One

Origins

The Toisan–California Pipeline

The Wayward Province of Guangdong

August 29, 1842, came and went no more eventfully than other Mondays in the twenty-six United States and a negligible hamlet called Yerba Buena in the Alta California territory of Mexico. On the other side of the world, however, the balance of East/West realpolitik was being permanently realigned at the city of Nanjing on the Yangzi River, about eighty-five miles from the eastern coast of China. Attended by phalanxes of British military and naval officers along with a bored-looking spaniel, the representatives of Queen Victoria and China’s Daoguang Emperor sat at a table in the state cabin of HMS Cornwallis to sign the Treaty of Nanjing.¹ This lopsided bargain ended the First Opium War by imposing a long string of British demands on China in return for nothing. It was a decisive defeat in the Qing dynasty’s attempt to turn back, or at least partly contain, the tide of an emerging global economy dominated by stronger and more ruthless powers.

The Qing were the descendants of non-Han aliens, Manchu invaders from beyond China’s northern borders who had seized the imperial throne less than two centuries earlier, in 1644. In many ways, the timing of the new dynasty’s arrival could not have been worse. The business of putting their new empire in order collided from the start with disruptive Western trading interests, now firmly pitched throughout the maritime Far East and scrambling with each other for advantage.

The lands the Qing intended to govern would have presented fearsome challenges in any case. Then as now, China’s climatic, topographical, and human barriers to unification dwarfed those of any other nation on earth. By claim at least, the empire took in the sky-piercing Himalayas in the far west along with innumerable ranges of lesser mountains and hills scattered across twenty-plus provinces; huge deserts and dry steppes stretching far along the old Silk Road in the northwest; the two greatest watercourses of Asia, the Yellow and the Yangzi Rivers, each winding to the Pacific Ocean throughout several thousand miles of stupendously varied terrain; a large, humid tropical and subtropical zone in the far south; and more than nine thousand miles of coastline. It also embraced literally dozens of different ethnicities and languages. The latter included not only a host of speech groups belonging to non-Han minority peoples but at least ten major Han Chinese languages with untold constellations of local sublanguages and dialects. (All the Han tongues were mutually intelligible as written in Chinese characters, but in spoken form might be further apart than Romanian and Portuguese.)

For the Qing authorities in Beijing, one annoying stretch of coastline, the people who lived along it, and the two major languages they spoke spelled particular trouble. The imperial court was obliged to call in interpreters to translate the uncouth speech of functionaries from the far south-southeastern regions—the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, which lay along what Beijing considered the empire’s most dangerous maritime frontier.

Between them, these two provinces would account for the lion’s share of emigration from China to the rest of the world until after World War II. But while the Qing were struggling to unseat the doomed Ming dynasty in the early seventeenth century, the very concept of emigration was almost impossible to reconcile with some aspects of a widely prevailing Chinese world view. Recent interlopers though they were, the Qing, once victorious, were determined to enforce most of that view.

By Ming and Qing lights, the mere act of travel to foreign parts, at least by sea, implicitly threatened a system of belief that placed China (the “Middle Kingdom”) and its ruler (the “Son of Heaven”) at the center of the universe, with other realms and peoples occupying different peripheral ranks from semicivilized to subhuman.2 Even when seagoing Western aliens had proved to be a permanent fact of life, official attitudes toward the planet at large were a strange amalgam of xenophobia and ambivalent acceptance. Leaving the ancestral realm without official clearance was, in theory at least, punishable by beheading.³ After all, it could serve little purpose except treason or merchant enterprise. The second ranked as the least honorable of all lawful human activities on the scale of Confucian values.

Nowhere in the Middle Kingdom did people more openly flout such doctrines than in Fujian and Guangdong. For centuries they had under stood that their coastal waters offered unparalleled access to all of Southeast Asia. They further knew that China could not very well do without many articles of trade shipped from those regions—the “Nanyang,” or “Southern Ocean,” as the lands from Vietnam to beyond the Spice Islands were collectively called—or the revenue from commercial traffic.

