White Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and NZ 1790–1950

in memory of

Joe Kum Yung and Edith Searell

Published with the support of Creative New Zealand.

Published by Otago University Press

P.O. Box 56 / Level 1, 398 Cumberland Street

Dunedin, New Zealand

university.press@otago.ac.nz

www.otago.ac.nz

First published in 2014

Text © 2014 Stevan Eldred-Grigg and Zeng Dazheng

Photographs © the photographers as named.

The moral rights of the author and photographers have been asserted.

ISBN 978-1-877578-65-6 (print)

ISBN 978-1-927322-82-6 (Kindle)

ISBN 978-1-927322-83-3 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-1-927322-84-0 (ePDF)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

This book is copyright. Except for the purpose of fair review, no part may be stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including recording or storage in any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Front cover: Chau Yip Fung with Otago missionary Alexander Don, Guangzhou, 1880.

Artist unknown, Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago

Back cover author photos: Les Maiden, Image Services, VUW (Stevan Eldred-Grigg) and Robert Cross, Image Services, VUW (Zeng Dazheng)

Publisher: Rachel Scott

Editor: Gillian Tewsley

Design/layout: Quentin Wilson & Associates

Index: Diane Lowther

Ebook conversion 2016 by meBooks

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

ONE: FUR AND TEA, 1790–1840

Introduction: suns and meteors

Nation and empire: money

Nation and empire: power

Race, nation, empire

TWO: COOLIES FROM CHINA? 1840–60

China: treaty ports

New Zealand: treaty state

THREE: NEW GOLD MOUNTAIN, 1860–80

Introduction: steam, smoke, shrapnel

Chinese New Zealand: economy and society

Chinese New Zealand: power

Race, nation, empire: New Zealand

FOUR: WHITE NEW ZEALAND, 1880–1910

Introduction: young dominion, dying empire

Chinese New Zealand: economy and society

Chinese New Zealand: power

China and New Zealand: economy, society and diplomacy

Race, nation, empire: New Zealand 1880–1900

Race, nation, empire: New Zealand 1900–10

Race, nation, empire: waves of feeling

Chinese New Zealand: power

Race, nation, empire: China

FIVE: AN OLD HOUSE FALLEN, 1910–30

Introduction: new stars

Chinese New Zealand: economy and society

Race, nation, empire: three races and New Zealand

Race, nation, empire: the racial state in New Zealand

Race, nation, empire: New Zealand in the Pacific

Race, nation, empire: China

Chinese New Zealand: power

China and New Zealand: economy, society and diplomacy

SIX: HOT WAR, COLD WAR, 1930–50

Introduction: savage days and a city of the sun

Chinese New Zealand: economy and society

Race, nation, empire: New Zealand

Chinese New Zealand: power

China and New Zealand: economy, society and diplomacy 1930–45

China and New Zealand: economy, society and diplomacy 1945–50

Afterword

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Back Cover

Acknowledgements

White Ghosts, Yellow Peril aims to summarise and synthesise all work done by the rather few writers who have looked at Chinese New Zealand. We have drawn heavily on the research of Julia Bradshaw, Dan Chan, Henry Chan, Manying Ip, Nigel Murphy, James Ng, Charles Sedgwick, Siaosi Noa, Nancy Tom and William Yuen. Charles Sedgwick stands out as a scholar whose 1982 doctoral thesis remains to this day the only serious work looking closely at the politics within Cantonese New Zealand. Brian Moloughney gave valuable feedback during the draft stages of the book. Gillian Tewsley earns our thanks for being a skilled and careful editor. Gordon Wu gave kind help with the holdings of the Wellington Tung Jung Association. Ammar Almerabi assisted with his design skills. Thanks to the team at Otago University Press, and especially to Rachel Scott, who looked after our book by encouraging, advising and critiquing in a generous way from the moment she first saw the manuscript until the completion of the finished work.

ONE

FUR AND TEA

1790–1840

Introduction: suns and meteors

New Zealand and China in 1790 were unknown to one another, seemed unlikely to come into contact for years, and were in many ways opposites. China, an immense subcontinent whose people had been writing books and building cities for more than three thousand years, glowed like a sun in the middle of a complex satellite system of colonies and protectorates. New Zealand, a young archipelago, was home to a tribal people who had lived there for only 500 years.

The two countries were very different, very far away from one another, but they were about to come into contact for the first time.

