Historical Chinese Australian names throw up all sorts of challenges – from the ubiquity of ‘Ah’ to confusion of name order – but in my recent research on Chinese Tasmanian history, it’s the challenge of matching Chinese and English versions of people’s names that’s been puzzling me.
As part of our Everyday Heritage Linkage project, we have compiled a list of the Chinese names of more than 950 people connected to Tasmania, dating from 1901 to 1936, taken from historical newspapers digitised in Trove.
“專 件 [Special Report]”, Tung Wah Times (Sydney), 18 October 1919, p. 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article227016320 – this newspaper article, about the establishment of a Tasmanian branch of the Chinese Anti-Discriminatory and Patriotic Association, includes the Chinese name of Claude Nam ShingTo do this, researcher Brian Tseng located 82 relevant newspaper articles in four newspapers: Chinese Republic News, Chinese Times, Chinese Australian Herald, and the Tung Wah News/Times. Many of these articles are newspaper subscription notices, society membership lists, or lists of philanthropic donations.
In time, our list of names, and the newspaper articles they came from, will be included in our forthcoming Chinese Tasmanian Stories 塔華舊事* website. But for now, they are one of the sources we’re using in researching the stories of Chinese individuals, businesses and places.
One of the individuals we’ve been looking into is Claude Nam Shing.
Claude (or Claudie) Nam Shing, greengrocer / fruiterer / market gardener, left a small but meaningful trace in the written archive in Tasmania, including English-language newspaper reports, post office directory entries (between 1907 and 1936), reports in the police gazette, and an alien registration record.
Given his long residence in Hobart and Glenorchy, we would expect that he also appeared at least once in the donation and subscription lists that we uncovered in the Chinese-language newspapers – but how do we work out what his name is in Chinese characters, beyond an educated / lucky guess?
Claude Nam Shing’s grave in the Cornelian Bay Cemetery, Hobart, January 2026
Luckily, Claude Nam Shing is buried in the Cornelian Bay Cemetery here in Hobart, and, even luckier, the headstone includes an inscription in Chinese. I was alerted to this fact by photographs of the grave in the Find a Grave website. The headstone is much weathered, as many of the old Chinese headstones in Cornelian Bay are, but it is possible to make out some of what it says from these online photographs.
Imogen Wegman and I also payed Nam Shing’s grave a visit to see if it would be easier to read in real life, with the help of rubbings. After some tricky deciphering, I am pretty confident that this is what it says:
CLAUDE NAN SHING
Died 15 June 1940 Aged 76 Years
增城 翁之墓 趙南成 (or another ‘sing’ character such as 盛) 廣東
Armed with these characters for his name, I then looked in our list of Chinese Tasmanians from the Chinese-language newspapers, and, lo and behold, there were half a dozen articles that mentioned 趙南盛 – lists of donations to famine, disaster and food relief, and membership of the Tasmanian branch of a Chinese-Australian community association – dating between 1908 and 1920.
Claude Nam Shing is just one of the hundreds of Chinese people who lived in Tasmania in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. We’re making a start at bringing their stories out of the archives, but as Claude’s case demonstrates, the biographical data that is found in Chinese headstone inscriptions is a critical piece of the puzzle of understanding both the Chinese and the Tasmanian sides of their lives. Enough remained of the inscription on Claude Nam Shing’s headstone to make it possible to read it, but this isn’t the case with others, and who knows, in a few years’ time, maybe Nam Shing’s headstone will be similarly illegible.
Transcription of some Tasmanian Chinese headstones was undertaken by researcher Kok Hu Jin some years ago, but perhaps we in Tasmania might look to the model of CAFHOV’s wonderful database of Chinese Graves at Melbourne Chinese Cemetery as an example of what is possible when it comes to documenting this precious aspect of Chinese Tasmanian heritage.
* For those of you who don’t read Chinese, 塔華舊事 is pronounced taap wàh gauh sih in Cantonese and tǎ húa jiù shì in Mandarin, and it means 塔 Tasmanian 華 Chinese 舊事 stories from long ago / echoes of history / traces of the past – you get the gist!
The Everyday Heritage: Chinese Tasmanian Stories project team is made up of me, Annaliese Claydon, Imogen Wegman and Tim Sherratt, with Chinese-language research assistance by Brian Tseng.
If you have wandered past the library on the corner of Murray and Bathurst streets, Hobart, you might have noticed a billboard featuring arresting black-and-white portraits of a young Asian woman in Edwardian dress.
