. Besides cargo, the ship also took on more than a hundred emigrant coolies for a Straits Chinese coolie broker named Hong Ling. ­After setting sail from Xiamen, the Sophie Frazier ran into a typhoon and was marooned at sea for two days, resulting in the death of over thirty of its passengers who w ­ ere locked in the lower deck of the ship with no means of escape. Villa­gers of the Xiayang She near Xiamen held Lee Shun Fah responsible for the death of eleven of their own who ­were on board the ship and, upon mediation, agreed that Lee should pay six dollars each to the families of the deceased as compensation. But Lee refused to comply, leaving the m ­ atter unresolved. In November 1847, a Xiayang She resident spotted Lee passing by the village with his ­uncle Li Qingfeng, thus rekindling the old animosity ­toward him. In the night, sixty to seventy members from the village barged into Lee’s residence and carried him off ­after ransacking the ­house. Lee was held captive and kept for four days in a torturous position—he was made to sit on the floor, and his body forced 15. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 27; Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy, 215. 16. Xue Fucheng, “Shiying Xue Fucheng zhouqing shenming xinzhang huochu jiujin yi hushangmin zhe,” in Zhongguo guji zhong youguan xingjiapo malaixiya ziliao huibian, ed. Yu Dingbang and Huang Zhongyan (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2002), 165.

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into a painful V shape with his feet fastened to wooden bars and elevated, while not allowing his head to rest by tying his queue to a beam aloft. Li Xinying, who was at Lee Shun Fah’s ­house but managed to escape, reported the incident to the British consul in Xiamen. ­Because Lee Shun Fah had been born in Penang, a British colony, and had for the last three years registered himself as a British subject, the British consul T. H. Layton felt obliged to intervene on his behalf. Through multiple petitions to the cir­cuit intendant of Xing-­Quan-­Yong Districts (Xingquanyong Daotai),17 Layton was able to secure the release of Lee Shun Fah and obtained for him $605 in compensation.18 Even though the British consul in Xiamen already had a full-­time job looking ­after commercial ­matters alone, he was generally quick and responsive in answering the grievances of British subjects since one of the main purposes for establishing British consulates was to ensure the application of the treaty and to safeguard the ­legal rights of British subjects in China.19 With the international balance of power shifting in Britain’s ­favor, the British consul was generally able to pressure Chinese local officials to act and investigate incidents involving British-­Chinese subjects no ­matter how trivial they might seem to his Chinese counter­parts. A case in point: the Xiamen authority had initially ignored a larceny case filed by a Singapore Chinese, Tan King Hee (Chen Qingxi), whose $300 he brought back for his wedding was stolen. It was only ­after repeated appeals from the British consul that the Xiamen official fi­nally took up the case and apprehended the culprits and even managed to recover $120 for Chen, albeit the village where the culprits came from was very poor.20 With the British consul providing the l­ egal and po­liti­cal backing that overseas Chinese other­wise lacked in China, many returned Chinese ­were more than willing to proclaim themselves British subjects to take advantage of consular protection. Besides shielding their Chinese subjects from Chinese authorities when they ­were criminalized, the British consul also helped them resolve issues regarding taxation, land owner­ship, debt, and conflict with other Chinese. It seems that overseas Chinese w ­ ere so e­ ager to benefit from their acquired nationality that between 1906 and 1908, over 30 ­percent of all letter communications between the British consul in Xiamen and Chinese authorities involved the British Chinese.21

17.  The cir­cuit intendant of Xing-­Quan-­Yong was the chief magistrate of the administrative cir­ cuit in Fujian that comprised the districts of Quanzhou, Xinghua, and Yongchun. 18.  CO228/71, no. 87; CO 228/71, no. 100; FO 677/26, no. 4. 19. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy, 161. 20.  FO 228/84, cited in Ei Murakami, “Shijiu shiji Xiamen de guiguo huaqiao,” in Riben Dongfangxue (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 1:234. 21. Ei Murakami, “Kiyosue Xiamen niokeru eiseki kajin mondai,” in Chinese Society in the Twentieth ­Century, ed. Tokihiko Mori, trans. Yuan Guangquan (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press [China], 2011), 155.

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Deepening Prejudices Overseas Chinese pretension as foreigners in their native land did not help the long-­standing negative images they suffered in China; in truth, their reputation sank to a new low ­after the Opium War.22 For the Qing government, returned Chinese emigrants’ willful recourse to a foreign power to undermine the authority of the imperial government validated its e­ arlier suspicion that they w ­ ere an opportunistic and traitorous lot who would sacrifice the interest of the empire for their own personal gains. Consequently, the relationships between the Qing dynasty and its returned emigrants became even more strained, and Chinese officials became all the more impatient and hardhanded in their dealings with them. In Xiamen, many Chinese from the Straits Settlements did indeed return for the new economic opportunities brought about by British presence in the treaty port. Straits Chinese ­were especially apt to fill the niche as translators and middlemen for the British government or merchant firms in Xiamen, b ­ ecause unlike Canton, where a long history of trading with Westerners produced a backlog of “pidgin-­English-­speaking” Chinese, the British could not find anyone in Xiamen with whom they could directly communicate and do business.23 Moreover, the Hokkien dialect spoken in this part of China proved not only difficult for the Westerners but also foreign to the Cantonese who had served so well as translators in the past. So when Captain Gribble arrived in Xiamen as the officiating British consul, he had to hire two more interpreters in addition to the two Cantonese linguists he brought with him, one of whom was an overseas Chinese who had learned some En­glish in Singapore.24 In addition to the language barrier, British merchants ­were also hampered by treaty stipulations that ­limited their movement to within the city of Xiamen and a travel distance of no more than half a day’s journey from the city if they ­were to venture into the interior.25 Hence, to facilitate trade, British firms depended on the Chinese to help them distribute British manufactured goods into the hinterlands and collect in exchange the produce of the area that they then exported. This constraint allowed Straits Chinese, who ­were uniquely positioned b ­ ecause of their ability to speak both the En­glish language and the local dialect, to reprise their role of middlemen—or in China, compradors—­for the British as they had done so successfully abroad, especially in Southeast Asia. Notable examples of overseas Chinese middlemen in Xiamen included Ke Xiaozhao, comprador for Tait & Co., who was born overseas, and Ye Deshui, comprador for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, who 22. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins. 23. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy, 164. 24.  Ibid. The other could translate between the South Fujian dialect and Mandarin. 25. ­Temple Hillyard Layton, “Local Regulations for the Port of Amoy,” China Mail, June 7, 1849.

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began his ­career as a coolie laborer and petty trader in San Francisco before returning to Xiamen.26 For Qing officials, overseas Chinese interpreters and middlemen w ­ ere pawns of the imperialists to be sure, and they might be avaricious and parasitic but still largely disregardable. However, when they participated in the scandalous coolie trade, thus aiding foreigners in the abuse and exploitation of fellow Chinese, they had disturbed the peace and posed as a menace to society. As we have seen in chapter 3, Chinese coolie brokers penetrated the hinterland for British firms in Xiamen, and they used a variety of tactics—­from deception to abduction—to procure the required coolies for export. Their involvement in this criminal and inhumane activity elicited the contempt and ill w ­ ill of local officials against them and even sparked conflicts with native Chinese. The aforementioned Lee Shun Fah was punitively tortured by the villa­gers of Xiayang She exactly ­because he was suspected to be a coolie crimp. During an 1852 riot, leaders of the Chinese community in Xiamen also called on fellow residents to kill any brokers caught on-­site rather than bring them before the authorities.27 Overseas Chinese posed an even greater threat to the security of the empire when they ­were involved in secret socie­ties that ­were traditionally intractable and even rebellious in nature. Ironically, it was the British who first exposed overseas Chinese associations with seditious organ­izations in Xiamen. In 1849, Lord Layton, then British consul of Xiamen, discovered that the same Tan King Hee, who had ­earlier requested consular assistance in recovering his stolen money, was actually a leader of the long-­standing anti-­Manchu Heaven and Earth Society, known locally as the Sanhe Hui (Three combinations society). As a registered British subject, Tan’s access to British protection emboldened him to engage in a range of unlawful activities in Xiamen, such as smuggling, extortion, blackmail, and robbery, with l­ittle regard for the local authorities.28 A pugnacious individual, Tan also tyrannized his neighbors, including on one occasion storming into a local rice shop with twenty men, beating up the shop­keeper, and disposing of him in a village three miles away from the city, a­ fter which the poor man was never seen again. ­After Tan’s neighbors fi­nally mustered enough courage to petition Layton to seek justice against him, Tan remained defiant when Layton interrogated him and even insulted the three respectable local witnesses called to provide impartial testimony. With evidence stacked against Tan, Layton found him guilty as charged and imposed a five-­dollar fine on top of a two-­month prison sentence. However, fearing the disturbances Tan might further cause to the local society, 26.  Xiamenshi zhengxie yanghang shiliao zhengji xiaozu, “Xiamen de yanghang yu maiban,” Fujian wenshi ziliao, no. 5 (1981): 161–65. 27. ­Great Britain Foreign Office, Correspondence with the Superintendent, 72. 28. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 28–29.

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he agreed to Tan’s request and banished him back to Singapore for three years in lieu of the original punishment.29 ­After Tan was deported, Layton also found that his b ­ rother, Tan King Sing (Chen Qingxing), who worked as an interpreter in the British consulate, was also a leader of another secret society, the Small Knife Society (Xiaodao hui). The younger Tan was summarily dismissed from his position and too ordered to leave Xiamen.30 Layton’s swift decisions to expel both secret society leaders from Xiamen ­were much appreciated by local officials and community leaders. ­After the Tan King Hee incident, Chinese officials in Xiamen continued to keep a watchful eye for potential rebels among returned overseas Chinese, and their vigilance paid off in 1851, when the cir­cuit intendant of Xing-­Quan-­Yong, Zhang Xiyu, arrested Tan Keng Chin (Chen Qingzhen) and several o ­ thers for their connections to the Small Knife Society. Born in Singapore of a Malay m ­ other, Tan Keng Chin was thus a British subject by birth, and he had also registered as one with the British consulate in 1849. Tan Keng Chin had learned to read and write the En­glish language while in Singapore and, at one stage, worked ­under M. C. Morrison, the officer in charge of interpreters at the British consulate in Xiamen.31 Morrison ­later recommended him to Jardine, Matheson & Co., where he worked ­either as a secretary or a comprador.32 Chinese authorities believed that Tan Keng Chin might also be a coolie broker.33 The only incriminating evidence against Tan seemed to be a book found at his ­house that contained the names and residences of members of the society.34 For the Chinese officials, that was enough, and upon interrogation and torture, Tan Keng Chin admitted to being the leader of the Small Knife Society. U ­ nder Chinese law, Tan’s penalty was death, but b ­ ecause he was a registered British subject, G. G. ­Sullivan, the successor to Layton as British consul in Xiamen, intervened and demanded a fair trial with the charges formally made out in writing.35 Zhang Xiyu consented. However, he soon regretted his decision and ordered Tan Keng Chin beaten to death with bamboo canes. The cir­cuit intendant, or Daotai, then had Tan’s corpse carried to ­Sullivan’s residence in a sedan chair and, as if to emphasize his contempt for the British consul’s intervention, dressed Tan in his usual attire and posed him in a seated position as if he was alive.36 29.  Huang Jiamo, “Yingren yu Xiamen Xiaodaohui shijian, 1850–1853,” Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, no. 7 (1978): 315. 30. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy, 300–301. See also, Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 28–29. 31.  “Journal of Occurrences,” Chinese Repository 20 (1851): 49. 32.  Ibid.; see also Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 30. 33. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 30. 34. George Hughes, “The Small Knife Rebels: An Unpublished Chapter of Amoy History,” China Review 1, no. 6 (1873): 245. 35. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 30. 36.  Chinese Repository 20 (1851): 49.

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What compelled Zhang Xiyu to dispense with protocol and deal Tan Keng Chin an unconventional and immediate death was undoubtedly the danger he perceived in the age-­old overseas Chinese‒secret society connections. Exactly how involved Tan Keng Chin was with the Small Knife Society was uncertain. According to Morrison and Robert McMurde, Tan Keng Chin’s boss at Jardine, Matheson & Co., Tan was a kindhearted and hardworking man who preferred to keep to himself.37 G. G. S­ ullivan believed that even though Tan might be a member of the Small Knife Society, he was actually a scapegoat for his b ­ rother, Tan King Sing, 38 who was the real leader of the organ­ization. In any case, Zhang Xiyu’s preemptive action seemed justified as the Small Knife Society initiated an insurrection two years ­later (1853) and began attacking Xiamen and its neighboring cities. Of the six known leaders of the rebel group, three ­were returned Chinese from Singapore, including Tan King Sing.39 Zhang Xiyu’s decision to mete out punishments before Tan could be rescued by the British consul also revealed Chinese officials’ increasing frustration over the constant subjugation of Chinese laws and Chinese pride to foreign privileges and their anger at the arrogance of the overseas Chinese for slighting their authority. The Tan Keng Chin incident was by no means an isolated transgression of an uncompromising Chinese official, and overseas Chinese ­were usually the ones who bore the brunt of Chinese officials’ ire when t­ here was nothing much they could do to the foreigners. Sir Julian Pauncefote, a se­nior official in the British Foreign Office, reported a similar incident in 1872 when a Straits Chinese from Singapore was “foully murdered by the authorities mainly ­because he claimed to be a British subject”: “It appears that the British Consul went to the Yamen [Magistrate’s Office] at Amoy to insist on the liberation of a respectable certificated Anglo-­Chinese from Singapore, who had been illegally seized and imprisoned. ­After some hours of expostulation he returned to the Consulate, and almost as he entered it a chair was set down at the door containing the corpse of the man he had endeavoured to save. He had been beaten to death in the Yamen.”40 Resentments against the overseas Chinese w ­ ere not ­limited to government officials since their nontraditional power base and refusal to conform to established social etiquette also alienated them from the local gentry. When Zhang Xiyu was to be transferred to Gansu Province, Xiamen’s gentry erected a stele in his honor. Of all Zhang’s contributions to the local society, they highly praised his decisive-

37.  Huang Jiamo, “Yingren yu Xiamen Xiaodaohui shijian,” 316 38.  Murakami, “Shijiu shiji Xiamen de guiguo huaqiao,” 226. 39.  Ibid., 227. 40. “Memorandum by Sir J. Pauncefote respecting British Protection to Anglo-­Chinese in China,” March 15, 1879, enclosed in CO 273/142.

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ness in executing Tan Keng Chin, which helped restore Chinese honor and pride in front of the foreigners.41

Defining Subjects The presence of British Chinese in China added another dimension to the difficult task of normalizing Sino-­British relations a­ fter the Opium War, since British consuls frequently clashed with local officials regarding juridical rights over ­these Chinese. To be sure, true to its ­legal princi­ples, the British government had undertaken to protect all its subjects in China, including Chinese subjects from its colonies when they returned to China. As early as March 1844, a Hong Kong ordinance extended the jurisdiction of the Hong Kong courts over all British subjects in China or within one hundred miles of the coast, which also came to include the British Chinese from the Straits Settlements.42 To properly identify ­these Chinese subjects, the governor of Hong Kong requested that the colonial governments in Singapore, Penang, and Malacca provide naturalized British Chinese with a certificate whenever they departed for China that would be lodged with the British consul immediately on arrival at a treaty port.43 The British consul in Xiamen also began to urge its Chinese subjects from the Straits Settlements to register with it so that protection could be extended when necessary. And as we have noted, a number of them did comply. Two years l­ater, British consuls in China followed up with a notice to all Chinese from British colonies further specifying requisites for protection: (1) they could not claim British protection ­unless they brought proof that they ­were British subjects and ­unless they registered at a consulate on arrival; (2) they would forfeit British protection if they penetrated the interior beyond treaty limits; and (3) they w ­ ere liable to all the 44 treaty regulations regarding smuggling and the like. The occasion for the new pronouncement was to avoid any dispute with the Chinese government. However, British consuls soon found the above restrictions impractical and difficult to enforce, while British Chinese also found them hard to comply with. As the British developed a heightened sense of superiority alongside their expanding empire, they became jealous of British nationality and considered it a privilege. Hence, they expected Chinese who had acquired British subjecthood ­either by birth or naturalization to be submissive and grateful for their benevolent rule. Ideally, the British hoped to fully Anglicize their Chinese subjects, but 41.  He B., Xiamen beizhi huibian, 62. 42. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy, 215. 43.  Ibid.; see also Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 68–69. 44. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy, 216.

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most of the time they w ­ ere satisfied when they could just wean them of their “foreign Chinese habits.”45 However, the value of Chinese subjects to British economic interests in China lay exactly in their ability to mediate between the British and the local; in part, this meant the British Chinese must remain Chinese and maintain their ties to their native places. ­There was thus an inherent conflict between British expectations and real­ity. Moreover, ­because the British ­were opium and coolie traders themselves, prohibiting British Chinese from participating in such activities was hugely hypocritical. And not surprisingly, most British firms actively enlisted the ser­v ice of British Chinese in their illegal endeavors. The best smugglers, it was said, ­were ­these Chinese in Western garb.46 It was also impractical to confine the activities of the British Chinese to the treaty port, since their ability to penetrate the hinterland of Xiamen was crucial to their success as traders themselves or as middlemen for the foreign firms. Because British Chinese w ­ ere mostly natives of South Fujian or descendants of Hokkien emigrants, they ­were well adapted to the way of life in Xiamen and blended in perfectly with the local population. Many thus chose not to register with the British consulate, and t­ here was nothing much the British consul could do. Distinguishing British subjects from the natives was almost an impossible task. In 1868, in an attempt to provide a vis­i­ble form of identification and to make British Chinese allegiance incontrovertible, Sir Rutherford Alcock, the British minister in Beijing, proclaimed his famous Costume Regulation. In a circular to British consuls in China, Alcock declared that all British subjects of Chinese descent ­shall, while residing or being in Chinese territory, discard the Chinese costume and adopt some other dress or costume whereby they may readily be distinguished from the native population, and I do therefore warn all British subjects of Chinese descent so residing or being in the Chinese Dominions as aforesaid, that, in the event of their infringing or not observing this order and regulation, they ­shall not be entitled to claim British protection or interference on their behalf in any court of justice or elsewhere in Chinese Dominions.47 Not only did Alcock add a sine qua non for British Chinese seeking protection in China; he also transferred the burden of claiming the status of British subjects entirely into the hands of the Chinese. When British Chinese and the Straits gov45.  Words of Sir Frederick Weld, Governor of Singapore, in 1883, cited in E. Tang, “The Status in China of Chinese British Subjects from the Straits Settlements: 1844–1900,” Papers on Far Eastern History, no. 3 (1971): 195. 46. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy, 216. 47.  US Department of State, Papers, 1332. It is in­ter­est­ing to note that as early as 1851, Zhang Xiyu had already suggested the idea of using costume to differentiate between British subjects and Chinese subjects. Chinese letters, Inward, 1851–1853, FO 663/56.

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ernment protested against the costume regulation, claiming that it inflicted unnecessary psychological hardship on the returnees since they would be ridiculed by other Chinese when they wore costumes uncustomary in China, Alcock defended his decision by stating that it was a means to discourage British Chinese from using British protection and native disguise to engage in activities that would arouse Chinese suspicion. According to Alcock, British Chinese, as a rule, had no desire to identify with British nationality. When they returned to China, “they go freely into the interior, trade, or travel, visit their ancestral tombs and return, or other­wise domicile themselves, but always as Chinese.” It was only when they got into trou­ble with the Chinese authorities while living and acting as Chinese subjects that they suddenly became interested in claiming British subjecthood, so they could enjoy British protection and treaty immunities. But as Alcock warned, their sudden transmutation into British subjects could prove to be a new source of danger for themselves as Qing officials, fearing rescue by British consuls, ­were more prone to make short work of them.48 Despite their best efforts to regulate Chinese subjects and effect the clauses of the treaties, the British ­were not always successful in avoiding judicial disputes with the Qing. This was especially so since overseas Chinese w ­ ere unwilling to give up reaping benefits from manipulating their dual statuses and Qing officials ­were bent on stamping their authority and disciplining t­ hese opportunistic and traitorous Chinese. The case of Choa Tek-­hee (Cai Dexi) fully illustrates the concerns and motives of the three parties involved and their inevitable conflict. Choa Tek-­hee came to the attention of both the British consul and the Daotai of Xiamen in 1879 when he requested, through the British consul, to have his passport endorsed by the Chinese authority so that he could travel to visit Zhangzhou and Quanzhou in the interior as a British subject. The Daotai initially stamped the passport but wrote the British consul two days l­ater requesting for the passport to be returned for annulment. He explained that he should not have stamped the passport in the first place, for Choa Tek-­hee had not ­adopted foreign costume nor removed his name from the local register and even owned property in his native Haicheng District; he thus remained a Chinese subject and was not entitled to use a foreign passport in China. The British consul, though, insisted that Choa was beyond any doubt a British subject, pointing to the fact he was born in Singapore and his registry in the register of his forefathers was inconsequential.49 48.  Cited in Julian Pauncefote, “British Protection to Anglo-­Chinese in China,” in British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, Part I: From the Mid-­Nineteenth ­Century to the First World War, Ser. E, Asia, 1860–1914, Vol. 22, Chefoo Convention and Its Aftermath, 1876–1885, ed. Ian Nish, Kenneth Bourne, Donald Cameron Watt, and Michael Partridge (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of Amer­i­ca, 1989), 112–13. 49.  FO 228/623, no. 41.

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Choa’s case was unilaterally settled by the Chinese side, which informed local authorities not to honor his passport.50 But this did not stop Choa from being active in China, and in 1890, he successfully petitioned the British consul to allow him to open a foreign trading firm, the Zhengji, in Xiamen. Inevitably, Choa’s new business venture also reignited the question over his nationality. Even though Choa recently switched to wearing foreign costume—­a fact perhaps unknown to the Chinese authority—­the Xiamen Daotai insisted that he should be considered a Chinese given that he had resided in and owned property in Haicheng for over ten years, and his firm should not be granted the same privileges reserved for British firms. The Daotai subsequently dispatched two runners to collect the transit tax, likin, on the 188 bales of cotton Choa imported from Penang and to emphasize his contempt for Choa’s per­sis­tent attempts to use foreign privileges to avoid paying taxes; he then issued a proclamation forbidding Chinese merchants and shop­keep­ers of Xiamen from d ­ oing business with Zhengji u ­ nless Choa reported his goods and paid the duty and likin on them like all Chinese merchants.51

Japa­n ese Empire Despite censures from Qing officials, Chinese in the treaty port continued to declare their foreign nationality as a means for protection against official oppressions and evasion of Chinese taxes. And as the power of the Qing waned, they could claim affiliations with an increasing number of countries. According to a report in Shanghai’s Shi Bao, by the first de­cade of the twentieth ­century, ­there ­were 340 Chinese ­owners of merchant firms claiming foreign nationality in Xiamen, including 10 American, 53 British, 9 Dutch, 2 German, 2 French, 24 Spanish, 1 Portuguese, and 239 Japa­nese.52 The overwhelming number of Chinese claiming Japa­nese nationality by the turn of the twentieth c­ entury was due in part to Japan’s expanding influence in Fujian and Xiamen ­after its victory over China in the Sino-­Japanese War of 1895 and its subsequent colonization of Taiwan. In addition, compared to the British, who jealously guarded their citizenship and had high expectations of their Chinese subjects, the Japa­nese had fewer inhibitions granting Japa­nese subjecthood to t­ hose Chinese they deemed useful. As a ­matter of fact, in pursuing its imperialist agenda, the Japa­nese government made use of Chinese subjects to expand 50.  The Zongli Yamen (Office of General Management) sent a dispatch to the British minister, Sir Thomas Wade, to inform him of the Chinese decision, but Wade does not seem to have replied. FO 228/886, no. 7. Established in 1861, the Zongli Yamen was in charge of managing relations with the Western countries. 51.  FO 228/886, no. 5, 7, and 8. 52.  Shi Bao, February 28, 1908, cited in Dai Y., Quyuxing jingji fazhan yu shehui bianqian, 316–17.

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its influence in China, and it even made Japa­nese nationality—­originally intended for inhabitants of the island of Taiwan—­available to mainland Chinese. The gifting of Japa­nese nationality to the Chinese was thus a means to buy their support, and it is not surprising that the Japa­nese government was more concerned with protecting its own prestige and interest in China than providing its Chinese subjects with an alternative to Chinese rule. Nonetheless, the readily available Japa­ nese subjecthood even allowed Xiamen Chinese with no overseas experience to manipulate their identity and claim foreign nationality, making identity in Xiamen even more mobile and malleable.

Japa­nese Ambitions Bolstered by the success of the Meiji Restoration at nation building and modernization, Japan in the second half of the nineteenth ­century began to pursue an aggressive expansionist agenda at the expense of its continental neighbors.53 ­Korea was the first to fall victim to Japan’s newfound military might. In 1876, Japan forced its own unequal treaty on ­Korea, demanding the opening of three ports for trade and the granting of extraterritoriality to its citizens. From then, Japan not only strengthened its economic ties with ­Korea but also tried to influence the Korean court into reforming and modernizing in its image. More importantly, Japan aimed to mold a regime in K ­ orea that was in­de­pen­dent of China—­which ­Korea had been a vassal state to for centuries—­but deferential to it.54 In the early 1890s, when the Tonghak Rebellion erupted in K ­ orea, Japan seized the opportunity to send troops into the country using the protection of Japa­nese citizens already t­ here as an excuse. Sensing it was time for Japan to exert its superiority over the peninsula, Japa­nese troops captured the Korean palace, appointed a “regent” loyal to their interests, and even forced the Korean court to declare war on China. When the Qing dispatched Chinese reinforcements to K ­ orea, their transport vessels w ­ ere fired on by a Japa­nese cruiser and sunk. This incident precipitated a war between China and Japan in 1895, fought over and in K ­ orea. The outcome of the First Sino-­Japanese War was devastating for China. Not only was China’s “Northern Ocean” (Beiyang) Fleet annihilated by the Japa­nese, the ensuing peace treaty, the Treaty of Shimonoseki, stipulated that the Qing not only had to pay Japan 200 million taels in war indemnities, add four more treaty ports, and recognize the autonomy of ­Korea (which, ­under the circumstances, effectively made ­Korea a Japa­nese protectorate); it had to also cede to Japan “in

53.  Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Pre­sent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 115–23. 54.  Ibid., 116.

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perpetuity” all of Taiwan and the nearby island group of the Pescadores.55 Taiwan (including the Pescadores) became the Japa­nese empire’s first overseas colony. The acquisition of Taiwan was a small but momentous step in Japan’s quest for hegemony over all of Asia. On the economic front, Taiwan’s abundant natu­ ral resources (including sulfur, oil, and coal) and agricultural products (especially lucrative rice, sugar, and camphor) could contribute significantly to the Japa­nese imperial coffers. Militarily, the strategic importance of Taiwan was also much appreciated by Japa­nese leaders. As early as 1873, Naritomi Chuzo, who had surveyed the island, already commented on Taiwan’s pos­si­ble role in Japan’s imperialist ambitions: Located to the southwest of Ryukyu, the island of Taiwan is truly the gate of our imperial state. If this gate is not secured, we ­will not be able to advance to control the vari­ous countries in the southwest or to withdraw to protect our country. In the past, p ­ eople in Kyushu’s peripheries have used this island as their base to infiltrate the Fujian and Guangdong Provinces to its west and to trade with Luzon and other islands in the south. Therefore if [Japan] wants to expand its influence overseas, by taking Taiwan we ­will be able to command the vari­ous countries in the southwest.56 Japan’s imperialist ambitions began to take shape when it took Taiwan from the Qing, and it soon built up the island as a “station colony” for its advancement into China.57 The Taiwan Governor-­General Office’s first priority was Fujian Province across the Taiwan Strait. In its view, the geo­graph­i­cal proximity and historical relations between Fujian and Taiwan would allow for easy transference of Fujian’s ­human and material resources to help consolidate its rule over the colony; more importantly, Fujian could also serve as the stepping stone to extend Japan’s dominance over all of South China.58 And since Xiamen was the “gateway” to Fujian Province and the “center that controlled Taiwan’s economy,” the Japa­nese had a vested interest in cultivating influence in the treaty port.59 To increase its institutional presence in Xiamen, Japan established a Japa­nese consulate in 1876 (a new consulate building was erected in 1898), a branch of the Bank of Taiwan in 1900, Xueying Acad­emy in 1908, Boai Hospital (1918), and a newspaper (the Quanmin Xinribao) in 1919. More significantly, they also made use of their Taiwan sub-

55.  Ibid., 221. 56.  Cited in Liang Huahuang, “Taiwan zongdufu de Fujian zhengce,” in Taiwan zongdufu de “duian” zhengce: Riju shidai Taimin guangxishi (Taipei: Daoxiang chubanshe, 2005), 11. 57.  Ibid., 37–61. 58. Ibid. 59.  Cited in Liang H., Taiwan zongdufu de “duian” zhengce yanjiu, 102.

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jects, the Taiwan sekimin, as “henchmen” to undercut Chinese authorities, reap economic benefits, and expand its influence in Xiamen.60 ­After Japan colonized Taiwan in 1895, to tighten its control over the island, the new colonial administrators gave the Chinese residents in Taiwan a two-­year period to sell their properties on the island and move back to the mainland if they so desired. ­After the deadline, all remaining Chinese in Taiwan would automatically become subjects of Japan.61 The original intention for giving the grace period was to encourage more Chinese to leave the island so as to make room for Japa­nese colonists, and the Japa­nese fully expected ­those with ties to China or the ones who did not want to live u ­ nder foreign rule to leave willingly. However, when the May 8, 1897, deadline came, only 4,456 Taiwanese out of a total population of 2.8 million had left the island.62 And to the surprise of both the Chinese and Japa­nese governments, not only did the anticipated exodus not occur; ­there was a reverse trend of Fujianese, especially ­those in Xiamen, seeking to become Taiwanese sekimin. As shown in t­ able 8, the number of Taiwanese sekimin (hereafter Taiwan Chinese) in Xiamen increased by a ­factor of fourteen between 1899 and 1937. Although still small in number—­amounting to only about 1.6 ­percent to 3.9 ­percent of the total population—­the Taiwan Chinese constituted a special class of foreign nationals in Xiamen, and with the backing of the Japa­nese government, they ­were a force to be reckoned with especially in the 1920s and 1930s and had a huge impact on Xiamen society.63

Taiwan Chinese The majority of Taiwan Chinese in Xiamen ­were residents of Taiwan who migrated back to the treaty port ­after becoming Japa­nese subjects. Many had returned to take advantage of the economic opportunities in the treaty port. The Japa­nese consul estimated that in 1926, half of the Taiwan Chinese in Xiamen had legitimate occupations, and as tea and sugar merchants, money changers, pawn shop ­owners, and even teachers, doctors, midwives, and carpenters, they occupied all

60.  Sekimin (jimin in Chinese) was the Japa­nese term for Chinese holding foreign nationality. Taiwan sekimin thus referred to a Taiwanese who was a Japa­nese subject. Goto Kenichi, “Japan’s Southward Advance and Colonial Taiwan,” Eu­ro­pean Journal of East Asian Studies 3, no. 1 (2004): 19. 61.  Kurihara Jun, “Taiwan jimin yu guoji wenti,” trans. Zhong Shumin, in Taiwan wenxian shiliao zhengli yanjiu xueshu yantaohui lunwenji, ed. Taiwansheng wenxian weiyuanhui (Nantou: Taiwansheng wenxian weiyuanhui, 2000), 426. 62.  Xu Xueji, “Riju shiqi de Banqiao Linjia—­y ige jiazu yu zhengzhi de guanxi,” in Jinshi jiazu yu zhengzhi bijiao lishi lunwenji, ed. Modern History Institute, Academia Sinica (Taipei: Academic Sinica, 1992), 2:667. The original rec­ord has the number as 5460, but Xu believes it is due to erroneous addition. 63.  Xiamenshi difangzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen shizhi, 1:205–6. The population of Xiamen was around 89,000 in 1910 and 265,631 in 1937.

