Slavery in All But The Name: The Enslavement, Trafficking & Fatalistic Labour of the Chinese
Foreword: The world was built by Black, Brown AND Yellow hands. Everywhere in the world that holds a Sinodiaspora has a part in this bloody history of Chinese peoples, one that our own often refuses to talk about and acknowledge. Our elders often believe that our dignity are endangered by speaking about our pain, but our stories are slowly dying with them.
Our pain is forgotten, we begin to lose ourselves, our roots, the view of the world and its divisions, and instead turn on ourselves and blame ourselves for our afflictions.
We begin to disbelieve in our own freedoms and our lack thereof, and we lose the words to explain our emotions and the intergenerational trauma which affects us and shall continue to affect us. We are unable to excise our pain.
Some of these resources might attribute blame to POC, it should not detract from the fact that the Eurocolonisers OWNED, built and perpetuated this system of slavery despite some "insider" actors. That it was the British and French who colonised parts of southern China and its coasts through the multiple Opium Wars [4 Sept 1839 – 24 Oct 1860], setting up trading and trafficking ports there. The Opium Wars saw the Eurocolonisers extort and rob China of her resources and instead of paying China in silver, forced her to submit by signing a treaty which accepted “payment” in opium, a drug that began to ravage the empire with addictions. The peoples starved and cost of living skyrocketed especially with the waters surrounding China being filled with pirates, slavers and robbers.
It should also be acknowledged that in SEA, especially the Malacca Straits, it was the joint British-Malaya administration (British, Malay Sultanate, Malay peoples, Brown and Black indigenous peoples in the region) who owned the labour of Chinese coolies. This is a core part in the history of how the anti-Chinese, pro-Bumi apartheid in Malaysia has come to be and its violent Sinophobic history.
+ I want everyone to look at the pictures of the coolies wearing tang jackets, when it was all they could afford (and it wasn't even Han Chinese, it was Manchurian designs because Chinese designs were banned during the Qing Dynasty). These keepsakes from home become the telltale attires of their foreignness, slavery, expendability and humiliation. These are my ancestors who worked the meat off their bones and died building your infrastructures, that allow you your comforts and luxuries and consumption. Because the Eurocolonisers had taken everything from them at home, and now, shall take everything from them abroad. And now you non-Chinese people want to wear it these days as a fashion statement.
Gale Review: The Rise & Fall of Chinese Indentured Labour
China was one of the major sources of coolies to many different locations across North America, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. The coolie trade mainly involved the British, the French, the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Dutch—all of whom had their own coolie systems. Most coolies were recruited by local Chinese agents (called “brokers” or “crimps”) hired by their colonial customers, with the indentured labourers held in barracoons, and then shipped out of Macao. Free emigrants, on the other hand, left via Hong Kong and travelled to mostly British colonies such as Malaya, Australia, and North America.
The coolie trade became a centre of controversy after it was connected with rising cases of malpractice and even serious crime. Crimps were reported to obtain coolies—who were often poor labourers—via unlawful means like kidnapping and nefarious schemes of deception. Thus forced into labour, coolies suffered severe abuse and mistreatment while held in the barracoons and on the journey overseas. The voyages were dangerous, with coolies confined in crowded ships with poor living conditions, cruel masters, and, often, outbreaks of disease and mutinies. As a result, mortality rates were high among coolies. Even in their destination countries—most especially in Latin America—the coolie was “hard worked, badly fed, poorly clothed, separated not unfrequently from his friends and countrymen,” without support and enforcement of contractual rights in a foreign land. So great were the coolie’s troubles that suicide was a known recourse among the population.
A debate arose surrounding the degree of freedom in coolie labour, and whether the coolie trade truly counted as free labour or free emigration. Those opposed to the coolie trade argued that it did not qualify as emigration, defined as “the voluntary exodus of a people from their native country to settle in some distant one.” The coolie trade was frequently compared and even equated to the slave trade in all but name. Certainly the timing of the ban on slavery and the emergence of coolies suggested a strong correlation between the two. In retrospect, the discourse on coolie labour was covertly coloured by the very same dehumanizing elements inherent in slavery. Coolies were often referred to using animalistic language, were called “pigs,” and were sometimes even branded as cattle would be.