The ethnic makeup of Fujian and Guangdong was complex and unruly even by Chinese standards. At different times over many centuries, successive Han Chinese groups had migrated to both provinces from the north, first colonizing farmland, later seeking refuge from northern invaders or a healthy distance from imperial oversight. The Guangdong residents—or “Cantonese,” as the English would later call them—considered themselves more truly Chinese than their northern rulers. Indeed, the difficult spoken languages of both Guangdong and Fujian are believed to resemble the most ancient forms of Han Chinese more closely than counterparts elsewhere, and non-Han genetic admixtures appear to be less prevalent in the southeast than in most of China.⁴

In any case, both provinces were hotbeds of smuggling, piracy, merchantry, and other dubious pursuits. Fujian—pronounced “Hokkien” in the most widespread of the local dialects—was the more active in establishing trading networks throughout the Nanyang. Unofficial Hokkienese outposts had long existed in many corners of today’s Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. People from Guangdong sometimes founded settlements in the Nanyang. But they also were the more adroit at exploiting the arrival of European traders in Chinese waters.

Guangdong, China’s southernmost province, lies about half north and half south of the Tropic of Cancer. It was the southern, or fully tropical, half that eventually would drag China willy-nilly into the early modern global economy. The dominant feature here is the massive delta of the Pearl River, or Zhu Jiang, flowing through verdant hill country into the South China Sea. It furnishes a convenient water route from Southeast Asia as far inland as the port of Guangzhou (Canton city), the provincial capital.

South of Guangzhou, the Pearl River Delta is a perplexed, hilly welter of innumerable tidal channels interspersed with dikes, fish ponds, and pieces of reclaimed ground. In this region, land flat enough for farming was less easily come by than in central or northern parts of the province. There was some cultivation of rice and a newer staple crop, the hugely important sweet potatoes introduced from the Americas in the seventeenth century. Sugar cane was the major cash crop; local tree fruits from oranges to litchis were reputedly among the finest in the kingdom.5 In rural districts nearly everyone had a small plot to supply kitchen needs. But the area was less self-sufficient in agriculture than the rest of Guangdong, and the locals had more of a nose for trade.

Only with difficulty could imperial officialdom stop delta residents from welcoming foreign vessels while barely preserving the dignified fiction that goods entering China from elsewhere were really tributary missions to the current Son of Heaven. The mazy backwaters between the sea and the port city were scant barrier to commercial interchange between determined outsiders and equally eager locals and offered endless aid and comfort to smugglers. For centuries, Guangzhou merchants had been selling porcelains, silks, and tea—with or without official sanction—to the Arab traders who plied the Southeast Asian coasts. They hoped to do likewise with the European voyagers who began seeking a piece of the action during the final Qing and Ming struggles for the throne.

It took the Qing six years to conquer the wayward province after coming to power. Afterward, Cantonese readiness to collude with the Portuguese and other foreigners made the situation difficult to monitor from Beijing, more than a thousand miles away. The imperial masters were almost as much at a loss to read the minds of these refractory subjects as U.S. and Canadian authorities later would be in the Far West.

The character of the southeastern Chinese and particularly the Pearl River Delta Cantonese, as it appeared not only to northerners but later to many British and American chroniclers, was indomitably hardy, persistent, stoical, practical, wily, and resourceful. No group more completely personified the xiang banfa instinct. From decades if not centuries pursuing trade opportunities in the Nanyang, they were used to organizing expeditions to foreign parts, where they knew how to hit the ground running. They could endure dreadful conditions with an apparent indifference that non-Chinese often interpreted as a penchant for squalor.