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­TABLE 8  Registered Taiwan Sekimin in Xiamen YEAR

NUMBER

YEAR

NUMBER

1899

743

1923

5,816

1900

531

1924

6,115

1907

1,435

1925

6,539

1909

1,410

1926

6,832

1917

2,883

1930

7,195

1918

3,374

1931

7,352

1919

3,516

1934

10,625

1920

3,765

1935

10,326

1921

4,722

1936

10,257

1922

5,226

1937

10,217

Note: The a ­ ctual number of Taiwan Chinese on the island of Xiamen was prob­ably fewer than the above figures, since the jurisdiction of the Japa­nese consul of Xiamen included parts of South Fujian on the mainland. Source: Zhong Shumin, “Rizhi shiqi Taiwanren zai Xiamen de huodong jiqi xiangguan wenti (1895–1938),” in Zouxiang Xiandai (Taipei: Donghua shuju, 2004), 412–13.

strata of Xiamen society.64 However, Taiwan Chinese w ­ ere better remembered by Xiamen’s residents for their involvements in sinister gangs and criminal activities and as accessories to Japa­nese imperialism. Derogatorily called “Japa­nese rowdies” (riji langren) and “Taiwan dumb dogs” (Taiwan daigou) by the locals, t­ hese Taiwan Chinese ­were a major source of lawlessness in Xiamen. As one writer explained: [Taiwan Chinese] are rogues who escaped from Formosa [i.e., Taiwan] to evade Japa­nese law. Once in Amoy they enjoy immunity from both Chinese and Japa­nese laws. They are immune from Chinese laws ­because they are Japa­nese subjects and entitled to extraterritorial privileges and from Japa­nese law ­because it has been the traditional policy of the Japa­ nese consuls ­there to shut their eyes to the criminal acts of t­ hese nationals of theirs. Thus, they trade in opium, morphine, and heroin; they run gambling ­houses; they sell arms and ammunition to bandits on the inland; they establish brothels; they practice highway robbery. Any desperado who has fifty yen can safely come to Amoy.65 Indeed, a significant number of the Taiwan Chinese who came to the treaty port ­were shady figures at best. Some broke the laws in Taiwan and fled to Xiamen to escape criminal punishment by the Japa­nese authority. But instead of extraditing them back to Taiwan, the Japa­nese consul in Xiamen extended them the same pro64. ­Inoue Kojiro, “Xiamen de Taiwan jimin wenti,” in Taiwan zongdufu de “duian” zhengce yanjiu: Riju shidai Taimin guangxishi, ed. Liang Huahuang (Taipei: Daoxiang chubanshe, 2001), 219. 65.  “The Formosans in Amoy,” China Critic 6, no. 32 (August 10, 1933): 780.

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tection and privileges as other Japa­nese subjects. This is to say, not only w ­ ere Taiwanese criminals exempted from indictment for what­ever crime they had committed in Taiwan; they w ­ ere also immune from Chinese laws. No small won­der then that Xiamen became the refuge for Taiwanese lawbreakers who continued to engage in all types of criminal activities and vio­lence in the treaty port. Reports by the Xiamen police department and the municipal government ­were full of accounts of the criminal acts and abuses of Taiwan Chinese: a Taiwan Chinese by the name of Liao was reported to have dashed into an opium den with a handgun and thirty men while the police ­were making an arrest and made off with all evidence and customers in police custody; a Xiamen resident was kidnapped and beaten by the Taiwan Chinese Jiang Ajun for owing the latter money; a Taiwan Chinese‒owned construction com­pany had built a ­house on land belonging to a French Catholic church but refused to return the land even ­after repeated requests by the city government.66 It is true that Taiwan Chinese ­were loan sharks, smugglers, and robbers in Xiamen, and they w ­ ere also ­owners of brothels, gambling h ­ ouses, and opium dens. Taiwan Chinese not only participated in illegal businesses; they soon came to dominate certain vices. This was ­because as foreign nationals in China, they ­were exempted from certain taxes and administrative formalities, which gave them a competitive edge over their Chinese competitors. In 1917, ­there ­were a total of 255 opium dens in Xiamen, of which an overwhelming 237 ­were owned by Taiwan Chinese or operated u ­ nder their names.67 By 1926, the Japa­nese consul in Xiamen reported that over two thousand Taiwan Chinese w ­ ere involved in the opium business in Xiamen.68 Even Taiwan prostitutes, who did not have to pay the so-­called flower tax, ­were ­doing booming business by “underselling” local prostitutes. Each prostitute was able to remit several thousand yuan a month to their families back in Taiwan.69 The “unfair” advantages granted to Taiwan Chinese certainly fuelled local ill-­feelings t­ oward them and added much volatility to an already violent environment. As the number of Taiwanese rowdies in Xiamen increased, many of them banded together and collaborated with local ruffians to form a gangster league known as the Eigh­teen ­Brothers, led by eigh­teen Taiwan Chinese. Interviews with former league members a­ fter the establishment of the P ­ eople’s Republic of China confirmed that the league was formed at the behest of the Japa­nese consul to do 66.  Chen Xiaochong ed., XiaTai guanxi shiliao xuanbian, 1895–1945 (Beijing: Jiuzhou chubanshe, 2013), 231, 243–44, 253. 67.  Zhong Shumin, “Taiwan Zongdufu de duian zhengce yu yapian wenti,” in Taiwan wenxian shiliao zhengli yanjiu xueshu yantaohui lunwenji, ed. Taiwansheng wenxian weiyuanhui (Nantou: Taiwansheng wenxian weiyuanhui, 2000), 229. 68.  Kojiro, “Xiamen de Taiwan jimin wenti,” 220. 69.  Ibid., 230.

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the biddings of the Japa­nese.70 Indeed, when a plot to kill the Japa­nese police chief was leaked, the Eigh­teen ­Brothers ­were summoned to have the contriver—­a youth from Taiwan—­beaten to death.71 In any case, the Eigh­teen ­Brothers became so power­ful that they began to encroach on the territories of the original three Xiamen clans—­the Wu, the Chen, and the Ji. Although the three clans w ­ ere not always on amicable terms, facing a common ­enemy in the Taiwan Chinese, they ­were forced to form a joint defense corps. In September 1923, a conflict between a Taiwanese loan shark and members of the defense corps escalated into a series of gun fights, kidnapping, and murder between both parties, which gave the Japa­nese navy the pretext to land marines in Xiamen to protect Japa­nese citizens. Hostilities between the two groups lasted for several months and only ended in the beginning of 1924 ­after Xiamen’s notables and Japa­nese representatives negotiated a truce.72 The arrival of the Taiwanese rowdies certainly caused more bloodshed and upset the original balance of Xiamen society.73 Ironically, not all Taiwan Chinese in Xiamen came from Taiwan. Many of Xiamen’s residents applied to become Japa­nese subjects, and they had good reasons to do so. T ­ here ­were ­those who had run afoul of the law in Xiamen and hoped to wipe the slate clean by crossing the strait to Taiwan and returning as a Japa­nese subject. ­Others, though domiciled in the treaty port, had business concerns in Taiwan, and becoming Japa­nese subjects would allow them to keep their businesses ­there. Many more simply desired the privileges that accompanied having foreign nationality in China. Ship ­owners and merchants, on the other hand, could expand their trade territory by holding both Chinese and Japa­nese passports—­they would pre­sent themselves as Chinese when they entered a native port but pose as foreigners when they docked at a treaty port.74 More importantly, foreign traders w ­ ere exempted from a variety of arbitrary taxes. For example, a Japa­nese merchant who registered with the Japa­nese consulate and paid a fifty-­cent administrative fee was exempted from paying likin when he transported his goods inland, and the money thus saved could amount to as much as two to three thousand yuan annually.75 In Xiamen, besides rent, property tax, and salaries, a Chinese 70.  “Xiamen de riji langren,” in MinTai guanxi dangan ziliao, ed. Fujiansheng danganguan and Xiamenshi danganguan (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1992), 39. 71. Ibid. 72.  Nakamura, “Xiamen zhi Taiwan jimin he sandaxing,” 191–93. 73.  The historian Zhou Zifeng notes that even though ­there ­were feuds between the three clans, they ­were generally more restrained, and fewer p ­ eople ­were killed in the pro­cess. Zhou Z., Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu, 258. 74.  Wang Xuexin, “Riben duihua nanjing zhengce yu Taiwan jimin zhi yanjiu (1895–1945)” (PhD diss., Xiamen University, 2007), 64. 75.  Bian Fengkui, “Taiwan jimin zai huanan diqu zhi dongtai,” in Rizhi shiqi Taiwan jimin zai haiwai huodong zhi yanjiu (Taipei: Lexue shuju, 2006), 114.

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merchant was also burdened by an assortment of taxes, such as levies for pigs, meat, salt, police, street cleaning, beans, wine, fish, and so on. However, foreign merchants need only pay the property, police, and street-­cleaning taxes.76 It was thus understandable that Chinese merchants would want to acquire a foreign nationality, and the Japa­nese intent to recruit Chinese allies to boost their influence in Xiamen made it easy for calculating Chinese to do so. For the Japa­nese government, when considering granting a Chinese Japa­nese nationality, ­whether he was from Taiwan or had actually been t­ here was inconsequential when compared to his perceived usefulness to the cause of the empire. Chen Shaowu and Wu Yunfu, leaders of Xiamen’s Chen clan and Wu clan respectively, ­were given Japa­nese nationality ­because they commanded thousands of shuangjiang lightermen.77 The Japa­nese also hoped that by awarding the agent for the Japa­nese firm Mitsui, Zeng Houkun, with Japa­nese nationality, he could win more Chinese merchants over to the Japa­nese side with his social status and influence. But perhaps the most flagrant abuse of Japa­nese power and privileges in China was to literally sell their protection to Chinese who w ­ ere wary of being stigmatized as turncoats. In the 1930s, some Japa­nese insurance companies in Fujian began offering rich Fujianese insurance policies that protected them against any civil or criminal lawsuits. In case of a lawsuit brought against the insured, he would be represented in court by ­either Japa­nese or Taiwanese attorneys; if necessary, he could even receive protection from the Japa­nese consul!78 Although Japa­nese consuls in China sometimes complained that many Chinese had acquired their Japa­nese nationality through underhanded or illegal methods, such as forging documents or bribing government functionaries, or that their Chinese subjects showed no loyalty to the Japa­nese empire, by pushing their own imperialist agenda the Japa­nese had created a condition in Xiamen whereby identity could be manipulated and foreign citizenship could be bought by t­hose who had never even left the country.79 Even though the Japa­nese had e­ very intention to make Chinese subjects their implements, the Chinese w ­ ere not mere pawns of the imperialists. As we mentioned, the Japa­nese had hoped to use the influence of Zeng Houkun to woo the upper-­class denizens of Xiamen, but Zeng in turn used Japa­nese protection to enrich himself by becoming an opium ­wholesaler and the owner of a gambling ­house that only catered to Xiamen’s elites.80 Even ordinary Taiwan Chinese ­were known to derive extra income from “renting” their names to 76.  Zhong Shumin, “Rizhi shiqi Taiwanren zai Xiamen de huodong jiqi xingguan wenti,” in Zouxiang Xiandai (Taipei: Donghua shuju, 2004), 419. 77.  Nakamura, “Xiamen zhi Taiwan jimin yu sandaxing,” 200–201. 78. ­Great Britain Colonial Office, Monthly Review of Chinese Affairs, CO 273/614 (May 1936). 79.  Nakamura, “Xiamen zhi Taiwan jimin zhu wenti,” 80; Liang H., “Taiwan zongdufu de Fujian zhengce,” 44. 80.  Anon., “Xiamen de riji langren,” 42–43.

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Chinese-­owned stores, especially opium dens, as their titular ­owners so that ­these stores could receive the same benefits as foreign businesses.81

Republic of China Reclaiming the Emigrants In 1873, stirred by international outcries over news of the slave-­like treatment of Chinese in Cuba, the Qing court sent an investigative commission to the Spanish colony to report on the conditions of Chinese laborers t­ here. This authorization of an overseas fact-­finding mission initiated a new phase of po­liti­cal activism by the Qing government, which led to the establishment of the first Chinese consulate in Singapore four years l­ater with the ostensible purpose of protecting overseas Chinese ­there.82 In 1893, ­after repeated urgings by world-­savvy Chinese diplomats like Huang Zunxian and Xue Fucheng, the Qing court fi­nally abandoned its 182-­year-­old ban on Chinese emigration.83 It took an even more assertive stand in reclaiming its overseas subjects by promulgating the first Nationality Law in 1909. Based on the princi­ple of jus sanguinis, the law stated that all Chinese of male descent, even if they ­were born overseas or had acquired foreign nationality without the Qing government’s consent, remained Chinese.84 Thus by ­legal definition, all overseas Chinese ­were necessarily “Chinese sojourners,” that is, Chinese nationals temporarily residing in foreign lands. This sea change in the Qing government’s attitudes ­toward the overseas Chinese, as vari­ous scholars have already pointed out, stemmed in large part from its belated realization of what Captain Du Pont had e­ arlier advised—­some Chinese emigrants had become prosperous abroad, and their riches, when successfully exploited, could contribute significantly to the cash-­strapped dynasty.85 In fact, by the late Qing, the wealth that overseas Chinese accumulated outside China had become legendary. For example, in 1886, an official commission to Singapore reported back to the court, albeit inaccurately, that the “one hundred fifty thousand Chinese [in Singapore] ­were the wealthiest among the vari­ous settlements. Besides public property, 80 ­percent of all prized property belonged to the

81.  Zhou Z., Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhanshi yanjiu, 269. 82. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, chaps. 3 and 4. 83. Zhuang, Zhongguo fengjian zhengfu de huaqiao zhengce, 59–263. 84.  DaQing fagui daquan (Taipei: Hongye shuju, 1972), 2:995–99. 85. Zhuang, Zhongguo fengjian zhengfu de huaqiao zhengce; Michael R. Godley, The Mandarin-­ Capitalists from Nanyang: Overseas Chinese Enterprise in the Modernization of China, 1893–1911(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Soon Keong Ong, “Chinese but Not Quite: Huaqiao and the Marginalization of the Overseas Chinese,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 9, no. 1 (2013): 1–32.

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Chinese, while foreigners owned only 20 ­percent.”86 The next year, Li Zhongjue, a visitor to Singapore, also commented: “Among the inhabitants in Silat [Singapore], the Chinese are most numerous and most wealthy with some multimillionaires and millionaires among them. One who possesses a fortune of several hundred thousand dollars could hardly be considered a rich man. He would merely be called a comfortably off person.”87 Subsequently, through a series of mea­sures, the Qing government sought to turn the concerns and loyalties of overseas Chinese, especially the wealthy ones, back ­toward China.88 To forge closer ties with emigrants, the Qing began to extend certain privileges that it had previously denied them. For the first time, the imperial court allowed overseas Chinese to buy brevet ranks and titles for themselves (and posthumously for their ancestors), ­after which they ­were allowed to don their official robes or “dynastic costumes” when receiving Qing delegates or celebrating Chinese imperial holidays.89 It also strove to inculcate Confucian virtues in the overseas Chinese communities by instructing Chinese consulates to sponsor gentry-­style literary and charitable socie­ties, build Confucian t­ emples, distribute Chinese calendars, propagate the imperial maxims in community centers, and promote Chinese education.90 And to demonstrate the court’s goodwill and care for the emigrants, it frequently sent Chinese officials to visit overseas Chinese communities and dispatched warships to patrol Southeast Asian ­waters. For the majority of overseas Chinese who had been on the margins of the Chinese empire, the Qing’s newfound interest in them was much welcomed, and they generously loosened their purse strings in response to the court’s appeal for disaster relief and the purchase of imperial titles and honors. And ­after the Qing stepped up its economic and industrial developments at the beginning of the twentieth ­century, overseas Chinese further raised millions of dollars to help set up railways, banks, steamship companies, and other modern enterprises.91 While it is true that the Qing government had profited financially from the emigrants in the last de­cades of its existence, the real beneficiaries of overseas Chinese generosity ­were anti-­Qing revolutionaries led by the ­future “­Father of the Chinese 86.  Cited in Zhuang, Zhongguo fengjian zhengfu de huaqiao zhengce, 140. 87.  Li Chung Chu, “A Description of Singapore in 1887,” trans. Chang Chin Chiang, China Society 25th Anniversary Journal (Singapore: China Society Singapore, 1975), 23. 88. Prasenjit Duara, “Nationalists among Transnationals: Overseas Chinese and the Idea of China, 1900–1911,” in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Donald Nonini and Aihwa Ong (New York: Routledge, 1997), 39–46; Cui Guiqiang, “WanQing guanli fangwen Xingjiapo,” Nanyang Xuebao 29 (1974): 15–26; Yen Ching-­hwang, “Ching’s Sale of Honors and the Chinese Leadership in Singapore and Malaya, 1877–1912,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1, no. 2 (September 1970): 20–32. 89.  Yen, “Ching’s Sale of Honors,” 28–29. 90.  Zhongguo diyi lishi danganguan, Qingdai zhongguo yu dongnanya geguo guanxi dangan shiliao huibian (Beijing: Guoji wenhua chubangongsi, 1998), vol. 1, documents 84, 102, 111, 188, 373, and 386. 91. Godley, Mandarin-­Capitalists from Nanyang; Yen, Coolies and Mandarins.

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Republic,” Sun Yat-­sen. An overseas Chinese himself, Sun found his support base among the millions of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, North Amer­ic­ a, and Japan. As he traveled from one Chinatown to the next, he not only received the strong backing of some well-­heeled businessmen but also found a groundswell of support from the working classes and petty bourgeoisie. Donations soon poured forth, and between 1906 and the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Sun was able to raise over 600,000 yuan of mostly overseas Chinese money to direct ten uprisings against the government.92 Sun’s operations fully corroborated the Manchu’s centuries-­old fear that insurrections would come from abroad. Any residual prejudice against the overseas Chinese as deserters and traitors from the late Qing was supposedly swept aside with the establishment of the Republic of China, especially a­ fter Sun Yat-­sen famously called them “the m ­ other of the revolution” in recognition of their contributions to the founding of the Chinese republic.93 Republican regimes, especially the Guomindang-­led Nationalist government that ruled from Nanjing ­after 1927, took the management of overseas Chinese affairs seriously.94 Like its Manchu pre­de­ces­sor, the Nationalist government’s continual interest in the emigrants sprang from an overriding concern with cultivating a China-­oriented nationalism to marshal their resources for state-­building proj­ ects. To achieve this goal, it had to make the Chinese identity of the emigrants incontrovertible, which it did by retaining the late Qing princi­ple of jus sanguinis as the basis of its nationality law. And as during the Qing dynasty, all overseas Chinese, even if they had acquired foreign nationality, remained Chinese in the eyes of the state. In addition, to sustain overseas Chinese continual interest in affairs in the motherland, the Chinese government also actively supported the establishment of Chinese-­language schools in overseas Chinese communities and encouraged them to participate in China’s politics by reserving seats in the vari­ous national institutions, including the Chinese parliament, for overseas Chinese representatives.95 Besides instituting new policies to benefit the overseas Chinese, Chinese po­ liti­cal activists from the turn of the twentieth ­century also engaged in the discursive reimaging of the emigrants to bind them closer to the homeland. In the first place, to convey their approval and even support for emigrants leaving China, Chi92. Yen, Overseas Chinese. 93.  Cited in Li Changfu, Zhongguo zhiminshi (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1937), 318. Recent research by Huang Jianli suggests that Sun himself perhaps never uttered the exact seven-­word slogan huaqiao wei geming zhi mu (huaqiao are the ­mother of the revolution). See Huang, Jianli, “Umbilical Ties: The Framing of the Overseas Chinese as the ­Mother of the Revolution,” Frontiers of History in China 6, no. 2 (2011): 183–228. My own argument is that prejudices against the emigrants continued to exist among Chinese officials and intellectuals despite the official discourse. See Ong S., “Chinese but Not Quite.” 94.  For a detailed study of policies relating to overseas Chinese during the Republican era, see Li Yinghui, Huaqiao zhengce yu haiwai minzu zhuyi 1912–1949 (Taipei: Guoshiguan, 1997). 95.  Li Y., Huaqiao zhengce yu haiwai minzu zhuyi, chap. 4.

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nese writers, beginning with the famous reformer and journalist Liang Qichao, no longer portrayed their departure as forced exile nor lamented their victimization by Western colonial rulers; instead, they celebrated them as heroic colonizers who boldly left China despite the hardship, suffering, and discrimination they ­were bound to encounter overseas.96 The new discourse thus imbued Chinese emigrants with a shared sense of adventure and entrepreneurship, which ­were qualities much appreciated in the modern world. Secondly, by branding overseas Chinese as huaqiao, Chinese activists found a power­ful catchall label to encompass the diverse mi­grant populations, regardless of their geo­graph­i­cal origins in China, their linguistic affiliations, or their locations of settlement abroad. According to the historian Wang Gungwu, huaqiao was a neologism constructed from two root words: hua, a name the Chinese have long used for their country and their civilization; and qiao, which literally means “a journey” or “a temporary stay” but contains the connotation that the sojourner’s removal from home was enforced and a return was longed for. In appending qiao to the national signifier hua, Chinese activists in China created a new name that could be immediately applied to all emigrants and served as a constant reminder that they considered the overseas Chinese as still part of the Chinese civilization no m ­ atter how many generations their ancestors had sojourned abroad.97 More importantly, the new name also emphasized that regardless how individual overseas Chinese might differ, they shared an essential attribute to their Chinese identity, that is, a primordial tie to the homeland, and as such, they owed their allegiance first and foremost to the Chinese state.98 Succeeding Chinese governments from the late Qing onward had a­ dopted huaqiao as the official title for the overseas Chinese. Their goal was to tie the overseas Chinese, now considered Chinese citizens, directly to the state, thus transcending all native-­place ties they had. And since huaqiao owed their identity, or their Chineseness, to the attention and patronage of China, they had to repay the Chinese state by demonstrating their loyalty to China. In a sense, the Chinese governments seemed to be successful: overseas Chinese quickly embraced huaqiao as their preferred self-­identification, replacing all other names they had previously used to refer to themselves, such as minren (­people from Fujian), yueren (­people from Guangdong), or minyueren (­people from Fujian and Guangdong).99 And 96.  Jing Tsu, “Extinction and Adventure on the Chinese Diasporic Frontier,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 2, no. 2 (2006): 247–68. 97.  Wang Gungwu, “A Note on the Origins of Hua-­ch’iao,” in Community and Nation: Essays on Southeast Asia and the Chinese (Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann Educational Books [Asia], 1981), 119; Ong S., “Chinese but Not Quite.” 98.  Duara, “Nationalist among Transnationals,” 54. 99.  Wang Gungwu, “Patterns of Chinese Migration in Historical Perspective,” in China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 2003), 7.

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while espousing the new name, some of them also internalized the sense of connections and obligations to China inherent in it. The following statement by a Hokkien in the Philippines fully captured this newfound sense of duty of the overseas Chinese: My fellow huaqiao, . . . ​when you or your ancestor left the motherland, you ­were not deterred by the arduous sea voyage and had accumulated some savings only ­after racking your brain and shedding much sweat and blood. T ­ oday many of you have become wealthy, and eight or nine out of ten of you have not entirely dissociated yourselves with the motherland. While you w ­ ere diligently making money, [it is understandable that] you have not given any thought to the situations in China. But now ­things have changed. As [Chinese] nationals, you need to think like Chinese nationals and fulfill your duties as Chinese nationals.100 While some indeed became “more conscious of their nationality than the ­ eople at home and just as patriotic as the p p ­ eople in China if not even more so,” overseas Chinese did not necessarily espouse China a­ fter it turned its gaze on them or respond in ways that the Chinese governments had hoped.101 For example, the fact that the Chinese government was perhaps more interested in their money than them or their welfare was not totally lost on the less sentimental souls. As early as 1909, a Chinese from Java who went by the pen name Zhaohua wrote a long open letter to Shanghai’s Chinese Federation Review. Addressing state officials and fellow Chinese in China, he questioned the Qing court’s motive for dispatching emissaries and gunboats to Southeast Asia yearly.102 If the court’s true intention was to protect them as it openly proclaimed, why, this Java Chinese asked, did the emissaries and gunboats only go to prosperous commercial ports when ­those who ­were actually oppressed lived in remote and poor communities? Why did the emissaries eat, drink, and make merry with Chinese merchants while the mistreatments of Chinese right ­under their nose ­were totally ignored? And how could huaqiao expect China to extend protection to them when it could not stave off foreign aggressions on the mainland? For this critic, the only reason the Qing court would even take an interest in the emigrants was to scrape money from them, but to look to huaqiao as its gold mine, he observed, was unrealistic: “Of the places huaqiao had settled, the larger ones have just over a hundred thousand residents while the smaller ones have less than one thousand. Chinese ­there ­were 100.  Xiamen Maqiaoru, “Lun difang zizhi wei jinri huaqiao de yaowu,” Huaqiao Shangbao 2, no. 2 (January 1921): 22. 101.  “The Patriotic Oversea Chinese,” China Critic 5, no. 3 (1932): 63. 102. Zhaohua, “Zuguo zhengfu ji gesheng tongbao qingkan,” Huashang Lianhe Bao, no. 12 (1909): 431–34.

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mere traders, and they did not get their money from digging gold and silver. How could they afford to satisfy the constant demand for money? If all the Chinese government ­after is money, then it better wake up from its daydream!”103 By sending the same two run-­down gunboats yearly to Southeast Asia but expecting to reap monetary reward e­ very time they came, the Qing court was merely wasting precious resources and humiliating itself for all to see. Besides, as the disgruntled Zhaohua warned, such incessant demand for money would only engender disillusionment or, worse, animosity among huaqiao t­ oward their homeland.104 Like so many Chinese overseas, Zhaohua too yearned for China’s recognition and longed to be reconnected with the homeland. However, intentions mattered for Zhaohua, and ­unless China was genuinely concern with the emigrants, he would rather the Chinese government stay away and be content with keeping to the margins. Even among ­those emigrants who had willingly sent their hard-­earned money back to China, they largely invested where and how they deemed fit. The Republican era was the golden age of overseas Chinese contributions to and investments in China, but instead of aiding the national government, the majority of their monetary flows had gone into investments in their home provinces and native places. In other words, even as the Chinese governments w ­ ere inculcating a national identity among the overseas Chinese, ­those same emigrants continued to identify with the regional localities of their origins well into the twentieth c­ entury.105 A 1934 investigation estimated that of the 6.2 million overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, 65.75 ­percent and 28.26 ­percent of them came from Guangdong and Fujian Provinces respectively, making t­ hese two southern provinces the largest emigrant-­sending regions in China. Not surprisingly, they also received the lion’s share of remittances sent homeward by emigrants fulfilling their moral and monetary obligations to their loved ones in China.106 And with the exception of Shanghai, the country’s most industrialized and commercialized city, Guangdong and Fujian Provinces w ­ ere also the favorite destinations for overseas Chinese investments in industrial and commercial enterprises (see t­ able 9).107 In Fujian Province, Xiamen received disproportionate attention from the overseas Chinese. According to the comprehensive survey on overseas Chinese investment compiled by Professors Lin Jinzhi and Zhuang Weiji of the Xiamen University, between 1871 and 1949, overseas Chinese invested almost 87.5 million renminbi 103.  Ibid., 433. 104.  Ibid., 434. 105.  Even Tan Kah Kee, widely regarded as the paramount of overseas Chinese patriotism, was not ­free from such provincialism. See Liu Jiaju, “Lun Dongnanya huaqiao de xiangtu zongzuxing xintai— du Chen Jiageng ‘Nanqiao Huiyilu,’ ” in Overseas Chinese in Asia between the Two World Wars, ed. Ng Lun Hgai-ha and Chang Chak Yan (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1989), 357–63. 106.  Wu C., “Xiamen huaqiao huikuan yu jinrong zuzhi,” 208–9. 107.  Lin Jinzhi, Jindai huaqiao touzhi guonei qiye galun (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1988), 35–36.

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­TABLE 9  Overseas Chinese Investment (in renminbi) PERIOD

NO. OF INVESTMENTS

TOTAL INVESTMENT

ANNUAL INVESTMENT

Guangdong

1862–1949

21,268

386,179,575

4,438,731

Fujian

1871–1949

4,055

139,189,807

1,784,484

Shanghai

1900–1949

187

107,347,000

2,146,940

Total

1862–1949

25,510

632,716,382

7,189,958

LOCATION

Note: The amount of foreign investment in China over the period u ­ nder study was first converted to US dollars before converting to Chinese renminbi at the standard 1955 conversion rate of 1 US dollar to 2.45 renminbi. Source: Lin Jinzhi, Jindai huaqiao touzhi guonei qiye galun (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1988), 35.

in Xiamen in said period, representing 62.9 ­percent of their total investment in Fujian and 12.9 ­percent in the w ­ hole of China. In terms of overseas Chinese investment, Xiamen was the second largest city in China ­behind Shanghai (see ­table 10).108 Hokkien emigrants’ partiality for Xiamen as the main site for their investment was perhaps not surprising. According to Lin and Zhuang, this could be boiled down to two key f­ actors: con­ve­nience and security.109 The authors believe that ­because overseas Fujianese exited China mainly through Xiamen, many of them ­were already familiar with the city or had business connections in the area. Moreover, as a collection point for overseas remittances, the city had a significant amount of idle funds that could be used to finance investments. More importantly perhaps was the fact that in the 1920s and 1930s Xiamen provided the security over overseas Chinese and their property that its surrounding countryside could not. Beginning in the summer and fall of 1922, the Nationalist army launched an attack on the Fujian warlord Li Houji, using both land and naval forces. Li was forced to flee, but the Nationalists ­were unable to hold on to the province. Their naval forces, on the other hand, ­were able to oust the Xiamen warlord Zang Zhiping in March 1924 and establish control over the impor­tant trading port. The Nationalists’ rule of Xiamen was much welcomed by overseas Chinese not only ­because the relationship between the Guomin­dang and overseas Chinese had been amicable since Sun Yat-­sen’s time but also b ­ ecause it provided the stability and security needed for overseas investments. In contrast, rural Fujian remained in the hands of local warlords and bandit chieftains who did not refrain from holding wealthy overseas Chinese ransom when in need of funds.110 Hence, overseas Chinese would rather leave their wealth in Xiamen for fear of their lives and property in the countryside on the one hand and for the better economic opportunities

108.  Lin and Zhuang, Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiye shi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan, 54. 109.  Ibid., 54–55. 110.  See chapter 5.

