Chinese immigration to Sydney

He married an English woman; Sarah Thompson, in 1823, changed his name to John Shying, and by 1829 held the licence for a Parramatta public house, the Lion.

The first large group arrived from Amoy (Xiamen) on the Nimrod, which docked at Henry Moore's wharf at Millers Point in October 1848, where about half of the 121 Chinese passengers disembarked.

By early 1852 news of gold had reached southern China, and many men from Cantonese and Xiamen shippers arrived under a credit-ticket system, with fares to be paid once fortunes were made.

Prince Henry Hospital was established at then isolated Little Bay, south of the city, in response to an outbreak of smallpox in 1881, accompanied by strident anti-Chinese sentiment.

In 1880, for example, the Eastern and Australian Steamship Company made 19 trips between Sydney and Hong Kong, moving 2,564 people in and 2,569 back to China, leaving a deficit of five.

Several public rallies were held, and following a large anti-Chinese torchlight meeting in Hyde Park, a group of protesters decided to march on Parliament House to demand exclusion of the Chinese.

and admitted that without the opium problem that 'it would be impossible to say that these, among the most unfortunate class of women in our midst, had not improved their surroundings by crossing the racial line' and 'there is not ground for suspicion that our alien population is now a danger to youthful virtue.'

[17] The commission admitted that 'The European women who lived as prostitutes amongst the Chinese appear, in nearly every case, to have fled to their present haunts as to refuges from the brutality of men of their own race.

[19] By the 1870s there was also an established group of Chinese places at the Haymarket end of town, in Goulburn and Campbell Streets and their alleyways, near the Belmore fruit and vegetable markets.

In the once-notorious Durand's Alley, long recognised in official health reports as a 'wretched rookery', a large building run by Kow You Man could accommodate 100 men.

Many of the wealthier, established Chinese merchants chose to remain in The Rocks or to move to suburban villas, such as famous restaurateur and bon vivant Mei Quong Tart, who built his family seat in Ashfield.

When the commissioners of the 1891 Royal Commission into Alleged Chinese Gambling and Immorality visited some of these families they found, to their great surprise, that their houses were neat and homely.

The 1891 Royal Commission noted that leading stores often doubled as bases for clan tongs (societies) which developed to look after the interests of men from different localities in China.

They provided letter writers, ferried money home through personal chains of contact rather than untrustworthy banks, gave legal support, adjudicated disputes and attended to burials and removal of bones to China.

By the early twentieth century, a number of Chinese language newspapers published in Sydney were actively arguing over both local issues and the dramatic evolution of politics in China.

Dr Sun Yat Sen, political leader of the republican movement, was conscious that overseas Chinese were a potential source of support and finance, especially if cultural connections were kept alive, and he encouraged the establishment of Chinese-language schools, such as that opened in Elizabeth Street, Sydney in 1910.

There was wide coverage in the English language press in Sydney, and a fine welcoming reception aboard the SS Victoria, of the recently formed ambitious China-Australia Mail Steamship Line.

By mid-1921 the Nationalists had raised the $10,000 promised at the conference for the construction of a new building with reading rooms, lecture hall and residential quarters in Ultimo Road, which opened with great fanfare and the hoisting of the Republican flag in 1922.

But China did not prosper, the local steamship line quickly succumbed to a freight pricing war designed to squeeze it out of the market, and over the next decades continuing immigration restrictions generated a plethora of sad stories of people smuggling gone wrong, and harassment by authorities.

The republicans, led by General Chiang Kai-shek, were now pitted against emerging communist forces under Mao Tse-tung, and gradually the Kuomintang came to represent more conservative elements.

This primary loyalty was never understood by the local intelligence agencies, which frequently failed to unravel and make sense of political connections in the Chinese community.

[22] In the early dark days of the 1930s, with Australia favouring the Japanese in trade and ignoring Japan's expansionary plans for China and the Pacific, the Sydney Chinese community was ever anxious to educate the rest.

This was the impetus for the George Ernest Morrison Lecture established by William Liu in 1932, and for a number of books and pamphlets written to put the Chinese case.

The local conditions generated by the Second World War were crucial to the slow collapse of the White Australia policy and many Chinese organised carefully to maximise their chances.

During and immediately after the war increasing numbers of Chinese were readily changing jobs and getting away with it, which helped build community tolerance and resistance to the immigration employment restrictions.

Arthur Gar Locke Chang, recalling that advice from China was to lie low, not march on May Day and not rock the boat, described these times as 'lonely, isolated, prosecuted and persecuted'.

After 1951 Chinese students began arriving under the Colombo Plan from Singapore, Malaya and Hong Kong, and while many returned to become part of the educated elite of Southeast Asia, many stayed, married, or came back in later decades.

When the anti-Chinese tabloid Truth asked through its columns why Jap Kuan Wong[Chinese script needed], who had come to Sydney as a student in 1938 was still here in 1954, the ploy backfired.

By the end of the decade, Dixon Street, a precinct no longer associated with the markets, received a facelift and became a pedestrian mall, complete with damen (arched entrance).

Areas of most dramatic population growth have been the City of Sydney and Hurstville, with growing numbers in Auburn, Ashfield, Parramatta, Ryde, Chatswood, Hornsby and Willoughby.