Category: Hometown Heritage Tour

Cangdong Cultural Heritage Month, January 2022

Click on the image to view a larger version of this poster

Sophie Couchman and I will be speaking as part of the Cangdong Cultural Heritage Month Academic Lecture Series on 23 January 2022. The theme of the workshop is ‘Heritage Conservation and Roots Searching in Home Villages of Overseas Chinese’.

Sophie and I will be in conversation with Canadian historian Henry Yu about our Chinese Australian Hometown Heritage Tour and its social impacts.

Also speaking on Sunday are Selia Tan Jinhua from Wuyi University, and Henry Yu and Denise Fong from the University of British Columbia.

The workshop runs for two days – details of the Sunday sessions are below and full details including the Monday program are available in the workshop schedule (pdf, 253kb).

Sunday, 23 January 2022, 12:00pm to 2.30pm AEDT

Zoom: https://ubc.zoom.us/j/68563524555?pwd=Yk5mVHZUaURUKzVVZUpOZ0RiZ2M2UT09

Meeting ID: 685 6352 4555

Passcode: 2021

TIME (AEDT) PRESENTER TOPIC
12:00 – 12:30 p.m. Prof. Jinhua Selia Tan, Wuyi University, China Heritage Conservation and the Cangdong Project
12:30 – 1:15 p.m. Prof. Henry Yu, and Denise Fong, PhD Candidate, University of British Columbia, Canada A conversation on the construction of the Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver Chinatown, from the perspective of heritage preservation and community development
1:15 – 1:20 p.m. Break
1:20 – 2:00 p.m. Dr. Kate Bagnall, University of Tasmania, Australia and Dr. Sophie Couchman, Curator and Historian A conversation on the Australian roots-searching program and its social impact, from the perspective of its organizers
2:00 – 2:30 p.m. Presenters Discussion, Q and A

Video highlights

Thanks to Cangdong Heritage Education Center for putting together this video of the session!

 

2018 Chinese Australian Hometown Heritage Tour

In January 2018, Sophie Couchman and I hosted our second Chinese Australian Hometown Heritage Tour to Hong Kong and Guangdong. The tour ran for eleven days, from 14 to 24 January 2018, and visited Hong Kong, Jiangmen, Kaiping, Taishan, Xinhui, Zhongshan and Zhuhai.

We were joined on the tour by seventeen guests, from New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and the UK – most of whom were descended from early Cantonese migrants to Australia. One of our guests was on the tour for a second time.

Our local tour guide was Stony Xiao from China Adventure Tours, with arrangements and bookings coordinated by Active Travel in Canberra.

For the Chinese characters and Cantonese pronunciation of the names of places we visited on the tour, see this glossary of place names in Chinese (pdf, 1.6MB).

You can find out more and join our mailing list if you’re interested in joining us on a future tour.

The 2018 Chinese Australian Hometown Heritage Tour, with Selia Tan, outside the ancestral halls in Cangdong village, Kaiping

Day 1: Hong Kong 香港

Sunday, 14 January 2018

Accommodation: Charterhouse Hotel, Causeway Bay

Itinerary: arrive in Hong Kong


Day 2: Hong Kong 香港

Monday, 15 January 2018

Accommodation: Charterhouse Hotel, Causeway Bay

Itinerary: morning visit to King Yin Lei mansion and walking tour of Hong Kong Cemetery led by Sophie Couchman; yum cha lunch in Causeway Bay; free afternoon and evening

King Yin Lei, Stubbs Road, Mid-Levels: We started the tour by visiting this magnificent mansion, built by Ballarat herbalist Frank Shum Goon and his wife in 1936. It narrowly escaped demolition in 2007 but was thankfully saved by Hong Kong’s heritage-minded citizens. It is rarely open to the public but we were treated to perfect weather and a magnificent view from the street.
Hong Kong Cemetery, Happy Valley: Sophie led us on a Chinese Australian walking tour of the cemetery – we started at the top and wove our way down to the main gates opposite the Happy Valley racecourse. Among more than 12,000 graves in this beautiful ‘garden cemetery’ are a significant number of Chinese Australians who built lives in Hong Kong after leaving Australia.
Hong Kong Cemetery, Happy Valley: Pauline Rule shared her knowledge about Australian Jane Benson, the wife of Chun Yut, who is buried in the cemetery. One of the exciting aspects of the tour is the knowledge our tour members share with us and each other.

Day 3: Hong Kong 香港 – Jiangmen 江門

Tuesday, 16 January 2018

Accommodation: Yucca Hotel, Jiangmen

Itinerary: morning transfer by ferry and bus to Jiangmen; lunch at Yucca Hotel; afternoon visit to Wuyi Overseas Chinese Museum; dinner at Wuyi Kitchen, Jiangmen

On the bus from Zhongshan to Jiangmen: Some on the tour were old China hands and others were setting foot on the mainland for the first time. People-watching out the bus window, and lively conversation inside it, quickly became part of the tour.
Wuyi Overseas Chinese Museum, Jiangmen: At the entrance of this terrific bilingual museum, where we got an overview of the breadth and significance of overseas Chinese migration from the Sze Yap region.
Wuyi Kitchen, Jiangmen: A taste of what was to come – food and architecture are a big part of the Hometown Heritage Tour!

Day 4: Jiangmen 江門 – Kaiping 開平

Wednesday, 17 January 2018

Accommodation: Pan Tower International Hotel, Kaiping

Itinerary: morning and lunch at the Cangdong Heritage Education Centre, Tangkou, Kaiping, with Dr Selia Tan; afternoon visit to Zili village, Tangkou; dinner at Jiaxiang Seafood Restaurant, Kaiping

Cangdong village, Tangkou, Kaiping: We took advantage of the beautiful weather to explore the village environs with Dr Selia Tan. Selia told us about the uses of local plants, the feng shui of the village and the various shrines placed on the village boundaries.
Cangdong village, Tangkou, Kaiping: It didn’t take long for these local dishes, prepared by the Cangdong village women, to be wolfed down! Kate was particularly happy to be fed such a delicious and diverse range of vegetarian dishes.
Zili village, Tangkou, Kaiping: Taking in the view from the top one of the UNESCO World Heritage-listed mansions in Zili. Built by overseas Chinese in the early 20th century, these mansions and diaolou (defensive towers) blend Chinese and Western architectural styles and building methods.