Amid the controversy, Britain insisted that the evils of the coolie trade did not apply to the British system, alleging it to be distinct from and far more upright than those of other nations. British writings and correspondences lauded the nation’s system as, “in spite of some faults, the most openly conducted, being under direct government supervision, and so far as the public can judge, not amenable to any strictures on its honesty or its humanity.” They portrayed it as a successful system of “bona fide emigration” with “purely voluntary expatriation,” where “the good treatment of the emigrant after arrival at his destination is secured by official guarantee.”
Human Trafficking Asia: 1900 Preliminary Census
The often egregious exploitation of South and Southeast Asian migrant workers in the Persian Gulf and East Asia is frequently cited as evidence that 27-32 million mostly Asian men, women, and children remain de facto slaves in the early twenty-first century.
Many indentured labor historians, echoing the concerns of nineteenth-century British abolitionists, have argued that the 3.7 million contractual workers, mostly from India and China but also from Africa, Indochina, Java, Japan, and Melanesia, who migrated throughout and beyond the colonial plantation world between the 1830s and 1920s were the victims of a ‘new system of slavery’ that developed following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834.
While research over the last half century has established that some 12.5 million men, women, and children were exported from sub-Saharan Africa to the Americas between 1500 and 1866, it is becoming increasingly apparent that transnational/pan-regional slave trading elsewhere in the globe was also massive.
The trans-Saharan and western Indian Ocean trades exported an estimated 10.9-11.6 million Africans toward the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia between 650 and 1900.
Europeans also trafficked large numbers of slaves beyond the Atlantic. British, Danish, Dutch, French, and Portuguese traders exported a minimum of 450,000-565,000 Africans, Indians, and Southeast Asians to European establishments within the Indian Ocean basin between 1500 and 1850, while the Manila galleons carried tens of thousands of Asian slaves to Central and South America during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Millions more were held in bondage in East Asia. Slaves comprised approximately 30 percent of Korea’s population from the eleventh into the eighteenth century. The complexities of defining slave status in China make it difficult to determine how widespread slavery was in the Middle Kingdom, but arguments that at least 2 percent of an early seventeenth-century population of 150-160 million were described variously as ‘slaves’ or ‘bondservants’ (e.g., nubi, nuli, nupu, bandang) suggest that large numbers of men, women, and children endured lives of servitude.
Historians have long held that China housed one of the globe’s largest markets in human beings before 1949, a market supplied in part from foreign sources such as Vietnam, which exported thousands of women and girls to southern China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and probably long before then as well.
Recent research reveals the existence of well-developed domestic slave trading networks during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. Guangdong, for instance, exported slaves from its coastal areas to inland regions while receiving the same from Guangxi and beyond. These networks also supplied slaves to the Portuguese comptoir at Macau, established in 1557, which, in addition to Chinese slaves, received perhaps 16,400-24,400 Japanese and Korean slaves via the Portuguese factory at Nagasaki between the late 1550s and 1600.
Slaves flowed in turn from Macau to the Spanish-controlled Philippines, from whence thousands of South, Southeast, and East Asian slaves were carried across the Pacific to Mexico and Peru during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chinese slaves also reached Portuguese Goa and Mozambique as well as Mauritius during the eighteenth century.
Beyond Chinese Coolies as Victims
THE CHINESE-MANCHURIAN GOVT INVESTIGATING THE COOLIE TRADE…eventually bans the coolie trade due to evidence of slavery, exploitation and abuse.