‘China’ was a Western word, of course, used as shorthand to speak about the states governed by Manchu clans and their supporters under the reigning dynasty, the Qing. The empire was strong and had been growing still stronger for most of the eighteenth century. Wealth from a booming economy paid for colonial conquest of territory in the north and west, where the Qing in the 1750s rolled their power right over the whole of Mongolia and Turkestan, or what the West at the time called Tartary.¹ The system of states controlled by Beijing at the end of the eighteenth century was home to far more people than any other empire in the world. ‘Our heavenly empire rules over ten thousand kingdoms!’ wrote government official Lin Zexu.²

The ‘heavenly empire’ itself had no single word to describe its own complexity. ‘Middle Land’ (Zhongyuan) defined the core provinces, thickly peopled, tightly tilled, where subjects of the imperial government mostly spoke one or more of the many languages and dialects today grouped together by linguists as Chinese. The delta provinces at the mouth of the big rivers were very rich, their highly fertile fields yielding raw material for long chains of selling, processing and reselling that made a good living for thousands of crowded cities and constantly plying fleets of ships.

Manchuria (Manzhou), the homeland of the dynasty, was a state of forests and steppes sprawling northwards from China. The people were mostly Manchu, speaking a language more closely akin to Mongol and Turkish tongues than to Chinese. They were citizens rather than vassals, and their wide-open spaces were forbidden to the subject peoples of China.

Outside the two core states was a ring of satellite colonies and protectorates. Making matters still more complex, though, the imperial government in its ceaseless proclamations had begun to blur boundaries between China and Manchuria, and between the two core states and some of the protectorates. Tibet, Mongolia and Turkestan were increasingly spoken about as though they belonged, together with the core states, to one empire known interchangeably by the imperial court as Middle Land and ‘Qing Land’ (Qingguo).³ Mongolia was split between a vast protectorate, known to Westerners as Outer Mongolia, and a zone called Inner Mongolia (Nei Menggu) in which states were neither imperial provinces nor protectorates.⁴ China also was in constant contact with Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

Europe and China, subcontinents at the western and eastern ends of the same landmass, had been trading goods and swapping thoughts in a small way for several hundred years. Chinese intellectuals occasionally examined the philosophical and scientific thinking of Europe. European intellectuals occasionally examined the philosophical and political thinking of China. Leibniz, a leading German philosopher at the end of the seventeenth century, portrayed the other end of the continent as a model society. China, he wrote, surpassed the West ‘in practical philosophy, that is, in the precepts of ethics and politics’.⁵ Opinions were a little less glowing by the middle of the eighteenth century. Montesquieu, a leading French philosopher, wrote in 1758 that while the goal of Chinese governments was ‘to make their subjects live in peace and tranquility’,⁶ the empire nonetheless was ‘a despotic state, whose principle is fear’.⁷ Western opinion in the last years of the eighteenth century swung more and more to the latter point of view.⁸ John Stuart Mill, a leading Scottish philosopher, by the middle of the nineteenth century found in China a ‘warning example’ of what could have been the social, economic and political fate of Europe. The empire, he wrote, had ‘become stationary’ for thousands of years.⁹

Yet the empire really was very dynamic. New techniques were always being worked out and applied on the land and in the workshops, mills and mints. The population was growing strikingly fast, soaring from 138 million at the beginning of the eighteenth century to 381 million within four generations.¹⁰ Imperial subjects were streaming out from its home provinces to colonise new lands in Southeast Asia.

Not, as yet, New Zealand.

What did the peoples of the empire know about New Zealand? World maps printed in the Qing realm since the late seventeenth century had shown an island to the southeast of what we now call Australia. The first, published in 1674 on the orders of the imperial government, showed Xin Selandiya not as a narrow archipelago but as one plump island.¹¹ The map was copied throughout the eighteenth century. Chinese officials now knew, should they wish to know, that there was a Xin Selandiya. Otherwise they knew nothing. Western learning was suppressed by the imperial government from early in the century, which meant the voyages of French and British explorers from 1769 onwards, showing that New Zealand was a big group of islands peopled by Polynesians, were not known in China.¹²

China was even less known to the New Zealanders.

Not that they called themselves New Zealanders, or their archipelago New Zealand. They knew themselves by the names of their tribes, and their islands by various names, among others Te Wai Pounamu and Te Ika a Maui. The two main islands and smaller islands sweeping in a shallow crescent through the southwest Pacific were home to a peasant society, a tribal people living in villages of wood and reeds. Their ancestors had begun crossing the seas from Southeast Asia several thousand years earlier but since then they had evolved their own way of life half a world away, with no trade or other contact with East Asia. New Zealand was still a small meteor well outside the orbit of the two powerful solar systems of Europe and China.

New Zealand (lower left) with Australia to the west and an unknown continent to the south. South America to the east. Detail from Kunyu wanguo quantu, published for the Qing government, 1674.

Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery

A first fleeting encounter with Europeans had taken place near the middle of the seventeenth century, but not until the last decades of the eighteenth century did a wave of Western ships set in for its shores. Maori met the newcomers, parleyed, played, made love and sometimes fought with them. The tribespeople of the archipelago were as dynamic in their way as the peoples of China. They were curious about goods brought by explorers on foreign ships. Often they were willing to work for long hours at backbreaking tasks growing food crops and processing flax in order to trade.

The hustling and huckstering of Europeans across continents was bound to bring sweeping change. European interlopers, above all the British, during the 1790s would link China and New Zealand for the first time in history by working out a way to coin cash in the archipelago and set up a commercial export trade.

Afterwards, three generations would be born before Chinese sojourners walked down gangways onto the wharves of Te Wai Pounamu, by then known as the Middle Island and still later as the South Island. They would find the land, its laws and folkways odd, even frightening. Yet the Ah Kews and Ah Kees of Guangdong, having bought tickets to travel so far, would not be easily thrown off their stride. Country and town life in their homeland by no means followed a timeless pattern of celestial tranquillity. Cantonese clans of peasants, artisans and shopkeepers sending sons out into the wider world were everyday experts at navigating strong, sometimes swift, tides of change.

Nation and empire: money

Those tides were sweeping. A Western industrial revolution driven by new technology and the new economic system of capitalism was releasing powers so swollen, so awesome, perhaps awful, that a few years later they would be embodied by Mary Shelley as a monster made by Frankenstein. Mill, for all his belief that China had become stagnant, was shocked by the ‘dark satanic mills’ of a rancorous and reeking new Europe. Adam Smith, on the other hand, looked upon the new order far more cheerfully. China and the Chinese were well placed to make money in the modern world, he wrote, for capitalism fitted the habits of the nation and, while European paupers lay about ‘indolently in the workhouse’, living off a dole as social parasites, industrious Chinese were ‘continually running about the streets with the tools of their respective trades, offering their service’. Smith made only one complaint, quite uncharacteristic of his views overall: those hardworking Chinese were able to wring from employers nothing more than what seemed to him very poor wages.¹³

Certainly money was there for the making. China was such a rich and thriving system of states that some twenty years after the turn of the nineteenth century its gross domestic product was nearly three times what it had been at the turn of the eighteenth century. Also, the empire was yielding nearly one third of the combined gross domestic product of the whole world.¹⁴ Average yearly earnings in the imperial states were rather more than half those available for the citizens of France, and only a little less than half those for citizens of the United States.¹⁵

The Qing Empire, in other words, was very wealthy.

The imperial government grandly denied any need for a trade in Western goods or other dealings with overseas lands. The Qianlong emperor wrote to the British government that his empire possessed ‘all things in prolific abundance’ and lacked ‘no product within its own borders’. China was willing to export tea, silk and porcelain out of kindness, since those goods were needed by Europe, but not out of necessity: ‘I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.’¹⁶ The imperial government when it made such sweeping claims was speaking for diplomatic purposes, hoping to deal with outside powers from a position that might seem strong. Nor could officials opt for a more pragmatic discourse in such matters without raising quite a few domestic eyebrows. Qing pretence to heavenly mandate was flowery wallpaper hiding many cracks in the state.

The truth about Chinese trade with the world was complex. Merchants carried out a thriving export trade in silks, porcelain and other highly refined products – along with hefty shipments of tea, in which the empire held what was more or less an international monopoly – not from kindness, of course, nor for reasons of state, but because the empire, despite the words of the Qianlong emperor, did not possess ‘all things in prolific abundance’. China indeed lacked many resources within its own borders. Southeast Asia had for several hundred years been supplying the empire with teak, mahogany and other hardwoods needed by the furniture and building industries. Silver was needed, too: imports of the ore worth 6.3 million taels at their first peak early in the eighteenth century surged to a whopping second peak of 16.4 million taels late in the century.¹⁷

Also, again in spite of magnificent words from the imperial throne, many people in the empire felt a craving for ‘strange or ingenious’ overseas goods. ‘Foreign things are the most fashionable now,’ wrote a scholar, Chen Zhan. Opium was one of those things.