Across the front and side portraits of the woman is an annotation that reads, ‘Tie Cum Ah Chung — 11–9–03 —’.
The caption below the photographs tells us that these 1903 images of Tie Cum Ah Chung come from Hobart Gaol’s Prisoners Records Books, held by Tasmanian Archives.
Billboard in the carpark of the State Library of Tasmania on the corner of Murray and Bathurst streets, Hobart, 7 November 2025. Photograph by Kate Bagnall
In this blog post I want to look into the history of Tie Cum Ah Chung, to see what can be uncovered about her life in Tasmania.
The obvious first place to look for information about Tie Cum Ah Chung is her prisoner record, which can be found through the Tasmanian Names Index (although under a slightly different spelling of her name).
The prisoner record notes that 18-year-old Tie Cum Ah Chung was first imprisoned for a month for larceny in September 1903, and then three months later she was imprisoned for another month for perjury. She was 5 foot 3 inches tall, single, had smallpox scars on her face, worked as a domestic, and apparently could not read nor write. Her native place was recorded as Yokohama, Japan, although the name of the ship that brought her to Tasmania was unknown. (Yokohama had a sizeable Cantonese population and a ‘Chinatown’, and I have come across other records of Chinese in Australia and New Zealand who stated their birthplace as being Yokohama – so this is not impossible!)
The Tasmanian Names Index brings up no other obvious records for Tie Cum, although there are, of course, other records for people with the name ‘Ah Chung’, including naturalisations, births, deaths, marriages and wills. Many of these records relate to the family of Chin Ah Chung and his wife Lily, whose descendants are still in Hobart today.
The next easy place to look for Tie Cum is in the historical newspapers in Trove, to see if there are any reports of her crimes, arrests or trials. ‘Ti Cum Ah Chung’ (in inverted commas) brings up two results, neither of which are what might have been expected – they relate to a shooting in Launceston late one Friday night in February 1906, which Tie Cum witnessed. She had been standing in York Street, near Storrer’s (an undertaker’s), talking to two young men at the time of the shooting, and she reportedly not only saw the victim but was threatened by the shooter and then warned passersby of the danger. Both articles referred to her as ‘Chinese’.
Searching under the variant spelling of her name – “Tie Cum Ah Chung” (in inverted commas) – yields some more results in the historical newspapers, with reports from September and December 1903 about her court hearings, and one further article about the 1906 shooting.
A month after the shooting, Tie Cum gave evidence at the trial, which was held at the Police Court in Launceston on Friday, 2 March 1906. Her evidence was reported under the heading ‘The Chinese Girl’. Tie Cum told the court she was a Christian, and she was sworn on the Bible. There was no mention of an interpreter, and she appears to have given her testimony in fluent English. Her evidence tallied with the earlier press reports of her involvement – she had been standing on the corner of York and St John’s streets with Albert Brooks and Alfred Grant when the events took place; interestingly she also stated that she knew two of the policemen involved in the case, one from her time in Hobart ‘before I came up here’.
A CHARGE of LARCENY. Tie Cum Ah Chung, a young Japanese woman, was again before the Court, charged with stealing 21b of biscuits from Mrs Meredith, of Harrington street. Accused was defended by Mr Davenport Hoggins (Hoggins and Gilmore). After hearing evidence, accused was found guilty and sentenced to a month’s imprisonment. An application by counsel for his client to be treated under the First Offenders Act was refused, Mr Shaw stating that the Act was never intended for persons of accused’s character. She had been before the Court several times under disreputable circumstances, and a short term of imprisonment would perhaps give her time to think over her position and probably—though he was afraid not—lead to her reform. The Court then rose.
PERJURY. Tie Cum Ah Chung pleaded guilty to having committed wilful and corrupt perjury at the City Police Court, Hobart, where, being charged with the larceny of a couple of pounds of biscuits from a shop in Argyle street, she elected to give evidence on her own behalf. Prisoner was defended by Mr C. Davenport Hoggins (Hoggins and Gilmore). Mr Hoggins made a strong appeal for leniency, and said the Salvation Army was prepared to take the woman in hand. His Honor imposed a sentence of a month’s imprisonment.
I also tried searching Trove Newspapers using some other variations of her name (Ti/Tie/Tye/Tei and Come/Chum, as well as just Ah Chung), refining the search using parameters like date range and place, with some further success. My other go-to place for researching Chinese Australians in the early twentieth century is RecordSearch (National Archives of Australia), but no records about her obviously come up under variations of the name Tie Cum Ah Chung.