This paper was written by a white man who aims to disprove that the Chinese were “taken against their will”, and instead that they “had agency” when deciding to emigrate. His main argument is that the coolies would not define themselves as “slaves”—which is ignorant to how Chinese dignity/“face” operates. He argues it was only the Chinese govt and other white govts who wanted to paint “the victim narrative”.
He continues to argue that there is a gap in coolie voices, which informs me that he didn’t interview coolies himself. I will only be quoting the parts that evidences the slavery and coercive trafficking of the Chinese, you can read the rest of the article yourself.
The recruiting process was depicted by critics of the coolie trade as a thinly veiled system of kidnapping. The fact that Chinese sent to Cuba and Peru traveled on vessels that had been African slave ships and that the emigrants were held below decks with armed officers meting out strict corporal punishments lent weight to this argument. One British judge in Hong Kong compared the coolie trade to slavery and declared emphatically, “the coolies were being forcibly taken against their wills.”
An 1859 New York Times article describing a rebellion against coolie traders ran a headline “Kidnapping Coolie—Excitement at Shanghai.”
The Cuba Commission that was sent by the Chinese government to collect testimony from coolies working on plantations in Cuba in 1873 provided evidence from over two thousand Chinese laborers who said they were tricked and deceived by crimps (recruiters). Hsein Tso-Pang and fourteen other coolies stated that:
“the foreigners of Macao sent out vicious Chinese in order to kidnap and decoy men and to place these in barracoons and on board of ships from which they cannot escape, chastise them there without restraint, and conveying them against their will to Havana, after removing their queues and changing their clothing, offer them for sale in the men-market.”
Others claimed they had been induced by “offers of employment abroad at high wages,” only to later discover that they had been “sold as slaves.”
According to the report, eight or nine out of every ten Chinese emigrants to Cuba had been taken against their will, however, the vast majority of these had been either decoyed (72%), entrapped (5%), or ensnared (10%). Only 7 percent indicated that they had been kidnapped, the same percentage who said they had emigrated voluntarily.
Historian Philip Kuhn notes that although some Chinese emigrants paid for their own passage and some were coerced into signing contracts, most fell somewhere in-between, having indebted themselves to merchants, brokers, shipping companies, or relatives to pay for their passage.
The Dilemma of Freedom: A Chinese Story in the Coolie Diaspora to Cuba 1847–1853,
( DURING THIS PERIOD, THE “CHINESE” ELITES AND GOVERNMENT WERE MANCHURIAN, NOT HAN CHINESE. )
Since 1847 dealers have played a leadership role in hiring labor; therefore, they represent the terrible practice of recruiting Chinese coolies, which implemented: pillage acts, tricks, bribing, and violence. Moreover, thousands of Chinese peasants embark unintentionally on transcontinental ships geared to tropical prosperous Caribbean islands. Thus, several historical elements deepen the first relationship between dealers and Chinese coolies, because 19th moral values emerged regarding freedom promises coined by French revolutionaries.
With those ideas in mind, it is worthwhile to understand the historical position of the Chinese coolie, who fought against adverse socio-economic conditions in China. They probably also receive a slight relief from the dealers, a product of the fake promises. In any case, the dealers represented the promoting agent of this perverse system of hiring labor force; however, they were just part of an economic complex protected by a legal frame. The central hypothesis shows the existence of a superior morality conviction, covered by a simple letter of freedom: “the contracting.” This document demonstrates that the Chinese coolie is a citizen with many civil rights such as freedom of work, housing, feeding, and health, which in reality means a new manner of slavery.
The manner dealers apply work engagement with the coolies aggravated existing notions regarding freedom because they exposed racial policies and European civilization notions, combined with a deep socio-economic crisis inside the Chinese Imperium since 1839.
The first evidence of an abnormality in the shipping of Chinese coolies arrived after an uprising in the traditional route between Xiamen and San Francisco. The Robert Bowne’s cruise, under the command of Capital Bryson, experienced a significant revolt in reaction to unfair treatment by the crew.