Day 5: Kaiping 開平

Thursday, 18 January 2018

Accommodation: Pan Tower International Hotel, Kaiping

Itinerary: morning visit and cultural activities in Cangdong village; lunch at Deji Restaurant, Tangkou; afternoon cultural activities and Cantonese opera performance in Cangdong village; own choice for dinner, Kaiping

Cangdong village, Tangkou, Kaiping: We were fortunate to spend two busy days full of food, talks, craft and music at beautiful Cangdong village. Cangdong is the ancestral home of Sydney-born Chinese Australian revolutionary Tse Tsan-tai.
Cangdong village, Tangkou, Kaiping: One of our favourite tour activities is making, and blowing, clay chicken whistles. The art of making this once-popular childhood toy was on the brink of disappearing, but has been revived thanks to the Cangdong project.
Cangdong village, Tangkou, Kaiping: We finished our second day in Cangdong with a Cantonese opera performance under the banyan tree – and Sophie made a new friend!

Day 6: Kaiping 開平 – Taishan 台山

Friday, 19 January 2018

Accommodation: Taishan Gaoye Hotel, Taicheng

Itinerary: accompanied by Dr Selia Tan, morning visit to Fengcai Tang, Dihai, then Majianglong village and Baihe Pier, Baihe; lunch in a local restaurant, Baihe; afternoon tea in Yueshan market, Kaiping, then visit to Qiaotou and Zhaolongli villages, Yueshan; dinner at Qianmanyuan restaurant, Taicheng, Taishan

Fengcai Tang, Dihai, Kaiping: A special treat for our tour was having Selia Tan talk with us about the heritage significance of this magnificent ancestral hall, built by the Yee clan, now on the grounds of a high school. Many Yees from Dihai made their homes in Australia and New Zealand.
Majianglong village, Baihe, Kaiping: UNESCO World Heritage-listed Majianglong village is surrounded bamboo – dense, protective, and beautiful – offering us very different views from those in Zili village. Among the bamboo we even discovered a school with Australian links!
Yueshan town, Kaiping: We might have already eaten a fullsome lunch but that didn’t stop us all enjoying these freshly baked goodies, on sale every afternoon from three o’clock in Yueshan. As well as the ever-popular egg tart, we found pineapple buns made with chunks of real pineapple!

Day 7: Taishan 台山

Saturday, 20 January 2018

Accommodation: Taishan Gaoye Hotel, Taicheng

Itinerary: morning visit to Longtengli in Shandi village and Meijia Dayuan, then to Haikou Pier and Silver Letter Museum, Haikou; lunch in Doushan; afternoon self-guided walking tour of ‘Old Toising’ and own choice for dinner, Taicheng

Meijia Dayuan, Dingjiang, Duanfen, Taishan: We visited the stunning Mei family market square on a Saturday and it was busy and bustling. Like at Yueshan there were plenty of local goodies for sale, except here it’s now on offer for tourists and day-trippers.
Haikou Pier and Silver Letter Museum, Haikou, Taishan: We like to do a bit of exploring on our tours, and this museum had only just opened. There’s lots of great historical material on display, but no English, so Stony provided us with an excellent overview and translated text panels on the run.
Wet market, Nanchang Street, Taicheng: On the tour we have plenty of opportunities to experience everyday life in southern China, such as the shops and markets in the backstreets of Taicheng, the capital of Taishan county.

Day 8: Taishan 台山 – Xinhui 新會 – Zhongshan 中山

Sunday, 21 January 2018

Accommodation: Sheraton Hotel, Zhongshan

Itinerary: yum cha breakfast at Gaoye Hotel, Taicheng; morning visit to Shiquli village, Luokeng, Xinhui; lunch at Yufuzi restaurant on the river at Luokeng; afternoon visit to Xinhui Confucius Temple and Jinniushan Overseas Chinese Cemetery, Xinhui; dinner at Shiqi Lao restaurant, Zhongshan

Shiquli village, Luokeng, Xinhui: One of the special things for Kate on the tour is bringing the group to Shiquli, a village whose Australian connections she has been researching for almost a decade. Since we were there on a Sunday, the village kids weren’t at school and they followed us as we were shown around the village by former village head, Chen Ruihuai, aka ‘Grandpa’ Chan.
Luokeng, Xinhui: We ate lunch overlooking a branch of the Tan River at Luokeng – while not as vital as in the nineteenth century, river culture is still an important part of life in the region.
Shiqi Lao restaurant, Zhongshan: Food as performance art!

Day 9: Zhongshan 中山

Monday, 22 January 2018

Accommodation: Sheraton Hotel, Zhongshan

Itinerary: morning visit to Zhuxiuyuan and Shachong villages, Zhongshan South District; own choice for lunch and afternoon self-guided walking tour of ‘Old Shekki’ along Sun Wen Road, Shiqi, Zhongshan; dinner at Xi Jia restaurant, Sanxi village, Zhongshan East District

Zhuxiuyuan, South District, Zhongshan: The Kwok brothers from Zhuxiuyuan founded the famous Wing On department stores in Hong Kong and Shanghai after business success in Sydney. We saw an expression of their wealth in this house built in their home village, now a suburb of Zhongshan city.
Shiqi, Zhongshan: There are lots of hidden sights down the laneways off Sun Wen Road in Shekki, the old part of Zhongshan city – these women do facial hair removal by ‘threading’.
Sanxi village, East District, Zhongshan: Enjoying a drink at the microbrewery before dinner.