Most of the other newspaper reports I found about Tie Cum were repeats of the information about her larceny and perjury convictions, and the Launceston shooting, including one that includes a more detailed account of her biscuit theft from Mrs Meredith’s shop. One other that piqued my interest was from the Hobart Mercury in July 1903, three months before the theft:
City Police Court. – On Thursday, before the Police Magistrate (Mr. B. Shaw) and Mr. A. Riddoch, J.P. …Two young women named Elsie Hardwicke and Ti Chum AhChung pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace in Elizabeth-street by assuming a pugilistic attitude. The former was fined 25s., and the latter, who was a first offender, 5s.
The circumstances of Tie Cum’s life as recorded in these few easily found records seem really quite remarkable – from what I am learning about Tasmania’s early Chinese community, there are many remarkable stories of women and families to be uncovered!
‘Melbourne Ghost Signs’ researcher Sean Reynolds has delved into Tie Cum’s history, too – she apparently left Tasmania for Victoria not that long after these events – and for her story in later life (as Sean has been able to piece together), you might have a look at his creatively (flamboyantly?) written blog post, Otherwise, Yokahama, or listen to his Royal Historical Society of Victoria podcast episode of the same name (embedded below). Note that I haven’t closely reviewed Sean’s research, but on the surface it seems to largely hold together; it’s just perhaps a little fanciful about her origin story.
What then of Tie Cum’s early life? How and when did she come to Tasmania? Was she really born in Yokohama? And was she connected in any way to the Ah Chung family that I know?
My first tantalising clue has come in the form of a newspaper report in the Hobart Mercury in May 1898, located in a search for ‘Chinese girl’ in Tasmanian newspapers, which reported an accident in Hobart involving a fourteen-year-old Chinese girl named ‘Tarcum’:
Accident. – Yesterday evening, as a butcher’s waggon was being driven along Melville street, a Chinese girl named Tarcum, aged 14, who was playing on the footpath with some other children, ran on to the road, and got on the vehicle. Just then a sudden jerk caused her to fall, and the hind wheel ran over her. She was severely injured, and subsequent to being called to her mother she was conveyed to the hospital and admitted. The extent of her injuries has not been ascertained.
This Chinese girl, ‘Tarcum’, was aged fourteen in 1898, and Tie Cum Ah Chung was aged eighteen in 1903, which broadly tallies. Could they therefore be the same person? I think it’s a real possibility! If so, she was born in about 1884 or 1885.
The 1898 article mentions that Tarcum was called to her mother after being injured, suggesting that she came to Tasmania with her family; if she was Tie Cum Ah Chung, a Tasmanian childhood would account for Tie Cum’s fluency in speaking English (as suggested by her 1906 court testimony).
So, here is my crazy theory, which makes sense with the limited evidence I have to date.
The only ‘Ah Chung’ family with a Chinese mother that I know of in Hobart in the 1890s was that of Chin Ah Chung (carpenter / cabinetmaker, later fancy goods storekeeper) and his wife Kim Wing aka Lingo, later known as Lily. Kim Wing came to Hobart in about 1892, aged in her mid to late teens, and she was known to have had her feet bound in childhood. She was befriended by white women in Hobart who taught her to speak English, and she was remembered as speaking without an accent.
We know that other Chinese wives coming to Tasmania around that time were accompanied by companions or maids (e.g. Lula Mon Chinn and Fanny Lee Fook). Is is possible then that Tie Cum was a mui tsai or maid who accompanied Kim Wing to Tasmania? She would have been perhaps 10 years younger than Kim Wing, although it’s hard to get a firm grip on their exact ages. There is no family memory of Kim Wing having migrated with a maid servant, but information about her early life is also scant. I think this arrangement would have been more likely than her being Kim Wing’s daughter, as the age difference was too close.
I hope that as time goes on I will be able to make more sense of Tie Cum’s early story in Tasmania in the 1890s and early 1900s, and either confirm or disprove my crazy theory. Whatever her story, it seems she was among the earliest, and most intriguing, immigrant Chinese women to call our island state their home.
UPDATE 14 November 2025: There goes that theory! Today I came across a snippet from the Mercury on 9 September 1903 that reads: ‘Tie Come Ah Chung is nothing to do with Ah Chung in Elizabeth-street whatever.’ This was around the time 18-year-old Tie Cum was getting into trouble in Hobart.