The Chinese coolie indenture system shows significant shortcomings in less than a decade. John Bowring, governor in Hong Kong and consul of New Grenadian affairs in China, reported irregularities in the indenture system. The main focus of his denounces is based on the tactics and strategies delivered by the dealers and their goals of capturing Chinese coolies.
“The men are kidnapped and carried off by force, without any prudence of a contract or wages…”; “Premiums are paid in China for such Coolies as are induced or forced to emigrate, by persons who contract to procure Chinese labourers, or by captains of the ships chartered to conveyed them”; “We have received some dreadful revelations as to the trade in coolies. It appears that there is now organized in the southern parts of China system of kidnapping to the full as bad as ever practiced by the native chiefs of Africa in the worst days of the slave trade”; “The Chinese agents decoy or force their victims on board their boats, and torture them until they wring from them a consent to become ‘free emigrants”; “Native Chinese are employed to entice from their homes such as may be persuaded, from hope to profit, to leave their friends.”
Among those tactics stood out the use of Chinese natives, which had the mission of visiting the nearest poor areas, where they must capture men engaged in gambling, opium, and liquor. After the kidnapping, the dealers took the Chinese coolies to the barracks on stand-by of the highest bidder. Simultaneously, the dealers implemented new tactics of technical resistance, such as distraction, geared toward the policies of halting the indenture system. In this scene, judges found it impossible to designate the punishment and the crimes to dealers and ship captains, which allow the indenture system to survive.
In 1855 regulation to contract Chinese coolies gained more conditions, based on the Chinese Passengers Act agreement. Its enactment expresses the deep social crisis related to the Chinese exactions, who for more than a lustrum immigrated under severe abuses. Thus, the most common demand consisted of health and safety on board the transoceanic vessels, although it was an aspect deliberately overlooked.
...while the emigration officer at Hong Kong had refused to grant a certificate for more than 81 Chinese coolies being taken to sea by the John Calvin, bound for Havana, that vessel carried away 297 such passengers, of whom 110 perished on the voyage by suicide and disease, and more in quarantine and hospital at Havana.
For instance, a woman with a child on her back caused the child’s bonnet to fall as she passed two men; on their picking it up she expressed her thanks and offered them some cakes for their civility; these were eaten, and being drugged, the men sat down stupefied; the woman’s confederates then came up, offered to carry the two men home, but lodged them in a receiving-ship instead.
On the contrary, the hiring of Chinese coolies continued to increase, most likely following the experience of the African trade. At the same time, the dealers developed better collaboration strategies with the conveyors, excited about the rising income. But unfortunately, kidnapping, extortion, and violence in acquiring Chinese coolies tend to rise, despite all the efforts to control the traffic.
“The Chinese agents are usually outlaw… mandarins-men of no character—who speedily amass large fortunes. The brokers are the worst and most depraved of men. They obtain the coolies by various devices; they have agents everywhere who are on the lookout for men, and who kidnap and entrap as many as they can. Once in the power of the brokers, they never regain liberty.
The police made a descent upon the vessel, and the men were brought on shore. From their statement, it appeared that they were from keeping Chi, and had been hired ostensibly to go to ‘the betel plantations’ in the neighborhood of Singapore. In reality they were being conveyed to the sugar plantations of Cuba. Of course, they were set at liberty…. What became of the majority of the 120 no one knows; but of the remains of the company, 45 in all, we have some more definite intelligence….”
“At the same time it seems clear that where the coolies are taken, not to British but, to foreign colonies, they are often kidnapped for that purpose, ill-treated on the passage, and sink into the position of mere slaves on their arrival in the colony.”
“They are penned up at night, hundreds of men together, like mules or oxen, in jail-like barracoons, and guarded by ferocious bloodhounds, kept in every state for the purpose. I fully believe, “says Mr. Lamont, “That they are literally worked to death in a very few years.”