Representatives of the West would soon marvel at the south Guangdong natives’ genius for improvisation and imitation in new surroundings while—like representatives of Beijing—often being frustrated by their skill at getting their own way by open or devious means. In the context of other people’s mores, they could look like congenital liars and lawbreakers. Probably it is more accurate to say that their lives were ruled by a consciousness of community and self almost impossible to communicate to outsiders but ineradicably bred into them as birthright members of tight-knit individual villages and clans in the delta backwaters. This instinctive identification with place and lineage was all the stronger for the spectacular fragmentation of Han sublanguages and dialects in Guangdong. Often people living in one administrative district could barely understand the speech of people from the next.6 The more educated might have some command of Cantonese as spoken in Guangzhou. This was officially the standard language of the province, but local speech was a token of jealously ingrained local loyalties expressed in frequent feuds.

It is not surprising, then, that even more than most Chinese, natives of the Pearl River Delta could travel and (for a time) settle anywhere in the world without ceasing to be citizens of some unshakably internalized ancestral domain.

The Canton System

A sometimes neglected truth underlying the Chinese diaspora of modern times is that from the moment the first Portuguese voyagers appeared in Chinese coastal waters not long after 1500, Chinese and Western economic influences throughout the Far East fed each other in a powerful synergy. While Portuguese, Dutch, and English entrepreneurs founded local beachheads and trafficked in an ever-expanding range of goods, Chinese entrepreneurs were doing likewise in all parts of the Nanyang.7 Of course most of these exporter-importers were from the untrustworthy provinces of Fujian and Guangdong. Quietly ignoring official prohibitions on leaving the shores of the Middle Kingdom, Hokkienese and Cantonese established berths at useful locations in incipient Western colonies from the Malay peninsula to the Philippines, buying or selling or brokering anything from metal ores to rice. The imperial court frequently viewed these activities as a form of organized crime, and sometimes with reason.

The Ming and (after 1644) Qing emperors uneasily sought to control an expanding flow of goods and people along the long Chinese coastline. Some form of triage was obviously necessary. Since the port of Guangzhou and the shoreline around the Pearl River Delta offered the easiest access to the interior anywhere in the kingdom, Beijing poured more effort into supervising this maritime area than any other. Arriving foreigners were considered national security threats until proved otherwise. The hope was that funneling them into one manageable zone would make other coasts safer.⁸

As early as 1557 the Ming authorities had permitted Portugal to establish the tiny trading outpost of Macau (later to receive the Chinese name of Aomen) on the western shore of the river mouth for regular access to Guangzhou, some seventy miles inland as the crow flies. The real distance upriver was much greater. The difficulty of navigating the shallow, tortuous channels between Macau and the port city without local help offered a good rationale for correspondingly tortuous bureaucratic oversight.⁹

In 1757, realizing that more drastic measures were needed to stop outsiders from doing business in other cities, the Qing regime declared all ports except Guangzhou closed to foreign vessels. This move annoyed both the British East India Company—now the most important Western commercial presence in the Far East—and merchants from every tea-drinking (and to a lesser extent, porcelain- and silk-importing) European nation. But all were obliged to operate under what came to be known as the “Canton system,” a procedural gauntlet that had begun to take shape at around 1700 and would reach full flowering between the 1757 decree and 1800.10

The system was so obstacle-ridden, and so maddeningly tailored to maintain Western trade deficits, that one of its eventual effects would be to awaken British minds to the charms of opium smuggling. It depended on incessant supervision by numberless functionaries.

The mere size of Western oceangoing ships barred open sailing (or surreptitious sneaking) upriver to the port city. Even going with the tide, the keels of the largest sailing vessels when fully loaded barely cleared the bottom of the deepest channels as far north as the anchorage at Huangpu (“Whampoa” to the English), about twelve miles short of Guangzhou. By law, non-Chinese vessels and personnel had to be attended at all times by successive troops of fee-collecting agents who oversaw every stage of their mission, starting with the hiring of local pilots licensed to take foreign ships upriver from Macau to Huangpu. There the cargoes were off-loaded to smaller “chop boats” leased from Cantonese merchants, for transport through a series of “chops” (toll stages) to the wharves at Guangzhou. All these procedures were under the ultimate control of the Hoppo, or Guangzhou-based imperial customs supervisor, who also superintended the performance of the same steps in reverse order for departing cargoes.¹¹