The soothing sap of the poppy seems to have first come into the empire during the Tang dynasty – not smoked but swallowed – to heighten the sexual pleasures of men of high rank at court while they romped with courtesans and boys.¹⁸ Opium smoking started in the eighteenth century. Lan Dingyuan noted: ‘one is alert the whole night and it increases sexual desire’. Fu Shen’s memoir Fu Sheng Liuji portrayed the pleasures of sex and drugs on the ‘flower boats’, the floating brothels of Guangzhou.¹⁹ Chinese historians in later years would blame the gunboats of the British Empire for the spread of opium smoking. The habit was well established, however, long before white foreigners made any reckoning about likely profits.²⁰ Yu Jiao claimed as early as 1801 that ‘among the four classes of people, only peasants do not taste it’. Zhao Guisheng, a government official, wrote poetry in the 1830s about the delights of smoking:

That unique odour,

that exquisite rarity

from overseas trade,

rises like steam and cloud.²¹

Guangzhou, sprawling and expansive, second city of the empire and third-largest city in the world,²² was the entry point for opium and also, from 1757, the only seaport allowed by law to carry overseas trade. Guangdong, the province of which the prodigious city was capital, developed an economy that was very forward-looking. The peasantry thronging the delta of the slow and silty Pearl River had stopped growing rice and other food for their own families and begun growing new cash crops – mulberry for the silk industry, sugarcane for big new refineries and cotton for big new mills. A traditional peasantry had, in other words, become a modern farming class oriented to the commercial market. Foshan, near Guangzhou, became a national centre of the iron industry, making tools to be sold throughout China. The expansive outlook of the province would suddenly bring it into contact with New Zealand.

Guangzhou, c. 1800.

Artist unknown, Peabody Essex Museum

Seal furs were another foreign fad sweeping through the wealthy households of the Qing Empire: warm and sleek, they were sought after for coats, muffs and other luxury trimmings. ‘It’s distinctly very cold, to-day,’ says a character to a young lady in Hong Lou Meng, the great novel written by Cao Xueqin and commercially printed in 1791, ‘how is it that you are so contrary as to go and divest yourself of the pelisse with the bluish breast-fur overlapping the cloth?’²³

Fur seals, unaware of the price on their heads, calved on the southern coasts of New Zealand. One of the quickest ways to make money in the archipelago and its outlying islands was to slaughter those seals and ship the pelts to China. All that was needed was gangs of cheap labour – men to club the seals and skin them at shore stations. Furs won so cheaply and hauled into the hulls of ships could be sold for costly clothing not only in Guangzhou but also in London and Amsterdam. There were so many seals, so readily available, and so much money to be made. Sir Joseph Banks, traveller in southern waters, wrote with amazement: ‘The beach is encumber’d with their quantities, and those who visit their haunts have less trouble in killing them than have the servants of the victualling office who kill hogs in a pen with mallets.’²⁴

The trade in sealskins took life suddenly when the merchant vessel Britannia anchored in a bay in Dusky Sound during the spring of 1792. William Raven, master, wrote that his plan was ‘to station a gang at Dusky to collect sealskins for the China market’. Men under his command laboured to found the first European settlement in the islands now known as New Zealand. Beech trees were felled and in their stead stood a wooden barracks in a bay called Luncheon Cove. Raven sailed, leaving behind a gang of twelve men who set to work in that first little colony in a new land to slaughter the sensitive creatures whose pelts would fetch a fine price in Guangzhou.

Blood spurted. Knives skinned.

Other ships followed, dropping gangs that worked their way methodically along the coasts, tearing bloody profits from mass slaughter. The first vessels were British; American ships later joined them. Favorite, for example, loaded itself with what one merchant house called ‘sixty thousand pure fur seal skins, a parcel of very superior quality’ and set sail for Guangzhou.²⁵ Offloading such valuable cargo from overseas vessels was nothing new to the wharf workers and boatmen and traders of the river city, which for many years had bought and sold in the seaports of a third of the world.

The Cantonese had evolved their own words for the pasty outsiders who came from far away. Gweilo or ‘ghost people’ was one word; another was bakgwei or ‘white ghost’.²⁶ White ghost merchants financed the fur industry, putting up money for ships then delegating authority to white ghost captains who sailed their vessels into the harbours of southern New Zealand. They landed shore crews. Tents were pitched and barracks run up. The mother ships set sail, leaving behind them a coastline dotted with primitive little factories.