‘Ah Chung in Elizabeth-street’ is Chin Ah Chung, mentioned above. I guess it is possible that the Ah Chungs were distancing themselves from Tie Cum because of her disreputable behaviour, but I think for now I will put aside my theory that she came to Hobart with Kim Wing.
FURTHER UPDATE later the same day: Ha, I was right after all! Tie Cum was associated to the Ah Chung family of Elizabeth Street, Hobart! I came across another little snippet in the Mercury in August 1900, a classified inserted by Ah Chung, that reads:
MRS. QUIN, late of Garibaldi, having been residing with me for three months, went away on Wednesday night last without any cause, taking with her Tie-Com, my servant. I will not be Responsible for their actions or any debts contracted in my name. AH CHUNG, 102 Elizabeth-street, Hobart.
One final find for today is perhaps less exciting, but it does provide one more little clue about Tie Cum in Tasmania.
In October 1905, the complainant in a maintenance case, Emily Maria Deeks, stated that:
when in Hobart she was living in Harrington-street as the housekeeper of a Mr Lung [and going by the name of Mrs Lung]. There were also in the house Mr Bowring, Mr Spurling, and a Chinese woman.
We know that at the time of her arrest in 1903, Tie Cum was working as a domestic (according to her prisoner record) and also that she was publicly disowned by Ah Chung that same year. So it would make sense for her to be the ‘Chinese woman’ mentioned by Emily Maria Deeks as also residing in the house of Mr Lung, presumably working as a domestic. Again, there is nothing concrete here to say this was Tie Cum, but given the circumstances it is very possible.
AND ONE FURTHER UPDATE: Just to document the last piece of evidence I’ve found so far that is possibly about Tie Cum in Tasmania – a search in Trove Newspapers for ‘Ah Chung’ turned up the report of a fire at Ah Chung’s premises at 162 Elizbeth Street on 21 March 1898. The article noted that at Ah Chung’s house, ‘there were four Chinamen, a woman and a girl’. If this was the right Ah Chung (still to be confirmed), then could the girl be Tie Cum? Bear in mind that by this stage Chin Ah Chung and Kim Wing (later known as Lilian Ah Chung) had two young sons: Royden (born 1894) and Tasman (born 1896). It is also unlike the colonial press not to mention the race of the woman and girl if they too were Chinese.
Coohey Fue (c. 1875–1920) worked as a market gardener in Devonport in northern Tasmania. He died by suicide on 10 April 1920 (Advocate, 12 April, p. 2; Tasmanian Archives SC195/1/86 Inquest 14257) and was buried by his compatriots in the Latrobe General Cemetery on 12 April (Advocate, 12 April 1920, p. 2; 13 April 1920, p. 2). Coohey Fue was said to have a wife and three or four children in China at the time of his death.
Coohey Fue’s life and passing are connected to two white marble monuments in the Latrobe General Cemetery – but as these memorials only have inscriptions in Chinese there is nothing obviously linking them to ‘Coohey Fue’.
The two white marble monuments to Coohey Fue in the Latrobe General Cemetery, Latrobe (near Devonport), Tasmania (Photo by Kate Bagnall, December 2022)
The monuments
The two monuments appear to have been made from the same materials at the same time, although one is in somewhat poorer condition than the other. The text on them differs only in the deceased’s name, and I believe they were both erected following the death of the man known in English as Coohey Fue.
Searching the Chinese-language newspapers in Trove brings up a few articles that mention the names given on the monuments:
林舉富 (Lam Kui Fu): ‘美利濱中華公會捐賑廣東水災彙録’, Tung Wah Times, 21 August 1915, p. 8, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article226737771 [list of Melbourne donors to Guangdong flood relief; includes 林舉富 and another man who is presumably a brother/cousin 林舉羨]
林舉章 (Lam Kui Cheung):
‘他省發起維持禁例會簡章’‘, Chinese Republic News, 5 October 1918, p. 7, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article226019302 [mentions 林舉章 and another man who is presumably a brother/cousin 林舉豪]
The text on the monuments includes a number of Chinese cultural terms that are difficult to translate directly into English, including: 公 (Cantonese: gūng, honorific, for a male person), 府君 (Cantonese: fú gwān, honorific, for a person who has died), 庚申 (Cantonese: gāng sān, one of the 60-year cycle/stem-branch cycle).