Foreigners were too dangerous to be left unsupervised for a minute, even for the purpose of going to buy food in Guangzhou, Huangpu, or anywhere else. That job and many others were ultimately controlled by the “cohong,” a consortium of Guangzhou merchants through whom Western merchant captains and supercargoes were obliged to channel all transactions. On behalf of individual European delegations, the different members of the cohong made official arrangements with local purveyors known as “compradors,” a name borrowed from Portuguese. Among other duties, the compradors bought each day’s food supplies for foreign ships’ crews and merchant delegations throughout their stay. Sometimes they also arranged for the hiring of local cooks to prepare Western meals to the visitors’ taste. After several decades the imperial court and the cohongs decided to house the Western merchant staffs in quarters of their own, and built a compound of “factories” (mansions-cum-warehouses) along the Guangzhou waterfront. Traders—originally obliged to return to Macau as soon as possible after finishing a mission—were eventually permitted to occupy these lodgings at certain seasons of the year.12

The barriers to East–West communication were many. Viewing unfettered talk between imperial subjects and nonsubjects as an invitation to trouble, Beijing harshly discouraged bilingual proficiency on both sides. Locals were officially forbidden to teach Chinese (including both Cantonese and Mandarin) to any European, and any acquisition of foreign languages by the Guangzhou citizenry at large seems to have been thought treasonous. For the purpose of business transactions with the English, numbers-crunching and other exchanges of necessary information were supposed to be carried out only by official interpreters through the sanctioned medium of pidgin English (modeled on the pidgin Portuguese that had been the first transcultural lingua franca of the delta). Nonetheless, some Westerners managed to pick up a little Cantonese, and some employees of the cohong got well beyond pidgin.¹³

The scene became more complicated after the Revolutionary War half a world away. American merchants had been hungrily coveting worldwide markets well before the signing of official peace treaties. The Empress of China, the first merchant ship bound for Chinese waters under the Stars and Stripes, sailed out of New York Harbor in February 1784, less than three months after the last British troops had evacuated the city. In a few years an official American “factory” had joined those of various European nations along the Guangzhou waterfront, and the merchants of the cohong were adjusting their ideas of foreigners to take in the interesting fact that the newcomers, though they ate like Englishmen, belonged to some other anomalous branch of humanity.

But the Canton factory system was already fraying, and with its decline Guangzhou would be relegated to a lesser role in a more intensive, more freely conducted international commerce. The first English-built steamships arrived in the region in the early 1830s. They drastically changed the terms on which foreign traffic could come and go throughout the Pearl River Delta. Not only could they sail in a dead calm, but they didn’t need deep keels to avoid pitching over in strong crosswinds. Large but shallow-bottomed cargo vessels could now bypass Huangpu along with native pilots and the entire “chop” gauntlet and travel directly upriver from any spot near the Pearl River mouth to Guangzhou.¹⁴ The British were thus able not just to navigate local waters with self-reliance but to graduate from opium smuggling to brazenly forcing the noxious trade on China in a series of armed naval initiatives that became the First Opium War of 1839–1842.

The Threshold of the Gold Rush

The First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanjing coincided with a cascade of domestic evils ravaging Guangdong along with the rest of China. An epoch of nationwide prosperity, peaking around and after the mid-eighteenth century, had contributed to a swift, drastic population growth that proved unsustainable. (By some scholarly estimates, China’s total population may have doubled from about 200 million to more than 400 million between 1750 and 1850.15) At the same time, opium trafficking, though still illicit, had assumed large enough dimensions to not only offset but outweigh the immense revenues derived from the export of Chinese tea and textiles. The hated treaty did not legitimize the trade—a blow made possible only by further wars leading to the 1860 Convention of Beijing—but it left the Qing regime helpless to stem an ever-increasing influx of British-conveyed Indian opium that would bring the economy to the brink of ruin.