Day 10: Zhongshan 中山 – Zhuhai 珠海

Tuesday, 23 January 2018

Accommodation: Aqueen Hotel, Zhuhai

Itinerary: morning visit to Xiangshan Commercial Culture Museum, Shiqi, then to Museum of the Former Residence of Sun Yat-sen and Zhongshan Folklore Culture Museum, Cuiheng, Zhongshan; lunch at Hi Centre and Zhuhai Opera House, Xiangzhou, Zhuhai; afternoon visit to Meixi Royal Stone Archways, Meixi village, Xiangzhou; dinner at Deyue Fang restaurant, Yeli Island, Xiangzhou

Xiangshan Commerical Culture Museum, Shiqi, Zhongshan: The top floor of this museum tells the story of the four major Shanghai department stores, established by Zhongshan-born Chinese who learnt their skills and raised their capital in Australia – the Mas, Kwoks, Choys and lastly the Lees and Lius.
Museum of the Former Residence of Sun Yat-sen, Cuiheng, Zhongshan: As well as stories about Sun Yat-sen’s childhood in Cuiheng and his later career, this museum contains displays about Zhongshan domestic life and culture.
Meixi Paifang, Meixi village, Xiangzhou, Zhuhai: These ‘paifang’ or archways were presented by the Qing government to Chun Afong, the first Chinese consul in Hawaii, for his benevolence and good works in his hometown. The nearby museum highlights the interesting lives of Chun Afong and his mixed-race Chinese-Hawaiian family.

Day 11: Zhuhai 珠海 – Hong Kong 香港

Wednesday, 24 January 2018

Itinerary: morning walking tour of old Xiangzhou fishing port led by Kate Bagnall and visit to Transient Fishing Culture Exhibition Hall, Xiangzhou, Zhuhai; ferry transfer to Hong Kong

Hong Kong-Macau Transient Fishing Culture Exhibition Hall, Xiangzhou, Zhuhai: We visited this former dragon boat pavilion as part of Kate’s Zhuhai walking tour – as a museum it now tells the history of Old Xiangzhou and the Tanka fishing communities of Zhuhai, Macau and Hong Kong.
Xiangzhou, Zhuhai: We were treated to an aerial display over the Zhuhai Opera House and Xiangzhou fishing port – the port will soon be relocated to make way for a luxury marina.
Jiuzhou Port, Zhuhai: Heading back to Hong Kong by high-speed ferry.

Finally, a big thanks to our 2018 tourers – Megan, Kerry, Pauline, Leanne, Natalie, Susan, Richard, Ann, Sally-Anne, Yvonne, Lyn, Kevin, Sarah, Robbie, Janice, Alice, Dalys – for the things each one of you brought to the tour. It’s a joy and a privilege to be able to share these experiences with you!

Communication and collaboration in the digital age

This is the paper that I presented at the Related Histories: Studying the Family conference, held at the National Library of Australia on 29 November 2017.

If you’re interested in knowing more, Caitlin Adams from Macquarie University has written a review of the Related Histories conference.

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the field of Chinese Australian history has been characterised by the active participation of family and community researchers alongside academic historians, museum curators and heritage professionals. Over the same period, digital technologies have changed the ways that we communicate and how we do historical research. In this paper I consider questions of communication and collaboration between academic and family historians in the digital age, based on my work in Chinese Australian history. Working with family historians and descendants over the past two decades has shaped my practice as an academic historian, in particular in thinking about who I write for and why. In the paper I will discuss some of the ways I have made my work accessible and actively engaged with family historians, particularly in the digital realm, and contemplate the benefits and challenges of doing so as an academic historian today.

Introduction

My contribution to this panel on ‘family history and the digital revolution’ is going to be something of a personal reflection based on my participation in the field of Chinese Australian history over the past two decades – a period that both starts and ends with me in the academy. Then, twenty years or so ago, I was a PhD student at the University of Sydney. Now, I’m an ARC DECRA Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong.

In between, there was a good decade or so in which I held no academic position or affiliation. I worked at the National Archives for about seven years, then in editing and publishing in the public service here in Canberra, and then as a freelance editor and historian-for-hire, completing projects for AIATSIS and DFAT among others. All the while I maintained my scholarly research practice as best I could around this paid work and family life. I wrote papers, presented at academic conferences, and published in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections. In 2016 I was awarded a DECRA fellowship, and so I now find myself back in academia.

In the two decades in which I have been a historian, digital technologies have radically changed the ways that we do history – as academic, community or family historians. These technologies affect every aspect of historical practice – most obviously in the ways that we find and access archival and library collections online, but also in how we can interact with, analyse and understand those collections; and in how we can present and communicate our work.

Digital history – ‘gathering, preserving and presenting the past on the web’ as Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig described it – democratises history by inviting and encouraging the participation of non-academic audiences. It makes historical knowledge more accessible to the public and multiplies the number of people who participate in making history. It also facilitates investigation, curiosity, participation and connection building around historical knowledge and historical collections.

One thing that has struck me after moving back into academia last year has been the reaction of my university colleagues to my use of the web and my outwards focus as a historian – the fact that I blog and I tweet, that I make time to give talks and workshops to family historians and other non-academic audiences, and that I would rather my work be accessible than locked behind the paywall of a ‘prestigious’ international journal.

In my paper today I would therefore like to reflect on how I think working with family historians and descendants over the past two decades has shaped my practice as an academic historian, and consider how digital technologies have created opportunities for communication and collaboration. I’ll discuss three examples: first, publishing my work online; second, running a heritage study tour to China; and third, developing an online archival transcription project.

Researching Chinese Australian family life

Working in field of Chinese Australian history, people often ask whether I have Chinese heritage – not an unreasonable question considering that much of my work has focused on mixed-race Chinese-European families. The short answer to that question is ‘no’, but there is one family connection that I do quite like to highlight.

My paternal great grandparents, Harry Bagnall and Florence Bellamy (both migrants to New South Wales – he from Dudley in England and she from Dunedin in New Zealand), were pioneers in the sport of cycling in Sydney in the 1890s. In 1892, Florence was one of four women elected as honorary members of the Sydney Bicycle Club, ‘in consideration of their being the first ladies in Australia to take up the pastime of cycling’ (Evening News, 21 May 1892, p. 5). Florence met Harry through their mutual interest in cycling. He was an active member of League of Wheelman and competed professionally in the mid-1890s.

Another migrant to New South Wales, one who had arrived a good three decades before my great grandparents, was also involved in the League of Wheelman, and that was Sydney merchant Quong Tart. Cycle club meetings were held in his tea rooms in King Street and Quong Tart was for some years a starter at League of Wheelman races. Margaret Tart’s biography of her late husband, published in 1911, includes a photograph of Quong Tart and my great grandfather officiating at a race meeting together. That is my historical family connection to Chinese Australian history!