From this perspective, overpopulation, famine, rebellions—such as the Taiping—government corruption, and unemployment are critical for the historical analysis. All those facts achieve relevance in the context of new economic conditions emerging from the European invasion of China after 1839.
“Everywhere there are bands of robbers and pirates scouring the country and its waters, oppressing the rich, pillaging the poor, and seizing whatever comes their way. The natural consequence of this state of things is stagnation of trade and commerce, a general feeling of insecurity of life and property, a rise in the price of provisions, fuel, clothes, and every necessary of life, occasioning much distress, poverty, and want among the poorer classes, especially in certain districts where labour and trade are entirely suspended… It is difficult to imagine how such a vast mass of human beings as are here congregated together manage to live and support life, with so little occupation and business at their command. Foreign trade, which gives employment to thousands at this port, is now all but extinct, and native commerce must be seriously embarrassed when the great highways and channels of communication through the country are closed up and beset on every side with robbers.”
We must consider the role played by the owners of sugar mills and Cuban landowners, which executed a clean process, shielding their social performance with legal protection through the use of intermediaries that applied legal conditions of hiring. It is also possible that the hiring process maintained proper freedom manners, but the contract displays slavery conditions. That would clarify the [Chinese coolies’] day-to-day forms of resistance, such as sabotage, desertion, and abandonment of work, in addition to gossip and revenge, that express the whole rage against the indentured service.
Chinese coolies are kidnapped by Chinese crimps in the most approved fashion; they are invited to gamble (an invitation that no Chinaman can resist) hocussed with shamshoo, and put quietly on board junks in the harbour at night. In the morning they awake to find themselves gliding out of the bay, bound for the Portuguese settlement of Macao. On arrival there they are transferred to barracoons –prisons under another name– where they are fed, clothed, and carefully watched till sent on board ships and consigned to Cuba, where they are sold for 250 or 300 dollars as slaves… I am also told that their gaolers have methods of inducement, into which the bamboo enters largely, for persuading them to make this declaration, and its value as a true exposition of their real feelings is extremely doubtful. They are said to cost, on an average, from the date of kidnapping to the period of shipment for Cuba forty-five to fifty dollars each.
The Other Slavery: Chinese Coolies in Latin America,
The Portuguese and the British started this human trafficking with people from the Far East, or the Orient, as it used to be called. Many ‘coolies’ were forced (sometimes literally kidnapped) or deceived into going to the Americas. Others were sold by their own people to coolie brokers and more sold themselves or were sold by family members to pay debts. The Chinese, mainly from the province of Guangdong, went to the west of the United States and Latin America. Indians, on the other hand, went mainly to the Caribbean basin especially to Trinidad Tobago and Guyana. As Ah Xiang states in the Imperialchina.org website, “From 1847 to 1875, 99,149 out of 150,000 Chinese coolies sold to Cuba departed from Macau”
Additionally, “Portuguese specialized in selling Chinese women and Chinese girls overseas as sex slaves throughout the latter half of 19th century. Shanghai would follow next.” In fact, the name Shanghai literally alludes to this practice of involuntary servitude by captains of merchant ships that were in need of crewmen.
In the United States the Chinese labor helped to build the first Transcontinental Railroad, and in western Canada, the Canadian Pacific Railway. Still, Chinese settlements were strongly discouraged. In 1862 California approved an “Anti-Coolie Act,” to protect white laborers while taxing Chinese business entrepreneurs; and in 1882 the US federal government approved the “Chinese Exclusion Act”, by which Chinese immigration to the United States was suspended for 10 years, but it lasted almost 60 years until it was repealed in 1943.
Of the Chinese already in the United States, some stayed and many just went south of the border to Mexico, especially to Baja California where they settled in Mexicali which has nowadays the biggest Chinatown in Mexico.