TAMIOT (the Tombstone and Memorial Inscriptions of Tasmania database) provides the following details about the monuments:
LAM Kui Cheung. Native of: Guangdong Taishun Chung Fa Tsui Village. Monument erected in 1920 – LATROBE CEMETERY, GENERAL SECTION – LATROBE – DEVONPORT – LT04/0865
LAM Kui Fu. Native of: Guangdong Taishun Chung Fa Tsui Village. Monument erected in 1920 – LATROBE CEMETERY, GENERAL SECTION – LATROBE – DEVONPORT – LT04/0866
LAM Kui Cheung 林舉章
廣東台山縣松花咀村
民國特贈舉章林公府君坟墓
192千歲次庚申年吉月吉日立
This headstone is in memory of Kui Cheung Lam, of Chung Fa Tsui, Toishan, Kwangtung.
Erected on a lucky day and a lucky month, 1920, Gang San Year, during the era of the Republic of China.
Monument for Lam Kui Cheung, Latrobe General Cemetery, Tasmania (Photo by Kate Bagnall, December 2022)
LAM Kui Fu 林舉富
廣東台山縣松花咀村
民國特贈舉富林公府君坟墓
192千歲次庚申年吉月吉日立
This headstone is in memory of Kui Fu Lam, of Chung Fa Tsui, Toishan, Kwangtung.
Erected on a lucky day and a lucky month, 1920, Gang San Year, during the era of the Republic of China.
Monument for Lam Kui Fu, Latrobe General Cemetery, Tasmania (Photo by Kate Bagnall, December 2022)
Coohey Fue’s ancestral village
Coohey Fue’s family name was Lam (林) and he came from Chung Fa Tsui, a Lam village in Toishan, Kwangtung, China. Chung Fa Tsui (or Songhuaju in Mandarin) is about 25 kilometres south-west of the county capital of Taicheng 台城 and about the same distance to the north-west of the coastal town of Guanghai 廣海.
廣東省 / Kwangtung / Guangdong (province)
台山縣 / Toishan / Taishan (county)
新安鄉 / Sun On / Xin’an (village)
松花咀村 / Chung Fa Tsui / Songhuaju (hamlet)
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Lyn Phillips, and Kelli Schultz, who alerted me to these two Chinese monuments in the Latrobe General Cemetery. Kelli pointed me to a query from Lyn about the memorials that Lyn posted on the ‘Tasmanians Finding their Past – Genealogy Group’ on Facebook on 21 October 2022. I used Lyn’s photographs to transcribe and translate the text; my thanks to Mei-fen Kuo (Macquarie University) and my UTAS colleague Lucy Li (and her father) for their assistance in teasing out the nuances of the text’s meaning. I’d also like to acknowledge that the information above from TAMIOT was posted by Suzanne Griffin in response to Lyn’s post to the Tasmanians Finding their Past Facebook group. In October 2022 I did some initial digging in Trove and the Tasmanian Names Index to identify who Lam Kui Cheung / Lam Kui Fu might be, and I was able to stop off in Latrobe just before Christmas to photograph the headstones for myself.
I very much like this explanation by Alexander Don, Presbyterian missionary to New Zealand’s Cantonese population, of the eternally perplexing question of the prefix ‘Ah’ in Chinese names.
Don spoke Cantonese and could read and write Chinese, having first studied in Guangzhou in the late 1870s. This piece comes from his account of a trip visiting Chinese communities around the Pacific in 1897 (Alexander Don, Under Six Flags: Being Notes on Chinese in Samoa, Hawaii, United States, British Columbia, Japan, and China, J. Wilkie & Co., Dunedin, 1898, pp. 11-12.)
‘AH’
Everyone has noticed the prevalence of this prefix to the names of Chinese abroad, and many are the attempts to explain. Generally it is supposed to represent our ‘Mr,’ but on one occasion a Supreme Court Judge gravely informed the jury and counsel that he had discovered it to mean ‘Bachelor’! In China it is used only to familiar friends, to close relatives, to inferiors, servants, and such. In the Colonies one finds the head of a large importing firm, known as ‘Ah ——,’ with ‘& Co.’ often attached. The nearest parallel to this in English usage would be to style the firm, Robert Wilson & Co., as ‘Bobby & Co.’ For the prefix ‘Ah’ has much the same force as our familiar and diminutive affix ‘y’ or ‘ie.’ For the Britons, James Brown, John Smith, and Thomas Jones, to be known among the Chinese in China as Jimmy, Johnnie, and Tommy—this is one with the Chinese Lee Wun, Chan Wing, and Wong Ping, bearing among us the names Ah Wun, Ah Wing, and Ah Ping. Their full names may be—probably are—Lee Yeong-Wun, Chan Shing-Wing, and Won Ping-Kwong. They would never be called Ah Lee, Ah Chan, nor Ah Wong; for these are surnames. Equally Ah Yeung-Wun, Ah Shing-Wing, &c., are not used, just as we do not call a boy Tommy Willie for Thomas William, but either Tommy or Willie separately. Chinese, not knowing the meaning of ‘Mr,’ say, when asked the meaning of ‘Ah,’—‘All the same Mr.’ And thinking that we have only names—not surnames—prefix ‘Ah’ indiscriminately. So I am sometimes called ‘Ah Don,’ and Mr Ings ‘Ah Joe.’