My interest in Chinese Australian history therefore did not come from my own family history, but it did emerge out of personal experience.

Twenty years ago, in 1997, after finishing Honours in History at Sydney University, I went to teach English in China for a year, in the small coastal city of Zhuhai, just across the border from Macau and an hour by ferry from Hong Kong. Zhuhai is in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong province, and it was from the Pearl River Delta, through Hong Kong, that most Chinese immigrants came to Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Having fallen in love with the language, culture and history of south China, when I returned to Australia to begin my PhD, I sought a topic that might combine this new love with my existing love of Australian women’s history. And so, under the supervision of Penny Russell, I began researching the history of Chinese families in colonial New South Wales.

What I found when I began that research was that the existing scholarship on the Chinese in Australia, including works written by academic historians, discounted the existence of Chinese families in colonial Australia – in part because of the small numbers of Chinese women who migrated at that time, and in part because of the assumption that white Australian women and Chinese men didn’t form families together. Failing to critically examine their sources, scholars repeated and compounded colonial thinking about the sexual, social and family lives of the Chinese in Australia.

They perpetuated myths and stereotypes about the scarcity of ‘real’ families, about the ‘immorality’ and ‘vice’ that resulted from this, and about the tragedy and moral failings of white women who formed intimate relationships with Chinese men. It wasn’t just white Australian historians who did this either. C.F. Yong, author of one of the earliest major histories on the Chinese in Australia, accepted the idea of widespread Chinese immorality in the colonies caused by a lack of family life, and gave credence to the idea that the Chinese were frequent ‘seducers’ of white girls. (I’ve explored this more in my 2011 article on ‘Rewriting the history of Chinese families in 19th-century Australia‘.)

After mining the footnotes of these earlier historians for sources – this was well before the days of Trove, remember! – it was pretty clear why they had this impression of Chinese Australian family life. The government reports and inquiries, parliamentary debates, and articles from the metropolitan daily press they cited spoke about ‘the Chinese’ as an anonymous group, rarely mentioning individual Chinese, other than those of wealth and community standing like Quong Tart or Louis Ah Mouy.

These sources did, however, mention here and there a Chinese man with a European wife, or a European woman living with a Chinese man, or the presence of Chinese-European children. So I went looking for material about these families elsewhere – in published local and community histories, in the collections of local history and family history societies, in birth and marriage records, and in immigration records. I also sought to make contact with descendants.

For me as a young historian, contact with descendants and family historians was important for a number of reasons.

The first, simply, was to try and locate names and biographical information about the Chinese-European families who were the focus of my study. I wanted to know who these people were, where they lived, how they met, and what their lives were like – research that is remarkably hard to do without a name.

The second, where I already knew names and had some information from the archives, was to form a more rounded picture of their lives, to understand more about them than the official record might tell.

Over time, a third reason emerged, and that was to be able to share what I knew and what I had uncovered in the archives, both about their families in particular and more generally about Chinese Australian family life. While many of the family historians I met had done the most extensive, fastidious research – as they do – Chinese ancestors were often a puzzle. Many had not known of their Chinese ancestry before digging into the family history, and I began to be able to provide a broader understanding of the context of their ancestors’ lives in both Australia and south China.

The questions that family historians asked me also pushed me to find answers. I’ll give you one example.

About 18 months into my PhD I made contact with a lady named Marlene from Lane Cove whose great-grandmother, Harriet Bourke, had married Thomas Ah Cue in Forbes in 1881. One of their daughters, Susan, born in Forbes in 1882, married a Chinese man named John Lee in 1899. Among the family documents Marlene had located was the 1915 naturalisation certificate of Susan Lee, and she asked me why Susan, who was born in New South Wales and was therefore a British subject by birth, had taken out naturalisation. At the time, I didn’t really know the answer, but it prompted me to find out. And I’m pleased to say that I now have a PhD student, Emma Bellino, who is writing her thesis on the topic of marital denaturalisation, focusing on Australian women who married non-European aliens in the early 20th century.

At the same time as making contact with these family historians, I found a community of researchers working in the field of Chinese Australian history whose backgrounds stretched across academic history, archaeology, heritage, the GLAM sector, and community and family history.

This community of researchers provided me with models of how good, scholarly history could take different forms and be presented for different audiences – I’m thinking here of the Golden Threads project run by Janis Wilton at UNE and the Chinese Heritage of Australian Federation project run by John Fitzgerald, then at La Trobe. Among their outputs, these two projects produced websites with publicly accessible databases and other online resources. Although time has not served these project websites well – the Golden Threads website no longer exists except in Pandora and the Internet Archive, and the CHAF website exists in a semi-functional ‘archived’ form hosted by the La Trobe University Library – they were both exemplary Australian digital history projects of their time.

In this Chinese Australian history community I also found my good friend and collaborator, Sophie Couchman. One of our first joint enterprises, along with a couple of other history postgrads, was the creation of the online Journal of Chinese Australia. The journal only lasted two issues, in 2005 and 2006, but I think our aim for the journal still epitomises the approach that Sophie and I take in our work. We hoped the journal would provide ‘access to research and resources on the history and culture of Chinese people in Australia’ and be ‘a place for family and community researchers, historians and students to share their ideas and questions’.

For the rest of my time I’d briefly like to share with you three more recent examples of how I have engaged with family historians in both the digital and non-digital worlds.

Being present on the web

Making my work available online has had a profound effect on my interactions with family historians and the research community more broadly.

I decided when I finished my PhD in 2006 to make my thesis accessible online through the University of Sydney’s online respository, and a couple of years later, in August 2008, I started a blog, giving myself a visible presence online. More recently again, in March 2009, I began using Twitter, which I use ‘professionally’ rather than ‘personally’, although there’s quite a deal of overlap between the two. Where possible, too, I now either publish my ‘academic’ work in open access publications or negotiate to be able to put a copy of my final article or chapter online through my website. I want my work to be read by the people I write it for – and many of them don’t have access to scholarly journal databases or university libraries or have the money to buy $150 books published by international presses.