Many of the Chinese coolies went to Cuba. From 1847 to 1862 about 600,000 per year went there on American vessels. In addition to going to work on Cuban sugar plantations they also went to work in the Peruvian guano pits. Conditions on board these ships were the same as the well known conditions in the ships that came from Africa: overcrowded, unsanitary, and brutal. The mortality rate was around 15% for the Cuba voyage and 30-40% for the Peruvian one. Few of these workers managed to return to China and the Chinese government itself became concerned with their citizens and brought forth the elimination of the coolie trade in 1874.
In Cuba indentured Chinese labored in the sugarcane fields well after 1884, the official date for the abolition of slavery in that country, and they were slaves in all but name after that, although their legal status separated them from Africans and their descendants. Havana‘s Chinatown (Barrio Chino de La Habana) is one of the oldest and largest Chinatowns in Latin America. Many used their savings to open small grocery stores or restaurants, and married into the larger Spanish, biracial and Afro-Cuban populations. In the 1920s an additional 30,000 Cantonese arrived, only male, and they intermarried with the white, black and biracial populations. When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, many Chinese grocery store owners had their properties expropriated. These mostly left Cuba and settled in different countries, but especially in the Caribbean region, in places such as Florida, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. After the 1990s there has been a revitalization of Havana’s Chinatown and there are cultural groups that are helping Chinese-Cubans to strengthen their knowledge of the Chinese language and cultures.
Meanwhile in South America, Chinese indentured laborers (about 100,000 people) worked in Peru’s silver mines, as well as the guano, sugar, and cotton industries from the 1850s to the 1870s. Nowadays the Chinatown in Lima (Barrio Chino), has over 6,000 Chinese restaurants called “chifas“ where they serve a type of Chinese food which has a fusion of Chinese and Peruvian ingredients. Maybe next time we order Chinese food we will remember how everything got started.
, in rising to call attention to the Chinese Coolie Traffic, and to move an Address for Papers, said, he must ask the indulgence of the House for what must be a painful, and he feared would be a long statement. Systematic plans prevailed in the neighbourhood of Hong Kong for kidnapping Chinese, which for cruelty rivalled the practice on the African Coast, or even the Middle Passage, against which Wilberforce and Clarkson raised their voices.
In support of this statement he referred to the destruction of the Dolores Ugarte, a vessel which sailed from the Portuguese Settlement of Macao for Peru in May of last year. There were 656 coolies on board, and a disturbance of some kind having taken place the hatchways were fastened down. Owing to an insufficiently explained cause a fire broke out in the hold; and, as the flames could not be extinguished, the captain decided to abandon the ship. The 600 Chinese below were left to their fate; while the crew, and a few of the coolies who were on deck, escaped in the boats, which were only capable of holding 40 men.
During a previous voyage of the same vessel 18 coolies jumped overboard in consequence of ill-treatment; 25 died from want; and 43 were in such a hopeless state of disease that they were landed at Honolulu. The statements of the few who managed to escape from the burning wreck of the Dolores Ugarte showed that they had been induced by acquaintances, on pretence of work, to make the journey to Macao; but that, instead of having their expectations realized, they were cruelly treated and threatened by emigration agents; that they signed papers which were neither explained nor read to them, and which, if even they were read to them, they could not understand, owing to their ignorance of the language, and were afterwards carried off on board ship against their will. One of these unfortunate men, Low Asow by name, deposed as follows:—
"I am 36 years old; I am a native of Sun-on A friend of mine named Awong said he could get me work in Hong Kong. I went with him, but he took me to Macao. At first I could not tell whether that was Macao or Hong Kong, but he told me it was Hong Kong. I have never been out of my village. He took me to a barracoon. Awong told me that the regulation of the place was I must be registered at an office before I could be engaged as servant, and that I must say 'Yes' to every question. I signed a contract; it was not read to me, and I did not know what it contained. I was not told where I was to go to either at the barracoon or Emigration Office, and I was under the impression that I was to be a servant in Macao. I was sent on board a Coolie ship under an armed escort. The ship sailed on the 15th, and on the 17th she took fire. I was picked up by a fishing junk. I am a widower, and have no children. I have no father or mother. My father died last year. I was a farmer in Sun-on, doing job work only."