Jung Hei 鍾熙, Siu Lo 蕭露 and Lau Naam 劉南 with Alexander Don at Tuapeka, Otago, c. 1898–1903. National Library of New Zealand – original held by the Hocken Library (MS-1007-009/009).
Names can be one of the trickiest parts of researching Chinese Australian history. They consistently seem to puzzle and confuse people – there’s the way that given names became surnames, the way that spellings changed over time and in different places and the way that ‘Ah’ appears everywhere.
I’ve written before about some of the challenges that come with researching Chinese names in Australian records. There are tricks you can learn, but my main piece of advice would be to be creative in your searching and in your spelling. I’ve recently been tracking a man whose name I first came upon as Mum Shou Pac—but he’s also turned up as Man Sue Bach, John Ah Shue Bach, John Ah Shue and John a Shue. All of these variations appeared in records from the same year and when he was living in the same place! I am yet to track him before that one year, and my stumbling block is knowing what name his baptism and marriage and the births of his children might be listed under.
I’ve heard some people say that the irregularity of spelling of Chinese names in early Australian records was the result of the disregard that white residents felt for Chinese residents—perhaps even that it was the result of racist attitudes. I have a slightly different take on it, as illustrated by discussions during a court case from South Australia in 1845.
In November that year, a young man named James Coyle was charged with, and then found guilty of, stealing the watch of a Chinese man named John Pegue at Gawler. John Pegue gave evidence at Coyle’s trial, and the following exchange took place when he was being cross-examined by Mr Poulden, the lawyer:
John Pegue: … I am no scholar; I do not know how to spell my name; I call it Pegue.
Mr Poulden: Do you know the letters in your name? Can you write?
John Pegue: No, I cannot write English; it is a China name; I cannot write Chinese; I am no scholar—not at all; my China name is Piggu.
Mr Poulden noted that in the indictment the name was spelled with two ‘g’s’ while in the deposition it was not. The Advocate-General thought the name sounded like it should have two ‘g’s’, and apparently the police at Gawler called him ‘Piggy’ (it doesn’t seem that this was necessarily meant in a derogatory way, just that it was how the name sounded to them). The judge noted all this ‘only shows that different people spell different ways.’
I think there are a couple of things going on here—things that happened over and over again as Chinese residents and white residents met and interacted in the colonies—things that influenced the way that many thousands of Chinese names were recorded in Australian records.
First, although it seems that John Pegue was fluent enough in English to give evidence, he was not literate. He did not know the alphabet. He could not even write his name in Chinese. He didn’t then know how his name should or could be spelled in English. There was no ‘right spelling’ to be written down.
Second, those who were recording his name in English couldn’t decide among themselves what spelling best represented the sounds of Pegue’s name. Was it represented better with a single ‘g’, or two ‘g’s’? Because Chinese names were written down phonetically, the way that English-speakers recorded them could be influenced by their own background, dialect, accent and level of literacy.
I’m not saying that cultural ignorance and misunderstanding had no part in the curious ways that Chinese names were recorded in colonial Australia. But when you explore the mechanics of how those names were written down, and about the personal interactions and exchanges they involved, the situation seems so much more complex and interesting than simple ignorance.
I’d love to hear other stories of strange renderings of Chinese Australian names.
Source
1845 ‘LAW AND POLICE COURTS.’, South Australian Register (Adelaide, SA : 1839 – 1900), 26 November, p. 3, viewed 12 February, 2013, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article27451418.
I recently took my own research advice on how to identify a home village in China. I’ve written before about the early 20th-century Chinese student records found in the Department of External Affairs record series A1, mentioning that:
The files can be a useful way of finding information about the Chinese name and origin (in characters) of people or families already living in Australia.
But before last week I’d never actually needed to use them in this way.