One of the most common ways that people have found my work is when they Google their family name as part of their family history research. My thesis includes stories about many families, and has two appendixes – one of Chinese-European marriages in colonial New South Wales, and one of Chinese-European families who travelled to and from China before 1930. It therefore includes lots of names, although as I am continually discovering, there are still many, many families I have never heard of!

As I mentioned before, many of the descendants who contact me were previously unaware of their Chinese heritage, and are at a loss about how to start researching. I’ve had some really lovely emails from people telling me what a help my thesis and blog have been in providing them with a place to start to understand the Chinese part of their family. For example, I received an email from a lady named Heather in 2013, who wrote:

I am so grateful that this part of our history has been researched and brought to light … I am so touched to finally feel that I might be about to discover something from a heritage that has been hidden and denied. It was all generations ago and my family has almost no stories or clues, and yet … to read about the experiences of similar families is exciting and promises a connection that has felt lost until now … Knowing [your thesis] exists is somehow something I find comforting, and I wanted to reach out and say thank you.

That is the sort of thing that really makes my heart glow as a historian!

Some of these contacts have helped me solve puzzles too. The story of Pauline Ah Hee is one example.

One of the groups of Chinese-European children I wrote about in my thesis were children who were in state care or adopted. Among them was a beautiful child named Pauline Ah Hee, born Dubbo in 1893, who was adopted by James and Fanny Choy Hing in Sydney. Based on a Customs file held in the National Archives in Sydney I wrote about Pauline in my thesis, pondering about her role in her adopted family. James and Fanny had children of their own, and I wondered why and in what circumstances they had taken Pauline into their family. In 2011, I got to know Howard, whose wife is the granddaughter of James Choy Hing and the niece of Pauline Ah Hee. Howard had heard me speaking on our local ABC radio here in Canberra and looked up my thesis online. My mention of Pauline and the Choy Hing family spurred him on to research that part of the family history, and in time he shared with me what he had uncovered about Pauline’s life. Howard told me that after her adoption Pauline was raised as a true daughter of the family, living as part of the wealthy Choy household in Hong Kong after the family’s return there.

Chinese Australian Hometown Heritage Tour

When I went to live in China in 1997 it was by lucky coincidence that the city I lived in, Zhuhai, was in the heart of the ancestral homelands of Australia’s early Chinese migrants. At that time, Zhuhai was still very much a Cantonese city – some of the city’s residents are from families that had lived in the area for generations, while many others had migrated from districts around Pearl River Delta after Zhuhai became a Special Economic Zone in the early 1980s.

Thanks to the friendships I made that year, I was welcomed into family homes and taken on visits to ancestral villages in the countryside, I celebrated traditional festivals like Chinese New Year and Qingming and took part in significant family events like weddings, new baby celebrations (满月 múhn yuht) and a funeral. The history, culture and language of the Pearl River Delta districts are very special and I feel really privileged to have been able to experience life there in the way that I have.

So, as I came and went from China in the years that followed – on holiday, to study, to do research – and as I spent time here with Chinese Australian family historians, I realised that many Australian descendants wanted to go and visit their Chinese ancestral homes, but didn’t know how to go about it, particularly because they spoke no Chinese. For many, too, there was insufficient information to trace their Chinese ancestor back to a particular place, other than the ubiquitous Canton.

So this year, after many years of quietly plotting in my own mind and a couple of years of serious organising, Sophie Couchman and I led our first Chinese Australian Hometown Heritage Tour to Hong Kong and Guangdong. The tour ran for ten days, beginning and ending in Hong Kong. In China proper, we visited museums, heritage sites and ‘Australian’ villages in six Pearl River Delta counties. Our sixteen guests came from New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and New Zealand, and most were descended from early Cantonese migrants to Australia. During the tour we visited a number of their ancestral villages, something that was very special for us all. We also ate a tremendous amount of excellent food, including the best egg tarts I think any of us have ever had.

Since the tour Sophie and I have been heartened by the participants’ responses to the experience. One participant, Jenny, has, for example, just given a conference paper – her first – about her Chinese ancestor, Ah Chin, at the Dragon Tails conference in Bendigo this past weekend. In her conference abstract Jenny wrote:

Until this year, I tended to think of him as ‘the Chinese guy’. When I travelled to China with the other Chinese descendants … my attitude changed. Suddenly, he was a real person, my ancestor, my great-great grandfather, and loving husband to Sarah and father to six children.

Another participant from our 2017 tour is even coming back to join us for our next tour in January 2018. We’re also really pleased that two of the participants in our upcoming tour in January are PhD students whose doctoral research draws on their own Chinese Australian family history, in Darwin and country Victoria. For me, it’s really exciting to see the possibilities that these personal experiences in the ancestral homelands in Guangdong might bring to a new generation of Australian histories.

Real Face of White Australia

One of the most significant sources for writing Chinese Australian history are the many thousands of Customs and Immigration files about Chinese Australians held by the National Archives of Australia. These records were created in the administration of the Immigration Restriction Act and include, among other things, about 40,000 identification documents called Certificates of Domicile and Certificates Exempting from the Dictation Test, which date from the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s.

Since the early 2000s, the National Archives has undertaken substantial arrangement and description and digitisation work on various of these record series, meaning that they are a lot easier to find and access than when I first looked at them as a PhD student twenty years ago. Individual records across multiple record series can, for example, now be easily located using a name-based keyword search in the National Archives’ collection database, RecordSearch, and digitised copied viewed online.

This year I have been working with University of Canberra historian Tim Sherratt and his digital cultural heritage students on an online project, called the Real Face of White Australia, that aims to transcribe data from these identification documents. Like the Hometown Heritage Tour, this project has had a long germination – from my various low-tech efforts at extracting personal data from the certificates to Tim’s very high-tech use of facial detection technology in his creation of the Real Face of White Australia experimental browser in 2012.

The transcription website that Tim has built uses the power of crowdsourcing to extract structured data – like names and biographical information – from the documents, data that can then be used for future research. As the project progresses Tim will release the data online so that anyone can use it, not just us. I’d encourage you to have a go at transcribing – it’s pretty fun!

There is a lot more that I could say about the project, but I will focus on two things with a family history perspective.