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­TABLE 10  Overseas Chinese Investment in Fujian, 1871–1949 (in renminbi) LOCATION

NO. OF INVESTMENTS

AMOUNT

PERCENTAGE (IN FUJIAN)

Fuzhou

30

6,828,925

4.90

Xiamen

2,668

87,486,598

62.88

Quanzhou

529

7,993,511

5.74

Jinjiang

632

6,726,137

4.83

Nan’an

61

3,078,570

2.21

Anxi

13

1,333,534

0.97

9

2,988,672

2.14

Putian

10

577,291

0.41

Zhangzhou

18

9,442,059

6.78

Longxi

20

2,981,750

2.14

­Others

65

9,752,760

7.00

4,055

139,189,807

100.00

Yongchun

Total

Source: Lin Jinzhi and Zhuang Weiji, eds., Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiye shi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1985), 54.

in the city on the other. The sociologist Chen Ta, who studied emigrant communities in southern Fujian in the 1930s, also revealed that some returned overseas Chinese chose not to return to their ancestral homes in the rural villages but stayed in Xiamen ­because they had already gotten used to urban lifestyles overseas.111 Xiamen became home for the many emigrants who passed through its port. The Republican era not only completed the reclaiming pro­cess of emigrants as Chinese citizens; overseas Chinese also began to figure prominently in the national consciousness and discourse. A case in point was a discussion put forth in the early 1920s that suggested electing an overseas Chinese as president ­because they ­were patriotic, financially savvy, and competent in dealing with foreigners.112 However, contrary to the wishes of Chinese politicians individually, overseas Chinese remained largely provincial and pragmatic in their concerns, and they even forged new local ties through their emigration experience. As the historian Madeline Hsu has noted regarding financial contributions, overseas Chinese would fulfil the needs of their ­family members first before consider giving to the village or clan. Only ­after all of them w ­ ere satisfied would they contribute to the district

111.  Chen T., Emigrant Communities. 112.  See the vari­ous articles in Qiaowu Xunkan, nos. 55 and 66 (1922, 1923). For example, Yimin, “Huaqiao dangxuan zongtong zhi keneng jiqi chongren zongtong zhi youdian,” Qiaowu Xunkan, no. 66 (1923): 5–7. The top three overseas Chinese candidates for president as suggested ­were the philanthropist Tan Kah Kee, Amoy University president Lim Boon Keng, and Oei Thiong Ham, reputably the wealthiest overseas Chinese in the early twentieth c­ entury.

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and county. “China the nation took a backseat to more local constructions of identity and common interest.”113 The foregoing discussions demonstrate how contesting states, in trying to exert their own power and benefit from the marginality of Xiamen, created in the treaty port a situation whereby Chinese identity became all the more fluid and mall­ eable. Returned overseas Chinese w ­ ere the quickest to capitalize on the uncertainty in Xiamen—on the one hand, they played up their native-­place ties to make themselves more desirable as imperialist tools to the foreign powers; on the other hand, they used the foreign nationalities and relationships they gained abroad to evade the disciplinary arms of the Chinese authorities. This is to say, besides relying on their traditional native-­place ties, as Kuhn observes, the emigrants w ­ ere just as willing and adroit in leveraging their newly acquired identities for survival and success when they returned home to China. During the Republican era, the Chinese government took the lead in making the Chinese identity of emigrants incontrovertible. While overseas Chinese became more prominent on the national stage and their relationship with the Chinese state became ever so close, they still maintained a careful balance between national identity and local concerns. In a sense, the dynamics between the state and the emigrants described in this chapter set the stage for our understanding of overseas Chinese activism in Xiamen. We have seen that returned overseas Chinese did not always bend to the ­wills of the vari­ous po­liti­cal regimes despite facing overwhelming state power. Rather, overseas Chinese acted according to their own interests as they carefully observed the changing politico-­economic situations and weighed the benefits the vari­ous regimes could offer them. And when they returned to China, many did not retire to their natal villages in the hinterland but made their home in Xiamen instead. This is b ­ ecause Xiamen provided them with the security and comfort that the hinterland lacked and, more importantly, b ­ ecause they could better leverage the differential advantages they derived from their time overseas in the treaty port. The returned emigrants in Xiamen remind us that home is not necessarily tied to a physical location and that the relationship between emigrant and home is also not predetermined and fixed. The following chapters show that home took on multiple meanings for the emigrants as they returned to Xiamen with dif­fer­ent goals, purposes, and ambitions.

113. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, 155.

5 TRANSFORMING XIAMEN Urban Reconstruction in the 1920s Amoy is a port where about one half of the world’s oversea [sic] Chinese stop over in returning from, and in ­going out to, foreign lands. It is also one of the commercial centers of South China. The oversea [sic] Chinese, particularly ­those coming from that part of the country, are therefore closely knit with the fortune of this city and . . . ​they are somehow concerned with its affairs. —­Ralph C. D. Ko (1933)

In recent years, scholars of Chinese migration have rekindled the study of qiaoxiang—­“mi­grant regions,” or, in Chen Ta’s preferred rendition, “emigrant communities”1—by placing greater emphases on the interconnections between qiaoxiang and places of settlement abroad, and the impacts emigrants had on the development and advancement of their home regions.2 Regardless, as Elizabeth Sinn points out, despite such development, in-­between places like Hong Kong and Xiamen, which played a vital role in making such interconnections pos­si­ble in the first place, are still overlooked by scholars.3 But as the above excerpt by a Philippine Chinese confirms, Xiamen, though ostensibly not an emigrant’s qiaoxiang, held a special place in the hearts of Fujianese emigrants.4 An analy­sis of returned Hokkien in Xiamen then could reveal much about the emigrants’ multifaceted sense of attachments and identities. The excerpt also suggests that overseas Chinese cherished their ties with Xiamen exactly ­because of the two roles it assumed: as an in-­between place and the metropolis of South Fujian. For the many Fujianese emigrants, Xiamen as the in-­ between place was the final stop where China ended and their overseas journey 1.  Chen T., Emigrant Communities. 2.  See for example, Leo Douw, Cen Huang, and Michael Godley, eds., Qiaoxiang Ties: Interdisciplinary Approach to “Cultural Capital” in South China (London: Kegan Paul, 1999); Yow Cheun-­hoe, Guangdong and Chinese Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of Qiaoxiang (London: Routledge, 2013); Hsu, Dreaming of Gold; M. Williams, Returning Home with Glory. 3. Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 304. 4.  Ralph C. D. Ko, “The First Mayor of Amoy: An Oversea,” China Critic 6, no. 14 (April 6, 1933): 358. 127

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began—­and their first stop in China when they returned. Xiamen thus encapsulated both the feeling of estrangement that leaving home inevitable brought about and the sense of familiarity and comfort that home provided. It is not surprising then that returning to Xiamen would evoke the sense of homecoming. As the regional metropolis, Xiamen provided the con­ve­nience, security, and, more importantly, economic opportunities that the emigrants’ natal villages in the hinterland lacked. Hence, a significant amount of overseas wealth remained in Xiamen for investment purposes. The historian Lucille Chia has noted that such rational and calculated investment strategy was already a common practice among Fujianese emigrants before the treaty port era. According to her, as the investment environment in South Fujian deteriorated ­after the mid-­Ming, the money emigrants brought back to their villages had gone into buying land for the building and renovation of ancestral halls, lineage schools, h ­ ouses, and roads but not for investment in business ventures. “Attachment to one’s native place did not include large financial investments,” Chia observes, “which went instead into businesses in Xiamen and other port cities in China.”5 Hence, as “home” and as the place for investment, Xiamen received a disproportionate amount of attention from returned overseas Chinese. In chapter 3, we saw how Xiamen expanded its functions to facilitate the movement of Fujianese abroad; in this chapter, we ­will detail how returned Chinese emigrants in turn transformed and modernized the city. According to the economist C. F. Remer, the economic life of Xiamen was “dominated by remittances from overseas Chinese.”6 His investigation found that while remittances used to flow singularly back to the emigrant villages in the hinterland, in the 1920s, an unusually large amount of remittances remained in Xiamen instead. Overseas financiers worked in tandem with city administrators to champion developmental proj­ects, and they also speculated in real estate for personal profits, pushing land prices up three to four times.7 This infusion of money from abroad allowed Xiamen’s municipal government to push forth the construction of new roads and the reclamation of marshlands, ponds, and even graveyards, which not only increased the acreage of the city’s usable land but also drastically improved the cityscape and the living conditions of Xiamen. In addition, overseas Chinese investors set up public utility companies and introduced to the city the amenities of modern life, including telephone, electricity, and ­running ­water. When urban reconstruction was completed in the early 1930s, Xiamen was dubbed “­Little Shanghai” for its modernity, infrastructure, con­ve­nience, and generally higher quality of life.8 5.  Chia, “Butcher, the Baker,” 529. 6.  C. F. Remer, Foreign Investment in China (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968), 187. 7. Ibid. 8.  Jing Xian, Zuixin Xiamen kuailan (n.p.: 1935), 9.

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The renewal of Xiamen could not have happened without the vision, money, and initiatives of the returned overseas Chinese.

The Old City of Xiamen The first Walled City of Xiamen, or Xiamen cheng, constructed by the Ming emperor Hongwu was razed to the ground by the conquering Qing army ­after it took the island in 1680. Three years ­later, with the empire now secured, Emperor Kangxi ordered the city rebuilt. The new Xiamen city, completed in 1685, was 40 ­percent larger than the one destroyed, but with a circumference of only 1.1 miles, it was still much smaller than the other walled cities in Fujian, an indication of the city’s lowly status within the Qing administrative hierarchy.9 Xiamen’s nonadministrative role was also reflected in the fact that the city was circular in shape instead of the standard rectangle (see figure 6), albeit the hilly topography of the island and cost considerations might have also affected its design.10 The Qing city stood on the same ground as its pre­de­ces­sor on the southwest corner of Xiamen Island, a short distance away from the waterfront that faced the islet of Gulangyu. With Gulangyu providing shelter from the southwesterly winds, the narrow strait between the two islands—­called the Egret River, or Lu Jiang, by the locals—­afforded safe and commodious access for junks and ships heading to the wharfs that lined the city’s waterfront. In the opinion of an eighteenth-­century witness, the Xiamen harbor was “one of the best harbors in the world. . . . ​It can contain many thousands of vessels, and the sea ­there is so deep, that the largest ships may come up close to the shore, and r­ ide ­there in perfect safety.”11 As Xiamen’s maritime trade flourished, especially ­after 1684 when it was designated as Fujian Province’s only legitimate port (see chapter 1), new wharfs ­were constantly constructed such that by the time the local gazetteer, Xiamen zhi, was compiled in 1832, t­ here ­were at least thirteen major wharfs, or lutou, along the Xiamen bank of the Lu Jiang.12 The busy commercial activities on the island also encouraged an increased influx of South Fujianese. The earliest available rec­ord suggested that ­there ­were   9.  The old walled city was 0.8 miles in circumference. Zhou K., Xiamen zhi, 35–36. The city wall of Quanzhou was 10 miles; Fuzhou, 6.2 miles; Longxi, 3.7 miles; Zhangpu, 3.4 miles; Changtai, 2.4 miles; Huian, 1.9 miles. Ng C., Trade and Society, 81. 10.  According to Chang Sen-­dou, circular cities ­were common in the peripheral areas of the central and southern regions. Also, circular walls ­were cheaper to build ­because they “required fewer construction materials per unit of enclosed area than rectangular walls.” Chang Sen-­dou, “The Morphology of Walled Capitals,” in The City in Late Imperial China, ed. G. William Skinner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977), 89. 11.  Jean-­Baptiste du Halde, The General History of China (London: printed for J. Watts, 1741), 169. 12.  Zhou K., Xiamen zhi, 33–34; Zhou Z., Jindai Xiamen chengshi fazhan shi, 122.

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FIGURE 6.  Walled city of Xiamen Source: Zhou Kai, Xiamen zhi (1840; repr., Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1996).

about “several tens of thousands” of residents on the island in 1680;13 by 1769, the total number of ­house­holds in Xiamen was 16,000, representing 64,000 to 80,000 ­people; on the eve of the Opium War, Xiamen’s population had increased to over 140,000.14 ­Because the small walled city was reserved mainly for the headquarters of the civil and military administrations, and the remaining more desirable land was taken up by places of worship (such as the Chenghuang ­Temple, the Guandi ­Temple, the Xi An ­Temple, and the Nan Shou ­Temple) and the famous Yu Ping Acad­emy, the vast majority of the island’s residents actually lived outside the city wall, especially the area between the walls and the waterfront, which made up the “urban sector”—­the main residential and commercial district—of the island.15 During the Qing dynasty, the urban sector was divided into four quarters called she—­the Fushan she, Huaide she, Fuzhai she, and Hefeng she—­and they w ­ ere interconnected by twenty-­five main streets, sixteen of which w ­ ere located near the waterfront where most of the overseas trading firms ­were concentrated.16 Residents 13.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 84. 14.  Zhou K., Xiamen zhi, 175. 15.  Yu Yang, “Remaking Xiamen: Overseas Chinese and Regional Transformation in Architecture and Urbanism in the Early 20th ­Century” (PhD diss., University of Hong Kong, 2007), 89. 16.  Zhou K., Xiamen zhi, 28–31; Dai Yifeng, “Quwei, kongjian yu chengshi fazhan: Xiamen ge’an,” Shi Lin, no. 2 (April 2008): 114.

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of the four quarters w ­ ere e­ ither merchants or craftsmen, while the rural population scattered among 136 villages on the rest of the island mainly fished and farmed.17 The soil of Xiamen was naturally thin and unproductive; hence, no more than 10 ­percent of the island was cultivated, and animal husbandry was also rare.18 The small amount of sweet potatoes, rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, and garden vegetables produced locally ­were peddled in the periodic and specialized markets that sprang up in vari­ous parts of the urban sector.19 When the Scottish botanist Robert Fortune traveled to Xiamen in the m ­ iddle of the nineteenth ­century, he found the urban sector to be lively but disorderly and dirty: It is one of the filthiest towns which I have ever seen, e­ ither in China, or elsewhere; worse even than Shanghae, and that is bad enough. When I was ­there in the hot autumnal months, the streets, which are only a few feet wide, ­were thatched over with mats to protect the inhabitants from the sun. At ­every corner the itinerant cooks and bakers ­were pursuing their avocations, and disposing of their delicacies; and the odors which met me at ­every point ­were of the most disagreeable and suffocating nature.20 A con­temporary resident missionary on the island agreed with Fortune. Despite Xiamen’s importance in domestic and foreign trade, this missionary saw l­ittle sign of prosperity. A large number of ­people flocked to the city for the economic opportunities it promised, but only a few actually became wealthy through commerce while the remaining masses of laborers lived in poverty. Dilapidated dwellings and untended ­temples far outnumbered decent residences, and the cries of the wretched poor could be heard everywhere. Xiamen, in his view, was a city on the retrograde.21 The arrival of the British and the establishment of a British concession did ­little to improve the general living conditions of Xiamen. Officially inaugurated in 1862, the British concession was a strip of foreshore 20 zhang (roughly 69 meters) from the bank of the Lu Jiang and extending 55 zhang (roughly 189 meters) along the shoreline from Daomei Wharf to Xin Wharf (the shorefront between ­today’s Zhongshan and Dadong Roads; see figure 7).22 Called Beach Ground (or 17.  Chinese Repository 15 (1846): 363; Dai Y., “Quwei, kongjian yu chengshi fazhan,” 114. 18.  Ng C., Trade and Society, 82; Chinese Repository 15 (1846): 362. 19.  Chinese Repository 15 (1846): 362; Zhou K., Xiamen zhi, 31. The periodic markets specialized in dif­fer­ent products; several sold vegetable, fruits, and other foodstuffs; one offered only peanut oil, and another dealt solely with young pigs. T ­ hese markets met e­ very day, e­ very ten days, or just several months a year. 20.  Robert Fortune, Three Years’ Wandering in the Northern Provinces of China (London: J. Murray, 1847), 24. 21.  Chinese Repository 15 (1846): 364. 22.  Xiamenshi danganju, Jindai Xiamen shewai dangan ziliao, 193–94. The British started looking for a permanent settlement in Xiamen as early as 1845 but had disagreements with Chinese officials

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FIGURE 7.  Xiamen bund Source: Photo­graph by G. Warren Swire. Image courtesy of John Swire & Sons Ltd. and Historical Photo­graphs of China, University of Bristol (www​.­hpcbristol​.­net).

Haihou Tan in Chinese), the British concession was only 25 mu in size, the smallest in China, but was purposefully selected to be in the thick of Xiamen’s maritime trading activities.23 Foreign firms quickly established their presence within the concession by erecting com­pany offices and godowns. Over the de­cades, they improved on the facilities in the concession by reclaiming land to construct a bund, paving new roads, and building new wharfs. Eventually, the Beach Ground bund became “the princi­ple business quarter of the town,” where not just foreign firms but Chinese merchants also came to carry on maritime trade.24 By 1880, 24 foreign firms, 183 Chinese ­wholesale ­houses, and 6 native banks crowded the British concession and its surrounding areas.25 But what­ever the improvements in the British concession and its environs, they ­were made primarily out of business considerations; almost no effort at all had regarding where the concession was to be situated. When the location was fi­nally agreed upon in 1852, the Small Knives Rebellion, which occupied Xiamen in 1853, delayed the British from actually settling in. 23.  Chen Yu, “The Making of a Bund in China: The British Concession in Xiamen (1852–1930),” Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering 7, no. 1 (2008): 31–38. 24.  Quotation from Bowra, “Amoy,” 814. 25.  CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1880,” 211–12.

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been applied to change the quality of life or the material well-­being of Xiamen’s residents. In real­ity, Xiamen’s foreign population—­numbering only 29 in 1854 and 285 in 1880—­along with the rich and privileged Chinese, preferred to make their homes in the healthier and more agreeable Gulangyu despite having to make daily passage across the Lu Jiang to come to their offices in Xiamen.26 If anything, the opening of Xiamen as a treaty port only aggravated the congestion, filth, and stench that had shocked Robert Fortune, as the surge in commercial activities and emigration prompted increased h ­ uman movement into the city. In an article published in the New York Times and revealingly subtitled “Amoy’s crowded h ­ ouses and dirty streets. Sights and smells which drive the foreign residents outside the city limits in search for fresh air and sunshine,” a late nineteenth-­century writer echoed many of Fortune’s observations and complaints: The streets are only three or four feet wide, being so narrow that seldom can two persons walk abreast. The eaves of the ­houses overhang the streets and exclude almost entirely the sunlight, making the streets so dark that in many parts lamps are kept burning all the time. From the ­house­tops, where most of the refuse is thrown, the filthy moisture drips down into the streets, forming pools of foul-­smelling mud, and the evil is further increased by all sort of trash thrown from the neighboring doors. As one passes through ­these streets invariably the nostrils are grasped by the fin­gers and a rush made for the open air. . . . ​The restaurants or food stores are a sight indeed. ­Here one sees all manner of eatables for sale. All meat are cooked and ready for immediate consumptions—­pigs roasted entire; fowls, some properly cooked, o ­ thers cooked with only the feathers removed; dogs, cats, and rats, cooked in vari­ous styles, exposed to the view of the customers, and for sale for rates depending on the quality of the article. Much of this food has been in store for a long time, and in many cases a portion of it is but ­little removed above decay. The odor from ­these stores can better be i­magined than described.27 Evidently, the living conditions for residents of Xiamen had not improved for de­cades. The prob­lems that plagued Xiamen and garnered the city the ignominious reputation as one of the filthiest ports in China stemmed from two fundamental shortcomings in the city’s infrastructure. Firstly, the roads and streets in Xiamen ­were inferior and inadequate. Foreign visitors to the port have variously pointed out that the city’s streets followed no standard specifications. While ­there ­were 26. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy, 159; CMC, “Amoy Trade Report, 1880,” 211. 27.  “Life in a Chinese City,” New York Times, November 6, 1891.

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streets that ­were ten, twelve, and fifteen feet wide, most ­were so narrow that one could barely carry an open umbrella while walking through them.28 And ­because illegal extensions to ­houses and shops often encroached onto the streets, further narrowing them and diverting traffic, Xiamen’s streets ­were notoriously tortuous. As P. W. Pitcher, missionary and onetime Xiamen resident, wryly commented, “­There is no street ­either straight, or one even called ‘Straight’ in Amoy.”29 Xiamen’s city streets ­were generally paved with rough and uneven flagstones, and the sewers that ran right under­neath them ­were plainly in sight through the chinks between the slabs. Garbage thrown into the streets by residents flowed readily into the sewers, which not only clogged the drains but also oozed back up during wet weather as an odoriferous mix.30 ­Because the sun was perennially blocked by overhangs, some of the streets ­were dark and damp year-­round and their ground soggy regardless of weather. Inch-­thick mud thus accumulated on the already slippery flagstones, which made walking on them both difficult and hazardous.31 Xiamen’s streets remained in such decrepit state u ­ ntil the end of the nineteenth ­century since, even when absolutely necessary, only desultory repairs ­were made. On the other hand, new roads and alleyways w ­ ere erratically added to cater to the needs of the sprawling city, such that by 1908 ­there ­were more than 220 streets in the urban sector. But beyond the city area, ­there was no new road built at all. Hence, traveling between the city and the rural areas, such as the remote Xiamen Wharf or the Heshan villages in the center of the island, one still had to rely on the waterways and ancient footpaths.32 Secondly, poor housing conditions and overcrowding in the urban sector posed a serious health threat to its residents and impeded further development of the city. To be sure, ­because of emigration and weak industrial growth, Xiamen did not experience a population growth as spectacular as Shanghai ­after its opening as a treaty port.33 Still, by the early twentieth ­century, ­there ­were about 120,000 permanent residents within the city and an unknown number of floating population vying for living space, of which Xiamen had ­limited supply.34 Confined to the southwest corner of the island, Xiamen city occupied an area slightly over 850 acres (5,180 mu). However, ponds, streams, and marshes dotted the cityscape and took up more than 128 acres (780 mu) of precious land. To make 28.  Philip Wilson Pitcher, In and about Amoy: Some Historical and Other Facts Connected with One of the First Open Ports in China (Shanghai: Methodist Publishing House in China, 1912), 17. 29.  Ibid., 16. 30.  Ibid.; CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1892–1901,” 131. 31.  Zhang Zhenshi and Guo Jingcun, “Xiamen zaoqi de shizheng jianshe, 1920–1938,” Xiamen wenshi ziliao, no. 1 (1963): 151. 32.  Xiamen shizhenzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen shizhengzhi, 54; Zhang and Guo, “Xiamen zaoqi de shizheng jianshe,” 151–52. 33. Murphey, Shanghai, 19–24. 34.  Zhang and Guo, “Xiamen zaoqi de shizheng jianshe,” 151.

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­ atters worse, the bodies of w m ­ ater served as con­ve­nient dumping grounds for the city’s refuse, ­human ordure, and—as customs warranted—­dead dogs and other animals.35 As garbage heaped up and ­water stagnated, they also became the main source of the foul stench that permeated the city and the breeding grounds for flies and mosquitoes.36 Some of the better lands in the city w ­ ere taken up not by the living but by the dead. A marked feature of Xiamen Island was the vast number of graves it contained—on the hillsides, in the valleys, and even interspersed among resident ­houses in the city. Xiamen was, effectively, “one gigantic cemetery.”37 The scores of haphazardly scattered graveyards throughout the city not only created an unseemly sight; they also deprived it of valuable lands for development and interfered with road constructions. Adding to the sense of disorderliness ­were the rows of tightly packed h ­ ouses along the streets. Usually one story tall and on rare occasions two, they w ­ ere low, damp, and dark and also infested with fleas and rats. During the warmer spring and summer months, plague and cholera would spread through the residential quarters, shutting the entire city down at times; during the windy autumn and winter months, fire could rampage through the streets, costing enormous loss of lives and properties.38

Gulangyu: The “Drum Waves Island” The dismal state of Xiamen was even more glaring when compared to the orderly and picturesque Gulangyu merely 850 yards away across the Lujiang. Less than 2 square kilo­meters in size, Gulangyu, literally the “Drum Waves Island,” was administratively part of Xiamen during the Qing dynasty.39 However, due to its hilly terrain and barren soil, it was spared by cultivators from its larger neighbor; instead, it was used as a resort by well-­to-do Xiamenese who built quality ­houses and cottages in scenic spots around the island—­“­under cliffs, among huge fragments of rock, or in small dells, often graced by flowering shrubs, sometimes overshadowed by wide spreading trees”—­where they could then come to stay and enjoy the cleaner air, open spaces, and natu­ral beauty that Xiamen could no longer

35.  Ibid. The residents of Xiamen had the unusual custom of disposing dead cats by hanging the bodies in the trees and allowing dead dogs to drift in the w ­ ater. 36. Ibid. 37.  Ibid.; Bowra, “Amoy,” 814. 38.  Zhang and Guo, “Xiamen zaoqi de shizheng jianshe,” 152. 39.  The “Drum Wave Island” was “so named ­because at certain states of the tide the waves rush through an opening in a rock on the southern side of it, and produce a sound which in the distance resembles the beating of a drum.” J. MacGowan, Pictures of Southern China (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1897), 147.

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offer.40 When the British occupied Gulangyu during the Opium War, they found that the island prob­ably had no more than three thousand inhabitants at any one time.41 Foreign officials and merchants who arrived at the treaty port ­were equally enamored by the grace and tranquility of Gulangyu, and they took up residences on the islet despite setting up their offices in Xiamen. As foreigners, wealthy Chinese merchants, and returned overseas Chinese began to build their impressive mansions on the islet, Gulangyu developed into an exclusively residential locale; the only offices to be found t­ here, besides a c­ ouple of foreign stores, w ­ ere the vari­ ous foreign consulates. Even though they preferred Gulangyu from the outset, the British had to establish their consulate within the old walled city on Xiamen b ­ ecause stipulations in the Treaty of Nanjing obliged them to evacuate the islet once indemnity was paid in full.42 However, from 1863, the British consul ­stopped his daily routine of traveling across the strait and instead worked out of a temporary office on Gulangyu. A ­ fter a two-­story consular office-­cum-­prison was completed in 1870, he permanently transferred the consulate to Gulangyu.43 The British consulate was subsequently joined by the US, Spanish, French, German, Japa­nese, Dutch, and other Eu­ro­pean consulates; by the end of the c­ entury, ­there ­were thirteen consulates on Gulangyu in all.44 Although the number of foreigners in Gulangyu remained unimpressive—115 in 1870 and slightly over 300 by 1890—­they had a vested interest on the islet since it was ­there they established their consulates, residences, and also churches, schools, and a hospital. Around 1880, despite oppositions from the Chinese authorities, the British consul led the way in forming the Gulangyu Road and Cemetery Committee, which imposed an annual head tax of 5 yuan on the islet’s residents and additional taxes on transportation vehicles and graves to raise money for the maintenance of roads, erection of streetlights, clearing of drains, and planting of new trees.45 Rev. John MacGowan, honorary secretary of the Gulangyu Road and Cemetery Committee, was proud of what they achieved, especially when compared to the abject conditions in Xiamen:

40.  Herbert Allen Giles, A Short History of Koolangsu (Xiamen: A. A. Marcai, 1878), 8. 41. Ibid. 42.  Article 12 of the Treaty of Nanjing. See William Frederick Mayers, Treaties between the Empire of China and Foreign Powers (Shanghai: North-­China Herald Office, 1902), 3. 43.  Xiamen zhengxie wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui, Xiamen de Zujie (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1990), 6. 44.  He Qiyin, Gonggong zujie: Gulangyu yu jindai Xiamen de fazhan (Fuzhou: Fujian Renmin, 2007), 8–19. 45.  Xiamen zhengxie wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui, Xiamen de Zujie, 21; Dai Y., “Quwei, kongjian yu chengshi fazhan,” 116.

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A very dif­fer­ent state of ­things exists on Kulangsu [Gulangyu]. Foreign ­houses abound on it, and the Foreigner must have good roads. Several miles of such have been made, and special care is taken that they are kept in good order. His keen sense of the beautiful has caused him to plant trees along the sides of the roads, and t­ hese have given not only a sylvan air to the scenery, but have also helped to mitigate, by their shade and by the breezes that wander around them, the extreme heat of the summer months.46 In 1902, China ceded Gulangyu to the foreign powers as the only other international settlement besides Shanghai’s and gave them full administrative rights over the isle. A multinational municipal government was installed, which vested the power to govern the settlement on a municipal council comprising six foreign members elected annually by taxpayers and one Chinese member appointed by the local Chinese officials. Once formed the municipal council immediately set out to implement regulations and mea­sures aimed at improving the safety, sanitation, public health, and public works on the island and made significant pro­ gress by the end of the first de­cade of the twentieth ­century: 24,123 feet of concrete drains ­were laid along the roads, which w ­ ere kept in a fair state of repair and ranked among the best in China; public latrines and refuse bins w ­ ere erected at dif­fer­ent points on the island, and sanitary coolies w ­ ere employed for flushing the drains, sweeping the roads, and the removal of ­house­hold garbage; Chinese villages ­were cleaned, drained, and paved, and much effort had also been made to increase their sanitary conditions; and public buildings, including police barracks, a jail, municipal offices, market buildings, and a slaughter­house ­were constructed.47 Without doubt, Gulangyu became a beacon for the orderliness and cleanliness that could be achieved ­under capable administration and planning. However, what­ever the foreigners accomplished in transforming Gulangyu, they ­were l­imited ­there since no effort had been extended to try to improve Xiamen. As a ­matter of fact, foreigners living in Gulangyu ­were keen to use the pristineness of the islet as evidence of their superiority and ­were thus content to leave the Chinese city across the strait to its own fate.48

Urban Reconstruction in Xiamen Sporadic efforts w ­ ere made by local Xiamen officials in beginning of the twentieth ­century to clean up the streets and improve the hygiene of the city, but ­these 46.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1892–1901,” 132. 47.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1902–1911,” 111–14. 48. Pitcher, In and about Amoy, 264.

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­ ere piecemeal endeavors that did l­ittle to eradicate the deep-­seated prob­lems it w had. A much more comprehensive and drastic program to ameliorate the decrepit city came only ­after the organ­ization in 1919 of the Xiamen Municipal Council in the mold of the one on Gulangyu. The Xiamen Municipal Council was created at the behest of Xiamen’s local elites, especially its wealthy merchants, who by this time had come to the forefront of the society. As early as 1904, Xiamen’s merchants ­were or­ga­nized and led by the Xiamen Chamber of Commerce, which was established ­under the order of the Qing Ministry of Commerce to represent and advance local business interests on the one hand and to encourage the return and protection of overseas Chinese businessmen on the other.49 By 1913, the registered members of the chamber included no fewer than 316 businessmen who, ­after the removal of the old bureaucracy following the collapse of the Qing dynasty, became the de facto leaders of Xiamen and the main advocates for urban and social reforms in the city.50 The first director of the Xiamen Municipal Council was Lin Erjia, a well-­known and well-­respected member of the Xiamen merchant community. Lin was originally born in Taiwan to one of the wealthiest pioneering families on the island. ­After the Qing court ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895, Lin’s ­father refused to be a Japa­nese subject and relocated with Lin, then aged twenty-­one, back to Xiamen and settled in Gulangyu. ­After the elder Lin died, Lin Erjia became the most prominent merchant elite in the treaty port ­because of his wealth and pedigree. He served as the only Chinese member of the Gulangyu Municipal Council for fourteen years and was appointed by the Qing government as the general director of Xiamen’s Merchant Protection Bureau and chamber of commerce from 1904 to 1907 and as a member of the Deliberative Committee for the board of finance (duzhi bu) in 1911. In 1912, Sun Yat-­sen selected him as an alternate member of the senate in the newly established Republic of China, and a­ fter Duan Qirui became premier of China in 1916, he even attempted to enlist him as the “director of overseas Chinese affairs” (huaqiao zongcai), which Lin respectfully declined.51 In 1920, when the Xiamen Municipal Council held its first meeting, Lin was considered the ideal person to lead the council and was invited by his peers to be its first director. Lin Erjia and the municipal council’s plan for urban reform in Xiamen was no dif­fer­ent from that of other major cities in China at the time: the tearing down of the old city wall, the paving of new and wider roads, and the improvement of

49. Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 269–77. 50.  Xiamen zongshanghui and Xiamen dang’anguan, Xiamen Shanghui dang’an shiliao xuanbian (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1993), 9; Dai Y., “Quwei, kongjian yu chengshi fazhan,” 118. 51.  Hong Puren, “Lin Erjia shengping shilue,” Gulangyu wenshi ziliao, no. 1 (1995): 2–3.