At the moment I’m doing some research into Poon Gooey and Ham Hop, the couple at the centre of the well-known deportation case from 1913. I had previously confirmed from shipping records that Poon Gooey was from Kaiping. He made one journey to Australia as ship’s crew (stevedore) and the passenger manifest lists ‘Hoi Ping’ as his place of origin. Two other Poons on the same voyage were also from Kaiping, as were others who lived in Australia (like Peter Poon Youie).
The research I’m doing has also shown that while there were Poons (and Pons and Pongs) in Melbourne (centred around the Leong Lee store in Little Bourke Street), they seem to have lived primarily in western Victoria, around Horsham, Hamilton, Donald, Warracknabeal, down to Warrnambool and up to Mildura, and also across in Adelaide. All of which suggests that there was some pretty significant chain migration by Poons from Kaiping to southern Australia, perhaps stretching from as early as the 1850s into the 1920s and 1930s.
Armed with all this, I hoped to be able to narrow down Poon Gooey’s home town origins somewhat. First, I checked the Roots Villages Database, to look for Poon villages in Kaiping – there are four, all in Yuet Shan / Yueshan:
Chung Wo Lay / Zhonghe Li
Kiu Tau Fong / Qiaotou Fang
Nam Kong Lay / Nanjiang Li
Siu Lung Lay / Zhaolong Li
(Apologies for not including Chinese characters for these names; there seems to be a bit of a technical issue with encoding.)
Which, if any, of these villages might my Australian Poons have come from?
This is where the Chinese student records come in handy! The applications and student passports included in the files give personal details of the applicants and their Australian sponsors in both English and Chinese characters. Working on the assumption that the Poons in Victoria were most likely from the same clan, I figured that the files may well reveal which village they came from.
I identified eight Chinese student files relating to Poons, Pons and Pongs and set off to the National Archives, baby in tow. Half of the files weren’t relevant, either because the family surname was not actually Poon or because they were from New South Wales not Victoria.
But the half that were relevant told me some interesting things. The boys came from: Shoylungle (Zhaolongli) and Kew How/Quiutay/Kew Too (the same village, Qiaotou, just spelled differently), with ‘Nanjiangli’ also written in Chinese on the Kew Too application. With the names from the Roots Villages Database, matching them up was easy!
The application for the boy from Zhaolongli, Poon Bak Cheung, was made through Leong Lee in Melbourne, and as I know that Poon Gooey was connected to Leong Lee too, it seems likely then that Poon Gooey was also a Zhaolongli native. The images above and below are from Poon Bak Cheung’s file (NAA: A1, 1931/7483).
So, I’d found the names of my Kaiping Poon villages – but where exactly were they? After a bit of searching using both Google Maps and ditu.google.cn (the Chinese Google Maps), there they were. Three little villages all in a row, to the northeast of Yueshan town, with the fourth village listed in the Roots Villages Database also just across the way:
Sometimes it seems incredible that it was only a matter of hours from when I looked up the Roots Village Database to when I was looking at satellite images of what I’m pretty sure was once Poon Gooey’s home. The slowest part of the equation was waiting for the Chinese student files to be retrieved from the repository (which, in fairness to the National Archives, happened as smoothly and promptly as you could expect.)
I know that as a result of the federal government’s deportation action against Ham Hop, the Poon Gooey family returned to China in 1913. While Poon Gooey himself then returned to Australia for a period, in the early to mid-1920s he was back in China and living in Shanghai, presumably with his wife and daughters. After that I don’t know where they went. From what I’ve seen in the archives, I don’t believe that they returned to Australia again.
I visisted Yueshan last year, on the hunt for another family’s home village. I now just have to stop myself from wanting to make another trip to try and find out the fate of the Poon Gooeys.
On 19 March 1930, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the arrest of a white girl, two white men and a Chinese man in a ‘suspect “Pak-a-Pu” den’ in Sydney. Along with the suspects, the police took with them ‘a number of squares of rice paper covered with strange Oriental signs’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 March 1930).
These little paper squares were pak ah pu tickets and they would have looked something like this:
(This ticket was passed on to me through my mum by an amateur local historian from Epping in Sydney. I don’t know where he got it from or what year it dates from – probably early 20th century. The square is about 9.25 by 8.5cm, on a piece of paper that’s 14 by 11.5cm. Here’s another one, from New Zealand, which has been used.)