Sealing ships were often people smugglers, laden with gangs of escaped convicts slipping out on the sly from Botany Bay. The General Gates weighed anchor at Sydney one day in 1819 before sailing to the Bay of Islands, taking with it a gang of runaway convicts for the sealing stations. The master of the vessel behaved brutally towards them, clapping some in irons, lashing others to the rigging to be flogged and then have brine rubbed into their wounds.²⁷ Harsh treatment led some convicts and other sealers to mutiny. The Cyprus was seized by smuggled convicts, who overthrew the officers and sailed the seas lawlessly. William Swallow, leader of the old lags, commanded the ship while they stole a store of sealskins gathered by a gang from the Samuel. The crew with their pirate vessel fetched up alongside the docks in Guangzhou.²⁸

Maori took to sealing too: several tribes sent their own gangs to slaughter and skin along the southern coasts. ‘The New Zealanders’, as they were called by the British and Americans, showed themselves to be keen rivals in the industry. Europeans sometimes joined them, or found wives from among them; a sealing village was set up by white sealers and their Maori wives, for example, on the island of Whenua Hou.²⁹

Rivalry between Maori and European sealers over supplying China led to the killing of more than furred innocents. Hairy men were slaughtered too: a station overseer in 1811 passed on news about men from several sealing gangs who had been ‘barbarously murdered, and mostly devoured by the cannibal natives’.³⁰ John Kent, master of a sealing ship, added that the tribes of Foveaux Strait were ‘exceedingly fierce and cruel’.³¹ Joseph Price told how four of his workmates were killed and eaten by those ‘inhuman people’.³² One writer observed in 1824 that ‘of late the southern and western coasts of New Zealand have been infested with Europeans and New Zealanders’.³³

At the height of the trade, tens of thousands of sealskins were shipped overseas every year for sale in the markets of Guangzhou.³⁴ The fur boom died out quickly, however. It operated on quick profits. Sealing stations were not in the business of farming seals, they were simply there to massacre them. Young seals, it was foretold in 1824, would be ‘totally extinct in about three years’,³⁵ and the prophecy proved true. Flooding the Guangzhou market with hundreds of thousands of top-quality skins drove prices down, too, and by 1815 profits had fallen markedly. A revival followed in the 1820s but by the 1830s little was left of the industry.

Sealing crew, 1833

Artist unknown, PUBL-0138-420, Alexander Turnbull Library

Other export trades opening up in New Zealand to take the place of sealskins did not link the country with China in the same way. A few shipments of timber went to Guangzhou in the late 1790s, and some small shipments of greenstone, but nothing much came of either trade.

Could the two countries be linked in some other way by those who sought to make money?

The land of the southwest Pacific was thought by many Westerners to offer a big, deep fund of wealth owned till now by nobody other than tribes. British and French speculators early in the nineteenth century set up land companies with the goal of buying, selling and settling what looked like temptingly empty acreage. Speculators also wondered where they might find settlers to work the new land. China seemed likely to yield cheap labour in almost limitless supply.

The leading spokesman for tapping that supply was also the most outspoken propagandist for land settlement: Edward Gibbon Wakefield. He wrote in 1829 in favour of wholesale shipments of ‘coolies’ – Chinese farmers and labourers – praising what he called their ‘admirable qualities as settlers’. Wakefield congratulated the ‘abstemious and industrious creatures’ who were the people of the province of Guangdong, above all, for their willingness to board ships and sail anywhere in the world to work hard for little pay. He ended by portraying a future when British merchants would be able to sell goods to ‘millions of fellow subjects of Chinese origin’ in new British colonies in the southwest Pacific.³⁶

The Wakefield theory of colonisation led a band of capitalists to set up a company to make money while settling New Zealand. The New Zealand Company early in 1840 disembarked its first settlers in Port Nicholson at a site they called Britannia near what later became Wellington. The first settlement, in other words, was to bear the same name as the first ship to land the first party of sealers.

London, worrying about what settlers might do to the tribespeople, and anxious too about the ambitions of a rival French company, had been wondering whether to take over the archipelago. British officials and politicians, while weighing likely gains and losses of making a move in the southwest Pacific, during the same few months also found themselves weighing likely gains and losses of taking a step forward in the northwest Pacific. Fu Sheng Liuji, that prose in praise of opium, had been published only one year after the landing of the first sealing gang in Dusky Sound. The two events can be seen in some ways as two sides of one coin.

The coin, stamped with the mark of a simpering monarch, was the gold sovereign, the currency of a powerful industrial and maritime state. Britain, its economy powered by brown and black coal, pumping out smoke, belching with steam engines, was beginning to rule the waves. Shipowners and merchants were selling goods around the globe. Opium, for example, sold in bulk to merchants in China. British traders hauled away nearly fivefold the value of goods from the storehouses of Guangzhou in the last years of the eighteenth century as in mid-century.³⁷

The export and import trade, by making big money for both those who bought and those who sold, helped thrust Guangdong towards its specialisation in cash cropping, manufacturing and banking.³⁸ The imperial government, however, was worried by the way China was now having to ship out a worrying weight of silver ingots in exchange for imports. Beijing early in 1839 sent Lin Zexu, a high-minded official, to Guangzhou. The task he was given as opium commissioner was to stop imports of the drug. Lin acted swiftly and sternly. ‘Any foreigner or foreigners bringing opium to China,’ he wrote, ‘shall most assuredly be decapitated, and the accessories strangled.’³⁹

London made up its mind that now was the time to strike a blow. Weaponry was rolled out, cannons were brought to bear, and in the last weeks of 1839 the first salvoes were fired – while the first shipload of settlers were on their way to found Britannia on the shores of faraway Port Nicholson.