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public hygiene.52 However, despite their ­grand vision, l­ittle was achieved between 1920 and 1926—­construction began on four strategic macadamized roads (totaling 10.66 kilo­meters) in the period but only one, the 700-­meter-­long Kai Yuan Road, was complete during the seven years.53 Reasons for the slow pro­gress ­were many, including disagreements and infighting among council members, inability to secure the finances for the vari­ous proj­ects, and re­sis­tance and willful obstructions by residents whose property ­were slated to make way for the roads.54 But it was during this period that Lin Erjia made the crucial decision of engaging Zhou Xingnan as head of the executive office (shi zhengju) to implement the council’s plans. Zhou was to serve Xiamen from 1921 to 1934, and although he was initially constrained and in­effec­tive, he was largely responsible for the city’s urban transformation a­ fter his administrative expertise was unfettered in 1926. Originally from Huiyang in Guangdong Province, Zhou Xingnan had already made a name for himself as an astute urban reformer for his accomplishments in Zhangzhou City before crossing the bay to Xiamen. Back in 1911, Zhou joined the anti-­Manchu revolution by affiliating himself with the army of his fellow Huiyang general, Chen Jiongming. A ­ fter the revolution was won and Chen Jiongming became the vice governor of Guangdong, Zhou was appointed director of the Guangdong Highway Department and gained valuable firsthand experience at road building. ­After President Yuan Shikai hijacked the Republican movement, Zhou left China to briefly teach in Singapore, but he returned immediately ­after Yuan’s death. In 1917, Zhou followed Chen to Zhangzhou, where his unique talent in city development and public works shone through. He tore down the old city wall and used the stone slabs from the wall to repair the banks of the Jiu Long River, widened the streets within the city, and ordered the ramshackle shops along the streets torn down or repaired. He also constructed the first public park in the city and a twenty-­mile highway that connects Zhangzhou with Shima.55 Zhou was invited to Xiamen to repeat the feats he had accomplished in Zhangzhou, but he had a mountain to climb as the municipal council had vision but no money. In the winter of 1921, Zhou proposed the issuance of a lottery to raise the necessary funds, and his idea was quickly accepted and implemented. According to the plan, the municipal council would start releasing the Xiamen Municipal Construction Lottery to the public in the spring of the following year. One 52.  Joseph Esherick, Remaking the Chinese Cities: Modernity and National Identity, 1900–1950 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 7–8. 53.  Xiamen shizhenzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen shizhengzhi, 56, 88. Zhang Zhenshi and Guo Jingcun, however, claim that six roads w ­ ere started, while only one was completed by 1926. Zhang and Guo, “Xiamen zaoqi de shizheng jianshe,” 154. 54.  Zhang and Guo, “Xiamen zaoqi de shizheng jianshe,” 152–56. 55. Hui Yang, “Shizheng jiangsheshi Zhou Xingnan,” Zhangzhou wenshi ziliao 18 (October 1993): 94–104.

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hundred thousand tickets ­were to be issued ­every month, and a draw would also be held. Seventy ­percent of the proceeds would be reserved as prize money while the remainder would go t­ oward the city’s reconstruction. Zhou estimated that the city could receive well over 20,000 yuan monthly.56 But Zhou and the council’s scheme was foiled when Tan Kah Kee (Chen Jiageng), the highly respected overseas Chinese from Singapore, led a vehement protest against the lottery idea. For Tan, lottery was tantamount to gambling, and he foresaw that it would be the poor of Xiamen who would be taken by the game and suffer the consequences.57 By 1922, Tan had just reached the peak of his repute and influence, as he had recently single-­handedly financed the establishment of China’s first private university, the Xiamen University, and his charge against the lottery quickly won the support of the general public and even members of the municipal council. Zhou had no choice but to abandon the proj­ect.58 Failing to raise the necessary funds locally, Zhou turned his attention to the overseas Chinese and hoped to attract capital from abroad. In 1923, he penned a propaganda pamphlet, “A report on the construction of new districts at the Yundang Harbor” (Tianzhu Xiamen Yundang gang baogao shu) detailing his plan for an old harbor to the north of the city, and appealed to the overseas Chinese for investments in the proj­ect. Zhou began his report by praising overseas Chinese achievements: A ­great number of the Chinese in Nanyang came from our Zhangzhou and Quanzhou Districts, and many of them had accumulated ­great wealth. Since the success of the 1911 revolution, their love for China has become ever more intense, and some have returned with their wealth to participate in industries, while ­others used their fortunes to fund educational ­causes, founding schools and cultivating talents. . . . ​Land in Xiamen is scarce, but its residents are many. When overseas Chinese returned to this land, they could hardly find a place to live. The building of new districts is a response to the needs of the time.59 Zhou continued by laying out his plans for the harbor and his assessment of the cost and projected profit. Accordingly, over 76,000 square zhang of land would be reclaimed along the harbor. Excluding the land set aside for the proposed fifty-­ two new streets, 51,000 zhang of land would be left for h ­ ouses and shops. If each square zhang ­were sold for 100 yuan, the proj­ect could turn a profit of over 2 million 56.  Guo Jingcun, “Xiamen kaipi xinqu jianwen, 1926–1933,” Xiamen wenshi ziliao, no. 19 (1992): 72. 57.  Ibid.; Tan Kah Kee, Nanqiao huiyi lu (Shanghai: Shanghai Sanlian shudian, 2014), 13–14. 58. Tan, Nanqiao huiyi lu, 14. 59.  Zhou Xingnan, Tianzhu Xiamen Yundang gang baogao shu (Xiamen: Xiamen shizhenghui, 1923), 1–2.

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yuan ­after factoring in the construction cost.60 Zhou concluded his report with a plea to the overseas Chinese by appealing to their connections with Xiamen: If every­thing goes smoothly, Xiamen’s harbor proj­ect could be completed in three years. By then it would be a model for the ­whole country. Recently, Xiamen’s cap­i­tal­ists have invested heavi­ly in Hong Kong and Macao, and their money has helped ­these places build their harbors. From an investment point of view, ­wouldn’t it be better if their money ­were used to build our harbor? Our wealthy merchants of Xiamen, please seriously consider our proposal and not let our years of effort come to naught.61 Despite Zhou’s well-­thought-­out plans and solemn pleas, support from the overseas Chinese was not forthcoming. This was ­because Xiamen at the time was still in the rapacious clutches of the minor warlord Zang Zhiping, and overseas Chinese would rather keep their money in the relative security of Gulangyu than invest in proj­ects in Xiamen, whose returns ­were uncertain.62 It was only ­after the removal of Zang from Xiamen that overseas Chinese investment flowed more readily. Zang Zhiping was originally affiliated with Duan Qirui’s Anhui clique and was sent to Fujian in 1917. From 1918 onward, Zang established his base in Xiamen, and at one time, his power extended over eleven counties, including Jinmen, Tong’an, Haicheng, Longxi, Zhangpu, and Changtai. In 1924, the pro-­ Guomingdang’s Fujian navy successfully negotiated for Zang to relinquish his power and leave the island peacefully by offering him a large sum of money, and a new administration was installed in Xiamen.63 The new Min(jiang) Xia(men) Naval Garrison Command (MinXia haijun jinbei silingbu) was headed by Lin Guogeng, a naval commander and Fuzhou native who turned out to be a staunch supporter of Zhou Xingnan and the Xiamen urban reform.64 In 1925, Lin and the Xiamen Municipal Council dissolved the in­effec­tive Municipal Executive Office to make way for the Municipal Superintendent Bureau; two years l­ ater, Lin abolished both the Xiamen Municipal Council and the Municipal Superintendent Bureau and set up a Road Administrative Office so that the navy had total and direct control to take charge of the city’s reconstruction proj­ect.65 Despite the po­ liti­cal vicissitudes during this period, Zhou Xingnan survived the administrative 60.  Xiamen gongshang guanggaoshe, Xiamen gongshangye daguan (Xiamen: Xiamen gongshang guanggaoshe, 1932), chap. 3, 3. 61.  Zhou X., Tianzhu Xiamen Yundang gang baogao shu, 56. 62.  Cook, “Bridges to Modernity,” 294. 63.  Hong Puren, “Zang Zhiping panju Xiamen shimo,” Xiamen wenshi ziliao, no. 13 (1988): 6, 11. 64. The MinXia haijun jinbei silingbu was renamed the ZhangXia haijun Jinbei silingbu in 1927. 65.  Dai Y., “Quwei, kongjian yu chengshi fazhan,” 118; Guo J., “Xiamen kaipi xinqu jianwen,” 175–176.

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reshuffling and continued to serve Lin Guogeng first as director (hui ban) for the short-­lived Municipal Superintendent Bureau and then as special advisor in the Road Administrative Office.66 ­Under Lin and Zhou, Xiamen’s urban transformation fi­nally began to take shape. To solve the perennial money shortage prob­lem that had plagued previous efforts, Zhou resorted to his old ideas of lottery and attracting overseas Chinese investment, and this time, with a stable po­liti­cal environment and the backing of Xiamen’s highest naval commander, he was much more successful. In 1928, Zhou issued the Land Cost Lottery and publicized it as a means to encourage enterprises in Xiamen. Even though each ticket was priced at 10 yuan, Xiamen’s residents found the promise of land as gifts and cash prizes up to 100,000 yuan too enticing, and they quickly snatched up all tickets, easily netting Zhou and the city 1 million yuan.67 To encourage overseas Chinese to invest in his construction proj­ects, Zhou began experimenting with selling strips of land in the proposed new districts even before construction began. In late 1925, he de­cided to test his idea in the Wengcai Creek District. Located in the ­middle of the urban sector (near ­today’s Siming South Road and Miaoxiang Road), the creek not only obstructed through traffic and took up valuable space in the congested residential area; its garbage-­ and dead-­animal-­filled ­water also posed a constant health ­hazard.68 And since it was only a short distance away from the city wall, using stones from the demolished wall to fill the river would be efficient and cost-­effective.69 Zhou estimated that reclaimed land in the Wengcai Creek District could command up to 200 yuan per square zhang.70 The reclamation of Wengcai Creek commenced in the spring of 1926 and was completed in 1927. In all, over 2,100 square zhang of new land was created, and ­after a main thoroughfare was built, the remaining 1,100 square zhang of land was made available to the public for shops and h ­ ouses. Along with the land cleared a­ fter the city wall was demolished, the city was able to make close to 30,000 yuan in profit from the reconstituted Wengcai Creek District.71 Emboldened by the success of the test proj­ect and a fuller trea­sury, Zhou employed similar financing techniques to expand the area of useful land in Xiamen by leveling hillsides, clearing cemeteries, reclaiming creeks and ponds, and extending the shorefront. By 1932, he had created thirty new districts, adding 1.16 square kilo­meters of devel-

66.  Guo J., “Xiamen kaipi xinqu jianwen,” 175. 67.  Xiamen gongshang guanggaoshe, Xiamen gongshangye da guan, chaps. 3 and 5. 68.  Zhang and Guo, “Xiamen Zaoqi de shizheng jianshe,” 151. 69.  Guo J., “Xiamen kaipi xinqu jianwen,” 174. 70.  “Shizhenghui dingjia chumai gongdi,” Nang Yang Siang Pau, October 8, 1926. 71.  Guo J., “Xiamen kaipi xinqu jianwen,” 174.

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opable land to the city.72 In addition, Zhou also constructed (1) sixty-­two new roads (totaling 52,467 meters) in the urban sector and another twenty-­seven roads (totaling 46,995 meters) connecting the urban sector with the rural regions; (2) over 3 kilo­meters of bund on Lujiang Boulevard; (3) a 0.16 sq. km public park, Zhongshan Park; and (4) nine permanent markets and over ten new wharfs.73 Comparing the city plan of Xiamen’s urban sector in 1908 with that of 1941 (see figures 8 and 9), it is evident that Xiamen has become more prescribed, orderly, and rational, and as Dr. Wu Lien-­teh, the famous plague fighter, testified, a far cry from its days of filth, disorder, and disease in the 1910s. In 1931, Wu went to Xiamen to oversee quarantine work ­there and was impressed with the transformation the port city had under­gone over the past few years.74 The “lack of order, foul stench and unswept narrow alleys” that used to be the hallmarks of treaty-­ port-­era Xiamen had been brushed away, and in their places the visitor was greeted with wide thoroughfares, ferroconcrete buildings, and ozone-­sterilized drinking ­water. Not only was Xiamen by the beginning of the 1930s sanitary and picturesque; it was also, in the opinion of Wu, distinctly modern.75

Investing in Xiamen The determined and well-­planned efforts by Lin Guogeng and Zhou Xingnan to clean up the city and reconfigure its layout ushered in an era of building frenzy. New pieces of land in the proposed Wengcai Creek District, for example, w ­ ere snatched up as soon as they ­were available, and constructions of commercial and residential buildings began even before the reclamation of the ­whole area was accomplished. When the entire developmental proj­ect was completed in 1928, Wengcai Creek District became the most vibrant shopping and entertainment area in Xiamen, boasting two movie theaters, one dance hall, four h ­ otels, over twenty restaurants, cafes, and eateries, and numerous stores selling medicine, canned goods, clothes, sundry items, and foodstuffs. Land prices in the region soared rapidly from the initial 200 yuan per square zhang that Zhou stipulated to close to 1,000 yuan, thus whetting the appetite of investors and enticing them to also invest in real estate speculation and building proj­ects in other parts of the city.76

72.  Xiamenshi tudizhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamenshi tudizhi (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1996), 43–44. 73.  Dai Y., “Quwei, kongjian yu chengshi fazhan,” 119. 74.  Wu Lien-­teh, “A Visit to Modern Amoy,” China Critic 4, no. 5 (January 29, 1931): 103. 75.  Ibid., 104. 76.  Guo J., “Xiamen kaipi xinqu jianwen,” 174.

FIGURE 8.  Xiamen in 1908 Source: Xiamen shizhenzhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen shizhengzhi (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1991), 7.

FIGURE 9.  Xiamen in 1941 Source: Image courtesy of Taiwan National Museum.

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Between 1928 and 1932, 5,349 new residences ­were built, and a survey counted a total of 5,202 stores in Xiamen’s urban sector by 1935.77 Indubitably, the driving force b ­ ehind Xiamen’s frantic urban construction was the infusion of capital from overseas Chinese. Many overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia accumulated significant wealth a­ fter 1914 by taking advantage of Eu­ro­ pean companies’ retreat from the region during World War I and Eu­rope’s hunger for Southeast Asian raw materials ­after the war.78 In the 1920s, as cash-­rich overseas Chinese ­were looking for investment outlets for their surplus capital, the rapid devaluing of Chinese currency during this time made investment back in China an especially attractive option.79 And t­ hese overseas financiers gravitated to real estate ­because of its relative security and, during Xiamen’s urban reconstruction phase, its promise of rapid and high return. According to a study conducted by the historian Lin Jinzhi, of all the 2,688 overseas Chinese who invested in Xiamen between 1908 and 1938, at least 2,145 of them w ­ ere involved in real estate. Their firms constituted around 60 to 70 ­percent of the total number of real estate development companies in the city, and the largest twenty-­six of them, all established a­ fter 1927, had an impressive collective capital of nearly 30 million yuan.80 (­Table 11 shows a list of representative overseas Chinese real estate firms.) Many of ­these overseas Chinese did not simply come back to Xiamen as speculators looking for a quick profit; they w ­ ere long-­term investors who believed in the developmental potential of the city and w ­ ere involved heavi­ly in building and construction. The Li Minxing Com­pany, for example, bought a piece of land in 1927 in front of the old God of War (Guandi) T ­ emple for a rec­ord 3,000 yuan per square zhang and erected six ferroconcrete store buildings each three or four stories tall. The total outlay for the building proj­ect was 120,000 yuan, and the com­pany de­cided to hold on to its investment even though a fellow overseas Chinese investor offered them 200,000 yuan for the six buildings when they w ­ ere completed.81 The same year, the Li Minxing Com­pany also built a row of over a dozen buildings along Da Shengli Road. One of its co-­owners was Li Qingquan, who owned another investment com­pany that was also involved in large-­scale construction proj­ects, most notably the building of 8 four-­or five-­story high-­ 77.  Chen Zhenhe, Xiamenshi fangdichan zhi (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 1988), 16, 25; Xiamen shizhengfu tongjishi, Xiamen yaolan (Xiamen: Xiamen shizhengfu tongjishi, 1946), 28. 78.  Tan Kah Kee, the rubber tycoon from Singapore, reminisced that he could only make about 100,000 yuan a year before 1914. But a­ fter 1914, he could make 900,000 yuan annually; a­ fter 1920, 2.7 million yuan annually. Tan also claimed that in 1922, at least three overseas Chinese in Xiamen ­were worth over 10 million yuan, and one had assets totaling 100 million. Lin and Zhuang, Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiye shi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan, 37–39. 79.  Chinese currency devalued rapidly in the late 1920s. In 1928, 1 Haikwan tael was valued at 0.71 US dollars; in 1929, that fell to 0.64 US dollars; in 1931, it further fell to 0.34 US dollars. 80.  Lin Jinzhi, “Lun jindai huaqiao zai Xiamen de touzi jiqi zuoyong,” Zhongguo jingjishi yanjiu, no. 4 (1987): 119. 81.  Ibid., 64.

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­TABLE 11  Overseas Chinese-­Owned Real Estate Developing Companies YEAR FOUNDED

COM­PANY

OWNER

PLACE OF SETTLEMENT

CAPITAL (YUAN)

1927

Li Minxing Co.

Li Zhaobei / Li Qingquan

Philippines

1,900,000

1928

Chen Tingqiang

Chen Tingqiang

Philippines

300,000

1928

Xin Shijie

Wang Changqing

Singapore

250,000

1928

Longqun Co.

Huang Chaolong

Indonesia

1,300,000

1928

Rongchang Co.

Ke Qingyuan

Burma

600,000

1928

Zeng Shangyuan Co.

Zeng Shangyuan

Burma

700,000

1928

Li Qingquan Co.

Li Qingquan

Philippines

350,000

1929

Kaiming Theater

Zeng Chengde

Burma

300,000

1929

San He Xing

Lin Hailong

Malaya

200,000

1930

Yinan Co.

‒

Singapore

300,000

1930

Oversea-­Chinese Bank

‒

Singapore

2,000,000

1930

Huang Jude Tang

Huang Yizhu

Indonesia

2,450,000

1931

Xingye Co.

Yang Kongying

Philippines

1931

Wenshan Tang

‒

Malaya

1934

Li Pishu Co.

Li Pishu

Indonesia

350,000

1937

Shenglong Co.

Li Chuanbie

Indonesia

600,000

500,000 60,000

Sources: Lin Jinzhi, “Lun jindai huaqiao zai Xiamen de touzi jiqi zuoyong,” Zhongguo jingjishi yanjiu, no. 4 (1987): 121; Xiamenshi tudizhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamenshi tudizhi (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1996), 63–64.

quality ferroconcrete buildings along the expensive Zhongshan Road.82 Other major overseas Chinese builders, such as the Indonesian “Sugar King” Huang Yizhu, invested on both sides of the Lu Jiang. On Gulangyu, he opened a road that he named Rixing Street in honor of his Rixing Com­pany back in Indonesia and erected rows of two-­story ­houses alongside it for rent. Lin Jinzhi estimated that Huang raised no fewer than 160 buildings in Xiamen and Gulangyu. T ­ able 12 lists some of Xiamen’s major investors in the early 1930s and the number of ­houses they built. In ­today’s Xiamen, around 60 to 70 ­percent of the buildings that line downtown Xiamen’s major thoroughfares, including Zhongshan Road, Siming Road, Datong Road, and Xiahe Road, and the residential quarters near Xiamen University and on Gulangyu, w ­ ere all built in the 1920s and 1930s by t­ hese overseas Chinese investors. Despite the many dif­fer­ent builders and concurrent construction proj­ects in vari­ous parts of Xiamen’s urban sector from 1926 to 1932, what emerged ­after the building frenzy subsided was a surprisingly uniform and harmonious streetscape in the new Xiamen. Part of the credit should go to Zhou Xingnan for his coordination 82.  Lin and Zhuang, Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiye shi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan, 480. On Li Qingquan, see chapter 6.

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­TABLE 12  Buildings Built and Owned by Overseas Chinese by the 1930s INVESTOR

PLACE OF SETTLEMENT

NO. OF PROPERTY

BUILDINGS AREA (SQ. M)

Huang Yizhu Huang Chaoqun

Indonesia

160

41,457.7

Indonesia

79

18,190.7

Zeng Yangsheng

Burma

44

13,381.4

Li Chuanbie

Indonesia

51

13,699.2

Huang Zhongxun

Vietnam

50

17,943.3

Li Chengye

Philippines

36

8,780.9

Li Pishu

Indonesia

26

8,121.4

Chen Songtao

Southeast Asia

94

14,399.1

Ke Qingyuan

Burma

24

13,786.5

Cai Yuanrun

Southeast Asia

37

6,706.7

Chen Qionglin

Philippines

47

3,243.6

Li Zhaobei

Philippines

23

3,133.0

Wang Qihua

Burma

18

3,140.0

Source: Lin Jinzhi and Zhuang Weiji, eds., Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiye shi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1985), 477–78.

and imposition of building codes, but perhaps more impor­tant was the importation of a new building type—­the “shop-­houses,” or qilou, as they w ­ ere locally known—­that was the hallmark of both functionality and orderliness and quickly became the standard form for buildings that lined the newly paved roads. As the name implies, shop-­houses combined commercial and residential functions in one building. Besides exchanging wood for reinforced concrete, shop-­ houses also departed from Xiamen’s traditional shoujingliao-­style (literally “towel ­house”) shop-­dwelling—­which w ­ ere usually one-­story narrow and elongated structures with a small storefront facing the street and residential quarters in the back—by building upward. They ­were usually two-­to four-­story erections with the bottom story reserved for business operations while the upper floors acted as residential apartments. An additional and unique feature of the shop-­houses was that the bottom floor receded a few feet so as to form a footpath, and since the upper stories projected out over the bottom floor, they acted as an overhang to protect pedestrians and customers from the ele­ments. Built contiguously to form rows with the facades facing the street, shop-­houses gave customers and pedestrians easy and all-­weather access year-­round (see figure 10). Some scholars have suggested that the qilou had its origins in e­ ither Hangzhou or South China and was brought to Southeast Asia by Chinese mi­grants before being reintroduced back to Xiamen.83 Even if Xiamen’s qilou had Chinese proto83.  Mei Qing, “Houses and Settlements: Returned Overseas Chinese Architecture in Xiamen, 1890s–1930s” (PhD diss., Chinese University of Hong Kong), 104–5.

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FIGURE 10.  Shop-­houses in Xiamen Source: Photo­graph courtesy of the author.

types, it is impor­tant to note its Southeast Asian colonial influence. As the scholar Jon Lim has noted, as soon as Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore, he began to lay down specific building regulations to ensure that the town would grow in an or­ga­nized and aesthetic way. Besides standardizing ­house plot sizes, construction materials, and building height, Raffles also mandated that the arcaded footpaths of shop-­houses was to be obligatorily and exactly five feet in width, becoming what the locals called the “five-­foot way.” The purpose of the covered walkways was to protect ­people from Singapore’s tropical sun and frequent rainstorms and to provide shelter for the small stalls and hawkers who ­were unable to afford premises. In addition, Raffles stipulated that the facades of the buildings must also be generally uniform in character.84 Raffles’s standardization of the shop-­houses and their incorporation into his city planning represented a turning point in their transformation into qilou. Such building design and function soon spread to Ipoh and Penang in Malaysia and to 84.  J. S. H. Lim, “The ‘Shop­house Rafflesia’: An Outline of Its Malaysian Pedigree and Its Subsequent Diffusion in Asia,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 66, no. 1 (1993): 47–67. See also Jane Beamish and Jane Ferguson, A History of Singapore Architecture: The Making of a City (Singapore: Graham Brash, 1985), 14.

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major cities in Dutch Indonesia where overseas Chinese congregated. And when overseas Chinese returned to help rebuild urban Xiamen, the qilou of Southeast Asia provided them with a ready blueprint. The influence of Southeast Asian qilou on their Xiamen counter­parts was evident in the fact that the footpaths ­were also called “five-­foot way” (wujiaoji in standard Chinese, or gho kha ki in the local dialect) even though they ­were rarely 5 feet wide—­the “five-­foot way” of qilou along Zhongshan West Road, for example, was 8.53 feet, and that of Siming West Road was 7.87 feet.85 Moreover, the decorative ele­ments on win­dows, doors, and facades and the arcades and colonnades of Xiamen’s qilou revealed the aesthetic preferences of their builders, who had lived in Eu­ro­pean colonies in Southeast Asia.86

Improving Living Standards Besides joining the city-­directed efforts in revamping Xiamen’s infrastructure, wealthy overseas Chinese also sought to improve the quality of life for the island’s denizens by introducing such amenities of the modern life as telephone, electricity, ­running ­water, and public transportation. Xiamen’s first public utility com­ pany, the Xiamen Telephone Com­pany (Xiamen delufeng gongsi), was founded in 1907 by the local merchant elite Lin Erjia. Lin supplied half of the starting capital of 40,000 yuan and solicited overseas Chinese financiers to contribute the other half.87 The initial setup of the com­pany was s­ imple and l­imited: the com­ pany had one Japan-­made magneto telephone system capable of ­handling no more than four hundred telephones and could thus only ser­v ice the urban sector of Xiamen Island. In 1912, a Japa­nese merchant launched another telephone com­ pany on Gulangyu, but b ­ ecause no underwater cable was laid, communication between Xiamen and Gulangyu was still not pos­si­ble. In 1922, Huang Yizhu raised funds to buy the faltering com­pany from Lin Erjia and pumped in another 200,000 yuan to purchase a US switchboard.88 The next year, he also acquired the Japa­nese telephone com­pany on Gulangyu, thus consolidating telephone ser­v ices on both islands and allowing direct phone calls between the two places ­after underwater telephone cable was laid in 1924. By 1930, Huang’s telephone lines reached into the rural district of Heshan on Xiamen Island and soon established long-­distance telephone ser­v ice with Zhangzhou, Shima, Haichang, and other cities in South Fujian.89 In 1933 and 1934, Huang’s 85.  Jiang Bowei, “ ‘Yanglou’: MinYue qiaoxiang de shehui bianqian yu kongjian yingzao, 1840s– 1960s” (PhD diss., National Taiwan University, 2000), 184. 86.  Mei, “Houses and Settlements,” 107. 87.  Xiamen huaqiaozhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen huaqiaozhi, 177. 88. Ibid. 89.  Chen Shuxi, “Shangban Xiamen dianhua gongsi,” Xiamen wenshi ziliao, no. 9 (1986): 232–33.

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telephone com­pany had close to 2,400 subscribed customers, and it was making over 10,000 yuan in profits annually.90 Overseas Chinese w ­ ere also the largest investors in and consumers of the city’s electricity. The Xiamen Electric Light Com­pany (Xiamen diandeng gongsi) was initiated in 1913 by a Xiamen local, Chen Yaohuang, with a small 300-­watt generator. In 1934, overseas Chinese ­were persuaded to invest in the com­pany, and its capital ­rose dramatically to 1.4 million yuan, of which 80 ­percent was supplied from abroad. With two additional 880-­watt and 500-­watt generators, the com­pany began supplying electricity not only to home users but also to theaters, flour mills, sawmills, and other industries. Consequently, the com­pany’s name was changed to the Electric Light and Electric Power Com­pany.91 Among home users, overseas Chinese residents ­were the main subscribers for the com­pany’s electricity. Perhaps the most impor­tant contribution overseas Chinese made to improving living conditions in Xiamen was investing in the provision of clean r­ unning ­water. Being a small island with no river system, Xiamen had always suffered from a dearth of potable w ­ ater. The notorious “seven ponds, eight rivers, and thirteen streams” on the island w ­ ere heavi­ly polluted, and wells dug into the reclaimed area of the urban sector produced only brackish and hard ­water, not suitable for ­human consumption. For de­cades, the majority of Xiamen’s residents had relied on “­water boats” (shui ­chuan) to ferry ­water from inland areas. Fresh w ­ ater thus was a rare and expensive commodity in Xiamen, costing 1 to 1.85 yuan per ton for ­water from the Jiulong River or as much as 10 to 15 cents per dan for superior spring w ­ ater that porters shouldered in buckets from the White-­Deer Cave on the island.92 Despite paying premium prices for drinking w ­ ater, Xiamen’s residents w ­ ere not guaranteed delivery as storms and winds often disrupted shipment. And b ­ ecause ­water was transported in barrels and had to pass through many hands before reaching the consumer, it was not just dirty but also a means for communicable diseases to spread. In 1923, Huang Yizhu founded the Commercial Xiamen W ­ ater PLC (Shangban Xiamen zilaishui gufen youxian gongsi) with initial capital of 1.1 million yuan. Huang provided 400,000 yuan himself, while the rest was raised among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. As the com­pany’s largest shareholder, Huang set a very high standard for his proj­ect—­when looking for a com­pany to build a reservoir and a water-­processing plant, Huang gave the job to the German Siemens Com­pany, believing it was better equipped to do the job even though a Japa­ nese com­pany had come in with a lower bid. When construction was completed 90.  Ibid., 233; Lin and Zhuang, Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiye shi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan, 136. 91.  Lin and Zhuang, Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiye shi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan, 136. 92.  Xiamen huaqiaozhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen huaqiao zhi, 178–79; Lin and Zhuang, Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiye shi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan, 123.

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in 1927, the Commercial Xiamen ­Water PLC boasted a one-­million-­ton (lifang mi) main reservoir in the southeast corner of the island and a water-­processing plant capable of purifying five thousand tons of ­water daily near the island’s famous Nanputuo ­Temple. Huang could be proud of the fact that his w ­ ater, ­after passing through three filtering ponds and a Swiss-­made ozone sterilizer, was the cleanest in all East Asia. Yet, at 53 cents per ton, it was still cheaper than imported ­water from the ­water boats.93 Beginning in 1927, the Commercial Xiamen ­Water PLC began delivering drinking w ­ ater to Xiamen’s residents. Between 1929 and 1932, Huang raised an additional 900,000 yuan to expand the com­pany to meet the demand of a rapidly increasing Xiamen population and to extend w ­ ater coverage to Gulangyu, thus increasing the total capital of the com­pany to a significant 2 million yuan, of which 72.86 ­percent came from overseas Chinese.94 By 1934, the com­pany was providing drinking ­water to several thousand ­house­holds on both Xiamen and Gulangyu Islands; it even had surplus ­water to supply foreign ships at 50 cents a ton, bringing in an additional 300,000 yuan annually.95 For Huang Yizhu, the Commercial Xiamen ­Water PLC was able to turn a profit before the Second Sino-­Japanese War, but more importantly, it also significantly bettered the lives of Xiamen’s residents by guaranteeing them an ample supply of clean w ­ ater and reducing the outbreak of waterborne epidemics.