Another coolie, named Lai Awom, who had been induced to visit Macao by the promise that employment should be found him in a mill-maker's shop, told a similar story. He said—
"On arrival at Macao, two foreigners came to our boat in a sampan, and took us away. I was taken to the Man Hop barracoon. At first I did not know it was a barracoon; I thought it was Ayee's shop. Therefore I did not question him why he took me there. I arrived at Macao on the 19th day of the 2nd moon. One day I wanted to go out, but a foreigner keeping guard at the door refused me egress. I then concluded the house was a barracoon. I saw Ayee in the barracoon, and I asked him why be took me to such a place. He replied that he was going to be an 'emigrant' also, and that I need not fear his selling me. He told me that I was only to answer to the call of a name, and then I would get eight dollars for doing so; that he would just row me off to a ship and take me back ashore again. But in order to get the eight dollars, I must state before an officer that I was willing to go. If I said I would not go, I would be put under chains and placed in a dungeon.
Ayee assured me that he would also go before the officer and state the same things, and then get his eight dollars. On the 6th day of the 3rd moon I was taken before the emigration officer. I was asked if I knew where I was to go. I replied that I did not. I was then informed that I was to go to a foreign country to get four dollars a month. The name of the country was not mentioned. My name in the barracoon was Lai Asam. I answered to that name at the Emigration Office, I put my finger-mark to a document: it was not read to me. I marked two places. My finger was held by a Chinaman in that office, and he guided my finger to impress the marks on the places. I was paid eight dollars after marking that paper. I slept two nights in the Emigration Office. On the third day—that was, the 8th, I was escorted on board a ship. Ayee did not row me back as he promised, neither did he go before the emigration officer as he assured me. When I got on board I knew then that I was 'sold,' and I cried the whole of the first night I was on board."
The miseries of the Coolie labourers on arriving at Peru were revolting beyond description. Their condition and treatment at the Chincha Islands had been vividly pourtrayed in a letter which had been published in one of the public journals. … “The Chinese, who, under specious promises, are inveigled to the islands for a term of three years, seldom live to complete the term of their slavery, for the nauseous dust and the overpowering effluvia of ammonia in which they work are of themselves rapidly destructive of life.”
“Sometimes they embark in China, and often at Melbourne, where they find nothing to do; and it is well known that shippers receive so much per head for every Chinese they land at the Chinchas. There they are detained by an armed force, hutted in the most miserable manner, fed only after performing a certain amount of labour, and subject to a treatment, of which some idea may be gathered from the following facts: —Whilst we were at the islands, a poor Chinaman threw himself off the rocks, and was dashed to pieces, rather than submit to the tortures that awaited him for having accidentally broken some tackle he was using in his course of labour; and we can form a good notion of the severity of the punishment they are subjected to by the horrible howling constantly heard on the islands.
The following are some that are constantly inflicted on the labourers, by order of the commandant, for the most trivial offences, under the eyes of Englishmen and other reputed civilized people; and certainly nothing more devilish, nothing more ingenious, could be invented—namely, hanging in ropes and chains round the waist, and in other ways, from sunrise to sunset, without food during that period, one, two, or more days, in proportion to the magnitude of the offence; and lashing to half-tide buoys, subject to exposure to the water in addition to heat and cold.
These punishments we saw inflicted in several instances; and it was reported that one man, whom we saw suspended daily for fully a week, had already suffered a fortnight previously to our arrival. We were also shown a refined instrument of torture, combining the fabled labour of Danaides, with the penalty of death staring the culprit in the face if he failed from exhaustion, or otherwise, in performing the task allotted to him: this was a lighter, with a large hole in the bottom, in which the offender was fastened, with a bucket to save his life by incessant baling.