Nation and empire: power

The Qing Empire and the British Empire grappled in what came to be called the First Opium War. Britain was free to fight without any grave consequences for itself as aggressor because the balance of strength had swung heavily away from its opponent during the last half century. The industrial revolution driving, among many other things, the settlement projects in the southwest Pacific, meant naval and military might. China, on the other hand, by the beginning of the nineteenth century was far weaker than it looked on the map. The subcontinent had slipped swiftly from its rank as one of the two or three centres of wealth and power in the world. Western opinion of China as a torchbearer for good government had also slipped swiftly. ‘The Empire of China is an old, crazy, first-rate Man of War,’ the leader of a British embassy in China had written at the time the first sealing station was founded in New Zealand. ‘She may, perhaps, not sink outright; she may drift some time as a wreck, and will then be dashed to pieces on the shore.’⁴⁰

The truth was not quite so straightforward, however, for some provinces of the empire were still thriving.

Guangdong boomed at the turn of the century. The farmers of the province, as well as making good incomes from cash crops, were secure in their holdings. The state seemed ready to leave the mortgaging and leasing of land in private hands, which meant that many farming families could win good contracts with landlords or tenants. Cheap mortgages and fixed low rents for those who were tenants, during decades when farm yields grew, meant money.⁴¹

Nevertheless, the authority of the state weakened as various groups of subjects stirred restlessly, some taking up arms against the imperial government.

Official ideology was that the whole world was governed by the universal empire (tianxia). The emperor was bound by law and religion to govern well and wisely. The universal state was in two halves. One half, lands governed directly by the emperor, was civilised. The other half, lands beyond the borders, was barbarous. The duty of chiefs and kings beyond the borders was to acknowledge universal empire by paying it tribute. Yet the imperial government knew very well that the truth was quite otherwise.⁴² Chinese politicians and officials found themselves working hard, like their counterparts in other states, to juggle many diplomatic balls.

The imperial government by the turn of the century was markedly poorer than during its heyday, even while some provinces were wealthier. Poverty of the state was brought about by a policy of never increasing the land tax. The policy, aimed at keeping the masses happy, had begun early in the eighteenth century. One outcome was that the tax base of the state was frozen, and in real terms shrank, as years went by. Western governments meanwhile were massively extending their tax take and spending the money on, among other things, weaponry, fleets and troops.

A shrinking tax base meant that the imperial state was less and less able to govern the country. Officials whose salaries shrank took bribes to pay their way. Provincial and county governments broke the law of the central government by slapping surtaxes on top of farming. The rich took gangs of thugs into their pay. Ordinary peasants in turn grouped themselves into bands in order to fight the thugs, or set up as bandits in their own right, roaming the countryside, robbing and kidnapping. Clan fought clan, and village fought village.⁴³

Guangdong saw the class of small farmers thriving economically but subject to a new levy of tributes from brigands and their grand neighbours. Villagers were ordered to kowtow to the ground whenever they came upon the gentry. Landowners added injury to insult by wresting from peasants an array of perks such as obligatory gifts of sugar, pigs, poultry and rice spirits. Almost all of these burdens on the peasantry were outside the letter of the law.

New Zealand, too, was disorderly during the early nineteenth century, for while tribal law still held sway everywhere, the system of power was badly rocked by imports of new weaponry. Power in the archipelago for many years had centred on the tribe. Tribes had fought for mana, wielding stone weapons and wooden spears.

Shaking the spear

Is charging, is flying,

The twin-bladed shark,

And the footsteps beating …⁴⁴

Warfare changed from 1807 onwards when tribes equipped themselves with musketry. Muskets, bought by tribe after tribe, were used to win battles with other tribes who were still wielding wooden spears. An arms race swept the country. Thousands of people were killed before the late 1830s and the last of the Musket Wars.

Europe meanwhile was slow to stake a claim to ownership of the archipelago. The gang of workers landed at Luncheon Cove skinned seals for China at a time when London, Paris and The Hague were doing little to colonise the southwest Pacific. New South Wales was only four years old and home to a handful of people, mostly convicts. The nearest neighbouring European society was made up of a few Dutch forts and plantations in Indonesia. France held a foothold on this or that island.