Public Transpor tation With new and wider macadamized roads being paved in Xiamen, overseas Chinese also seized the opportunity to invest in public transportation. In 1926, returned Malayan Chinese Huang Jinghui and seven partners took advantage of the newly completed Kaiyuan Road and started Xiamen’s first public bus ser­vice with two buses on a single route, charging only 25 cents a ticket for the 6.2 km ­ride. Public response to his initiative was so overwhelming that Huang de­cided to go public by forming the Quanhe Motor Car PLC, and he was able to raise 100,000 yuan by selling stocks at 5 yuan a share. Huang then reinvested the money in twenty vehicles to open five new routes that ran mainly in the urban sector but also reached into the rural areas. In 1929, the Quanhe Motor Car PLC merged with another bus com­pany, the Xiamen City Bus Com­pany, to form the XiaHe Motor Car PLC. By so d ­ oing, Huang increased his transportation com­pany’s

93.  Zhao Dexing, Huang Yizhu zhuan (Changsa: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1998), 209–11. 94.  Xiamen huaqiaozhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen huaqiao zhi, 179. 95. Zhao, Huang Yizhu zhuan, 211.

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working capital to 300,000 yuan and expanded its ser­vices by hiring over 150 employees to run forty vehicles on six regular bus routes with twenty-­five stops.96 No doubt public transportation was another worthwhile business venture for wealthy overseas Chinese, but some of them pursued it not to make money but as part of their philanthropic duties to fellow emigrants. This was especially true of long-­distance shut­tle ser­v ices between Xiamen and the vari­ous emigrant cities in the hinterland. For example, in 1928, the Anxi Bus Com­pany was initiated by the Anxi Native-­Place Association in Xiamen with support from Anxi natives living in the vari­ous ports of Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. The motivation ­behind its founding was the fact that many Anxi emigrants had found the trip from Xiamen back to their home villages arduous and perilous b ­ ecause of the omnipresence of bandits in the hinterland. Moreover, even if the emigrants dared to brave harassments from the bandits, they often could not escape extortion by government officials and local authorities. The purposes of the Anxi Bus Com­pany thus w ­ ere to pave a direct road from Xiamen to Anxi and to provide scheduled shut­tle ser­v ices such that Anxi emigrants could have a fast and safe trip back home.97 By 1934, likeminded overseas Chinese had established twenty-­seven shut­ tle companies and paved over 845 kilo­meters of roads connecting Xiamen to vari­ous points in the countryside.98 As the commissioner of customs at Xiamen observed in the early 1930s, “not long ago all the principal places hereabout w ­ ere interconnected by motor-­bus and motor-­truck ser­vices, which have proved a g­ reat boon to merchants and travelers. . . . ​In ever-­increasing numbers the general public is patronizing the motor-­bus ser­v ices, especially on ­those routes that link villages and towns in the interior, where the vehicles always appear loaded to their full capacity.”99 Regardless of their initial impulse for their involvement in road building, the overseas Chinese helped finance public roads and highways that not only connected Xiamen with emigrant villages in its hinterland but also major cities in South China, significantly Shantou to the south, Fuzhou to the north, and Nanchang in Jiangxi Province to the west, thus further consolidating Xiamen’s position as the regional metropolis.100 Moreover, the increasing use of motor vehicles also made some positive impacts on the local society and economy. According to Chen Ta’s survey, the new roads and transportation ser­v ices helped improve the income of rural peasants by stimulating the flow of commodities. Local perishable produce like narcissus bulbs, oranges, pomelos, longan, and lychee could now   96.  Xiamen jiaotong zhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen jiaotongzhi, 131–34.   97.  Lin and Zhuang, Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiye shi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan, 267.   98.  Ibid., 295; Chen, Emigrant Communities, 189.   99.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1922–1931,” 147. 100.  CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1932–1941,” in Xiamen shizhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Jindai Xiamen shehui jingji gaikuan (Xiamen: Lujiang chubanshe, 1990), 415.

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move with minimum delay and spoilage to Xiamen, where they w ­ ere then distributed to other cities in China or to Southeast Asia. Besides being the region’s economic center, Xiamen was also South Fujian’s cultural center. The new lines of communication facilitated the spread of news and knowledge from Xiamen to the hinterland, opening new horizons to millions of rural Chinese. Previously, newspapers published in Xiamen took a day to reach Tongan and two to Quanzhou. But with the new roads and new mode of transportation, they could be enjoyed in the two cities the same day they w ­ ere published.101

City for Consumption For the many weary emigrants returning home, Xiamen offered a welcome reprieve from their year-­round toil in foreign lands, as they could rest and enjoy the urban center for a day or two and purchase the obligatory gifts for their families before heading inland to their home villages. As a ­matter of fact, the tens of thousands of Hokkiens who passed through Xiamen exiting or returning to China yearly fostered the burgeoning of the city’s retail businesses. In 1935, ­there ­were as many as 5,202 shops in Xiamen selling a wide array of goods—­from clothes, textiles, shoes, watches, and jewelry to bicycles, antiques, furniture, and all sorts of food items—­and the city’s itinerant visitors constituted their main customers. The textile industry, for example, flourished ­because woven cloth was one of the favorite gift items overseas Chinese purchased during their homeward journeys. One estimate reported that overseas Chinese spent an average of $15 each on woven cloth in Xiamen, totaling $525,000, or one-­third of the city’s total sale, annually.102 In 1930, t­here ­were 63 textile establishments in Xiamen that employed over five hundred employees, and overseas Chinese investments represented 18.2 ­percent of their combined capital of over 1 million yuan.103 Besides ­doing their rounds of necessary shopping, the travelers in Xiamen could also dine in one of the city’s many restaurants and coffee-­or tea­houses. They could also get a haircut, take a bath in a bath­house, tour the famous Zhongshan Park and its zoo, go dancing in one of the two Westernized dance halls, or enjoy a movie in a modern cinema, of which the city had eleven.104 For the less inhibited, they could try their luck in gambling, satisfy their cravings in an opium den, or relax in the com­pany of a prostitute—in 1931, the city had 2,150 prostitutes catering 101. Chen, Emigrant Communities, 181–82. 102. Xiamen zhengxie wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui, “Jiefang qian Xiamen de choubu shangye,” Xiamen wenshi ziliao, no. 4 (July 1983): 119–20. 103.  Ibid., 112, t­ able 1. 104.  Xiamen gongshang guanggaoshe, Xiamen gongshangye daguan, 99–100; Jing, Zuixin Xiamen kuailan, 26.

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to men from all levels of spending power.105 No doubt the modern city of Xiamen was renovated with the help of the overseas Chinese; it was also, in many ways, or­ga­nized to cater to the legions of returnees. While overseas Chinese might have sal­vaged Xiamen from decline, the port’s overdependence on its emigrants had unforeseen and unfavorable consequences as well. Firstly, ­because ­there ­were readily available markets in the emigrant communities for local products, Xiamen’s export and industrial developments tended to skew ­toward fulfilling overseas Chinese demands. The major cottage industries on the island in the latter half of the nineteenth c­ entury ­were shoe and umbrella making, products that had few buyers besides Fujianese emigrants. Similarly, when modern industries arose in Xiamen, many of them also had overseas Chinese as their targeted consumers, especially when they ­were founded or funded by overseas Chinese investors themselves.106 Xiamen-­made canned fruits, canned vegetables, medicines, medicated samshu (spirits), vermicelli, soy sauce, and cigarettes could be found in almost e­ very emigrant community in Southeast Asia in the 1920s and 1930s.107 And it was this distribution of overseas Chinese favorites to Southeast Asia—­constituting as high as 70–80 ­percent of Xiamen’s total export in the early twentieth ­century and more than 90 ­percent by the 1930s—­that maintained the port’s export trade ­after the “death” of Xiamen’s tea trade.108 But this narrow focus on catering to the needs of its own emigrants was also the main reason why Xiamen failed to produce industrial products that had a wider appeal in China, Eu­rope, and the United States, and its industrial sector never prospered. Secondly, the infusion of money by overseas Chinese to fuel the city’s growth inevitably tied the prosperity of Xiamen to the health of the economies in the Southeast Asian colonies. When Southeast Asia thrived and overseas Chinese w ­ ere rich, as ­after World War I, a considerable amount of remittances and investments ­were sent back to Xiamen, and the city underwent a period of unpre­ce­dented boom. But when the wealth of the overseas Chinese shrank and the flow of money back to Xiamen was curtailed, as during the G ­ reat Depression, the city’s economy headed ­toward a downturn. In the 1920s, the vari­ous urban reconstruction proj­ects driven by overseas Chinese capital artificially inflated land prices in Xiamen to an all-­time high. By 1930, Xiamen was the third-­most-­expensive place in China to own a piece of land, ­behind only the International Settlement and the

105.  Hong Puren and Wu Yangrong, eds., Jindai Xiamen shehui lueying (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 2000), 14. 106.  “Quyu chengshi fazhan: Yi Xiamen wei zhongxin,” in Dai Y., Quyuxing jingji fazhan yu shehui bianqian: Yi jindai Fujian diqu wei zhongxin, 337–45. 107.  Ibid.; CMC, “Amoy Decennial Report, 1922–1931,” 143. 108.  Dai Y., “Minnan haiwai yimin yu jindai Xiamen xingshuai,” 48.

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French Concession in Shanghai.109 But ­after the ­Great Depression hit and overseas Chinese pulled their capital out of the Xiamen market, the real estate b ­ ubble 110 burst, and property prices fell by more than 30 ­percent. Similarly, retail sales in Xiamen w ­ ere also dependent on the buying power of the overseas Chinese and their families. In 1930 alone, the textile industry conducted 1 million yuan in sales. But a­ fter remittances to Xiamen shrunk following the global depression, sales fell by 26 ­percent in 1933, forcing twelve textile w ­ holesalers and retailers to close their doors.111 Xiamen’s spectacular transformation in the 1920s and 1930s has impressed many con­temporary observers, Chinese and foreigners alike, and led them to compare the southern port to prominent Chinese cities like Shanghai and Qingdao.112 What sustained Xiamen’s continual prosperity despite its yearly and widening trade deficits, as t­ hese observers have pointed out and we have supported in this and preceding chapters, was the port’s transformation into a regional migration hub and its enduring ties with its emigrants, who remitted large amounts of money to the city and also returned to help finance the city’s development. By not returning to their natal homes in the hinterland but residing in Xiamen instead, Hokkien returnees did not conform to the sojourner ideal of “leaving home—­staying abroad temporary—­returning home,” with “home” referring strictly to the emigrant’s original dwelling place. But rather than seeing them as deviating from the normal migratory cir­cuit, the case of Xiamen testifies to the fact that for emigrants, they need not necessarily go back to their geo­graph­ic­ al origins to be home. As we w ­ ill discuss further in the next chapter, emigrants are no longer bound to a given place once they began their journeys. Hence, home is not about returning to from where they originated but where they go that is most comfortable and familiar and where they could create a sense of belonging, that is, a place that feels most like home.

109.  Lin C., Fuzhou Xiamen dijia zhi yanjiu, 50a–­b. 110.  Between 1927 and 1931, the twenty-­six largest overseas Chinese real estate firms invested 1.94 million yuan in Xiamen annually. But during 1932 to 1934, they averaged only 0.27 million yuan annually. Dai Yifeng, “Dongnanya huaqiao zai Xiamen de touzi: Feilubin Li shi jiazu ge’an (benshiji 20 zhi 20 niandai),” Zhongguo shehui jingjishi yanjiu, no. 4 (1999): 64–65. 111.  Mao Yuenan, Xinxing de Xiamen (Xiamen: Cui Jing Tang, 1934), 44. 112.  Wu L., “Visit to Modern Amoy”; Jing, Xiamen Kuailan, 9; “Reconstruction in South China: One Time ‘Dirtiest City’ Carries Out Remarkable Five-­Year Program Making Garden Spot of Amoy,” Far Eastern Review 28, no. 11 (November 1932): 526–28.

6 MAKING HOME Xiamen as Destination and Home International migration is tantamount to an extended detachment from what used to be home. In practice, it denaturalizes it, as it reveals that the sense of obviousness and familiarity attached to the previous domestic place was ultimately artificial and reversible. Mi­grants’ everyday life, therefore, is a privileged terrain to make sense of home by default. It brings to the fore a range of emotions, practices and living arrangements that mirror the need to re­create home anew, dynamically, rather than a static and full-­fledged ­identification with one par­tic­ul­ar dwelling place. —­Paolo Boccagni, Migration and the Search for Home

The above passage by the sociologist Paolo Boccagni forces us to rethink our understanding of Chinese emigrants and their relationship with home. As we know, home is commonly thought to hold a special place in the hearts of Chinese on the move. The familiar Chinese sojourner discourse, for instance, privileges home as a natu­ral and perennial presence, the starting point of the emigrant’s journey overseas but also where he returns to find closure to his sojourn. As the Chinese assume, the sojourner would yearn to and ultimately return to his home, since like “falling leaves returning to the roots” (luoye guigeng), home is where he could reclaim his emotional moorings, sense of security, interpersonal relationships, and Chineseness. To push the centrality of home to the emigrants to its extreme, Philip Kuhn asserts that b ­ ecause the Chinese emigrants’ connections to the “old country” ­were never broken, and they continued to benefit from its ­people and culture even while abroad, they had in effect “never left home.”1 For Kuhn, the idea of “home” does not mean the emigrants’ original ­house or dwelling but rather the social and cultural environment of the “old village, lineage, province” that nurtured them and acted as the training ground for their survival strategies in distant places.2 Yet despite his novel interpretation, home for Kuhn, as with most scholars of Chinese migration, still remains a geo­graph­ic­ al 1. Kuhn, Chinese among O ­ thers, 49. 2. Ibid. 157

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concept that the emigrants statically identify with. In the excerpt above, however, Boccagni provides us with a dif­fer­ent perspective to rethink our conception of home. According to him, home loses its original significance as soon as the emigrant leaves it. But rather than leaving him with no home, Boccagni believes that the emigrant, throughout his journey, enters into a meaningful relationship with a place (or places) to create the sense of familiarity, security, and belonging that would allow him to call the place(s) home. What Boccagni is telling us then is that home, or more precisely home making, is not a static identification with a physical structure or locality but an interactive and purposeful endeavor on the part of the emigrant.3 Taking inspiration from Boccagni, this chapter looks at the thoughts and actions of two returnees to Xiamen: Li Qingquan (1888–1940), a first-­generation emigrant who became the community and business leader of Chinese in the Philippines, and Lim Boon Keng (Lin Wenqing, 1869–1957), a third-­generation Singapore-­born Chinese who served as the president of Xiamen University for sixteen years. ­Because scholars have tended to assume the relationship between Chinese emigrants and their original homes as natu­ral and immutable, they have not considered the possibility of returned overseas Chinese making home in China. What we ­shall see is that Chinese emigrants w ­ ere in a constant strug­gle to make sense of their socioeconomic and po­liti­cal environments and to ­settle, and foreign circumstances ­were as impor­tant if not more so than native-­place connections in informing their decisions to return to China. More importantly, they did not assume a natu­ral affinity with the place they returned to; rather, their choice to make home in Xiamen was a deliberate one—­they deemed the treaty port more congenial than the hinterlands in allowing them to create the sense of intimacy, security, and control that they sought, while at the same time providing them with an environment where they could fulfill their personal potential and ambitions.

“The Pillar of the Overseas Chinese”—­L i Qingquan The Man Li Qingquan was born in 1888 in Shizhen, a small village belonging to Jinjiang City. Typical of coastal villages in South Fujian, Shizhen was cursed with infertile soil and a paucity of fresh w ­ ater. According to the genealogy of the Li lineage,

3. Boccagni, Migration, 2.

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members of their clan began to look for better prospects overseas as early as the late seventeenth ­century. Taiwan was the logical choice considering its proximity, but ­later generations w ­ ere increasingly drawn to the Philippines given the better economic prospects t­ here. Li Qingquan’s great-­grandfather survived the perilous voyage to the Philippines in the late eigh­teenth ­century, and he was followed by Li’s grand­father and ­father. Li Qingquan’s ­father initially ran a small furniture shop with his ­uncle. But as it was unfortunately burned down, they de­cided to switch to the lumber business and set up a lumber-­processing factory that they named Chengmei. The elder Lis’ new venture coincided with Spain’s decision to open the Philippines to world trade and promote economic growth. Hence, their business quickly took off, and it laid the foundation for Li Qingquan’s business empire in the early twentieth c­ entury. Li Qingquan was groomed to take over the f­amily’s business at a young age. ­After some private education in one of the village schools, he was sent to Xiamen’s American-­run Tongwen Acad­emy at age eleven. A ­ fter two years of En­glish, mathe­matics, and other subjects essential to a Western education, he had his first exposure to the ­running of the lumber business when he was summoned by his ­father to the Philippines. One year ­later, seeing that Li still had a passion for study, his f­ ather enrolled him in the Saint Joseph Institute in Hong Kong. For four years, Li received further instructions in Western education, and it is also believed that the rapid transformation of Hong Kong from a fishing village to a major commercial hub in East Asia left some favorable impressions on the young man in his midteens.4 Despite being only eigh­teen when he returned to the Philippines, Li Qingquan’s business acumen showed through during his first business transaction—­the acquisition of several hundred hectares of land in Manila.5 He soon won unreserved trust from his f­ather and u ­ ncle who handed over the reins of their com­pany to young Li in 1907, still shy of his twentieth birthday. As if to repay the faith entrusted him, Li worked tirelessly to expand the f­amily business. In less than one de­cade ­after he took charge of Chengmei, he turned the com­pany from a small lumber retailer to a firm that owned its own timberland, pro­cessing mills, and distribution networks. It was estimated that by 1916, Li Qingquan was worth well over 11 million pesos. Having firmly established himself as the undisputed “lumber king” of the Philippines, Li began to diversify into the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal industry, the aluminum industry, the paint industry, and other ventures.6 Most significantly, he established the Chinese newspaper Huaqiao shangbao (Chinese commercial news) in 4.  Dai Y., “Dongnanya huaqiao zai Xiamen de touzi,” 524. 5. Ibid. 6.  Ibid., 525.

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1919, and formed, in the following year, the Philippines’ first Chinese private bank, the China Banking Corporation.7

As Community Leader With wealth, came power. In 1919, Li Qingquan was elected chairman of the Philippines Chinese General Chamber of Commerce and held that office for six consecutive years. It was during his tenure that Li led his peers in a fight against the passing of a bookkeeping law by the Philippines government, which not only consolidated his position as the undisputed leader of the Chinese community but also gave him valuable experience in marshaling fellow Chinese emigrants for a common cause. In 1921, Francis B. Harrison, then governor-­general of the Philippines, passed a bookkeeping law that made it illegal for any person or com­pany “to keep their books of account in a language other than En­glish, Spanish, or any native dialect.”8 The government’s rationale for passing the law was to facilitate the work of revenue collectors and prevent fraudulent tax returns. It alleged that ­because an estimated fifteen thousand Chinese stores in the Philippines kept their rec­ords in Chinese, which naturally posed a major handicap to inspectors of the Internal Revenue Bureau, it lost 1.5 to 2 million pesos in tax revenue annually.9 Despite the government’s claim that the enactment of the bookkeeping law was simply a fiscal mea­sure, the Chinese insisted that the law was a racist act targeting them and that it was designed to prevent the Chinese on the islands from advancing in the country’s economy.10 As chairman of the Philippine Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, Li Qingquan petitioned the governor-­general on behalf of the Chinese community to state their objections, claiming that not only was the bookkeeping law racist, it also imposed undue burdens on Chinese businessmen who had to spare an extra 50 to 100 pesos a month to hire a bookkeeper just to comply with the new law.11 Seeing that the law was passed despite vehement local protests, Li Qingquan and the chamber de­cided to expand their fight. They first or­ga­nized a nationwide convention of Chinese merchants in May 1921 and ­later dispatched special envoys   7.  Ong Soon Keong, “To Save Minnan, to Save Ourselves: The Southeast Asia Overseas Fujianese Home Village Salvation Movement,” in China on the Margins, ed. Sherman Cochran and Paul Pickowicz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 258–60.   8.  Antonio S. Tan, The Chinese in the Philippines, 1898–1935: A Study of their National Awakening (Quezon City, Philippines: R. P. Garcia, 1972), 98, quotation from p. 185.   9.  Ibid., 187; see also Philippine Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, Golden Book, 1955: A Fiftieth Anniversary Publication of the Philippine Chinese General Chamber of Commerce (Manila: Philippine Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, 1955), 3:21. 10. Tan, Chinese in the Philippines, 187. 11.  Ibid., 191. Philippine Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, Golden Book, 1955, 3:21.

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to Washington, DC, to lay their plight before the US president and Congress.12 Concurrently, they also printed circulars condemning the law and widely distributed them to Chinese and non-­Chinese business h ­ ouses in China and other foreign countries.13 ­Because of the chamber’s efforts in publicizing the impracticality and unjustness of the new law, it won the support of not only their compatriots in China, the United States, and other parts of Southeast Asia but also impor­tant foreign firms—­including US ones—in Manila.14 The stir created by protests and petitions from Chinese and non-­Chinese within and outside the Philippines alarmed the new governor-­general, Leonard Wood, but instead of abolishing the bookkeeping law, he merely postponed its implementation u ­ ntil January 1, 1923. In 1925, Li and the chamber stepped up their fight even further by filing a suit in the US Supreme Court challenging the legality of the bookkeeping law. On June 7, 1926, they fi­nally won redress when the US Supreme Court officially declared the bookkeeping law unconstitutional. The Chinese ­battle against the bookkeeping law took five years and five months and cost the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in excess of 167,000 pesos.15 Unsurprisingly, the common outcry over the bookkeeping law united the Chinese community in the Philippines. However, the Chinese demonstrations and protests, the cohesiveness they showed in mobilizing their community, and their ability to marshal public opinion in their ­favor caused considerable apprehension in vari­ous Philippine quarters.16 The Philippine government considered their move to bypass its legislature and bring their petitions to the US Supreme Court a sign of disrespect, while the natives of the islands saw the same gesture as using the Americans to oppress their government. Relationships between the Chinese and the Filipinos became so strained that an anti-­Chinese riot broke out in 1924 in Manila that also spread to other provinces, causing substantial Chinese injuries and property damage.17 Even though the Philippine Chinese ­were exceedingly lucky to survive the 1924 riot with only one death, events in the 1920s made plain to them their general helplessness in the face of colonial discipline and native harassment.18 It is true that the prospects of financial betterment originally enticed many Chinese to the Philippines, but the anti-­Chinese conditions of the 1920s meant that they did not 12. Tan, Chinese in the Philippines, 190; Edgar Wickberg, “The Philippines,” in The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, ed. Lynn Pan (Singapore: Chinese Heritage Center, 1998), 192. 13. Tan, Chinese in the Philippines, 188. 14.  Ibid., 189. 15. Ibid. 16.  Ibid., 193. 17.  Ibid., 343. 18. Ibid.

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feel safe and secure in their place of settlement. Hence, Chinese of means such as Li Qingquan began to look to their home villages to try to transform them into a safe haven where they could return when circumstances in the Philippines r­ eally became unbearable.

Salvaging Home Villages For overseas Fujianese hoping to one day return, the socioeconomic and po­liti­ cal situations in early twentieth-­century South Fujian w ­ ere indeed dismal. As we have noted in chapter 2, unremitting population growth during the Qing dynasty reduced the per capita land u ­ nder cultivation to well below subsistence level, making life exceedingly difficult for rural farmers. Even though the large-­scale emigration of Fujianese slightly eased population pressure in the province, the woes for ­those who stayed ­behind persisted as it was also constantly ravaged by natu­ ral disasters. The pervasiveness of natu­ral disasters in Fujian and the distress they brought about can be gleaned through the following data: in the thirty-­eight years of the Republic of China, floods occurred in thirty-­three years of them, droughts in twenty-­four, typhoons in twenty-­two, earthquakes in twenty, and epidemics in ten.19 With the exception of 1930 when only one earthquake struck Fujian, two or more forms of calamities normally frequented the province yearly. On average, 30 ­percent of the province was affected by natu­ral calamities annually; and in the single year 1933, as many as four hundred thousand Fujianese ­were displaced from their homes.20 As the Chinese saying goes, tianzai renhuo, natu­ral disasters and man-­made calamities often come together. This was especially true in the Republican era. The end of imperial rule in 1912 did not bring about peace and the rejuvenation of Fujian. Instead, Fujian soon became the arena for power strug­gles among strongmen of dif­fer­ent fractions. Amid the unrestrained striving for personal and provincial goals, ­these warmongers brought terrible suffering to the ­people of Fujian through unremitting hostilities, rapacious exploitation, and banditry. The state of being in South Fujian was well summarized in a 1922 report by A. E. Charleton, the US consul to China: The year 1921 in South Fujian may be described as one of ­great social unrest. The primary c­ auses may be briefly stated as being ­those of continued fighting throughout the interior between Northern troops and bandits armies and arm robberies in the interior and on the island of 19.  Chi Xiumei, “A Study on the Famine Relief in Fujian Province during the Period of the Republic of China” (MA thesis, Fujian Normal University, 2005). 20. Ibid.

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Gulangyu. Bandit leaders have no re­spect of central authority and always on the alert to wage warfare against the military governor in Fuzhou. . . . ​ With conditions as they are and the absence of a strong central authority, both in the military and po­liti­cal sense, it is only natu­ral that vari­ ous groups of bandits are robbing the ­people, destroying property and killing ­those who oppose them.21 This unceasing loss of lives, property, and means of subsistence caused by pervasive conflicts and banditry ­were cited by 33 ­percent of Fujianese abroad as the main reason ­behind their initial decision to leave home.22 For Li Qingquan and other Chinese in the Philippines, they knew well that they had to find ways to relieve the misery caused by natu­ral disaster and to halt the exploitations of rapacious warlords if they ­were to have a chance of retiring to their home villages. In 1922, Li and over seventy overseas Chinese leaders in the Philippines banded together to form the Association for the ­Eager Pursuit of Self-­ Government by Overseas Chinese in the Philippines (Lufei huaqiao zizhi jijin hui). As chairman of the association, Li sent a tele­gram to key Fujianese organ­ izations in Southeast Asia and China in which he openly proclaimed the motives for establishing the association and promulgated an idealized image of their natal villages as peaceful, sufficient, and ­free from oppression: In view of the devastations caused by marauding troops and roving bandits, your overseas compatriots know that if moves are not taken to save our ancestral villages, ­there can be no peace at home. Hence, we . . . ​ propose to pull together resources to vitalize education, build better transport, and develop industries and commerce. By so ­doing, we may turn our beloved native place into a land of happiness. Not only can our fellow townsmen at home enjoy peace and security, but our brethren overseas, when aggrieved by government policies in their place of settlement abroad, can look to their hometowns as their final resting place. . . . ​For a new Fujian ­after the eleventh year of the Chinese republic, we must depend on our overseas Fujianese, we must depend on our 20 million Fujianese!23 To open its membership to all Hokkiens in Southeast Asia, the association was renamed the Southeast Asia Overseas Fujianese Home Village Salvation Association 21.  Carleton to Shaw, January 21, 1922, US Department of State, Rec­ords of the Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of China, 1910–1929 (Washington, DC: National Archives, 1960), quoted in Cook, “Bridges to Modernity,” 132. 22.  Zhang Youyi, ed., Zhongguo jindai nongye shi ziliao (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue, 1980), 3:892. 23. Quoted in Xiamen huaqiaozhi bianzuan weiyuanhui, Xiamen huaqiaozhi, 129, emphasis added.

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(Nanyang minqiao jiuxiang hui, hereafter the Association) in 1924 and even moved its headquarters from Manila to the international settlement on Gulangyu in Xiamen, which provided relative safety for its wealthy members yet allowed them to be closer to their troubled home villages. Despite ­these developments, Li Qingquan remained as president of the Association, and u ­ nder his leadership, overseas Fujianese embarked on vari­ous endeavors in the 1920s for the betterment of South Fujian, such as settling armed feuds (xiedou) between dif­fer­ent Fujianese clans, appealing against the conscription of laborers in Quanzhou, helping with the organ­ization of local militias, and planning the publication of a Chinese newspaper, the Fookien Times (Xinmin ribao).24 Among their vari­ous undertakings, Li Qingquan and the Association’s most ambitious ­were the proposed extension of the Zhang-­Xia Railway to Longyan and the eradication of the bandit leader Chen Guohui. Z HA NG -­L ONG R A I LWAY

At the time when the Association was founded, South Fujian already had a Zhang-­ Xia Railway linking Zhangzhou and Xiamen, but it had long fallen into disrepair. The Association passed a resolution to revive the existing railway and to lengthen it to Longyan. This extended Zhang-­Long railway would run from Xiamen across the Jiulong River via Jiangdong Bridge to reach Anhua, Zhangping, and Longyan. Then it would turn south t­ oward Kanshi and Yongding. A branch line would also connect Zhangzhou with Punan. The proposed Zhang-­Long Railway would be 347 miles in length, and it was agreed that the Association would raise 16 million yuan to complete the construction of the railway.25 Like so many progressives at the time, the Association took to railway building ­because of a belief in its relevance to the economic well-­being of Fujian. Its members w ­ ere convinced that the new mode of transportation could help rejuvenate the dilapidated province by facilitating fundamental construction. More significantly, the Association had planned to develop the railway system in tandem with the promotion of the mining industry, which was why the proposed railroad was to end at Longyan, the site where a Japa­nese prospecting team had discovered a coal seam estimated to be 120 miles in length, 60 miles in width, and 4 to 6 feet thick.26 According to one French engineer, once excavated, Longyan alone could supply coal to the world for fifty years.27 The Zhang-­Long Railway 24.  “Nanyang Minqiao jiuxianghui zonghui chengli hou zhi baogao,” Nanyang Siang Pau, November 28, 30; December 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, and 22, 1925. 25.  A Chinese mile equals roughly one-­third of a statute mile. Shi Xueqin, “Nanyang minqiao jiuxiang yundong yu Zhanglong lukuang jihua,” Nanyang wenti yanjiu, no. 4 (1995): 47. 26.  Shi, “Nanyang minqiao jiuxiang yundong yu Zhanglong lukuang jihua,” 48. 27.  Huang Yizhu, “Minban Fujian quansheng tielu gufen youxian gongsi yuanqi,” in Zhao, Huang Yizhu zhuan, 366.