Meanwhile, successive floods along several great rivers after the start of the century had begun triggering catastrophic soil loss. Devastating droughts alternated with floods. In the south, years of reduced or failed rice harvests ensued along with intermittent starvation. At the time of the Nanjing accord, remaining arable land in Guangdong was being more and more bitterly fought over by clans belonging to the Cantonese majority and a Han minority whom they despised as greedy northern carpetbaggers: the Hakka people, who had arrived in the southeastern provinces a few generations earlier, bringing their own language and habits.

During the 1850s the Punti (Cantonese) and Hakka conflict would reach the level of warfare, particularly in the Pearl River Delta.¹⁶ But it was dwarfed by more wide-reaching civil wars that broke out at the same time and nearly toppled the Qing dynasty. The bloodiest of these was led by a deranged Hakka who believed himself to be Jesus Christ’s younger brother and who preached a messianic gospel inspired by smatterings of Christian missionary teachings. Sweeping across many provinces between 1851 and 1864, the so-called Taiping (“Great Peace”) Rebellion is thought to have claimed some 20 million lives.17 Staggering though this figure sounds, it probably represents less than half the overall toll of midcentury turf wars and armed rebellions. The carnage barely made a dent in China’s ruinous labor surplus.

The First Opium War formed a grim prelude to these events. It began in 1839 with a Beijing-appointed commissioner destroying twenty thousand chests of opium confiscated from British factories at Guangzhou. It ended three years later at Nanjing with the first of many “unequal treaties” that foreign powers would exact from the hapless Qing rulers before the end of the century. Among other provisions, Great Britain was to receive unfettered commercial access to five port cities in which British and other foreign nationals would occupy their own quarters under their own laws, unanswerable to any Chinese authority. Guangzhou was the most important of these extraterritorial concessions. The remaining four were Shanghai, its slightly southerly neighbor Ningbo, and two cities locally called Amoy and Hokchiu (Xiamen and Fuzhou in pinyin, today’s official transliteration of the Mandarin language) situated on the Straits of Taiwan in Fujian Province. In addition, China was required to cede control of an obscure island named “Fragrant Harbor,” or Hong Kong in Cantonese (Xiang Gang in pinyin).¹⁸ The new British possession lay along the eastern side of the widening Pearl River mouth where it debouches into the South China Sea, some forty miles from Macau on the opposite side.

The harbor was the finest anywhere on the Chinese coastline south of Shanghai. The location had every advantage over Guangzhou, which soon was relegated to a secondary staging role as the four other mainland ports assumed their own importance. International traders and navigators rejoiced at being spared the tricky journey up and down the Pearl River. Still, the river’s supremacy as a conduit of goods moving between the interior and the seven seas continued unthreatened for some decades. What no one had foreseen was that the river and Hong Kong together would also become the great nineteenth-century conduit for people moving between China and the outside world.

For several years after its founding, Hong Kong remained an unpromising small settlement. What triggered its rise to a uniquely multi cultural and cosmopolitan entrepôt was the discovery of gold a few days’ journey from the even more obscure village of Yerba Buena, situated next to an equally excellent harbor on the other side of the Pacific. For a few frenetic decades, the little British colony and the California hamlet—now rechristened “San Francisco”—grew like siblings linked through a kind of transoceanic symbiosis.19

The race to California (by now a territory of the United States) from all parts of the Old and New Worlds got under way in earnest in 1849. An Australian gold rush followed in 1851, a brief stampede to the Canadian diggings at Fraser Canyon in 1858. Short-lived though they were, all three presaged a new era of Western-driven progress whose world-spanning wheels would be turned by brute manpower, recruited from wherever it could be found and massively deployed on every continent in such different arenas as mining, plantation-scale food production, and tremendous engineering projects. Today’s global Chinese diaspora is rooted in that epoch.

Never in history had there been a mass exodus of surplus manual labor from the Middle Kingdom to other nations. But there never had been anything like the mid-nineteenth-century fusion of circumstances in war-torn southern China. Among the dazzling range of goods circulating through Hong Kong during and after the Gold Rush, the most important export came to be human beings.