To launch the project, we held a transcribe-a-thon weekend at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, where we and Tim’s students and members of the public sat and transcribed all weekend. Being an online project, though, it wasn’t just those of us physically in the building who took part in the weekend’s activities. One of our China tour participants set up his own mini transcribe-a-thon at home in Melbourne, where he and his family sat around the dining table working away at transcibing the records on the Saturday night. He is now also working with Sophie Couchman on developing a similar transcription project for a significant set of Chinese immigration registers held in the Melbourne office of the National Archives.

My final example is something that I, as a mum, think is probably the best thing to have come out of the whole project. Tim and my seven-year-old daughter, Emily, really got into transcribing the records during the transcribe-a-thon, and in the records she came across the photograph of a little Chinese Australian girl named Dolly Denson from 1909. Emily was so taken by Dolly’s picture that she wanted to find out more about her, so together we did some more research and, over the last school holidays, she wrote a blog post about her discoveries (using her nom de plume, Parker). Since the post went live on my blog, three of little Dolly Denson’s relatives – two of her nieces and a grand niece – have written lovely comments in response. How good is that?

Conclusion

Engaging with family historians and descendants over the past two decades had given me a very concrete sense of why I do what I do as a historian. Yes, I’m a historian because I love being a historian – like many of us, I may well be my happiest when I’m buried in the archives – but I’ve also kept being a historian through those lean years when it wasn’t what I was paid to do because I feel like my research makes a difference to people.

In the world of academic history I hope my work shifts our understanding of the place of Chinese Australians and Australia–China relations in the broader narrative of Australian history. In the world of family history, I hope that my work contributes to people’s understanding of their own family histories and how their ancestors lives fit into the bigger story of both Australian and Chinese history. These family stories are not always easy ones to uncover or understand, and they can be very emotional to research – but they are important and they deserve to be told.

Although this session was about ‘family history and the digital revolution’, you can see from my examples that my engagement with family historians is not all about being digital – the tangible and the face to face are still important. In my experience though, there are many positive things about working online, not least of which is the fact that it scales up the possibilities for participation, communication and collaboration between academic historians and family historians.

2017 Chinese Australian Hometown Heritage Tour

In March 2017, we – Kate Bagnall and Sophie Couchman – hosted our inaugural Chinese Australian Hometown Heritage Tour to Hong Kong and Guangdong. The tour ran for ten days, from 22 March to 31 March 2017, and visited Hong Kong, Jiangmen, Kaiping, Taishan, Xinhui, Zhongshan and Zhuhai.

We were joined on the tour by sixteen guests, from New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and New Zealand – most of whom were descended from early Cantonese migrants to Australia. The tour was guided by Stony Xiao from China Adventure Tours, with arrangements and bookings coordinated by Active Travel in Canberra.

For the Chinese characters for names of places we visited on the tour, see this glossary of place names in Chinese (pdf, 1.7MB).

Day 1: Hong Kong 香港

Wednesday, 22 March 2017

Day 2: Hong Kong 香港

Thursday, 23 March 2017
  • Morning at leisure
  • Afternoon walking tour of old Pokfulam village, including the Tung Wah Coffin Home, with Jason Wordie – the tour introduced the history of Hong Kong and some its of overseas Chinese connections
  • Dinner at Gold Mui Seafood Stall restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui, with a talk by Dr Catherine Ladds (Hong Kong Baptist University) on the history of Eurasians in Hong Kong and treaty-port China
  • Accommodation at Stanford Hillview Hotel, Tsim Sha Tsui
The group outside Douglas Castle, now University Hall at the University of Hong Kong, on our Pokfulam walking tour (photo: Jonathan O’Donnell)

Day 3: Hong Kong 香港 – Jiangmen 江門

Friday, 24 March 2017
  • Ferry to Jiangmen (3 hours) – arriving in Guangdong by river boat we got a sense of the way overseas Chinese travelled in the 19th century and early 20th century
  • Lunch at Wuyi Kitchen restaurant in the Yucca Hotel mall in Jiangmen – where we got our first taste of local Jiangmen cuisine
  • Visit to the Wuyi Overseas Chinese Museum with Dr Selia Tan from Wuyi University – in this bilingual museum we were introduced to the broader history of overseas migration from the Wuyi (previously Siyi or See Yup) area of Guangdong, including migration to Australia
  • Visit to the Overseas Chinese Culture Research Centre at Wuyi University – where Dr Selia Tan told us about ongoing research at Wuyi University on overseas Chinese history
  • Dinner at leisure – most of us ate in one of the restaurants in the glossy shopping mall attached to the Yucca Hotel
  • Accommodation at Yucca Hotel, Jiangmen
At the Wuyi Overseas Chinese Museum in Jiangmen (photo: Kate Bagnall)

Day 4: Jiangmen 江門 – Kaiping 開平

Saturday, 25 March 2017
  • Visit to Cangdong village, Tangkou, Kaiping led by Dr Selia Tan – the Cangdong Heritage Education Centre, run by Selia, is working with local villagers to restore and revitalise the village of Cangdong; Cangdong is the ancestral village of Sydney-born Chinese revolutionary James Ah See or Tse Tsan-tai
  • Lunch at Cangdong village – lunch was a traditional village meal prepared by women from Cangdong in the communal kitchen, which we ate sitting in one of the restored ancestral halls
  • Visit to Li Yuan mansions and garden – built as a private home by Chinese American Xie Weili in the 1920s and 1930s, Li Yuan’s residences and garden were restored in the early 2000s and opened as a tourist site, which now also features a museum
  • Cultural activities at Cangdong village – we listened to performances of traditional folk music, watched calligraphy, paper flower-making and toy-making, and sampled some traditional Cangdong village sweets
  • Dinner at Lingzhiyuan restaurant in Tangkou, Kaiping – Lingzhiyuan’s menu is based around the lingzhi mushroom (Ganoderma lucidum), a ‘magic fungus’ formerly credited with miraculous powers and considered a symbol of good luck!
  • Accommodation at Pan Tower International Hotel, Kaiping
View from the top of the diaolou (watchtower) in Cangdong village, Kaiping (photo: Jonathan O’Donnell)