Pak ah pu was one of the popular forms of gambling that made their way overseas with nineteenth-century Chinese migration to Australia (and New Zealand, the USA and other places). Its name came from the Cantonese baakgaap piu – literally meaning ‘pigeon’s note’ or ‘pigeon’s ticket’ – and it was what was commonly known as the Chinese lottery. Spellings vary, including pak ah pu, pak a poo, pak a pu, with or without spaces and hyphens.
Marlon K Hom provides this explanation of pak ah pu in his book Songs of Gold Mountain (University of California Press, 1987, pp. 25–28):
Baakgaap piu is a lottery game based on the first eighty words of the ‘Thousand Word Prose’ (Qian zi wen), a well-known four-word-per-line prose-poem. No words are duplicated in the prose; hence there are eighty different spots on which the players can bet. A player wins if his choice of words matches the winning word(s)… The game’s popularity was due to the fact that, in addition to being a simple lottery that required no skill but only luck, it did not require presence of the player, who could carry on his usual business while playing the game. Agents in storefronts wrote up the lottery tickets for the players; in addition, couriers for the operators were readily available to pick up or deliver bets and winnings. This game was also well received by non-Chinese players. The Japanese mockingly called it baka (‘foolish’), a play on its Chinese name, baakgap (lit., ‘pigeon’). It was also immensely popular among white players, so much so that, according to Stewart Culin, white casinos later adopted it and turned it into the game of Race Horse Keno, and later, simply Keno. Here, eighty numbers, written from left to right and top to bottom, replace the original Chinese characters, which were arranged from top to bottom and right to left.
In Australia, pak a pu was one of those parts of Chinese culture that became so familiar that it entered the vernacular. Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English lists the expression to ‘look like a pakapu ticket’, meaning to be completely indecipherable (8th edition, edited by Paul Beale, pp. 850–51).
The ABC’s Kel Richards recalled this about the expression:
Any writing that is difficult to decipher was once labelled ‘a pakapoo ticket’…
The origin of the expression is a Chinese gambling game played with slips of paper marked with columns of characters…
…It’s an expression that seems to have died out, but still I remember being told, as a school boy: ‘This exercise book looks like a pakapoo ticket, Richards.’ From that use it was extended to describe anything that was untidy or disorderly. The earliest citation for this sort of use is from Eric Lambert’s novel, based on his wartime experiences, called Twenty Thousand Thieves (1951) in which an officer complains that the platoon’s pay book ‘looks like a pak-a-poo ticket’…
Because of the inability of Aussies to read these Chinese characters, such slips were said to look like untidy scribblings. ‘Pakapoo ticket’ is another distinctively Aussie contribution to the English language. (Kel Richards, ABC NewsRadio website)
And another small reminder of the widespread presence of the Chinese in 19th- and early 20th-century Australia and their influence on colonial life in many ways, large and small.
When I studied Mandarin at Sydney University in the late 1990s, everyone spent their first year learning to read and write traditional characters. At the end of that year, we could choose which way we wanted to go. Looking back at my textbooks, it would seem that I went down the ‘traditional’ road. Well, for six more months at least. After that I went to Guangzhou to study at Zhong Da (Sun Yat-sen University), and the rest, as they say, is history.
I’m very glad, though, that I did have that initial basic education with traditional characters. Just today, for instance, I’ve been looking at some Victorian naturalisation applications dating from the 1850s and 1860s on which the Chinese gentlemen have signed their names, amazingly, in characters. (It’s all a bit exciting when one comes across a name in characters.) My Chinese is pretty rusty, but at least I’m familiar enough with old-form characters to be able to look them up!
I recently did some investigations into Chinese schools in Canberra, with the thought of getting my nearly 4-year-old daughter started on the path to Chinese literacy. The one school that teaches traditional characters has had so little interest that they are no longer putting on new classes. The biggest and most active school goes with simplified characters, although they say they do give the students chances to become familiar with traditional ones. I think that’s a bit of a shame (much like I think it’s a shame that my daughter’s going to end up speaking Mandarin, if anything, rather than Cantonese or dialect… But I digress!)
So what about bringing traditional characters back? Of course, in some places they never went away. (Another good reason for knowing traditional characters is to be able to make sense of noodle restaurant menus in Hong Kong when one’s Mandarin is ignored and one’s Cantonese is unintelligible.) But seriously, the latest issue of Geremie Barmé’s China Heritage Quarterly (no. 17, March 2009) has a really interesting article about moves to reintroduce traditional characters. Have a look at The Chinese Character—no simple matter.