From the start, southern Cantonese in Hong Kong hugely outnumbered British-born colonists, usually by more than fifteen to one.²⁰ Ignoring cries of hanjian (“Traitor!”) from more tradition-minded Chinese, Pearl River Delta natives had soon begun heading to the new port in defiance of the ineffectual imperial ban on emigration. Few if any meant to make it their home for good; the idea of seeking permanent citizenship anywhere beyond one’s native village or district was all but unintelligible in southern Chinese culture. On the other hand, no one hesitated to temporarily exploit advantageous opportunities elsewhere, and Hong Kong was an ideal roost in which to look for or create them.²¹

Hong Kong was nothing like Guangdong under the Canton system. It offered relief from stifling layers of neo-Confucian bureaucracy, with unsupervised direct communication in several languages between private parties to contracts. Like San Francisco, it welcomed go-getters, a role to which Pearl River inhabitants seemed to have been born.

Hong Kong, the Toisanese, and Overseas Sojourning

The new order of things resulting from the encounter of an underfed, overpopulated China with Western colonial powers in late-Qing times introduced complexities to which Chinese and English terms are equally inadequate. It should first be understood that the custom of transplanting merchant communities to overseas dominions, either temporarily or semipermanently, was widespread throughout the Old World centuries before the Gold Rush. Armenians and Jews were the greatest (though not only) founders of trading diasporas as far east as India; Cantonese and Hokkienese almost as far west. The practice does not correspond to notions of emigration or immigration rooted in any modern view of the nation-state. The Mandarin Chinese name for such voyages, as well as voyagers, is qiao (Cantonese, kiuh), rendered in English as “sojourn” and “sojourners.” This translation has had its critics. But the words “emigration” or “immigration” and “emigrants/immigrants,” as usually understood in the United States, are much more distorting.

In any case, everything connected with sojourning outgrew manageable categories during the Qing era. The historian Wang Gungwu has proposed the convenient Mandarin term “hua shang” for the general class of Chinese entrepreneurs, middlemen, and brokers who came to prominence with the arrival of European adventurers in the sixteenth century and spread throughout the Nanyang, stimulating the circulation of money and goods.22 Immigration officials in California later sought to classify them as “merchants,” with some awkwardness. I have preferred Wang’s phrase because these agents’ and traffickers’ activities far exceed any conventional Western notion of merchantry. The hua shang are better described as the whole tribe of operators who converted plans—large or small, honorable or shady—into profitable action. They included many sorts of wheeler-dealers who would have a longstanding role in diffusing foods between China and other Asian regions.

The turmoil of late-Qing China helped to create another overseas contingent with no real counterpart in prior Chinese history. Wang refers to them as the hua gong, roughly corresponding to “Chinese manual labor” or “Chinese workers.”23 In mere numbers, they soon surpassed the hua shang. But the two groups’ fortunes would be complexly intertwined.

When Hong Kong became the undisputed magnet city for East–West commerce, an ambitious group of new arrivals from Guangzhou and the delta quickly made themselves indispensable to both their compatriots and the island’s new rulers, as hua shang engaged in a slew of business enterprises. With a resourcefulness and adaptability that astonished their supposed masters, they seized on any role that might have a future. In no time they had turned themselves into wholesale jobbers or retail shopkeepers, building contractors, artisans, makers of sampans and junks, carpenters and outfitters for Western seagoing vessels, restaurateurs, brothel keepers, landlords, bankers, currency dealers, and facilitators of traffic in many wares including two major foundations of Hong Kong’s future prosperity: opium and human beings.²⁴ Meanwhile, nearly anyone with a head for business also cultivated the knack of networking with all sorts of Westerners. Pearl River natives might be found managing wealthy English households as steward-factotums or handling entire departments of large European firms.