Day 5: Kaiping 開平

Sunday, 26 March 2017
  • Visit to Fengcai Tang (Yee Ancestral Hall) in Dihai with Dr Selia Tan – Fengcai Tang, now the site of a secondary school, is a magnificent example of the Western-influenced Chinese architecture of the early 20th century; one of our tour guests is a descendent of the Yee clan from Dihai, so it was an extra-special visit for her
  • Visit to Chikan town – a riverside market town built with overseas remittances mainly in 1920s to 1930s
  • Visit to Zili village – a magnificent example of the Kaiping’s tower mansions, which have been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list
  • Lunch at Youzhiming restaurant in the countryside in Sanbu, Kaiping – Youzhiming specialises the local Kaiping delicacy, goose!
  • Visit to a cluster of Poon villages in Qiaotou, Yueshan, Kaiping – Kate has been researching one of the Poon families from Victoria, so brought everyone to visit the Poon ancestral villages; one of our tour members is a descendent of the Poon clan, most likely from this same cluster of villages
  • Afternoon tea in the market town of Yueshan – Yueshan is renowned for its streetside stalls, selling a range of afternoon tea treats each day from three o’clock; we enjoyed chatting, and resting our legs, while munching down freshly baked egg tarts and other delights
  • Visit Longtian village in Lechong, Kaiping – we visited the ancestral home of the mother of one of our tour guests
  • Dinner at leisure in Kaiping city
  • Accommodation at the Pan Tower International Hotel, Kaiping
  • And yes, this was a super busy day!
Diaolou (watchtowers) in the World Heritage listed village of Zili, Kaiping (photo: Kate Bagnall)

Day 6: Kaiping 開平 – Taishan 台山

Monday, 27 March 2017
  • Visit to Meijia Dayuan (Moy Family Compound), in Duanfen, Taishan – an interesting example of a market square built by overseas Chinese, perhaps best known today as the set for the 2010 action comedy film, Let the Bullets Fly
  • Visit to Longtengli, Shandi, Duanfen – here we saw the sadly delapidated home of famous Sydney merchant, Quong Tart, which he built for his parents in the late nineteenth century
  • Lunch at Qianmanyuan restaurant – this charming private restaurant is located in the grounds of the Taishan Library, surrounded by its own vegetable garden (arguably the most delicious meal of the trip!)
  • Visit to Taishan No. 1 Middle School – Taishanese people overseas contributed greatly to education in their home county and many of the school buildings were funded by overseas Chinese contributions, particularly from Canada
  • Free afternoon and evening in Taicheng (Taishan city) – the old part of the city, with narrow streets, shop houses, two historic churches and old-style shops is fun to explore
  • Accommodation at Taishan Gaoye Hotel, Taicheng
Stalls selling snacks and local products at the Mei Family Compound, Dingjiang, Taishan (photo: Kate Bagnall)

Day 7: Taishan 台山 – Xinhui 新會 – Zhongshan 中山

Tuesday, 28 March 2017
  • Visit to the Xinhui Fan Palm Museum – Xinhui is known for its fan palm trees, and the museum gave an interesting insight into some of the local crafts made using fan palms
  • Lunch at Yutai Temple, Guifeng Mountain Park, Xinhui – here we had the opportunity to visit a Buddhist temple, located at the top of a lush mountain park, and sample the temple’s vegetarian cuisine
  • Visit to Shiquli village, Luokeng town, Xinhui – Kate has been researching the Australian connections of Shiquli; the first men from Shiquli arrived in Victoria in the 1850s and migration continued up to the 1950s
  • Visit to Chen Chong village, Luokeng town, Xinhui – the grave of a man from this village is one of the few Chinese headstones in the Old Chiltern Cemetery in Victoria
  • Dinner at Shiqilao restaurant in Zhongshan – a fabulously kitsch (!) restaurant specialising in local Zhongshan cuisine
  • Accommodation at Sheraton Hotel, Zhongshan
The group outside the rundown 1920s school in Shiquli village, Luokeng, Xinhui (photo: Jonathan O’Donnell)

Day 8: Zhongshan 中山

Wednesday, 29 March 2017
  • Morning yumcha at Rongguang Guoyan Hotel, Zhongshan – a traditional Cantonese breakfast of tea and dimsum
  • Visit to the Xiangshan Commercial Culture Museum, Zhongshan – a museum dedicated to telling the story of the town of Shekki (now part of Zhongshan city), where the top floor highlights the Cantonese history of the ‘Big Four’ department stores of Nanjing Lu, Shanghai, all of which were started by Cantonese Australians from Shekki
  • Free time to have lunch, wander and explore around the Sunwen West Road pedestrian walking street, the historic heart of Shekki where there are shops, restaurants, a hillside park, temple, more museums and lots of interesting little backstreets to explore
  • Dinner at Time 1912 restaurant, Sanxi village, Zhongshan – Sanxi is a historic village tucked away in the centre of Zhongshan city, and has been converted into heritage zone with restaurants and galleries and a nice little pub
  • After dinner some of us took the opportunity to do admire the lights along the river and do some night-time shopping along Sunwen West Road
  • Accommodation at Sheraton Hotel, Zhongshan
Evening view over the Shiqi River, Zhongshan, looking north (photo: Kate Bagnall)

Day 9: Zhongshan 中山 – Zhuhai 珠海

Thursday, 30 March 2017
  • Visit to the Museum of the Former Residence of Sun Yat-sen and the Zhongshan Folklore Culture Museum in Cuiheng – we saw Sun Yat-sen’s ancestral home and village houses furnished to show how they would have looked at different points in the 19th and 20th centuries
  • Lunch at the Shi Shen seafood restaurant, Tangjiawan, Zhuhai
  • Visit to Waisha village, Tangjiawan, Zhuhai – we saw the home and ancestral hall of Choy Hing and Choy Chong of the Dah Sun Company department store, as well as the primary school they built; one of our tour members has been researching the Choy family history (his wife’s family) and made valuable connections with local officials
  • Dinner at De Yue Fang restaurant, Xiangzhou, Zhuhai – here we experienced some of the splendour and spectacle of modern China at a famous local seafood restaurant for our final night together; De Yue Fang is in a ‘boat’ off Yeli Island, with a view over the lightshow at the new Zhuhai Opera House
  • Accommodation at Guangdong Hotel, Gongbei
Exploring Choy family history in Waisha village, Tangjiawan, Zhuhai (photo: Kate Bagnall)

