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.
We began this newspaper search by consulting the English-language Tung Wah Newspaper Index, which was originally created as part of the Chinese Heritage of Australian Federation project back in 2000 and is currently maintained online by Tim Sherratt. It’s a very handy reference, particularly if you’re not able to read Chinese, or, in our case, if you are looking for information about a particular place (Tasmania).
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?
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
Tsangshing [his native county] | grave of | Jiuh Nàahm Sìhng [his name] | Kwangtung [his native province]
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.