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thus was designed with this huge coal reserve in mind. The Association believed that when completed, not only could the railway pay for its own construction, it would also alter the economic landscape of Fujian and improve the lives of all Fujianese. Having ­great expectations for its railway proj­ect, the Association proceeded with much gusto. In 1926, Li Qingquan met with Du Xigui, prime minister of the government in Beijing, and received oral consent from the latter for the proj­ ect. In August the same year, Huang Yizhu, Li’s close friend and the most ardent supporter of the railway proj­ect, tendered their proposal to the Ministry of Transportation in Beijing. Huang was granted the rights to operate railways in the ­whole of Fujian Province and to mine coal in an area of not more than six hundred square miles in Longyan, Zhangping, and Ninyang. But before any concrete work could take place, Chiang Kai-­shek’s Northern Expedition forces took over Fujian Province and refused to accept any agreement reached between the Association and the ousted Beijing government. The Zhang-­Long Railway proj­ect was shelved for five years b ­ ecause Chiang’s new Nanjing government did not allow private entrepreneurs to own or manage railroads. In 1932, a­ fter the Nineteenth Route Army led by Cai Tingkai was sent to govern Fujian, the Association rekindled a glimmer of hope and again put the railway proj­ect on its agenda. Jiang Guangnai, the new chairman of the Fujian provincial government, was especially excited with and supportive of the railway initiative. Encouraged by the official sanction, Li Qingquan made special trips to Shanghai and Nanjing to scout for qualified professionals to survey the proposed route and begin prospecting in the mines along the railway. A geologist and a mineralogist ­were hired for the job, and for two months beginning in September 1933, they trekked the entire length of the proposed railway, mea­sur­ing the roadbed and collecting several dozen cases of mineral samples.28 In November the same year, Huang Yizhu also hired a German pi­lot to perform an air survey of the region.29 With detailed ground mea­sure­ments and aerial photo­graphs, a precise topographical map was prepared. It is noteworthy that Li and Huang footed the expenses for the surveys out of their own pockets; and of the proposed 20 million yuan to be raised for the proj­ect, they each shouldered half of the responsibility.30 Again, the mercurial po­liti­cal environment of the Chinese republic put an unexpected halt to the proj­ect. In November 1933, Jiang Guangnai and Cai Tingkai initiated the Fujian Rebellion, declared Fujian to be autonomous, and proclaimed the establishment of the ­People’s Revolutionary Government. The rebellion was 28.  Shi, “Nanyang minqiao jiuxiang yundong yu Zhanglong lukuang jihua,” 49. 29. Zhao, Huang Yizhu zhuan, 174. 30.  Shi, “Nanyang minqiao jiuxiang yundong yu Zhanglong lukuang jihua,” 49.

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short-­lived as Chiang Kai-­shek’s superior forces crushed the rebels with ­little difficulty and brought the revolt to an end in mid-­January 1934.31 Losing their patrons, Li and Huang w ­ ere forced to shelve their pet proj­ect again, this time permanently. A BA N DI T

At the same time that the Association was aiming to improve ­people’s livelihood through its railway-­cum-­mining proj­ect, it was also trying to restore some sense of order to South Fujian. Fully aware that the passive mea­sures of organ­izing local militia could not guarantee complete safety, the Association actively pursued the eradication of roving bandits and rebel armies. First on its list of targets was Chen Guohui, the most power­ful among a host of “local despots” (tu huangdi) in the region. To say that Chen Guohui was “exceedingly unpop­u­lar” in South Fujian was an understatement.32 Headquartered in Longyan, Chen Guohui controlled much of Quanzhou and Yongchun. At his height, he commanded in excess of fifteen thousand men and owned a comparable number of r­ ifles, more than seventy machine guns, several cannons of vari­ous makes, and two airplanes.33 Better equipped than most units of the government’s army in the region, it is small won­der that Chen was called the “King of Minnan” (Minnan wang), and he had almost a ­free rein to act as he pleased in South Fujian. A man with a propensity for destruction and ­little regard for ­human lives, Chen Guohui squeezed the peasants mercilessly by raising existing taxes and imposing dozens of supplementary taxes. It has been determined that Chen created as many as twenty-­six dif­fer­ent taxes and levies in the eigh­teen years he was active in Minnan.34 To amass even more wealth, he allowed his troops to ransack large and small towns, often with ruthless thoroughness. In the spring of 1930, a thousand of Chen’s men raided Wufeng in Yongchun, killing thirty-­three ­people in the pro­ cess, burning forty-­three ­houses, and holding several hundred ­people for ransom. A few months l­ater, they looted Huyang, another town in Yongchun, and caused over 10 million yuan in damages. Ten townspeople w ­ ere killed, over a hundred ­were kidnapped, and numerous young girls w ­ ere taken captive and sold.

31.  Lloyd Eastman, The Abortive Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), chap. 3. 32.  Reports of the American Consulate, Amoy, China, June 6, 1929, in Jules Davids, ed., American Diplomatic and Public Papers: The United States and Chin (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1979). 33.  Li Zhong, “Shijiu lu jun chujue Chen Guohui ji Chen bu fumie jingguo,” Fujian wenshi ziliao, no. 3 (1964): 65. 34.  Nan’an wenshi ziliao, cited in Shi Xueqin, “Huaqiao yu qiaoxiang zhengzhi: 20 shiji ersanshi niandai feilubin minqiao yu jiuxiang yundong yanjiu,” Huaqiao huaren lishi yanjiu, no. 2 (1999): 44.

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Seeing the tremendous hardships Chen Guohui brought to South Fujian, overseas Chinese bristled with hatred for this “local despot.”35 Adding to their fury was Chen’s fondness of kidnapping returned overseas Chinese or their ­family members in China for high ransom. Hence, as soon as the Association was formed, Li Qingquan immediately tele­grammed the government in Beijing and the provincial government in Fujian, appealing for troops to be dispatched to fight Chen Guohui. In response, Beijing ordered Zhou Yingren, then governor of Fujian, to suppress Chen. Zhou in turn delegated the responsibility to Kong Zhaotong, commander of the government forces in Quanzhou, who launched an attack on Chen’s headquarters on Chinese New Year’s Day 1926. Caught by surprise, Chen retreated into the deep mountains of Anxi ­after having lost more than half his men through death, surrender, or flight. But Chen still had a thousand men by his side, enough to be a continual menace in South Fujian.36 When the Northern Expedition forces entered Fujian in 1927, Li Qingquan wrote to the commanding officer beseeching him to come south to exterminate Chen once and for all. ­After the Nanjing government was established, Li again wrote Generalissimo Chiang Kai-­shek with the same request. Both entreaties fell on deaf ears. As it turned out, the chaos that followed Chiang’s Northern Expedition gave Chen Guohui the breathing space to expand his forces and reestablish himself in South Fujian, and his power reached a new height at the beginning of the 1930s. In 1931, Li again brought Chen’s many crimes against the ­people to the notice of the Nanjing government, but the Nationalist Party was too preoccupied with national affairs to pay heed to the ravages of a local bandit.37 ­After the Nineteenth Route Army was transferred from Shanghai to Fujian in 1932, Li Qingquan and other foremost members of the Association again formally filed charges against Chen and appealed for help from the Nineteenth Route Army. Compared with the Nanjing government, the Nineteenth Route Army was more receptive to overseas Chinese grievances, and in September 1932, it lured Chen Guohui to Fuzhou, where he was summarily arrested and charged for “ordering the cultivation of opium, levying arbitrary and exorbitant taxes, and harassing merchants and ­people.”38 Chen’s troops quickly surrendered ­after his capture, and on December 23, 1932, much to the im­mense gratification of onlookers, Chen Guohui was publicly executed. 35.  An overseas Chinese whose native place of Yongchun was constantly ravaged by Chen Guohui vowed “not to live ­under the same sky” (bugong daitian) as Chen. See Shi, “Huaqiao yu qiaoxiang zhengzhi,” 43. 36.  Yang Yanying, “Zhou Yingren shilue,” Fujian wenshi ziliao, no. 9 (1985): 44. 37.  Shi, “Huaqiao yu qiaoxiang zhengzhi,” 46. 38.  Minguo ribao, August 2, 1932, quoted in Shi, “Huaqiao yu qiaoxiang zhengzhi,” 47. See also Cai Tingkai, “Gaizao Fujian yu huaqiao,” in Feilubin minlila zhonghua shanghui sanshi zhounian jinian kan, ed. Huang Xiaocan (Manila: Philippine Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, 1936), 2, 71–72.

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The failure of the Zhang-­Long railway-­cum-­mining proj­ect but the successful elimination of Chen Guohui remind us that as mere civilians, t­ here was a limit to what overseas Chinese could achieve in instigating changes in a tumultuous Fujian. It would be rash to overcelebrate their role in the transformation of South Fujian during the Republican era.39 However, as we have seen, Li Qingquan and ­others learned from their experience in influencing the authorities through concerted efforts in the Philippines and formed a pan-­Asian Fujianese association in Xiamen that brought together the ideas, money, and influence of overseas Fujianese from Southeast Asia. By keeping up per­sis­tent pressure on the national and provincial authorities and liberally using their wealth, t­ hese overseas Chinese ­were still able to bring some of their bold intentions to bear and made some real and positive impacts on the lives of ­people in their home villages.40 While we do not need to doubt the sincerity of Li Qingquan’s resolution to restore peace and prosperity to his natal village, it should be noted that Li himself perhaps did not take returning t­ here as his final goal. Instead, Li built an impressive villa on Gulangyu and dispensed g­ reat energy and fortune in Xiamen to try to transform it into the new center of his regional business empire.

Investing in Xiamen Even though Li Qingquan emigrated to the Philippines at age thirteen, his personal and intimate ties to his hometown—­that is, his “channel of connections,” in Kuhn’s words—­were never broken. Like many Chinese emigrants before him, Li was ordered home by his m ­ other to marry a girl from a neighboring village in 1910, who bore him a son the following year.41 In 1913, Li funded the establishment of Shizhen’s first modern school, which featured a curriculum including En­ glish, mathe­matics, geography, and science. This Longmen School was to be the first of Li’s many philanthropic contributions to his birthplace, which comprised a ­couple more schools, a public library, and a bridge. Li was also fondly remembered for using his wealth and influence to help prevent a dispute between Shizhen and an adjacent village from escalating into an armed feud.42 As early as 1923, Li already sought to benefit his home village by joining with a few fellow overseas Chinese from Jinjiang to establish the Quan-­Wei Transport Com­pany. Though moderate in size and ­limited in scope, the transport com­pany not only facilitated the movement of p ­ eople from the southern parts of Jinjiang to key commercial and communication centers of the province, especially Fuzhou, 39.  See, for example, Cook, “Bridges to Modernity.” 40.  Ong S., “To Save Minnan,” 243–66. 41.  Li Rui, Li Qingquan zhuan (Manila: Yu Yitong Foundation, 2000), 156. 42.  Ibid., 60–68

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Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, and Xiamen, but also provided Li with his first taste of business success in China. We do not know how much confidence in the investment environment of China Li gained from this small business pursuit, but the opening of a branch of the China Banking Corporation in Xiamen in 1925 truly signaled his intention to expand his business empire to China. In 1927, Li Qingquan set up in Xiamen the Li Mingxing Com­pany in his ­uncle’s name with an initial capital investment of 1.9 million yuan; two years l­ater he established his own real estate com­pany with another 350,000 yuan.43 Unlike smaller investors who speculated in property prices, Li’s intention was to establish a business stronghold in Xiamen. Between 1927 and 1933, he pumped well over 2.2 million yuan into Xiamen for the acquisition of two tracts of land along the bank of the Lu Jiang, the construction of a bund along the bank (the Lujiang Boulevard), and the development of shop-­houses, buildings, and a marketplace in downtown Xiamen or by the sea.44 According to the recollection of Li’s agent in Xiamen, Li had a g­ rand design for the land he acquired. He was prepared to expend another 1 million yuan to erect a department store building in the proposed Lujiang Boulevard that would outclass similar edifices in Hong Kong and Shanghai. The scale of his plan may be seen from the fact that a section of land by the bank of the Lu Jiang would be set aside specifically to build wharves and ware­houses so as to support the operation of the department store.45 In ­today’s Xiamen however, only the shop-­houses that Li raised and his magnificent villa on Gulangyu still stand as a reminder of Li’s impressive wealth and vigor. Unfortunately, due to the bursting of the speculation b ­ ubble in real estate in the early 1930s and the Japa­nese occupation of Xiamen ­after 1938, most of Li’s ambitious plans remained unfulfilled, and his investments in Xiamen w ­ ere ultimately a failure. An estimate made in 1953–1954 revealed that Li Qingquan’s property in Xiamen was worth only a paltry 96,000 yuan. Not only could Li find no buyer for his land a­ fter World War II; he could only rent it out to petty vendors who sold coffee and tea out of the s­ imple plank shops they built on his property. Despite losing millions of yuan in China in the 1930s and 1940s, Li could perhaps find solace in the fact that the main reasons for his failure ­were all beyond his control: world depression, po­liti­cal turmoil in China, and Japa­nese invasion.46 ­After Li Qingquan’s business ventures failed in Xiamen, he retreated back to the Philippines. It is perhaps a bit ironic that while Li lost a huge amount of money 43.  Ibid., 73; Lin and Zhuang, Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiyeshi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan, 468. 44.  Dai Y., “Dongnanya huaqiao zai Xiamen de touzi,” 111; Lin and Zhuang, Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiyeshi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan, 480–81. 45.  Lin and Zhuang, Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiyeshi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan, 481; Dai Y., “Dongnanya huaqiao zai Xiamen de touzi,” 533. 46.  Lin and Zhuang, Jindai huaqiao touzi guonei qiyeshi ziliao xuanji: Fujian juan, 481–82. Dai Y., “Dongnanya huaqiao zai Xiamen de touzi,” 533–37.

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in Xiamen, it was his foundation in the lumber business in the Philippines that saved him from collapsing during the G ­ reat Depression. According to Li’s associate, Li still controlled the lumber industries in the Philippines in the 1930s with his five lumber-­processing factories and one trading firm. It is believed that Dee C. ­Chuan & Sons Inc., one of the five factories alone, had a capital of 3 million pesos and sales valued at 10 million pesos annually.47 In addition to the lumber industry, Li’s China Banking Corporation was flourishing as well. In 1936, the Bank’s total assets swelled from its starting capital of 10 million pesos to 26 million pesos, and its working capital also more than doubled from its initial 2 million pesos to 5.7 million pesos. Besides setting up branches in Xiamen and Shanghai, the China Banking Corporation also had foreign exchange agencies in major cities around the world.48

Westernized Confucian from Afar—­L im Boon Keng The Man Unlike Li Qingquan who maintained close and unbroken ties to his native place, the corridor of connections had long collapsed for Lim Boon Keng, a third-­ generation Singapore-­born overseas Chinese. Lim Boon Keng’s grand­father Lim Mah Peng left his native village in the Haicheng District near Xiamen in 1839 to come to the Straits Settlements of Penang.49 ­There, he settled down and married a local-­born Chinese nyonya.50 The ­couple subsequently remigrated with their only son, Thean Geow, to Singapore, where Mah Peng took up a job as man­ag­er of the opium farm of Cheang Hong Lim—­a successful Singapore-­born merchant who derived his wealth mainly from serving as a revenue farmer for the ruling British. Following in his ­father’s footsteps, Lim Thean Geow too worked for Cheang as an assistant in the latter’s “spirit” farm. He married a Malacca-­born nyonya in Singapore who bore him nine ­children, the third of whom was Boon Keng.51 Like many of his peers, Lim Boon Keng was sent to a government school where En­glish was the medium of instruction ­after he had received a modicum of education in Confucian classics at a local Hokkien clan t­ emple. Although Mah Peng and Thean Geow ­were prob­ably literate in Chinese themselves, the decision to 47.  Dai Y., “Dongnanya huaqiao zai Xiamen de touzi,” 544. 48. Ibid. 49.  Formed in 1826, the Straits Settlements comprised Malacca, Penang, and Singapore. 50.  Nyonya refers to Straits-­born Chinese w ­ omen. 51.  Khor Eng Hee, “The Public Life of Dr. Lim Boon Keng” (academic exercise, History Department, University of Singapore, 1958).

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send Boon Keng to an En­glish school was a pragmatic one.52 En­glish was the commercial language and the language of high society in this part of the world, and knowledge of it was indispensable for someone with the Lims’ modest background to become successful.53 Fortunately for the elder Lims, Boon Keng made the most of his education and became, in 1887, the first Chinese to win the prestigious Queen’s Scholarship for study in Britain. Returning to Singapore in 1893 with a medical degree from Edinburgh University, Lim started his own private practice, and his medical talent soon won recognition from both his peers and the public. When Huang Zunxiang, the Chinese consul in Singapore, personally delivered a plaque to Lim’s clinic at Telok Ayer Street for “curing” his chronic lung disease, Lim, barely one year ­after returning from Scotland, became an instant celebrity and established his reputation firmly within the Chinese community.54 Lim gained even more visibility as a public figure when he became the most vocal advocate for social reform in Singapore. He exhorted his fellow Chinese to cut off their queues, promoted the learning of Mandarin, and started an antiopium campaign. He also maintained a private hospital for prostitutes, championed education for girls, and helped raised funds for the founding of the King Edward VII Medical School. A man with “more irons in the fire” than anyone ­else in Singapore, Lim was also active in business.55 He was the first person to plant rubber on a commercial scale and cofounded with friends the Ho Hong Bank, the Chinese Commercial Bank, and the Overseas Assurance Corporation.56 In less than three de­cades ­after returning from Scotland, Lim was worth well over 2 million Singapore dollars.57 As one of the colony’s first “new generation” of English-­educated professionals and intellectuals, Lim used his command of the En­glish language and his good name among the Chinese to serve the British as intermediary between the rulers and the ruled.58 In 1895, he was appointed Chinese member of the Legislative Council in the colonial government. He was also a justice of the peace (1897), a municipal commissioner (1905–1906), and a member of the Chinese Advisory

52.  Ibid., 1. 53.  See, for example, the views expressed by a Straits Chinese de­cades ­later in CO 273/572/82049, June 1931. 54.  Chen Yusong, “Ji Lin Wenqing yi gourou qi Huang Zunxian chen ke shi,” Nanyang Xuebao, no. 17 (1961): 29–30. Huang prob­ably had tuberculosis, and Lim was only successful in alleviating its symptoms. 55.  “Dr. Lim Boon Keng,” Straits Echo, June 22, 1921. 56.  Khor, “Public Life,” 10. 57.  Lee Guan Kin, Lin Wenqin de sixiang: zhongxi wenhua de huiliu yu maodun (Singapore: Singapore Society of Asian Studies, 1990), 157. 58.  Carl A. Trocki, Singapore: Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control (London: Routledge, 2006), 72.

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Board (1897–1898, 1913–1922).59 For his many ser­vices as a public man, Lim was conferred the order of OBE by His Majesty the King in 1918 and awarded an honorary doctor of law degree from the University of Hong Kong in 1919.60 Lim might indeed have been “the most respected Chinese of his time in Singapore.”61 And it was at the height of his earning power and social influence in Singapore that Lim abruptly gave them all up and returned to China. In 1921, Lim Boon Keng received an invitation from Tan Kah Kee, the Singapore rubber tycoon and a personal friend who recently founded the Amoy University (a.k.a. Xiamen University, or Xiada), to serve as president of the infant institution, which Lim could not pass up. Lim was a firm believer that “sound education . . . ​­will result in permanent good,”62 and he had championed education in Singapore. Just eight years ­earlier, he rued the missed opportunities of his fellow Straits Chinese Ku Hung Ming (Gu Hongming) to head Shandong University and Peking University.63 So when Tan Kah Kee presented him with the challenge, he was full of high hopes for what he could do for the university and China. However, at age fifty-­two, Lim was still at the prime of his c­ areer in Singapore.64 Relocating to Xiamen thus entailed significant personal sacrifices, which included his resignation from the directorships of several business concerns (including two banks, two insurance companies, and a rubber firm), giving up his eminent social standing in Singapore, and leaving a sociopo­liti­cal milieu he was accustomed to.65 Prior to his departure, Lim also rejected an offer by Sun Yat-­ sen from Guangdong Province to serve as his advisor in foreign affairs and willed three-­fifths of a fifty-­one-­acre piece of land in Singapore to the new Amoy University.66 Lim Boon Keng thus showed the depth of his commitment to his new role and the university at Xiamen. For Tan Kah Kee, tendering Lim the chancellorship of his university was an easy decision. “A ­simple and upright man selflessly committed to the common 59.  Jurgen Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities: A Social History of the Babas in Singapore (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), 383. 60. Song, One Hundred Years’ History, 238. 61.  Edwin Lee, The British as Rulers: Governing Multiracial Singapore, 1867–1914 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1991), 238. 62.  M. C. Lin (Lim Boon Keng), “Straits Chinese Educational Needs,” Straits Chinese Magazine 8, no. 1 (March 1904): 9. According to the scholar Lee Guan Kin, M. C. Lin was one of Lim Boon Keng’s many noms de plume. 63.  Lim Boon Keng, “The Role of the Babas in the Development of China,” Straits Chinese Magazine 7, no. 3 (1903): 99. 64.  Lim Boon Keng was not holding any official position in the Straits Settlement in 1921, but by all accounts he was still very much active in public affairs. See Wang Gungwu, “Lu Xun, Lim Boon Keng and Confucianism,” in China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 2003), 177n1. 65.  Khor, “Public Life,” 10–11, 38; Lee Guan Kin, “Wei Lin Wenqin xiang lishi tao gongdao,” Lianhe zaobao, July 23, 1995; and Tan Kah Kee’s speech in Nanyang Siang Pau, June 16, 1924. Tan Kah Kee estimated that Lim’s annual income exceeded ten thousand Straits currency. 66.  Lee G., Lin Wenqin de sixiang, 129; Lee G., “Wei Lin Wenqin xiang lishi tao gongdao.”

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weal,” Lim had won Tan’s re­spect and admiration for his public-­spiritedness, stern moral fiber, and, above all, superior scholastic qualities.67 Although a scientist by profession, Lim was more of a humanist at heart. He read voraciously and published widely on a variety of subjects in publications like the English-­language quarterly Straits Chinese Magazine (which he cofounded) and the Chinese-­ language newspaper Jit Sin Post (Ri Xin Bao, which he owned) and had proved to be equally au fait with Confucianism and m ­ atters of China as he was with Chris­ tian­ity and the theories of Darwin and Malthus. “No one among the millions of overseas Chinese,” in Tan Kah Kee’s estimation, “could combine the knowledge of Western material science with Chinese cultural spirit better than Lim Boon Keng.”68 Lim Boon Keng justified Tan Kah Kee’s faith in him by guiding the university through its difficult first phase (1921–1937) as a private institution. In 1924 and 1926, Lim weathered two rounds of widely publicized student protests, the first of which called specifically for his resignation. And when Tan Kah Kee’s business empire took a downturn in 1926, thus plunging the university into chronic financial difficulties, he shouldered the extra burden of financing it. Lim picked up his stethoscope again to serve the affluent residents in Xiamen even though he had ­stopped practicing medicine long before in Singapore and donated the entirety of his earnings to the university.69 Between 1926 and 1935, Lim personally made three trips back to British Malaya and Indonesia to solicit contributions for Xiada even though he was already in his late fifties and early sixties. Amid all ­these difficulties, Lim was steadfast in his commitment to Tan Kah Kee and Xiada.70 He remained at Xiada for sixteen years, leaving Xiamen in 1937 only ­after the university was nationalized as it had become impossible to finance it privately. Despite the financial difficulties Xiada experienced, Lim was still able to establish a medical school and build up the university into one that could rival any university in the country in terms of facilities, equipment, faculties, and library books.71 During the first few years of his tenure, Lim had refused recompense 67.  Tan Kah-­Kee, letter to Ye Yuan (principal of Jimei School), cited in Lee G., “Wei Lin Wenqin xiang lishi tao gongdao”; Yong, Tan Kah-­Kee, 100–101. 68.  Tan Kah-­Kee, “Piwu,” Nanyang Siang Pau, June 16, 1924. 69.  Lim had ­stopped practicing medicine around 1910, hiring five to six doctors to staff his clinic. See Khor, “Public Life,” 36; and Lee G., Lin Wenqin de sixiang, 157. 70.  In 1935 at a welcoming function for Lim Boon Keng in Singapore, both Lim and Tan vowed to “fight for Xiada till death.” “Chen Jiageng xiansheng zai Wulu yanshuo,” Nanyang Siang Pau, January 9, 1935. 71.  Lim Boon Keng, The City of Amoy Now Named Sze-­Ming, or The Island that Remembers the Ming: with a Brief Description of the University of Amoy (Xiamen: Amoy University Press, 1936). During Lim’s tenure as president of the university, he erected over forty teaching buildings, dormitories, a sports complex, laboratories, museums, and a library and established the five Faculties of Arts, Science, Law, Education, and Commerce in the mold of Western universities. See also Lee G., Lin Wenqin de sixiang, 33.

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for his ser­v ice. He was forced to accept a token salary from the university only ­after his own businesses in Singapore incurred substantial losses during the ­Great Depression. By the time Lim returned to Singapore, he was nearly broke. Yet the last ­thing he did before his departure was to bequeath his impressive villa on Gulangyu to the university.72 Lim’s legacy thus was one of selfless commitment to the educational cause in Xiamen.

Interpreting Lim Boon Keng Why did Lim Boon Keng return to Xiamen, especially as it entailed so much personal sacrifice? As one of the most impor­tant overseas Chinese intellectuals of his generation, Lim has attracted a fair share of scholarly attention.73 In par­tic­ u­lar, Lee Guan Kin, the Singapore historian who wrote the first book-­length treatise on Lim, has produced the most authoritative interpretation of his intellectual progression and po­liti­cal affiliation. According to Lee, Lim Boon Keng returning to China was the natu­ral outcome of an inherent need to reconnect with his ancestral homeland. She believes that Lim went through three crucial phases in his intellectual development: the first phase was his search for his racial roots, which led to his reaffirmation as a Han Chinese; the second phase was his learning of the Chinese language and his espousal of Chinese culture, especially Confucianism; and the final phase was his growing concerns for China and subsequent return to China. As Lee saw it, Lim pushed himself closer to China as his thinking progressed from one phase to the next, and his move to Xiamen, where he remained in residence for many years, signaled that his “journey in search for roots reached its final destination.”74 In other words, the wayward son had fi­ nally returned home, and only then did Lim find closure to his identity. By using the unfolding of an innate Chineseness as the reason for Lim Boon Keng’s eventual return to China, Lee is deeply entrenched in a tradition of Chinese-­ language scholarship that posits a singular Chinese identity that originates from China and that Chinese emigrants, regardless of where they w ­ ere born or how long they have been away, remain Chinese. Hence, Lee does not question Lim’s Chinese identity or the notion of China as homeland, and she also assumes that overseas Chinese returning to China is unproblematic. But while it is true Lim 72.  Lee G., Lin Wenqin de sixiang, 157–58. 73.  Lee G., Lin Wenqing de sixiang; Lee Guan Kin, “Lin Wenqing zouxiang Xiamen daxue: Yige Xinjiapo huaren de xungeng lichen,” Nanyang xuebao, no. 52 (1998): 5–21; Jean DeBernardi, “Lim Boon Keng and the Invention of Cosmopolitanism in the Straits Settlements,” in Managing Change in Southeast Asia: Local Identities, Global Connections, ed. Jean DeBernardi, Gregory Forth, and Sandra Niessen (Montreal: Canadian Council for Southeastern Asian Studies, 1995), 173–87; Chan, Diaspora’s Homeland, chap. 3. 74.  Lee G., “Lin Wenqing zou xiang Xiamen daxue,” 18.

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Boon Keng did not deny the fact that he was Chinese, he also did not submit to a Chineseness defined by China as Lee assumes; as a ­matter of fact, Lim was comfortable being a racially and culturally mixed Straits Chinese living outside China.75 As we have seen, Lim Boon Keng was not the typical Chinese emigrant. To put him in historical context, we should note that writers on the Chinese society in nineteenth-­century Singapore have invariably distinguished two types of Chinese: the majority but transient China-­born Chinese who came fresh to British rule from China and the numerically inferior but established peranakan (local born), or Straits(-­born) Chinese, who ­were no strangers to the region or to colonial administration before they set foot on Singapore.76 In many ways, the Lim ­family typified the Straits Chinese, who possessed three qualities that separate them from the China-­born. A S ET T L ED C O M M U N I TY

As a group, the Straits Chinese distinguished themselves by being early emigrants who came to Southeast Asia and the Straits Settlements before the onset of mass migration by Chinese laborers out of China in the 1840s, and they had come to ­settle. As a m ­ atter of fact, the wealthiest of them traced their ancestry to voyaging traders from South Fujian who had been active in the Malay archipelago since the fifteenth ­century and had settled down in maritime trading centers in the region, especially Malacca and Penang. Being already in the region, they w ­ ere the first Chinese to heed Singapore’s call ­after Sir Stamford Raffles established a ­free trading post on the island in 1819, and by the ­middle of the nineteenth ­century, the Straits Chinese ­were well established in Singapore and had thrown in their lot with the blossoming port. According to one con­temporary observer, three hundred or so of ­these “Malacca Chinese merchants and shop­keep­ers” composed the top stratum of the Chinese community in Singapore, and the Straits-­born ­were also the most likely to get married, have families, and live in the towns.77 Among Straits Chinese, the Lims ­were relative latecomers to the Straits Settlements, and they did not find their pot of gold ­here. But compared to the army of China-­born immigrants who, with no skill and no connection, ­were mostly involved 75.  Ong Soon Keong, “Rebuilding Corridor, Preserving Prestige: Lim Boon Keng and Overseas Chinese–­China Relations,” China and Asia 2, no. 1 (2020): 134–61. 76.  See, for example, Png Pho-­seng, “The Straits Chinese in Singapore: A Case of Local Identity and Socio-­cultural Accommodation,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 10, no. 1 (March 1969): 95–114; Owen Wong and Lee Guan Kin, “The Search for Identity among the Singapore-­Born Chinese at the Turn of the Twentieth C ­ entury,” Chinese Scholars, no. 5 (1973): 1–30; “British Attitudes ­towards the Chinese Community Leaders in Singapore, 1819–1941,” in C. F. Yong, Chinese Leadership and Power in Colonial Singapore (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1992), 287–307; Wang Gungwu, “The Chinese as Immigrants and Settlers: Singapore,” in China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 2003), 185–99. 77.  Siah, “Chinese in Singapore,” 283–90.

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in backbreaking jobs with meager pay, the Lims ­were comfortably making home ­there and securely working as man­ag­ers and assistants for wealthy Straits Chinese. POL ­ I T I ­C A L A ND C U LTU R A L A FFI LI ATI ONS WI TH THE BR I TI SH

For Raffles and his successors, the Straits Chinese, especially the wealthy ones from Malacca, ­were invaluable in getting Singapore off the ground. On the one hand, being successful traders in their own right, they continued to dominate the interregional trade between South China and Southeast Asia—­now extended to Singapore—­and the trade of Southeast Asian produce and British or Indian goods in Malaya.78 On the other hand, they ­were highly sought ­after by Eu­ro­pean merchants in Singapore to act as middlemen in the archipelago trade, due to their entrenchment in the regional trading networks and familiarity with the En­glish and Malay languages.79 And a­ fter the mass influx of immigrants from China, the British again sought the collaboration of Straits Chinese leaders like Cheang Hong Lim to help collect taxes, or­ga­nize l­ abor, and mediate between the Chinese community and the British administration. By working closely with Eu­ro­pean merchants and officials, Straits Chinese enjoyed amicable and mutually beneficial relations with the ruling British right from the start, and they ­were in a position to accumulate ­great wealth and to wield significant influence over the Chinese community at large. ­Because of their close association with the British, Straits Chinese also began to develop a fondness for the culture of their colonizers. They increasingly sent their ­children to En­glish schools and aspired to an Anglicized style of living. As the En­glish journalist Henry Norman attested, the Straits Chinese he met in fin de siècle Singapore “plays cricket, football and lawn tennis. . . . ​He goes to the ­Free Library and reads the newspaper; he attends a Debating Society and he carries off prizes at the Raffles School; he eats foreign food and he imitates foreign vices.”80 ­Whether guided by a genuine sense of appreciation or simply out of con­ve­nience, ­there is no doubt that by the late nineteenth ­century, Straits Chinese had integrated into the colonial lifestyle and ­were living contentedly in British Singapore. As one of colonial Singapore’s favorite and most successful sons, Lim Boon Keng was embedded within the British system. He won the highest distinction in the English-­language education locally and even earned a medical degree at the metropole of the British empire. ­After returning to Singapore, besides practicing medicine, Lim also served the colonial government by performing the conven78.  Chin, “Merchants and Sojourners”; Yao Souchou, “Ethnic Bound­aries and Structural Differentiation: An Anthropological Analy­sis of the Straits Chinese in Nineteenth ­Century Singapore,” Sojourn 2, no. 2 (1987): 213–14. 79.  “Kaibu chuqi de xin­hua shehui,” in Lim H., Xinjiapo huashe yu huashang, 18–19. 80.  Quoted in Donald Moore and Joanna Moore, The First 150 Years of Singapore (Singapore: Donald Moore, 1969), 461–62.