France and Britain were the most active powers vying for trade and territory in the Pacific. Explorers from their seaports had begun sailing New Zealand waters in 1769 and since then Paris and London had been wondering off and on whether it might be worth their while to fly the flag in New Zealand. The outcome of this power play between the two richest states of Western Europe would have deep implications for whether or not New Zealand would come to be linked with China. A French colony would want little from the subcontinent other than shards of porcelain and scraps of silk. A British colony, on the other hand, would open up a strong tea trade. Officials, when talking about whether to take New Zealand, spoke about its harbours as what one historian calls ‘a jumping-off point’ for commerce with China.⁴⁵ John Bigge, for example, pondered the question in 1823 while he was a colonial commissioner for the southwest Pacific: ‘Whenever the China market shall become accessible to English vessels’, he wrote, ‘the value of New Zealand, as a place of deposit for the produce of the whale and seal fisheries, cannot fail to attract them to its harbours.’⁴⁶

London during the middle months of 1839 made up its mind to take over the archipelago.

Race, nation, empire

The Qing Empire was seen by its government as not just a system of states but a racial state. All races, or so the theory went, had their place and together made up a multiracial political entity.⁴⁷ The Manchu and their allies among some Mongol tribes supposedly were the governing race. The Han and other racial groups supposedly were the governed races. An array of laws on the books aimed to police the boundary between governing and governed races. Han, for example, were not allowed by law to marry Manchu. Nor were they allowed to settle beyond the Willow Palisade that walled off Manchuria; Manchuria was reserved solely for Manchu.

The Manchu, who made up only about one per cent of the population of the empire as a whole,⁴⁸ were a privileged nation within a nation, a state within a state. Manchu rights under law were greater than those of the Han. Manchu also had a very strong grip on the bureaucracy.⁴⁹ They lived mostly in Manchu cities within or alongside Han cities. A Manchu city was usually green, leafy and peaceful, unlike the thronged, noisy, treeless Chinese cities. Manchu Xi’an, for example, was praised by a traveller for its ‘wide, healthy spaces, its lovely gardens, its grand old trees’. Manchu Chengdu was portrayed by a novelist who knew it when young as a city of ‘flowers and trees’, where women wearing long gowns with cinched waists ‘would walk along slowly in their slippers smoking long bamboo pipes’.⁵⁰ A typical Manchu city was not unlike the colonial cantonments in British India.

The imperial theory of a racial state nevertheless was thoroughly thinned down during the eighteenth century. All laws against intermarriage between Han and Manchu, as well as the ban on settlement of Manchuria, were increasingly overlooked by magistrates. The government during the long reign of the Qianlong emperor also spilled a good deal of ink on the development of a newer theory of state which claimed that each race had a unique role to play. The Manchu and Han were the central races, the culmination of civilisation, the embodiment of racial superiority. The other races were all placed in a descending rank. They were cadet races, like the Mongols or Tibetans. Or they were primitive races like the Miao, who were to be taught by the higher races how to become as civilised as the Manchu and Han.⁵¹

Qing theory seems not to have been followed by many Han. The imperial policy of a racial state provoked the development of an opposition policy calling for another sort of racial state, a state for the Han. Wang Fuzhi in the mid-seventeenth century had been among the first to develop a concept of China as ‘Han Land’ (Hanguo or Huaxia). As he sat pensively in bamboo groves he brushed deft passages about the racial superiority of the Han that were unnervingly like passages to be typewritten 200 years later about the racial superiority of the Aryan. Annihilating ‘alien kinds’ of races, wrote Wang, was ‘not inhumane’ since those races were outside the bounds of ‘faithfulness and righteousness’. Han people must ride the ‘horse’ of lesser races such as the Manchu.⁵²

We have no way of knowing how common such views were among peasants and small tradespeople. We do know, as one historian notes, that dislike and even hatred towards the Manchu was ‘kept alive’ at both ‘scholarly and popular levels’ throughout the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.⁵³ Not that many were willing to pay the ultimate price by standing up for such a theory. Ordinary people were likely to think less about their manifest destiny than about daily grievances involving petty officials or, now and then, an imperial magistrate, which could warp into a formless yet simmering anger against the Manchu. At any rate, few people in the empire can have thought of themselves as belonging to anything like ‘China’ in the modern sense of the word. The politics of identity most likely revolved around tribe, clan and family. Although the heartland spoke one or another of ten or twelve ‘Chinese’ languages, those tongues were as unlike one another as German and English, or Romanian and Portuguese. The Yongzheng emperor early in the eighteenth century had been beaten by such lively linguistic variety when he mounted a fleeting campaign to standardise the spoken language.

