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Choie Sew Hoy (1838-1901) The most prominent individual in New Zealand's 19th century Chinese community, Choie Sew Hoy, probably arrived in 1868 after venturing to the gold rushes in California and Australia. He started a successful business in Dunedin that provided provisions, loans and advice to other Chinese goldseekers. He also invested in numerous gold-mining ventures, including his innovative Big Beach dredging operation on the Shotover River and hydraulic sluicing on the Nokomai River, which led to a revival of the goldfields in northern Southland. Sew Hoy was active in the anti-opium movement. His second marriage was to a European woman, Eliza Prescott, who bore him two children.

Chew Chong (1828-1920) When Chew Chong arrived in Otago in 1867, he focused his energies not on gold but on exporting scrap metal to China. Later, he travelled throughout New Zealand as an itinerant peddler. In Taranaki, he spotted abundant supplies of an edible fungus highly prized in China, for which he set up a major exporting operation in the fungus. With returns from it, he built the Jubilee Butter factory. He was the first known butter manufacturer in the country to use mechanical refrigeration in his factory, and was also said to have developed a new type of rotary butter churn.

James Shum (1853-1914) James Shum was an ordinary Chinese gold miner who was close to the Rev Alexander Don, the Presbyterian minister who evangelised among the New Zealand Chinese and is the chief source of information about them. Shum arrived at Port Chalmers in 1871. Among the places he prospected were Frazer River, Naseby, Moa Creek, Ida Valley and Ophir. By 1875, he had earned enough to take a trip home and marry, but he grew alienated from his family and other Chinese miners. Rev Don baptised Shum in 1896. In 1905, he returned to China, remarried and worked for Christian missionaries until his death.

From issue: Spring 2003

Rich History Hidden in Gold Mining Country

by Paul Titus

Paul Titus records a timely project to ensure that an influential piece of New Zealand History is no longer hidden under the remains of the Otago gold mining era.

The Rev. Alexander Don with Chinese gold miners at the Kyeburn diggings, Otago. Photo : Alexander Turnball Library* F-19156-1/2

Like all pioneering history, the story of New Zealand's Chinese prospectors is a remarkable one of adversity and adaptation.

Their story was long ignored as the mainstream of New Zealand history emerged out of the confluence of European and Polynesian peoples. From 1865, Chinese immigrants joined the gold rush in Central Otago as they had in California, Australia and British Columbia. The wealth Chinese gold prospectors generated made a significant contribution to the early development of Otago although, until recent decades, it was largely unknown and unacknowledged.

In 2002, some of that history gained public prominence when Prime Minister Helen Clark apologised for the poll tax and other discriminatory laws imposed on Chinese immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Now the Historic Places Trust is set to enhance public awareness further by registering 10 key sites that illustrate various aspects of Chinese involvement in the mining economy (see short story, opposite).

According to census figures, the number of Chinese in the first wave of immigration to New Zealand peaked at just over 5000 in 1881.At that time, they made up about 40 per cent of Otago's miners. By then, some Chinese had shifted to the goldfields of the West Coast and others moved into the wider economy as shopkeepers, market gardeners and orchardists. Some even became labourers, shearers and cooks on stations and farms.

Dunedin physician and historian Dr James Ng has written a definitive four-volume study of the New Zealand Chinese, Windows on a Chinese Past. Ng says most of those who came here seeking gold were from the countryside around Canton, and he still marvels at how they managed to travel 10,000 kilometres and survive in the most southern goldfields in the world.

Historian Dr James Ng. Photo: David Wall

"Chinese peasants were the backbone of their country but they had no tradition of mining. They were mostly illiterate even in Chinese but they were used to hardship and frugality. One advantage they had was that the Cantonese were among China's strongest exponents of the family system. They formed kinship and family groupings both at home and in foreign parts, where members found help, comradeship and trust. If six people joined together to go mining, they could cancel out any disadvantages of lack of skills or resources. Only one needed to speak English for them to communicate."

To a large extent, the experience of the Chinese miners was the same as that of their European counterparts. They put up with the same deprivations and used the same mining technology. But an additional dimension to the experience of the Chinese in Otago was their outsider status.

While a few prominent individuals were accepted into European society, most lived separate, parallel lives. They had distinct, largely self-sufficient communities; stuck to a diet of rice, pork and imported Chinese foods; relaxed by gambling; and preferred opium to alcohol.

Ng says Chinese miners initially came to Otago from Australia at the invitation of local businessmen with the support of the Otago Provincial Council. Perhaps not surprisingly, many European miners opposed their presence.

The Rev George McNeur with Chinese miners at Macetown, near Arrowtown, while touring the Otago goldfields before departing to South China as a pioneer missionary. Photo : Alexander Turnball Library* F-19150-1/2

As the gold ran out, antagonism against the Chinese rose, and the Government passed restrictive laws affecting them, including the £10 entry poll tax that jumped to £100 in 1896.

On the other hand, the Chinese prospectors made little effort to assimilate since their main incentive was to send money to their families in China and eventually return there themselves.

"The Cantonese goldseekers were sojourners," Ng says. "For a contemporary parallel, think of Kiwis working in the oilfields of the Middle East. They are not interested in learning Arabic or intermarrying. They mix with their own kind and they want to earn the most money in the shortest possible time, then beggar off home."