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tional Straits Chinese role as an intermediary between the British and his fellow Chinese. His talents and value ­were well recognized by the colonial government, which appointed him to several official roles and awarded him a ­couple of honors. Lim thus represented what a self-­made man could achieve within the colonial system in Singapore, and he had on more than one occasion expressed his appreciation for British rule. HY B RI D I D E N TI TY

Even though Straits Chinese w ­ ere officially recognized as a subcategory of Chinese in Singapore’s first ever population census in 1881, they themselves w ­ ere convinced that somewhere in their ancestry, their Chinese forefathers had married Malay wives and that they ­were racially mixed.81 Indeed, one of the most impor­ tant legacies of early Chinese traders settling in the Malay archipelago was to produce communities of such Chinese-­Malay “creoles.”82 And since Straits Chinese ­were not pure Chinese, Lee Guan Kin imagines, they must have been e­ ager to relegate their “Malay ­mothers” to the “mythical realms,” so they could “fervently identify with the Han race.”83 In truth however, not only did Straits Chinese like Lim Boon Keng not downplay his Malay ancestry; he even helped legitimize and disseminate such popu­lar belief by historicizing it in a widely cited article, “The Chinese in Malaya,” published in the encyclopedic Pre­sent Day Impressions of the Far East.84 In Lim’s account, the first Chinese itinerant traders to venture to Malaya ­were men of valor and virtue who had survived and persisted despite encountering physical obstacles, climatic perils, and barbarian atrocities.85 The ethnogenesis of the Straits Chinese began when ­these enterprising men de­cided to s­ ettle down: The Chinese [traders who came to Malaya in the fifteenth ­century] . . . ​ did not at first attempt to form permanent colonies, but always at the end of each trip return home in their junks when the monsoon changed. . . . ​In course of time the itinerant traders found it con­ve­nient to marry the ­women of the country in which they had established business ­houses. The native wives w ­ ere useful as h ­ ouse­keepers and saleswomen,

81.  S. Dunlop, W. A. Pickering, V. Cousins, H. Hewetson, A. Knight, and A. P. Talbot, Report on the Census of Singapore, 1881 (Singapore: Straits Settlements Government Press, 1882). 82.  G. William Skinner, “Creolized Chinese Socie­ties in Southeast Asia,” in Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese, ed. Anthony Reid (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996), 51–93. 83.  Lee G., “Lin Wenqing zou xiang Xiamen daxue,” 7. 84.  Lim Boon Keng, “The Chinese in Malaya,” in Pre­sent Day Impressions of the Far East, ed. W. Feldwick (London: Globe Encyclopedia, 1917), 875–82. Part of this essay was based on an e­ arlier work, “The Chinese in British Malaya,” in Proceedings of the Straits Philosophical Society for the Year 1910–1911 (Singapore: Methodist Publishing House, 1911), 159–162. 85.  Lim B., “Chinese in Malaya,” 878.

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keeping the shops g­ oing while their husbands returned to China for further shipments of goods.86 Such Chinese-­Malay miscegenation might have started as a m ­ atter of con­ve­nience; it nonetheless proliferated and produced “through the fusion of Chinese and Malay blood” a new group of natives who ­were to become the permanent population of the peninsula.87 For Lim Boon Keng then, the fact that Straits Chinese w ­ ere of mixed-­cultural heritage was undeniable, and he made the most of it. At home, Lim enjoyed a Malayanized lifestyle: his entire ­family, including his parents and his generation, spoke Malay, and his s­ isters ­were dressed like typical nyonyas, wearing Malay-­ influenced attire, the baju panjang and kerosang, and fixing their hair with chuhok sanggul.88 According to Lim’s sons, sambal belacan, a Malay condiment made from shrimp paste mixed with pounded chili, dry herbs, and spices was an indispensable item on Lim’s dining ­table.

Connecting with China Since Lim Boon Keng was secure in the Straits Settlements and at ease with his mixed heritage, what prompted his efforts to learn and promote Chinese culture in Singapore and his eventual return to China if not his innate Chineseness? Recently, the historian Shelly Chan provides a dif­fer­ent interpretation of Lim’s motivation. Instead of the unfolding of his innate Chineseness, Chan credited changing global conditions as the reason b ­ ehind Lim’s “turn to China as a homeland.”89 As she points out, the late nineteenth ­century witnessed the expansion of Western colonialism, the mass emigration of Chinese, and a Qing court that began to mobilize its emigrants ­toward Chinese ­causes ­after being belatedly alerted to their potential usefulness. It was in such a complex environment, Chan says, that “Lim Boon Keng recognized China” and exhorted his fellow Straits Chinese to join him in returning to help shape the modernization of China.90 In contrast to Lee Guan Kin then, Chan privileges external circumstances as the main force that pushed overseas Chinese back to China. While I agree more with Chan that Lim was influenced to go to Xiamen by external considerations rather than pulled back due to his innate Chineseness, 86.  Ibid., 875–76. 87. Ibid. 88.  Wu Lien-­teh, Plague Fighter: The Autobiography of a Modern Chinese Physician (Penang: Areca Books, 2014), 220; Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 392. 89.  Shelly Chan, “The Case for Diaspora: A Temporal Approach to the Chinese Experience,” Journal of Asian Studies 74, no. 1 (2005): 110. See also her Diaspora’s Homeland, chap. 3. 90.  Ibid., 112.

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I argue that instead of relying on global trends and the politico-­economic context in China as explanations, we need to look instead to the development and changes within the Chinese community in Singapore itself. We noted that the Straits Chinese had occupied the upper stratum of the Chinese society in the colony since the founding of Singapore. But t­oward the end of the nineteenth c­ entury, their superior position was seriously undermined by the up-­and-­coming China-­born community. Firstly, to meet the high demand for ­labor in the Straits Settlements and the Federated Malay States, the British had encouraged the migration of Chinese laborers from China. ­After the 1840s, Chinese coolies—­invariably strong, young men of h ­ umble origins from Fujian and Guangdong Provinces—­landed in Singapore by the thousands. This huge influx of Chinese immigrants, whom Lim likened to an “army of ants,” not only swelled the population of the colony; they also made up the greater part of the Chinese community. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth ­century, the China-­born had never allowed the Straits Chinese to constitute more than 10 ­percent of the total Chinese population.91 Besides overwhelming the Straits Chinese numerically, the China-­born also began to challenge their economic dominance. Trade in Malaya used to be monopolized by the Straits Chinese, but with the arrival of an increasing number of aggressive China-­born Chinese hungry for success, the Straits Chinese ­were finding it harder to maintain their traditional stronghold. As a Straits Chinese writer pointed out, by 1902, nearly the ­whole internal trade of the colony was in the hands of immigrant Chinese, who ­were not only producers but importers, distributors, and exporters as well. And as this author also noted, the Straits Chinese lost out to China-­born Chinese b ­ ecause the newcomers possessed the enterprising spirit and the ­will to succeed that Straits Chinese no longer had.92 Why did the Straits Chinese lose the energy and vitality to compete with the China-­born? Ironically, Lim Boon Keng blamed the two key ­factors that made them distinct from the China-­born: their Malay heritage and the government-­sponsored En­glish education that Straits Chinese parents sent their ­children to “most willingly and gratefully.”93 Lim Boon Keng received his education in medicine in Eu­rope at a time when the works of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer w ­ ere all the rage; it is not surprising then that he quickly became a believer in racial theory, especially social Darwinism. Back home, Lim began to internalize the dif­fer­ent racialized views of the Chinese and the Malays that the British in Malaya had propagated and echoed many of them in his own writings. Specifically, b ­ ecause indigenous Malays ­were often reluctant to participate in the vari­ous colonial proj­ects, the British 91.  Lim B., “Chinese in British Malaya,” 159; Rudolph, Reconstructing Identities, 56. 92.  Tan Tek Soon, “Chinese Local Trade,” Straits Chinese Magazine 6, no. 23 (1902): 89–97. 93.  Lim Boon Keng, “Our Enemies,” Straits Chinese Magazine 1, no. 2 (June 1897): 54.

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increasingly viewed them as indolent, mendacious, and totally unfit for long-­ term ­labor of any kind; on the contrary, since the economic base of the British colonial establishments in the Straits Settlements rested almost completely on Chinese ­labor and entrepreneurial activities, most Eu­ro­pe­ans felt a “grudging admiration” for the Chinese, considering them “the mule among the nations,” unlovable but capable of the hardest tasks and useful in the highest degree.94 As the new racist theory spread in the late nineteenth c­ entury, such observable characteristics as the “lazy Malays” and the “hardworking Chinese” became natu­ral and immutable endowments of the two races and determined their roles and statuses in the colony.95 Deeply influenced by colonial discourse, Lim Boon Keng too held the Chinese in high regard as he deemed them to be vibrant, virtuous, and entrepreneurial. In stark contrast, he castigated the Malays for their indolence, detestation for l­ abor, and unwillingness to strive for pro­gress. To illustrate his points, Lim related an encounter he had with a Malay: When food is superabundant, man w ­ ill not exert himself. . . . ​The Malays afford us an in­ter­est­ing example of a scarce population in the midst of plenty. The writer once made a proposal of the head of a kampong to collect all the idle young men and to bring them to a rubber plantation about 1000 yards from their village, where ­every man could earn fifty cents a day as a tapper. He shook his head and smiled. Hendak buat apap berkreja siang sampai petang? What is the use of working the ­whole day long? Apa guna wang jikalau tidak ada senang? What is the use of money without leisure?96 ­ here was no doubt in Lim’s mind that as a race, the Malays ­were incapable of T success in the age of commerce and competition among the vari­ous nations. Thus the legacy of having Malay ancestry on the Straits Chinese maternal side was “a disturbing ­factor of ­great importance” as it had led to their obvious degeneration in significant ways.97 Physically, Lim believed that the Straits Chinese w ­ ere inferior to their brethren from China ­whether in height, in weight, or in form.98 Mentally they also lacked the power of initiative and the capacity for continuous hard work 94.  Charles Hirschman, “The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Po­liti­cal Economy and Racial Ideology,” So­cio­log­i­cal Forum 1, no. 2 (1986): 346; Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th ­Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London: Frank Cass, 1977), 75–76. 95.  Hirschman, “Making of Race,” 354. 96.  Lim Boon Keng, “Criticism on ‘Malthus on Population’ by Rev. W. Drury,” Proceedings of the Straits Philosophical Society for the Year 1910–1911 (Singapore: Printed at the Methodist Publishing House, 1911), 28. 97.  Lim B., “Chinese in British Malaya,” 165. 98.  Lim Boon Keng, “Race Deterioration in the Tropics,” Straits Chinese Annual, 1909, 4.

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that the China-­born possessed. To make m ­ atters worse, Straits Chinese also developed a propensity for extravagant habits, sensual indulgence, distaste for work, and the “love of gewgaws,” which w ­ ere obvious racial traits of the Malays.99 Besides inheriting undesirable traits from the Malays, Lim also believed that Straits Chinese intimacy with the “orang puteh,” or “white man,” further contributed to their degeneration. While it was true that the British had provided education for the Straits Chinese by establishing government-­sponsored schools, in Lim’s view, the English-­language education ­these schools provided was a very poor one. ­Because the British ­were more interested in producing office workers than responsible citizens, they had not incorporated any moral education in the schools. Consequently, the hopes of the Straits Chinese w ­ ere drowned at a young age, and their only aspiration was to become clerks for merchants or functionaries in the bureaucracy. Additionally, b ­ ecause of their close association with Westerners, Straits Chinese youth also felt the need “to dress, to be stylish, and in ­every way emulate the airs and graces of the Eu­ro­pe­ans.”100 And in their mad rush to make money so as to indulge in such extravagances, young Straits Chinese totally neglected the pursuit of knowledge and moral princi­ples.101 Lim feared that if such degeneration was left unchecked, the Straits Chinese as a group would eventually disintegrate. To check their decline and restore their competitive edge in the Singapore society and economy, Lim proposed that the Straits Chinese should rekindle the entrepreneurial spirit of their Chinese forefathers. This was pos­si­ble ­because in many ways, Straits Chinese w ­ ere more Chinese than Malays. As Lim revealed in his historical narrative, not only did Straits Chinese continue “to uphold Chinese customs and to practice, in variously modified forms, the social and religious practices of their forefathers”; they also managed to curtail the pro­cess of indigenization as f­ athers of eligible nyonyas inevitably preferred newly arrived Chinese from mainland China as sons-­in-­law and never gave their ­daughters in marriage to the Malays or to any other race.102 ­Needless to say, the constant influx of pure Chinese blood thinned the Malay blood in the Straits Chinese and allowed them to retain more Chinese characteristics. Since Straits Chinese remained “to all intents and purposes Chinese,” it was thus feasible for them to reclaim their Chineseness through an immersion in traditional Chinese culture.103 In 1897, Lim and fellow Queen’s Scholar Song Ong Siang launched an English-­language quarterly, the Straits Chinese Magazine. The   99.  Ibid.; citation in Straits Chinese Magazine 6, no. 24 (December 1902): 167. 100.  “Has the Baba Fallen or Risen?,” Straits Times, March 31, 1894. 101.  “Straits Chinese Hedonism,” Straits Chinese Magazine 4, no. 15 (1900): 108. 102.  Lim B., “Chinese in Malaya,” 875–76. 103. Ibid.

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stated aim of the magazine was to promote intellectual activities among the English-­reading Straits Chinese, chief of which was to “restore to them the knowledge of their forefathers in En­glish dress.”104 Lim used the magazine as a podium for the introduction of every­thing Chinese, including history, politics, lit­er­a­ture, language, social customs, and religion and to express his views about the current state of affairs in the Straits Settlements and China. And to make Chinese language and culture available to his Straits Chinese readers, Lim went through ­great pains to translate selected passages from the famous Chinese classic Zuozhuan (Commentary on history by Zuo) into En­glish. He not only explicated them but also Romanized the original Chinese scripts according to their Hokkien pronunciations so that Straits Chinese could begin to pick up some Chinese characters. For Lim Boon Keng, the essence of traditional Chinese culture was undoubtedly Confucianism. Lim was a firm believer in the goodness of the values and morality Confucianism embodied, and he was also convinced that unlike other world religions, including Chris­tian­ity, Confucianism was still relevant in the modern world as it was compatible with and promoted science. Hence, from the late nineteenth c­ entury onward, Lim took the lead in promoting the revival of Confucianism, building Chinese schools, and rationalizing ancestral worship based on the Confucian princi­ples of filial piety. However, it should be noted that Lim was not advocating the complete and unquestioned ac­cep­tance of traditional Chinese cultures and practices. For him, the ideal education for the Straits Chinese was for them to be taught Confucian classics that would restore a sense of “racial pride” in them and “ennoble [their] mind and purify [their] character,” but at the same time they should also be trained in modern sciences, which was essential to help combat native prejudices and superstitions.105 In fact, Lim’s own interpretation of Confucianism and its relevance to the modern world owed much to his Western learning; as Philip Kuhn testifies: “Lim’s Confucianism [was] purist, agnostic, and secular . . . ​cognate with the rational, progress-­oriented British education [he] received in Singapore and Scotland.”106 It is now clear that Lim Boon Keng did not deny the mixed heritage of the Straits Chinese; nor did he advocate a total rejection of Western influences; he was well aware that they w ­ ere integral parts of the Straits Chinese identity. Rather, he believed that the Straits Chinese needed to upgrade themselves through a relearning of Chinese language, history, and Confucianism—­something they had imprudently neglected ­after settling in Southeast Asia. By drawing new cultural capital from China, Lim believed that Straits Chinese would be able to “[send]

104.  “Our Programme,” Straits Chinese Magazine 1, no. 1 (1897): 2. 105.  Lim B., “Our Enemies,” 54–55. 106. Kuhn, Chinese among ­Others, 255.

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out new shoots” from “the old tree of Han,” and they as a group could be successful again not just in Singapore but also in the world.107

China, a New Field for the Straits Chinese Despite his personal success in Singapore, Lim Boon Keng was nonetheless disappointed with the British per­sis­tent implementation of racial discrimination, which he believed impeded the full advancement of talented Straits Chinese and caused g­ reat disaffection in the colony. To begin with, the many English-­educated Straits Chinese who worked as clerks or minor functionaries in the civil ser­v ice had to endure an inequitable pay scale that privileged Eu­ro­pe­ans. Moreover, no ­matter how hard the Straits Chinese strove to better themselves, even to the point that they could “out-­English the En­glish p ­ eople,” t­ here was the heavi­ly reinforced “color bar” that they could never overcome.108 As revealed by Lim’s brother-­in-­ law, the renowned “plague fighter” Wu Lien-­Teh (Wu Liande), Lim was confined to private medical practice instead of working for the government exactly ­because “a high medical appointment was not open to any Asian gradu­ate in ­those days, however special his qualifications.”109 Lim Boon Keng was convinced that even though Singapore offered them a peaceful and comfortable lifestyle, the Straits Chinese could not realize their full potential in the colony. If they w ­ ere to fulfil their own aspirations, they had to seek their ­careers elsewhere. In 1912, a distraught Lim declared to an audience of fellow Straits Chinese: Gentlemen . . . ​I would advise every­one of you to teach your c­ hildren— to spend your money in educating your c­ hildren, not in this unfavorable country, but anywhere e­ lse where a good education can be found. This is my native country. I have an affection for it as such. I would fain have continued to call it mine, to abide in it, and serve it. But I now realize that I must leave it, ­because however able and however worthy my posterity may be, they ­will never be allowed to be more than the most subordinate servants, clerks, and so on, u ­ nder men who think their white skins are the sole sign of born rulers and administrators, and who have the impudence to declare that we prefer them in authority over us before all ­others.110

107.  Ong S., “Rebuilding Corridor, Preserving Prestige,” 150–51. 108.  Lim Boon Keng, “The So-­Called Clash of Races in Malaya,” Straits Chinese Annual, 1930, 8. 109.  Wu Lien-­teh, “Lim Boon Keng: Scholar, Linguist and Reformer,” Straits Times, January 7, 1957. 110.  Straits Echo, May 10, 1912.

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Where should Straits Chinese go? Lim believed that China could serve as a new field for Straits Chinese enterprise. He told his peers that despite China’s weakened position in the international arena in the late nineteenth ­century, he had “infinite faith in the potential strength of the Chinese” and believed that “China is continually progressing.”111 What China needed was “suitable doctors” who could diagnose its defects and prescribe the appropriate medicine that would rid China of its past “ignorance of science and scientific methods.”112 And who better to perform this task than the Straits Chinese, whose prejudices w ­ ere not so deeply rooted and who w ­ ere cosmopolitan in tastes and habits? Moreover, b ­ ecause of their familiarity with the Western way, Lim posited that Straits Chinese could act as middlemen like they did in the Straits Settlements and bring about the reconciliation of East and West in China.113

In Xiamen While in Singapore, Lim Boon Keng had already tried to reconcile East and West by teaching Confucianism while concurrently promoting Western science. Returning to Xiamen to helm Amoy University allowed him to put his ideal to practice on a much larger scale and in a more systematic way. And as we have seen, Lim had to make significant concessions to pursue his goals. Yet despite all he had done for the Chinese institution, Lim was not commensurately respected nor appreciated in China. In the 1920s, at a time when leading intellectuals in China like Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, and Lu Xun ­were advocating scientism and proposing the transvaluation of all Chinese values, Lim’s conviction that China needed a living philosophy like Confucianism more than “the technique of ‘bread-­and-­butter’ sciences” was seen as anachronistic and regressive. No won­der Lu Xun, whom Lim hired as a professor in the Department of Sinology, derided him as a “Chinese of British nationality who cannot avoid speaking of Confucius whenever he opens his mouth.”114 Being three generations removed from China and of mixed heritage, Lim Boon Keng was well aware that ­there ­were formidable ethnic and cultural barriers between himself and the Chinese within China. Through learning the Chinese language, immersion in Chinese culture, and establishing po­liti­cal affiliations, Lim had tried to scale ­these barriers and to reestablish a corridor to the homeland. Nevertheless, the fact that Lim was a British subject who could express himself 111.  Lim Boon Keng, “The Renovation of China,” Straits Chinese Magazine 2, no. 6 (1898): 89–90. 112.  Ibid., 91. 113. Ibid. 114.  Lu Xun, “Haishang tongxin,” in Huagaiji xubian; quoted in Wang G., “Lu Xun,” 156.

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better in En­glish than Chinese continued to alienate him from many Chinese intellectuals. An “intimate portrait” of Lim written by Wen Yuannin, a contributing writer to the China Critic, typified Chinese disdain for the overseas Chinese: Wen ridiculed Lim as a celebrity and an accidental educationalist who was more suited for the cabaret in Shanghai than the presidency of a university.115 In 1929, Lim published an En­glish translation of the Chinese poem “Li Sao,” written by the third-­century BCE patriot Qu Yuan.116 When asked by a Singapore reporter why he took on the arduous task, Lim replied that he once asked a friend which book was most difficult in Chinese lit­er­a­ture and the friend pointed to the “Li Sao.” So he immediately de­cided to study and translate it. ­After the book was published, he won fame among scholars in China and abroad so that, according to Lim, “no one dare considered him a Baba who did not know anything about Chinese culture.”117 The two examples in this chapter show that for Chinese on the move, their relationships with their natal or ancestral homes ­were not natu­ral nor permanent. While it might be true that culture from home played a crucial role in the emigrants’ success abroad (as Kuhn argues) and that qiaoxiang links and considerations influenced their decisions to s­ ettle or return (according to Williams), it is equally true that emigrants acquired new social, economic, and po­liti­cal capital while abroad, which they then applied when back in China, and that foreign circumstances w ­ ere just as pivotal in affecting their choices. As we have seen, in the 1920s, Li Qingquan and fellow Hokkiens in the Philippines ­were forced to look homeward ­because of the anti-­Chinese campaigns in their land of settlement, and in their efforts to salvage their home villages, they employed the knowledge they learned during their fight against the bookkeeping law in the Philippines, especially how to or­ga­nize themselves, propagandize their cause, and appeal to and challenge the authorities. It is impor­tant to note that the village salvation movement does not represent a passive return to their original homes and villages as the sojourner discourse dictates. Rather the Philippines Chinese ­were engaged in a home-­making pro­cess in their natal homes; in the name of salvaging their villages, they ­were attempting to transform their home villages into the ideal home—­peaceful, ­free from oppression, and abundant; that is, a safe haven where they could retire. Both Li Qingquan and Lim Boon Keng attempted to make a home in Xiamen, albeit for very dif­fer­ent reasons. An ambitious and successful entrepreneur, Li Qingquan could afford to cast his eyes on multiple locations. So even though he 115.  “Dr. Lim Boon Keng,” China Critic 7, no. 22 (1934): 519. 116.  Lim Boon Keng, trans., The Li Sao: An Elegy on Encountering the Sorrow by Ch’u Yuan of the State of Chu (Shanghai: Commercial, 1929). 117.  Lian Shisheng, Xianren Zaji (Singapore: Shijie Shuju, 1963), 141–42.

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was wary of po­liti­cal discrimination in the Philippines, he kept his businesses t­ here ­going as he joined forces with fellow Hokkiens to rebuild their home villages; concurrently, he was also planning to remake Xiamen into the new center of his commercial empire, deeming the treaty port more congenial than the Philippines or his home village to commerce. In contrast, Lim Boon Keng was already quite at home in Singapore. He was secure with his identity as a mixed-­race Chinese and even excelled within the British system, enjoying financial success and high social status. Lim’s decision to play up the Han ancestry of the Straits Chinese and to promote Confucianism among his peers was not intended to make them into “au­then­tic” Chinese; rather, he saw ­these acts as mea­sures to restore the competitive edge to the Straits Chinese, so they could keep their superior position within the British colony. ­There is no doubt that Lim’s main concern and the group he identified primarily with was the Straits Chinese. Before he returned to Xiamen, Lim already knew that he faced formidable subethnic barriers between himself and the Chinese within China, and he made strenuous efforts to try to scale them, including learning the Chinese language, immersing himself in Chinese culture, and establishing po­liti­cal affiliations. And Lim showed his commitment to s­ ettle in Xiamen by giving up all his interests in Singapore. Yet despite his efforts and sacrifices, Lim did not actually feel at home in Xiamen; nor was he made to feel at home by the Chinese in China.118 Ultimately, Lim—­and also Li Qingquan—­had to retreat and find solace overseas. For overseas Chinese, returning home was not as natu­ral and instinctive as previously assumed.

118.  Ong S., “Rebuilding Corridor, Preserving Prestige,” 156–57.

  C onclusions

This book has a dual focus on Xiamen and the returned overseas Chinese. It tells the story of how individuals and businesses in Xiamen and the mechanisms and connections they engendered through the port facilitated the movements of Hokkiens overseas and how returned overseas Chinese in turn helped determine the urban landscape and the development of the port city. Through an analy­sis of the relationships between returned emigrants and the port city, this book emphasizes the transformative impact of the migration pro­cess, which not only affected t­ hose who moved but also affected the place that they moved through.

Xiamen Xiamen was not the typical Chinese city. While the port city had risen to prominence during the Qing dynasty due to its increasing importance as a trading outpost, it was not designated as an administrative center by the court.1 It was exactly b ­ ecause of Xiamen’s burgeoning trade but lack of official supervision that it si­mul­ta­neously became the preferred embarkation port for l­egal and clandestine emigrants heading to Taiwan and Southeast Asia and l­ater one of the first 1.  In his study of nineteenth-­century Chinese cities, G. William Skinner has contended that “most of China’s central places that ranked as local cities or higher in the economic hierarchy also served as administrative capitals.” G. William Skinner, “Cities and the Hierarchy of Local Systems,” in The City in Late Imperial China, ed. G. William Skinner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977), 301. 187

188 Conclusions

treaty ports chosen by the British. But despite the British plan to use the port as a beachhead for their economic expansion into China, Xiamen did not bend to foreign w ­ ill—­foreign trade failed to take off even though its domestic trade remained lively throughout the treaty port era, and it was Chinese merchants rather than foreigners who profited the most from the port’s newfound status. As a treaty port, Xiamen was incorporated into the transoceanic network that Western powers created. ­After Western colonists stepped up the exploitation of raw materials in the nineteenth ­century, the demand for ­labor in their Southeast Asian colonies spiked. Xiamen seized the opportunity to become one the main suppliers of cheap Chinese ­labor for the plantations and mines in Southeast Asia. Of course, ­these Southeast Asian destinations ­were not new to Xiamen since Hokkiens had been trading and migrating ­there for centuries. And as Qing authority in the treaty ports waned ­after the Opium War, Xiamen revived its traditional connections with Southeast Asia and capitalized on the new technology of steamship travel introduced by the Westerners to send an unpre­ce­dented number of emigrants southward. With an ever-­growing number of aspiring emigrants funneling to Xiamen for a passage overseas, migration became increasingly lucrative for t­ hose involved in facilitating ­human movements. Money could be made in e­ very step of the migration pro­cess, and residents of Xiamen (including new emigrants to the port city) thus found a new niche where they could prosper. The presence of recruiters, emigrant inns, shipping companies, letter offices, and so on in the treaty port not only transformed Xiamen into an in-­between place par excellence but also affected the city’s development in unexpected ways—­because of the success of migration-­related business, Xiamen saw no need in developing large-­scale industries to manufacture products for Western markets. On the contrary, the port city ­housed a small number of mechanized (and unmechanized) factories that produced everyday items like umbrellas and shoes, which had overseas Chinese as their targeted customers. Into the twentieth ­century, ­because a substantial amount of remittances and a multitude of returned emigrants passed through the city annually, Xiamen boasted a significant number of retail shops selling a wide variety of goods to cater to its residents with cash to spare and the sojourners who needed to buy mandatory gifts while heading home. As Xiamen became more con­ve­nient and modern, wealthy overseas Chinese also returned to build their impressive villas ­there, especially in the international settlement on Gulangyu. The Chinese writer Lu Yan, ­after a trip to Xiamen in the early twentieth ­century, wrote that it was “the district of China’s wealthiest.”2 2.  Lu Yan, “Xiamen yinxiang ji,” 87–104.

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The rise of Xiamen as a migration hub was not necessarily the reason why more Hokkiens emigrated, since as the British observed, South Fujianese w ­ ere already more prone than Chinese from other provinces to go overseas. But it certainly made emigration pos­si­ble and easier for the masses. In migration studies, the familiar “push-­pull” theory has been useful in explaining why p ­ eople emigrated and why they ended up in specific destinations. However, besides the fact that migration was seldom a ­simple, direct movement from place A to place B, as Elizabeth Sinn has pointed out, emigrants also could not teleport themselves from home to overseas destinations instantaneously once they made up their mind. They thus needed the assistance of ser­v ice providers, ­either as headmen, moneylenders, inn o ­ wners, shipping brokers, or steamship companies, to lead them through ­every step of their journey overseas. ­These ser­vice providers congregated in Xiamen and helped establish the port city as the crucial nexus that moved aspiring emigrants from their villages in the hinterland to lands across the ocean, while at the same time they provided the mechanism and conditions to connect both ends—­the native places and the overseas settlements—of the migration pro­ cess. In the ­grand scheme of Chinese migration then, it would be a gross oversight—as Sinn warns—if we merely focus on e­ ither end of the migration pro­cess but ignore the transit hubs, since in-­between places in China like Xiamen, and possibly also Swatow and Hainan, ­were crucial to the realization of emigration and return and pivotal in determining the contours of the Chinese overseas dispersal. In the field of Chinese history, the case of Xiamen testifies to the fallacy of conforming to a prescribed developmental model. As foreign beachheads, treaty ports ­were expected by their designers to be the sites where “pro­gress”—­especially in the form of international trade, technological improvement in industries and transportation, and a healthier and modern lifestyle—­would first appear in China ­under the aegis of Westerners. But Xiamen defied such supposedly “normative” trajectory as foreign trade was unexceptional during its treaty port era despite the fact that Westerners had already established their footholds and set up merchant firms ­there soon ­after 1842. Xiamen also did not industrialize, and foreign pre­ sent was never power­ful enough to determine the development and modernization of the port city. Yet by the 1920s and 1930s, visitors to the treaty port w ­ ere unanimously impressed by the wealth and modernity of Xiamen, especially its macadamized roads, ferroconcrete buildings, modern city planning, clean and hygienic living conditions, and modern amenities, including telephone, electricity, and ­running ­water. To be sure, Xiamen had trodden an alternate path to prosperity and modernity.3 Even though it had few material goods to offer the world, Xiamen had 3.  Dai Y., “Minnan haiwai yimin yu jindai Xiamen xingshuai,” 47–56.