Other aggressive operators from all Western nations were now converging on Hong Kong, hoping to cash in on some facet of its many-dimensional boom. The Guangzhou and delta Cantonese were not alone. But they understood local resources and the xiang banfa mentality better than anyone else. They had huge advantages in already speaking and writing the language. Veterans of the earlier Canton trade in Guangzhou could steer them to supply webs for especially desirable porcelain goods, teas, or other trade articles as well as basic shipboard necessities. Still better, the hua shang could read the local labor market with unparalleled accuracy and recruit hua gong from particular districts in order to keep townsmen or clansmen clustered together on the other side of the sea—an all but obligatory aid to both morale and ease of communication.²⁵

The dozen or so southern counties of the delta encompassed different sublanguages or dialects as well as strong contrasts between haves and have-nots. The better-off mostly lived in Guangzhou and three somewhat urbanized counties or districts (Mandarin, xian; Cantonese, sin) to the south, on the west side of the river. Their names were, in modern pinyin, Nanhai, Panyu, and Shunde. Beyond Shunde, another county called Zhongshan stretched southward toward the port at Macau. Xinhui county was situated on Zhongshan’s western border; west of that lay a group of three other counties. Their names were Kaiping, Enping, and—the southernmost and poorest of the lot—Xinning on the South China Sea coast. These eight counties would account for almost all Chinese immigration to the United States before, and long after, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.26

The importance of Xinning, which was officially renamed Taishan in 1914, is unique enough to warrant some inconsistency in rendering Chinese names. The community’s own pronunciations were “Sunning” and “Toishan,” or more commonly “Toisan” or “Hoisan”; “Toisan” and “Sunning” are the versions probably most familiar today to people with ancestral links to the county. Of course nobody there spoke Mandarin, and even the Cantonese of Guangzhou was strange to the local ear. As the memoirist William Poy Lee has observed in our own time, the seven-toned “Big City Cantonese” was positively “melodic, like a stanza of music,” while Toisanese sentences were unleashed at piercing volume “like a mortar barrage, with consonants, vowels, all the tones meshed into a tight, barbed clump of earthy linguistics.”²⁷ (Many Mandarin-speakers felt the same about all versions of Cantonese.)

Workers leaving Toisan and the other counties transplanted jealous parochial loyalties to California and other parts of the United States. Most people firmly identified with either the prosperous Three Counties (“Sam Yup” in Cantonese or “San Yi” in Mandarin) of Nanhai, Panyu, and Shunde or the less fortunate Four Counties (“Sze Yup” or “Si Yi”) of Xinhui, Kaiping, Enping, and Sunning, the future Toisan. (Zhongshan also had some representation in California but sent more workers to Hawaii.) They clung proudly to their own county or even village speech-ways—indeed, their deepest allegiance was to people of the same surname, indicating descent from a common lineage.

The Hong Kong labor recruiters dispatched more people to California from Toisan than anywhere else in China.²⁸ Unfortunately, exact statistics are impossible to reconstruct, and I have found wildly different numbers published with little documentation. But it is beyond dispute that nearly all the Chinese who came to California in the nineteenth century were from the Pearl River Delta, Four Counties natives greatly outnumbered Three Counties natives, and by far the largest Four Counties contingent was Toisanese.

The human traffic out of late-Qing-era China was not limited to Hong Kong and reached many parts of the world besides California. For sheer brutality, much of this lucrative shipping business came second only to the African slave trade that it replaced. Pearl River Delta Cantonese making the Hong Kong to San Francisco voyage were luckier than many others. Most went of their own will, as a conscious risk in pursuit of gain. For a few years the chief object was gold; from 1849 on, America was the “Gold Mountain” (Cantonese, gum saan; Mandarin, jin shan) in Chinese dreams. A more lasting goal was to earn money for the support of families back in Guangdong, and ideally for final return to one’s native village, alive or dead. (When possible, delta-born sojourners made advance arrangements to have their bones shipped home for burial; again, Hong Kong was the usual conduit.) Enough Toisanese families ended up receiving steady remittances from Gold Mountain for several generations to outweigh all other contributions to the district’s economy and leave it completely dependent on sojourning sons, husbands, and fathers.29

The story was very different for millions of other hua gong. The worldwide demand for manual labor had ramped up just as slavery was being abolished throughout the Americas and elsewhere. Filling the manpower shortage became an urgent concern for all the colonial powers as well as entrepreneurs in newly independent states. A notorious system of press-ganging sprang up in all the Chinese ports opened to international trade in 1842, and eventually in the many other ports where Westerners grabbed similar concessions in the next decades.