Day 10: Zhuhai 珠海 – Hong Kong 香港

Friday, 31 March 2017
  • Breakfast in the revolving restaurant atop the Guangdong Hotel – alas, we only got glimpses of the view through the fog and misty rain!
  • Ferry to Hong Kong (1 hour) – a leisurely return by boat that gave us time to reflect on the trip and say farewell to other tour members before going our separate ways
View over Gongbei, Zhuhai, from the top of the Guangdong Hotel (photo: Kate Bagnall)

 

Hometown Heritage Tour survey results

Earlier in the year I conducted a survey of people who had registered their interest in my Chinese Australian Hometown Heritage Tour. I received 40 responses, which is great! Feedback I’ve received so far about the tour is very positive, and I look forward to putting together a tour that hopefully fulfils what most people would like to get out of it.

One of the survey respondents asked why I was interested in running the tour. Over the past 20-odd years I’ve had contact with many Australians who know little or nothing about their Chinese heritage, often because the social stigma of racial mixing in the era of White Australia resulted in deliberate ‘forgetting’ and hiding of non-European heritage. Others know more, but have never been to China before. The time I’ve been lucky enough to spend in Guangdong has helped me to better understand the historical lives of those who migrated to Australia, the culture and landscape they came from, and the social worlds they inhabited. I’m hoping that the tour will provide others with the same sort of experience and understanding. I also love to travel, and especially love travelling in the weird and wonderful world of south China!

I’m very aware that the itinerary I’m planning, which includes Zhongshan and the Sze Yup counties of Xinhui, Kaiping and Taishan, leaves out some major hometown districts such as Dongguan and Zengcheng in Guangdong and Xiamen (Amoy) in Fujian province. The tour destinations reflect the areas in which I’ve spent most time and where I have contacts. The first tour in March 2016 will be a bit of an experiment, and if things go well I hope to offer more tours in the future (if the demand exists!).

Here’s a summary of the results of the survey. I’ll be working with this in mind as I put together a firm itinerary and program of activities in the next few months.

You can still subscribe for updates about the tour.

What is the main reason for your interest in the tour?
Seventy-five per cent of respondents were descended from a Chinese migrant to Australia or New Zealand, with a further 15 per cent related to someone descended from a Chinese migrant to Australia or New Zealand.

Have you been to mainland China before?
Respondents were divided into three main groups: 45 per cent had lived or travelled in mainland China, 30 per cent had never been to mainland China or Hong Kong, and 25 per cent had been to Hong Kong but not to the mainland.

The tour is currently planned for March 2016, with a possible second tour in November 2016. Which date would suit you best?
Either or both dates suited all respondents. One respondent requested that the tour take place during school holidays, but due to the differences in Australian school holiday dates between the states this may not be possible.

The tour is planned to last 10 days, starting and finishing in Hong Kong. Transfers (ferry, private minibus), accommodation and most meals would be included, as well as entry to sites, talks and workshops. How much would you expect to pay?
Almost 40 per cent respondents felt that between $2000 and $2500 would be the expected cost for the tour, including land transfers, accommodation, most meals, site entry, talks and workshops. Almost equal numbers said they would be prepared to pay up to $3000 or over $3000.

How do you feel about the quality and price of the tour?
Nearly 80 per cent of respondents stated that they would prefer ‘comfortable accommodation, meals and transport at a reasonable cost’, with almost 20 per cent stating that they would prefer basic standards to keep costs as low as possible.

How do you feel about meals and eating on the tour?
Most respondents said that they would like to try local foods and specialities, including eating at street stalls or markets. A smaller number said that they would like to eat local foods, but only in restaurants that met Australian standards. One indicated that they had dietary restrictions.

Would you join the tour by yourself or as part of a group?
Most respondents indicated that they would travel as part of a couple, with friends or family (over 60 per cent). Almost 40 per cent said that they would be travelling alone. I will give the option of sharing accommodation with someone of the same gender, or of paying a single supplement.

What is your level of interest in possible tour destinations and activities?
The most popular activity suggestions were:

  • visiting ancestral villages of early Chinese who migrated to Australia (100 per cent of respondents said ‘definite yes’ or ‘sounds good’)
  • visiting World Heritage-listed diaolou in Kaiping (85 per cent of respondents said ‘definite yes’ or ‘sounds good’)
  • visiting other heritage sites with connections to overseas migration (95 per cent of respondents said ‘definite yes’ or ‘sounds good’)
  • visiting overseas Chinese history museums (over 90 per cent of respondents said ‘definite yes’ or ‘sounds good’)
  • hearing expert talks on overseas Chinese history and heritage (over 95 per cent of respondents said ‘definite yes’ or ‘sounds good’)
  • eating local foods, such as dim sum and cakes (over 95 per cent of respondents said ‘definite yes’ or ‘sounds good’)
  • doing independent activities, such as free time to explore a town or city by yourself (over 80 per cent of respondents said ‘definitely yes’ or ‘ sounds good’)
  • taking evening shopping walks (80 per cent said ‘definitely yes’ or ‘sounds good’).

Other activities were a bit less popular (with between 70 and 80 per cent of respondents who said ‘definitely yes’ or ‘sounds good’): visiting general history museums, introduction to Cantonese language, village cooking classes and village cultural performances.

The least popular activity suggestion was cycling through the countryside between heritage sites (60 per cent of respondents said ‘take it or leave it’ or ‘not interested at all’).

Is there a particular ancestral village or county in Guangdong you would like to visit?
Thirty per cent of respondents said they had a particular village or town they wanted to visit, while nearly 40 per cent said they knew of the county they wanted to visit but not a particular village. The places respondents listed included: Shekki (Zhongshan), Zhuhai, Hoiping (Kaiping), Sunwui (Xinhui), Taishan, Jiangmen, and Amoy. Over 30 per cent didn’t have a particular place they wanted to visit.