We were also credibly informed that one of the punishments inflicted on the Chinese on the islands is that of placing them on a small point of rock to which they are chained; so small that sleep or change of position must result in their falling off, to hang in their manacles, severely bruised, perhaps, until the period of relief."
The treatment of coolies in other parts of Peru was equally cruel. He was indebted to a friend of his, well known to that House, both as a literary man and a politician—he referred to Mr. Jenkins, the author of Ginx's Baby, for a statement made by a well-informed Englishman resident at Callao. The writer began by remarking that—
"England and the United States have abolished slavery, and profess to prevent the carrying of it on; yet here, under the name of 'emigration,' it exists in its worse form—Norfolk Island in its convict days being an improved state of existence.
Every year thousands of Chinamen are kidnapped and induced under false pretences to leave their country; many die; many destroy themselves; they mutiny and burn the vessels, proving they are not willing emigrants. On arrival here, if in good health, they are sold at a high price, for eight years; but many are sent to the hospital where they die partly through ignorance of the language, and also from want of a will to live,
The few who are bought for house and business purposes are fortunate in comparison with their 300 or 400 brethren purchased by some large farmer and sent miles into the interior, where they are locked up in an inclosure at night, turned out at half-past four in small gangs, each with its armed and mounted driver.
They get two meals a-day of rice or beans, and on some farms meat twice a-week. Work being over, they are driven back and locked up at six, and this goes on from week's end to week's end, from year's end to year's end; they have no note of time, the Sabbath being like any other day. Those who exist—I will not say live—out their contract have become so degraded and ruined in health that they would be afraid to ask their liberty, having been flogged for much less.
The owner of the farm is the only judge, in his absence his overseers; they whip, imprison, put in the stocks, and even kill with impunity; there is no one to interfere. Happy is the Chinaman who dies on the way; to whom can he apply for redress? He does not speak the language, and, after years of residence, only knows the names of the articles used on the farm, and the oaths that have been addressed to him.
It was to the slave owner's interest that his slaves were healthy and increased, as each young slave was so much added to his stock—so many dollars more to his cash; but these poor creatures do not see a woman; the farmhouse is a fortified castle with iron bars, the inmates well armed; but the low feeding and hard work leave little spirit in poor John Chinaman to disturb his master."
“The vessels employed in this trade resemble those with which the 'Middle Passage' has rendered us familiar.
The poor Chinese are confined on board in great crowds, with hardly air enough to breathe; and the miseries of their condition often lead to revolts, followed by sanguinary massacres. On arriving at Havana the Chinese are treated exactly like the n*groes. They are confined in large barracoons, and sold individually or in lots by a mere endorsement of their contracts, and then taken to the sugar plantations. On the plantation the Chinese labourer is treated as a slave.
His scanty wages—a fourth less than is earnt by many of the n*groes—hardly suffices to supply him with the necessaries which, from the poverty of his own fare, he is compelled to buy. The frequency with which the Chinese commit assassination or suicide is the best proof of their desperate condition in Cuba.
In most of these cases, however, the Chinese endeavour to get rid of the intolerable burden of existence by flight, and frequently perish in the woods.
In spite of protecting laws, the Chinese are subjected to cruel punishments on the sugar plantations, the overseers being both judges and executioners.
Formerly the Chinaman recovered his liberty of action on the expiration of his original period of service; but recent ordinances imposed by Spain compel him to be always under a master or patron, or at once to leave the country—which, of course, for want of means he is unable to do.
He is put in jail until he gets a new master, who is compelled to pay the military authorities a sum of money—not long ago 34 dollars—for the privilege. Thus the servitude of the Chinese practically becomes lifelong.
Having shown, he said, that the Coolie traffic both in Peru and in Cuba was stained by the worst crimes of the African slave trade, he would next proceed to point out the connection between it and the gambling practices carried on at Hong Kong in houses licensed by the British Government. The poor Chinamen who had lost all their money at these gambling-houses fell easy victims to the agents of that so-called emigration system, and sometimes staked their persons on a last throw.