What is the enduring legacy of the early Chinese in Otago? A few notable individuals left their mark on the landscape and in the history books, and they are well remembered today. Most, however, lived transient lives in remote locations, and few visible traces of them remain.

In the first category is Choie Sew Hoy, the Dunedin-based merchant who developed a new type of bucket dredge to work his Big Beach claim on the Shotover River. It was the prototype for what became known as the "New Zealand gold dredge," which developed an international reputation. Along with his son Choie Kum Poy, Sew Hoy went on to develop large-scale hydraulic elevating and sluicing on their claim at Nokomai.

The town of Lawrence was the chief gateway to the goldfields and had a major Chinese community. The physical remains in Lawrence illustrate the dichotomy of the Chinese experience in Otago in which some people were integrated while others remained outsiders. Chinese were not allowed to live in Lawrence so they set up a shantytown a kilometre out of town. Nor were they permitted to bury their dead in the European cemetery so they established their own graveyard.

But Lawrence also has two landmarks associated with successful businessman Sam Chiew Lain. They are the European-style Chinese Empire Hotel, which sat beside the Chinese camp on the town's outskirts, and Chew Lain's mausoleum, an imposing monument sponsored by his European Masonic brothers.

The chore of documenting the remnants of the gold mining era has fallen largely to archaeologists. As project archaeologist on the Clutha Power project from 1977 to 1987, Dr Neville Ritchie excavated 23 Chinese mining sites and surveyed dozens more in the effort to document cultural resources that were to be affected by five proposed dams on the Clutha River.

Ritchie says there are some 580 recorded Chinese archaeological sites in New Zealand. Those associated with mining include dwellings, rock shelters, water races, dams and workings. For the untrained eye, it is difficult to distinguish most of them from European mining sites.

"The Chinese arrived five years later than the so-called Australian miners, who were the first to arrive in Otago. In some places, the Europeans moved off and the Chinese had the goldfields to themselves. In others, the Chinese and Europeans lived cheek by jowl.

"While it can be easy to identify a Chinese dwelling site by fragments of rice bowls, food containers and opium pipes, it is more difficult to distinguish gold workings. Some people have suggested certain characteristic features, such as neatly stacked tailings, are indicative of Chinese workings. But it is not as simplistic as that.

"At first glance, most Chinese sites look European. Chinese often bought already worked ground and methodically reworked it so there is a mix of influences in a single site. Also, Europeans and Chinese miners worked the ground in similar ways. Chinese miners did a lot of sluicing but there was no 100 per cent Chinese technology. All the Otago miners used technology that has been tried and proven for alluvial mining over thousands of years," Ritchie says.

One of the most important Chinese settlements in Central Otago was Cromwell's Chinatown. In its heyday, it had about 30 huts and 40 residents, while 400 miners lived in the surrounding area and visited its stores and gaming rooms regularly. Ritchie led the effort to excavate the Cromwell camp and other sites in the area before they were flooded by Lake Dunstan, created by the construction of the Clyde Dam.

In terms of heritage, the most fortunate consequence of the Clutha River power scheme was that, to compensate for the loss of Cromwell's Chinatown, Ritchie was funded to excavate the Chinese camp at Arrowtown. What was once an overgrown ruin of 10 Chinese huts choked with weeds, willows and gorse has now been restored and renovated. It attracts 100,000 visitors a year and includes Ah Lum's store, the most intact Chinese store of dozens that once dotted the Otago goldfields.

"We had historic photos and archaeological evidence that enabled us to rebuild some of the huts to show what they looked like. Others were stabilised as ruins. The Arrowtown camp is the most complete and accessible of all the Chinese mining sites. It is at the end of Arrowtown's main street so people can do their shopping, then play tourist and wander down to the camp and go to the museum to see the artefacts from the excavations," Ritchie says.

Despite such success stories, archaeologists such as Ritchie believe more should be done to document, protect and publicise sites associated with the Chinese goldminers. No one has yet done a systematic study of Chinese sites on the West Coast, for example. The large Chinese camp outside Lawrence is another potential gold mine of information about the Chinese experience. One proposal suggests it should be excavated and serve as an interpretation centre and starting point for a driving tour of Otago's Chinese heritage sites.

As part of its poll tax apology, the Government has established a reconciliation package. Historic Places Trust senior archaeologist Dr Rick McGovern-Wilson hopes some of those funds will go to projects that will make people more aware of the Chinese presence in New Zealand.

McGovern-Wilson is one of the driving forces behind the move to add Chinese sites to the Register. He says most of the sites designated by the project will be potential archaeological sites and registration will help preserve material conveying how people lived.

"I believe archaeology should be used as an educational tool," he says. "My job is to tell stories about the past, and the role of the Chinese in our society is a story that has been overlooked. The Chinese miners of the late 19th century were socially ostracised for who they were but in time they came to be part of the economic backbone of the Dunedin economy.

"The isolated huts and workings that remain are redolent with the stories of their trials and tribulations, the endless hard work that saw so few of them ever return alive to their homeland."

Paul Titus is the principal in Titus Writes , a network of freelance writers, photographers and graphic artists