Bands of “crimps”—thugs hired to recruit people for either Western or Chinese labor brokers—kidnapped or decoyed able-bodied men to confined harborside coops known to Westerners as “barracoons” and to Chinese as “pigsties” (zhu zi juan). There they were gulled or beaten into signing indentures for a certain term of servitude and crammed like animals onto ships bound for foreign plantations, mines, or railway projects. If they were lucky or unlucky enough to survive the voyage, their indentures were made over to new masters and they served out their terms under conditions as brutal as those formerly visited on black slaves.

The most notorious points of origin were Macau, Xiamen (Amoy) in Fujian Province, and Shanghai (which gave its name to the usual recruiting technique). The most terrible destinations were Peru, Cuba, and the West Indies. The semi-enslaved victims of the trade came to be known as “coolies,” a word that made its way from several Indian languages into several Chinese languages as well as English. Originally the English term carried only the neutral meaning (carried over from Indian usage) of “hired worker.” But as the barbarous indenture system spread, it took on inflamed emotional overtones. Angry debates about the word’s exact application spread to Western political theaters.30

Hong Kong had some share in this evil traffic. But it would also be the scene of the first British efforts to clean up the coolie trade. Besides, a large proportion of hua gong leaving Hong Kong were voluntarily embarked for the United States, Australia, and Canada. Conditions aboard many ships bound for those destinations might be hard to endure, but they were less monstrous than on the notorious “floating hells” that carried thousands to early deaths in South American guano mines or Cuban sugar plantations. Instead of being forced or duped into signing indentures, passengers without ready money usually traveled under “credit ticket” arrangements by which their fare was advanced to the shipping company by a labor broker or other third party, to be repaid with interest out of their eventual earnings.³¹ Nearly all Toisanese newcomers to Gold Mountain had shipped as credit ticket passengers.

It would be a mistake to think of the Toisanese and their Four Counties neighbors as hapless yokels with no understanding of the modern world. Perhaps because the Four Counties had the poorest soil and most marginal farm incomes in the delta, local people already had a history of frequently turning their hand to other trades in Three Counties manufacturing centers on the outskirts of Guangzhou (for instance, iron works in the town of Foshan, a major source of woks). Between growing seasons, many Toisanese routinely traveled to the Three Counties for temporary jobs at foundries or textile mills.³² After 1849 they would set out for Hong Kong and America not as unworldly naïfs but as possessors of survival skills on several different levels.

Certainly they did not arrive in San Francisco like friendless shipwreck victims. From the start, many Pearl River Delta and Hong Kong hua shang were involved in the California traffic not just as planners and facilitators but as passengers who would climb off the schooner or steamer ready to start re-creating practical home comforts within weeks or days.33 Thanks to them, many other Chinese fresh off the boat found themselves better equipped to survive in the rude beginnings of San Francisco than many or most Yankees arriving from the East Coast or Midwest.

The factotums seem to have had an extraordinary sense of organization. Their grasp of what people would need on the other side extended from clothes and shoes to soy sauce and prefabricated houses. In both Hong Kong and San Francisco, these wheeler-dealers were equally quick to discern the developing contours of the local “service” economy and managed to have crucial personnel at hand in time to start playing a part in it. Among these were cooks. Who they were and how they were recruited are not questions that ever troubled any contemporary record keeper on either side of the Pacific. But there can be no doubt that experienced professional cooks were part of the San Francisco Chinese community from the start of its existence, and they were already familiar with Western appetites.