Language was only one side of the story. The ethnic map of the heartland was a patchwork. Guangdong and several other southern provinces were home to what scholars more than 2000 years earlier had called the ‘Hundred Yueh’. The term referred to scores of states and tribes. The official narrative of the Chinese imperial state was that the indigenous peoples of the southern provinces were crowded out over the centuries by incoming Han migrants. Genetic science in recent years has shown, however, a ‘clear split’ between the genes of southern people and those of people from elsewhere in the heartland provinces of China.⁵⁴ Cantonese may well be less closely akin to the northern Han than they are to Vietnamese, Thai and even Samoan, Tongan and Maori peoples.⁵⁵ Tens of millions of other imperial subjects did not speak any sort of ‘Chinese’ but talked in Turkish, Tibetan, Mongol, Manchu, Thai or one or more of scores of other languages.

Han settlers meanwhile were pushing outwards from the old core provinces into new western lands. The booming economy of the eighteenth century drove farmers inland to fertile but lightly peopled river plains and valleys. The imperial government backed the trek, wishing to strengthen the economy of the western provinces by carrying out vast irrigation and land development projects in the early to mid-eighteenth century. The state, while smoothing the path of people seeking to settle inland, did its best to stop other people from settling overseas.⁵⁶ The imperial government drew up a new law: ‘All officers of government, soldiers, and private citizens, who clandestinely proceed to sea to trade, or who remove to foreign islands for the purpose of inhabiting and cultivating the same, shall be punished according to the law.’⁵⁷ The law could be sidestepped by paying a bribe, however – a sort of poll tax levied by corrupt officials whenever a subject of the state left through a seaport. Men who could pay did; though most found it easier and cheaper to head inland.

‘Go west, young man!’ was the policy. Young men and women were willing to go west – or elsewhere, if they could – in order to get land, harvest any sort of yield and make money. Guangdong, for example, sent settlers streaming upriver into Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan.⁵⁸ The settlers found themselves, upon setting foot on the new lands, staring at Miao, Zhuang, Yao and many another nationality. This may have sown a sense of race consciousness, a belief in being Han.⁵⁹ Yet would many farming folk have traded in their solid old sense of belonging to clan or village for the woolly concept of nationality? Clan and village loyalty could indeed have strengthened as many kinship networks or villages were uprooted and transplanted as a body to the new lands.

The relationship between the national minorities and the supposed Han was never straightforward. Often their dealings were peaceful and mutually profitable. Often, however, contact led to fear, flight and open warfare. Tribes were driven into the poorest, most mountainous or most arid lands of the outlying provinces, colonies and protectorates. They did their best to hold out against the tide of interlopers who, over the decades, surged up the easy river valleys and began swirling around the steep slopes, the rocky ranges and the grassy steppes. The Miao, for example, a people numbering several million, went to war against the imperial state during the last years of the eighteenth century. The state fielded powerful battalions and paid wagonloads of silver taels in bribes to kill or buy off the ‘rebels’. Han villagers from Guangdong were settled by the state on lands formerly belonging to the Miao.

The imperial government’s outlawing of overseas migration in order to settle the western provinces meant that everybody in a position of power, from court circles down, had less and less reason to keep up with new Western knowledge of the world – for example, of New Zealand.

Western awareness of the archipelago advanced swiftly during the half century after 1790. New Zealand was changing. The stations built by sealers were followed by the stations of whalers, traders and missionaries. A new generation was being born, of children who were both European and Maori.

New Zealand by 1839 was about to be yanked wholesale into the orbit of Europe.

A group of merchants, financiers and politicians in France was keen on taking over Te Wai Pounamu. Pierre Darmandaritz, merchant captain, in 1838 wrote an eloquent report about the ‘magnificent, safe ports’ and ‘harmless but lazy natives’ of that ‘huge’ island.⁶⁰ The French New Zealand Company was formed in Paris, Nantes and Bordeaux to build ten or twelve towns and claim the hinterland as a colony of France. A rival company was formed by bankers, merchants, landed gentry and politicians in Britain. The British New Zealand Company planned to build towns in the lower half of the North Island and the upper half of the South Island. London, as we have seen, made up its mind to stop the French and try to impose ‘order’ in the country by taking control of the whole of New Zealand.

British officials, together with many Maori chiefs, early in 1840 signed the Treaty of Waitangi. The two big islands and all the small islands were proclaimed to be the Crown Colony of New Zealand. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans would soon transform the archipelago. Europeans bringing with them sheep, steam engines and steel. New Zealand was changing, and