190 Conclusions

nonetheless seized on the growing global demand for manpower to become one of the main ­labor providers for Eu­ro­pean colonies in Southeast Asia. Fortunately for Xiamen, ­human l­abor was one commodity that South Fujian had in abundance. By providing the necessary ser­v ices to move p ­ eople abroad and the mechanisms to keep them connected to their home villages, Xiamen played an impor­tant role in the emigrants’ sojourning experience and thus occupied a special place in their hearts. They not only sent large amounts of remittances through Xiamen, which kept the economy of the treaty port afloat even though its imports perennially outstripped its exports, but also brought their money back when Xiamen began its urban reconstruction program in the 1920s to invest in real estate, road building, transport companies, public utilities, and a wide variety of other ventures. Hence, it was the money and vision of the overseas Chinese—­a vision no doubt acquired during their experience living in Eu­ro­pean colonies—­ that transformed and modernized Xiamen in the twentieth c­ entury. This is to say, modernity in Xiamen was not defined by China or the West but by the overseas Chinese, whose notion of modernity was mediated through the Western colonies in Southeast Asia.4

Returned Overseas Chinese Philip Kuhn’s proposition that Chinese emigrants owed their survival and success in strange lands to the special skills and resources they brought with them from their native places is well taken. However, his suggestion that ­because the emigrant has preserved so much from his society of origin that he might even be considered as “never left home” is moot, since an overemphasis on the emigrants’ tie to and dependence on the native places would lead one to downplay the effects foreign environment and experience had on the emigrants and to take for granted that Chineseness was predicated on origin and unchanging.5 This book asserts that we cannot fully comprehend the activities of returned overseas Chinese in Xiamen u ­ nless we allow the emigrants to leave home. We must also accept the fact that their mobility and foreign residence significantly influenced their decision making and prompted them to review their identities. Specifically, ­because they had lived in foreign socie­ties and w ­ ere exposed to dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal systems, many overseas Chinese acquired new skills, knowledge, world views, identities, and even wealth while abroad. It should come as no surprise then 4. James A. Cook has made the forceful argument that returned overseas Chinese w ­ ere the “bridges to [Xiamen’s] modernity.” However, Cook does not question what type of “modernity” the overseas Chinese actually brought back. Cook, “Bridges to Modernity.” 5. Kuhn, Chinese among O ­ thers, 49.

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that when they returned, their relationship with their home villages, with Xiamen, and even with China inevitably changed. They w ­ ere no longer l­imited to their native places, and the old imperial system also could not confine them; more importantly, they no longer saw themselves as subordinate or marginal to the land they once left b ­ ehind but sought to impose their w ­ ill and shape their native places according to their own objectives and visions. It is also impor­tant to note that contrary to the sojourner discourse that presumes the emigrants’ return as a natu­ral outgrowth of their emotional attachments to the homeland, this book has argued that the choice ­whether or not to return was a conscious decision and was guided more by the emigrants’ pragmatic and po­liti­cal concerns and their desire for personal and even selfish gains. We have shown how successive generations of overseas Chinese from the mid-­nineteenth ­century on took advantage of their affiliations with more than one state. They not only cooperated with colonial powers and acquired foreign nationality in their places of settlement; they also flexibly manipulated their identities when back in China. ­These Chinese willingly shuttled back and forth between dif­fer­ent countries and had literally come back to China as foreigners. They emphasized their foreign nationality to enjoy impunity from Chinese laws and be exempted from Chinese taxes but deemphasized it whenever they wanted to blend into the local society to take advantage of anonymity. Hokkien emigrants’ participations in the home village salvation movement and urban reconstruction in Xiamen also reveal that even if their concern for the welfare of their home villages was genuine, the motive for their involvements in ­these ostensibly “love-­of-­homeland” movements in the 1920s and 1930s was neither singular nor s­ imple.6 In par­tic­ul­ar, overseas Chinese had hoped to combine rural and urban reconstructions with the prospect of economic gain (through the proposed Zhang-­Long Railway or investment in real estate in Xiamen), to expand their own commercial empires to Xiamen and South Fujian (as Li Qingquan did), or to secure a safe refuge for their return in case their sojourns overseas w ­ ere cut short. The multiplicity of their motives suggests that overseas Chinese w ­ ere never a homogeneous w ­ hole bound together by a unified love for the homeland, but their activism in Xiamen did transform its cityscape and modernize the port city according to their devices. The fact that Hokkien emigrants of means returned and settled in Xiamen instead of their natal villages in the hinterland allows us to reconsider the meaning of home to the emigrants. As the sojourner discourse would have us believe, home is often assumed to be the material, emotional, cultural, and historical anchors of the emigrants, who upon leaving home would inevitably be consumed by a 6.  Ong S., “To Save Minnan,” 243–66.

192 Conclusions

sense of “displacement” and “uprootedness.”7 And it was this unbearable state of limbo that compelled the emigrants to return home again. This was exactly the plight Lee Guan Kin posits Lim Boon Keng was in even though Lim was not born in China, and she believes that Lim could only find closure to his search for roots and identity by returning to Xiamen. Regrettably, scholars with such China-­centered perspectives do not see the possibility that Chinese emigrants could be home in places other than their original native places in China. But as we have shown, Chinese emigrants w ­ ere constantly trying to reestablish that sense of familiarity, security, and control associated with home wherever they went, and their decisions to ­settle overseas, reside in Xiamen, or return to their natal homes, while affected by their native-­place links, ­were also influenced by circumstances in their place of settlement and personal considerations. And it was not just foreign-­born Chinese but first-­generation Chinese emigrants who w ­ ere similarly not as attached to their original homes as previously presumed. This is not surprising once we depart from a purely territorialized understanding of home and identity. Our study shows that not only was their identity not a fixed entity based on native places; the emigrants also constantly (re)defined their identity through their activities and their interactions with the vari­ous states and communities they located themselves in. Consequently, besides having ­little material motivation to return to the hinterland since the socioeconomic conditions of their native villages had not improved while they ­were gone, emigrants also need not return to the their native places for reaffirmation or closure to their identity. Many Hokkien emigrants returned and settled in Xiamen instead. In a sense, by leaving home, the emigrants no longer had a “fixed” home, and they ­were thus f­ ree to form new communities and secure new homes wherever they went. In Xiamen, Hokkien emigrants from vari­ous parts of South Fujian returned to become part of the local community. Compared to their native villages, Xiamen offered them safety, comfort, and shelter from persecution that the hinterland could not. It also gave reins to their commercial talents, completed their vision and ideal, and allowed them to come to the forefront of Xiamen society. H ­ ere, returned emigrants could truly feel at home. Xiamen thus should not be seen as a substitute or a secondary home to the original one they left. For t­ hese returnees, home was not their origins but their destinations. This study of Xiamen and its emigrants tells us much about the Chinese migration pro­cess and the flexible relationships between places and p ­ eople. More 7.  Lisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of ­Peoples and the Territorializing of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (February 1999): 24–44.

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importantly, it also affords a unique perspective for the investigations of the Chinese urban and overseas experience. As a port city located on the margins of the Chinese empire, Xiamen straddled Chinese history and the history of overseas Chinese. On one hand, it was geopo­liti­cally grounded within China’s national borders and regulated by Chinese policies; yet its operations ­were embedded in transoceanic migration and trade networks, leaving it unbounded. Xiamen’s history thus cannot simply be told as the story of one place or understood within the context of Chinese national history alone; nor can it be fully captured if we merely focus on the Chinese mi­grants passing through and returning to it without considering their attitudes ­toward the port city and China. This book thus adopts an open and expansive approach to the study of the overseas Chinese in Xiamen. We have considered how Xiamen utilized its migration networks to not only move mi­grants overseas but also to motivate individuals from overseas to take initiatives in Xiamen. At the same time, we have investigated the multiple, fluid but seemingly unending relationships emigrants had with their homes (be it China, Xiamen, or their home villages) and the varied and sometimes conflicting motivations overseas Chinese had for returning. By so d ­ oing, this study brings new insights to our understanding of Xiamen and the overseas Chinese that are not tied to any one place.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures, ­tables, and maps. Alcock, Rutherford, 108–9 Amoy. See Xiamen Ang, Ien, 12 avoidance, rule of, 28, 28n56 Batavia: Chinese migration to, 33, 35–37; letter offices in, 89; maritime trade in, 29–31, 35; massacres of Chinese in, 35, 99 Blussé, Leonard, 30 Boccagni, Paolo, 157, 158 Bogue, Treaty of the (1843), 100 bookkeeping laws, 160–61, 185 Bowra, Cecil, 55 Britain. See ­Great Britain British East India Com­pany, 27, 32, 55, 72 Brown, J. McLeavy, 82 bus ser­v ices, 152–54 Cai Tingkai, 165 Canton system, 17, 43 Chan, Shelly, 9, 12, 178 Chang Sen-­dou, 129n10 Charleton, A. E., 162–63 Chen Guohui, 164, 166–68 Chen Jiongming, 139 Chen Ta, 71, 125, 127, 153 Chen Yaohuang, 151 Chen Yilao, 99–101 Chia, Lucille, 128 Chiang Kai-­shek, 165–67 China: balance of power with Britain, 17, 102; ease of travel to Southeast Asia from, 10, 63, 81–82; exploitation of, 17, 44, 51, 70, 188; extraterritoriality princi­ple in, 100, 114; in First Sino-­Japanese War, 49, 50, 59, 110–12; imperialist reductions of sovereignty in, 4; in-­between places in, 8, 13, 18, 94, 127–28, 188–89; migration hubs in (see migration hubs); modernization of, 3–4, 9, 178; Republic of China, 120–26, 138, 162; in Second Sino-­Japanese War, 91, 152; secret socie­ties in, 15, 104–6; treaty ports in (see treaty ports). See also specific locations and dynasties

China Banking Corporation, 160, 169, 170 Chinese identity: huaqiao and, 121–23; hybrid forms of, 177–78; local constructions of, 126; manipulation of, 12–13, 97, 109, 111, 117, 126, 191; nationality laws on, 118, 120; reclamation of, 15, 181–86; traditional views of, 11, 12, 174 Chinese migration: as business, 40–42, 78, 84, 94, 188; coolie trade and, 64–72, 70, 101, 104, 108, 179; corridor view of, 6, 7, 11, 76, 95–96; credit-­ticket systems of, 71–72; domestic, 39–40; history of, 18, 18n4, 32–40; homeland-­hostland approach to, 5–6; hubs for (see migration hubs); imperial bans on, 33, 36, 65, 99; maritime trade as influence on, 32–37, 40–42; mobility strategy of, 87; motivations for, 10, 14, 33, 37, 71, 163; pro­cess for (see migration pro­cess); push-­pull theory of, 37, 189; qiaoxiang perspective on, 5–7, 127, 185; restrictions imposed on, 76, 80; temporal approach to, 9. See also overseas Chinese; returned overseas Chinese Choa Tek-­hee, 109–10 Chuzo, Naritomi, 112 circular cities, 129, 129n10 Commercial Xiamen ­Water PLC, 151–52 compradors. See middlemen Confucianism, 98–99, 119, 172–74, 182, 184, 186 Cook, James A., 5, 190n4 coolies (indentured laborers), 64–72, 70, 101, 104, 108, 179 Costume Regulation (1868), 108–10 cotton, 21, 39, 44–48, 47, 59, 110 couriers (shuike), 88–89, 88n91 credit-­ticket systems, 71–72 discrimination, 14, 121, 160–62, 183 domestic trade, 59–60, 94, 188 double-­oarsmen, 83–84 Drum Waves Island. See Gulangyu Du Pont, S. F., 98, 118 Duan Qirui, 138, 141 Dutch East India Com­pany, 30, 31 221

222 Index

Eigh­teen ­Brothers gang, 115–16 emigrant inns, 76–80, 83, 86, 88–89, 188 emigration. See Chinese migration exports: imports vs., 9, 46, 60, 61; ­labor, 39, 40; in Sino-­British trade, 45, 55, 58; sugar, 20, 29, 60, 99; tea, 1, 2n3, 20, 55–59, 57 extraterritoriality princi­ple, 100, 111, 114 Fairbank, John King, 17 First Opium War (1839–1842): migrations following, 18, 70; Nanjing Treaty as end to, 3n8, 17, 43, 136; occupation of Gulangyu during, 136; Sino-­British relations following, 86, 107 First Sino-­Japanese War (1894–1895), 49, 50, 59, 110–12 flour, 43, 45, 48–49, 60 Fortune, Robert, 131, 133 Freedman, Maurice, 11 French Concession (Shanghai), 4, 156 Fujian Province: coastal depopulation of, 26–27, 35; Japa­nese influence in, 112–13, 117; major cities in, 24; natu­ral disaster prevalence in, 162; overseas Chinese investment in, 123–24, 124–­25; population growth in, 37, 162; societal changes in, 37–40; topography of, 19. See also South Fujian; Xiamen Gao Qizhuo, 40–41 Ginsberg, Robert, 14 ­Great Britain: balance of power with China, 17, 102; concession in Xiamen, 44, 131–32n22, 131–33; in coolie trade, 64–66, 69, 104, 108; extraterritoriality princi­ple and, 100; restrictions on Chinese immigration, 76, 80; Sino-­British trade, 43–45, 45, 55, 58; subjecthood as determined by, 100–110; in transoceanic network, 4, 86 ­Great Depression, 1, 61, 80, 91, 155–56, 170, 174 Gribble, Henry, 44, 103 Gulangyu: construction proj­ects in, 147; emigrant inns on, 78; geography of, 22, 129, 135; international settlement on, 62, 137, 164, 188; living standards on, 150, 152; origins of name, 135n39; as residential district, 62, 133, 135–36, 188; social unrest on, 163 Gulangyu Municipal Council, 137, 138 Gulangyu Road and Cemetery Committee, 136–37 Guo Youping, 89 Gutzlaff, Charles, 32

Hall, Stuart, 14 Han dynasty, 23 Harrison, Francis B., 160 headmen (ketou), 71–72, 76–80, 86, 88–89, 88n91, 189 hierarchy of homes, 13 Hobson, H. E., 50–51 Hokkiens: dialect spoken by, 103; investments by, 124; land acquisitions by, 38; in maritime trade, 19–22, 30–35, 39, 40; in weaving industry, 39, 45. See also Chinese migration; Fujian Province Holwill, C. N., 63 home: conceptualizations of, 13–15, 157–58; native village salvage efforts, 162–68, 185; in sojourner discourse, 11, 13, 96, 156–57, 185, 191–92. See also native-­place ties Hong Kong: headmen (ketou) in, 77; as in-­between place, 8, 13, 18, 94, 127; jurisdiction of courts in, 107; maritime trade in, 52, 53; as migration hub, 7–8 Hongwu (Emperor), 24n, 129 Hsu, Madeline, 125 Huang Jinghui, 152–53 Huang Yizhu, 147, 150–52, 165–66 huaqiao, 121–23 Hughes, George, 48 identity. See Chinese identity imperialism: exploitation of China through, 70; Japa­nese ambitions and, 111–14, 117; sovereignty of China impacted by, 4; subjecthood as utilized in, 110–11 imports: competition for, 51–55; cotton, 39, 44–48, 47, 110; exports vs., 9, 46, 60, 61; flour, 43, 45, 48–49, 60; kerosene, 43, 45, 49–50, 50n30, 60; likin duties on, 54–56, 54n45, 110, 116; matches, 43, 45, 49, 60; metal, 45, 50–51, 53; opium, 43–45, 45n8, 53–55; rice, 19, 20, 59, 60; in Sino-­British trade, 43–45, 45; transit pass system for, 55 in-­between places, 8, 13, 18, 94, 127–28, 188–89 indentured laborers. See coolies inns for emigrants. See emigrant inns international settlements: on Gulangyu, 62, 137, 164, 188; in Shanghai, 4, 60, 155–56 Jackson, Michael, 14 Japan: extraterritoriality princi­ple and, 100, 111, 114; in First Sino-­Japanese War, 49, 50, 59, 110–12; imperialist ambitions of, 111–14, 117; maritime trade in, 25, 26, 30; matches imported from, 49; modernization of, 111;

Index

in Second Sino-­Japanese War, 91, 152; subjecthood as determined by, 110–18; Taiwan as colony of, 58–60, 110, 112–13; tea exports from, 57 Jiang Guangnai, 165 Jiaqing (Emperor), 58 Jin dynasty, 20 junks (Chinese ships): in maritime trade, 25–32, 34–35, 56; mi­grant transport on, 40–42, 59, 72, 80–81, 81n67; replacement with steamships, 43, 52–53 Kangxi (Emperor), 28, 31, 129 Ke Xiaozhao, 103 kerosene, 43, 45, 49–50, 50n30, 60 ketou. See headmen Ko, Ralph C. D., 127 Kong Zhaotong, 167 Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong), 25–27, 30, 31, 36, 99 Kublai Khan, 21 Kuhn, Philip: corridor perspective of, 6, 7, 11, 76, 95–96; home as conceptualized by, 157–58; on Lim Boon Keng, 182; on migration motivations, 37, 40; on native-­ place ties, 94–97, 126, 190 ­labor exports, 39, 40. See also coolies Layton, T. H., 44, 102, 104–5 Lee Guan Kin, 174–75, 177, 192 Lee Shun Fah, 101–2, 104 letter offices, 64, 89, 89n93, 91–94, 92, 188 Li Qingquan, 158–70; background and early life, 158–59; business ventures of, 159–60, 170, 186; community leadership of, 160–62; investments in Xiamen, 146–47, 168–69; salvaging of home villages by, 162–68, 185 Li Xinying, 101, 102 Li Zhongjue, 119 Liang Qichao, 121 Liang Zhangju, 32 lighterage business, 8, 84, 117 likin duties, 54–56, 54n45, 110, 116 Lim, Jon, 149 Lim Boon Keng, 170–85; background and early life, 170–71; Confucianism and, 172–74, 182, 184, 186; interpretations of, 174–79, 192; racialized views of Malays, 179–81; reclamation of Chinese identity, 15, 181–86; Straits Chinese heritage of, 175–78; as Xiamen University president, 158, 172–74, 173n71, 184

223

Lin Erjia, 138–39, 150 Lin Guogeng, 141–43 Lin Jinzhi, 123–24, 146, 147 Lindsay, H. Hamilton, 32 living standards, 64, 128, 150–52 Lu Xun, 184 Lu Yan, 188 MacGowan, John, 136–37 Man, J. Alex, 54 Manila: anti-­Chinese riots in, 161–62; Chinese migration to, 33–35, 37; letter offices in, 89; maritime trade in, 22, 31, 34; massacres and expulsions of Chinese in, 34; metal imported from, 50 maritime trade, 18–42; coastal network of, 26, 29, 30; Hokkiens in, 19–22, 30–35, 39, 40; intermediaries in, 31, 33–35; junks for, 25–32, 34–35, 56; migration influenced by, 32–37, 40–42; private, 21–22, 24, 24n, 37; profits from, 19, 28–29; regulation of, 22, 28; smuggling in, 23–25, 28, 32, 41; steamships for, 43, 52–53, 81; wharf construction for, 129; Zheng regime of, 25–27, 30 matches, 43, 45, 49, 60 McKeown, Adam, 5–6 merchants. See trade metal, 45, 50–51, 53 middlemen, 80, 103–5, 108, 176, 184 mi­grant regions (qiaoxiang), 5–7, 127, 185 migration. See Chinese migration migration hubs: economy of, 1–2, 62, 156; as in-­between places, 8, 18, 189; role in migration pro­cess, 7, 189; social contacts at, 12; treaty ports as, 4, 18, 63. See also Xiamen migration pro­cess, 76–87; arrival at port of disembarkation, 86–87; brokers in, 76, 79, 80, 189; emigrant inns in, 76–80, 83, 86, 88–89, 188; expenses incurred during, 78, 79; headmen (ketou) in, 71–72, 76–80, 86, 88–89, 88n91, 189; native-­place ties in, 77, 78, 86–87, 94–97; passage conditions in, 82–86; return voyage in, 10–11; shipping options in, 80–86, 83 Ming dynasty: ban on overseas travel, 33; fall of, 27, 31; maritime trade ­under, 21–26, 24n, 39, 40; Taiwan ­under, 29; weaving industry during, 45 Minnan. See South Fujian mobility strategy of migration, 87 Morrison, M. C., 105, 106 Murphey, Rhoads, 44

224 Index

Nanjing, Treaty of (1842), 3n8, 17, 43, 136 Nanyang. See Southeast Asia nationality laws, 118, 120 native-­place ties: British economic interests and, 108; huaqiao in transcendence of, 121; in migration pro­cess, 77, 78, 86–87, 94–97; returned overseas Chinese and, 126, 158, 190, 192 Ng Chin-­keong, 3, 21, 29, 32, 39 Norman, Henry, 176 Ong, Aihwa, 12 Ong Ban Guan, 85 opium: antiopium campaigns, 171; opium dens, 115, 118, 154; Second Opium War, 45; trade in, 43–45, 45n8, 53–55, 59, 114. See also First Opium War overland trade, 19, 19n9, 26, 54, 55 overseas Chinese: as British subjects, 100–110; buildings built and owned by, 146–47, 148; communities formed by, 33; as coolies, 64–72, 70, 101, 104, 108, 179; discrimination against, 14, 121, 160–62, 183; home as viewed by (see home); as huaqiao, 121–23; identity of (see Chinese identity); investments by, 123–24, 124–­25, 128, 146–47, 150–53, 168–70; as Japa­nese subjects, 110–18; marginalization in Chinese history, 5, 9; massacres and expulsions of, 34, 35, 99; migration pro­cess for. See migration pro­cess; Qing dynasty on, 98–110, 118–20; real estate firms owned by, 146–47, 147; remittances from (see remittances); in Republic of China, 120–26; sojourner discourse on, 11, 13, 96, 156–57, 185, 191–92; wealth accumulated by, 98, 118–19, 140, 146, 146n78; worldwide population of, 63, 63–64n2, 72. See also Chinese migration; returned overseas Chinese; Straits Chinese Pauncefote, Julian, 106 Philippines. See Manila piracy, 23, 23n35, 25, 26 Pitcher, P. W., 134 Pottinger, Henry, 43 public transportation, 152–54, 164–66 push-­pull theory, 37, 189 Qianlong (Emperor), 29, 31, 35, 99–100 qiaoxiang (mi­grant regions), 5–7, 127, 185 qilou (shop-­houses), 148–50, 149, 169 Qing dynasty: ban on migration, 65, 99; coastal depopulation policy, 26–27, 35; domestic

migration during, 40; fall of, 120, 138; in First Sino-­Japanese War, 49, 50, 59, 110–12; maritime trade ­under, 26, 28, 31; opium trade during, 45n8; on overseas and returned Chinese, 98–110, 118–20; po­liti­cal activism by, 118; population growth during, 39, 162; steamship regulations in, 82–83; Taiwan annexed by, 27, 29, 36–37, 99 Quan-­Wei Transport Com­pany, 168–69 Raffles, Stamford, 72, 149, 175, 176 railway ser­v ices, 164–66, 168 Rawski, Evelyn, 39 Remer, C. F., 128 remittances, 87–94; annual figures (1905–1938), 90, 90–91; banks and post offices used for, 93–94; decline during G ­ reat Depression, 156; early delivery methods, 87–88; economic impact of, 8, 9, 63–64, 128, 156, 190; letter offices for, 64, 89, 89n93, 91–94, 92, 188; shuike in h ­ andling of, 88–89, 88n91 Republic of China, 120–26, 138, 162 returned overseas Chinese: as British subjects, 100–110; buying power of, 1, 61, 64, 155, 156; Costume Regulation for, 108–10; economic impact of, 8–9, 14–15; home as viewed by (see home); identity of (see Chinese identity); as Japa­nese subjects, 110–18; motivations for return, 14, 158, 191, 193; movement through Xiamen, 72; native-­place ties and, 126, 158, 190, 192; Qing dynasty on, 98–110, 118–20; in Republic of China, 120–26; role in migration pro­cess, 10–11. See also Chinese migration; overseas Chinese rice, 19–20, 29, 32, 38, 59–60, 65, 99 rule of avoidance, 28, 28n56 seaborne trade. See maritime trade Second Opium War (1856–1860), 45 Second Sino-­Japanese War (1937–1945), 91, 152 secret socie­ties, 15, 104–6 sekimin (Taiwan Chinese), 113–18, 113n60, 114 Shanghai: cotton from, 45, 46; French Concession in, 4, 156; International Settlement in, 4, 60, 155–56; overseas Chinese investment in, 123, 124; se­lection as treaty port, 17; trade in, 28–30, 44, 51; Xiamen compared to, 4, 60, 62, 62n81 Shi Lang, 27, 29 Shimonoseki, Treaty of (1895), 111–12

Index

ships and shipping: brokers, 76, 79, 80, 189; relationship between emigrants and tonnage, 82, 83; square-­rigged clippers, 81, 81nn66–67. See also junks; maritime trade; steamships shop-­houses (qilou), 148–50, 149, 169 shuike (couriers), 88–89, 88n91 Siah U Chin, 10, 87–88 Singapore: Chinese migration to, 10, 72, 76, 118–19, 179; in coolie trade, 179; emigrant inns in, 86; establishment of, 72, 149, 175; as in-­between place, 8; letter offices in, 89; metal imported from, 50; restrictions on Chinese immigration, 80 Sinn, Elizabeth, 7, 8, 13, 70–71, 127, 189 Sino-­Japanese War, First (1894–1895), 49, 50, 59, 110–12 Sino-­Japanese War, Second (1937–1945), 91, 152 Skinner, G. William, 26–27, 32, 87, 187n Small Knife Society, 105–6 smuggling, 23–25, 28, 32, 41, 104, 107–8, 115 sojourner discourse, 11, 13, 96, 156–57, 185, 191–92 Song dynasty, 19, 23 Song Ong Siang, 181–82 South Fujian: bandits in, 162–63, 166–67; investment environment in, 128; major cities in, 24; maritime trade in (see maritime trade); native village salvage efforts in, 162–68; population growth in, 162; weaving industry in, 45–47. See also Hokkiens; Xiamen Southeast Asia: Chinese migration to, 33–37, 63, 72, 76; ease of travel to China from, 10, 63, 81–82; economic relationship with Xiamen, 1, 155; letter offices in, 89, 91–94, 92; maritime trade in, 20, 25–31, 34–35, 52; metal imported from, 53. See also specific locations Southeast Asia Overseas Fujianese Home Village Salvation Association, 163–68 Southern Song dynasty, 20 square-­rigged clipper ships, 81, 81nn66–67 standard of living, 64, 128, 150–52 steamships: conditions on, 83–86; junks replaced by, 43, 52–53; for maritime trade, 43, 52–53, 81; mi­grant transport on, 8, 81–86, 188; Qing regulation of, 82–83; travel time shortened by, 10, 63, 81–82 Straits Chinese: discrimination against, 183; hybrid identity of, 177–78; as middlemen, 103–4, 176, 184; po­liti­cal and cultural affiliations with British, 176–77, 181;

225

racialized views of, 179–81; reclamation of Chinese identity, 181–83, 186; as settled community, 175–76; Xiamen populations of, 100–101, 106, 107 sugar, 20–21, 29, 32, 38, 59–60, 99 Sugihara, Kaoru, 10 ­Sullivan, G. G., 105, 106 Sun Yat-­sen, 120, 124, 138, 172 Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), 54, 54n45 Tait, James, 66n10 Taiwan: Chinese migration to, 36–37, 63; as Japa­nese colony, 58–60, 110, 112–13; maritime trade in, 26, 29–31, 52; Qing annexation of, 27, 29, 36–37, 99; tea exports from, 57–58; Zheng regime in, 27, 29, 36 Taiwan Chinese (sekimin), 113–18, 113n60, 114 Tan Kah Kee, 140, 146n78, 172–73 Tan Keng Chin, 105–7 Tan King Hee, 102, 104–5 Tan King Sing, 105, 106 Tan Tingxiang, 98 Tang dynasty, 20, 23 Tawney, R. H., 3 tea, 1, 2n3, 20, 55–59, 57 Tek Sing sinking (1822), 41–42 Tianyi Letter Office, 89, 89n93, 91 tobacco, 30, 38, 59, 60 trade: in coolies, 64–72, 70, 101, 104, 108, 179; domestic, 59–60, 94, 188; emigrant inns and, 79; in opium, 43–45, 45n8, 53–55, 59, 114; overland, 19, 19n9, 26, 54, 55. See also exports; imports; maritime trade transoceanic network, 4, 86–87, 188, 193 transportation ser­v ices: bus routes, 152–54; Quan-­Wei Transport Com­pany, 168–69; Zhang-­Xia Railway, 164–66, 168. See also ships and shipping treaties. See specific names of treaties treaty ports: characteristics of, 3–4, 189; coolie trade in, 64–72, 70; as migration hubs, 4, 18, 63; origins and growth of, 3, 3n8; se­lection of, 17–18, 32, 44, 188; in transoceanic network, 4, 188. See also Shanghai; Xiamen United States: on bookkeeping laws, 161; extraterritoriality princi­ple and, 100; flour imported from, 48–49; kerosene imported from, 50; tea exports to, 56–57 urban reconstruction, 10, 15, 90, 128–29, 137–44, 144–­45 Vasantkumar, Chris, 12

226 Index

Walled City of Xiamen, 23, 129–30, 129n9, 130 Wang Gungwu, 33, 121 Wang Shibei, 89 Wang Sing-wu, 68 Wang Yuanmao, 33 weaving industry, 39, 45–47 Wen Yuannin, 185 Williams, Michael, 6–7 Wood, Leonard, 161 Wu Lien-­teh, 143, 183

trade in (see trade); in transoceanic network, 4, 86–87, 188, 193; transportation ser­v ices in, 152–54, 164–66; urban reconstruction in, 10, 15, 90, 128–29, 137–44, 144–­45; urban sector of, 130–35, 142, 143, 146–47, 150–51; Walled City of, 23, 129–30, 129n9, 130; Zheng regime in, 25–27, 30. See also Gulangyu Xiamen Municipal Council, 138–41 Xiamen University, 123, 140, 147, 158, 172–74, 173n71, 184 Xie Zhaozhe, 40

Xiamen: British concession in, 44, 131–32n22, 131–33; bund construction in, 132, 132, 143, 169; consumer culture in, 1, 9, 154–56; early history of, 22–25, 187–88; economy of, 1, 8–9, 128, 155; emigrants in (see overseas Chinese; returned overseas Chinese); geography of, 22–23, 24; historical rec­ords collection in, 2–3; as in-­between place, 8, 13, 18, 94, 127–28, 188–89; living standards in, 64, 150–52; as migration hub (see migration hubs); in migration pro­cess (see migration pro­cess); overseas Chinese investment in, 123–24, 125, 128, 146–47, 150–53, 168–70; passenger traffic through (1845–1940), 72, 73–­75; population growth in, 130, 134; remittance industry in (see remittances); se­lection as treaty port, 17–18, 32, 44, 188; Shanghai compared to, 4, 60, 62, 62n81; shipping companies with ser­v ice in, 81–82, 83; shop-­houses (qilou) in, 148–50, 149, 169; Taiwan Chinese (sekimin) in, 113–18, 114;

Yap Ee Chian, 85 Ye Deshui, 103–4 Yongle (Emperor), 21 Yongzheng (Emperor), 37, 40 Yu Yonghe, 27 Yuan dynasty, 21, 23 Yuan Shikai, 139 Zang Zhiping, 124, 141 Zeng Houkun, 117 Zhang Xiyu, 105–7, 108n47 Zhang-­Xia Railway, 164–66, 168 Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga), 25–27, 30, 31, 36, 99 Zheng He, 21 Zheng Zhilong, 25–26, 26n46 Zhou Xingnan, 139–43, 147–48 Zhou Zifeng, 2–3, 116n73 Zhu Boneng, 1–2, 2n3 Zhu Yuanzhang (Emperor), 21 Zhuang Weiji, 123–24