The Cantonese Pacific, Part I: How Hong Kong Became a Global City

This is the first in a three-part series of stories exploring historian Henry Yu’s theory of the Cantonese Pacific. The series is an excerpt from The Dragons That Crossed the Sea, an upcoming Zolima Culture Guide publication.

In 2024, the United Nations estimated there were at least 60 million people of Chinese descent living outside mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, making it one of the world’s largest diasporas. There’s a word in Chinese used to refer to this vast international population: waa4 kiu4 (華僑) in Cantonese, or huaqiao in Mandarin, which literally means a Chinese person living overseas. If that sounds broad, it’s because it encompasses not just one diaspora community but many. 

The word 華 can mean magnificent, luxurious or prosperous, but it’s also a shorthand for China and Chinese. Hidden within this all-encompassing term is a long and diverse history of migration. As early as the 14th century, young men from southern China were setting sail for Malaysia and Indonesia, establishing trading businesses and marrying local women, creating a unique Peranakan Chinese culture that still exists today. Generations of migrants have followed, their lives and labour forming an intrinsic part of places as diverse as Liverpool and Lima, Montreal and Mauritius. 

Their journeys were never one way. Many migrants returned to China, transforming their hometowns with foreign money and fresh ideas. Even if they spent the rest of their lives overseas, their departure left an indelible imprint on the communities they left, weaving threads of social, cultural and economic connections that spanned the oceans and presaged the globalised, interconnected world we know today. 

Despite this diversity, the Chinese diaspora is often perceived as a monolith, the many layers and wrinkles of its histories flattened into a single sheet of homogeneous Chineseness. Over the course of history, this reductive view of the diaspora has been a useful strategy for leaders who build political capital on racist or xenophobic sentiment, notably in Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Australia, where they stoked fear of a “yellow peril” to justify laws that banned Chinese immigration and discriminated against the Chinese people who were already living in those countries. The idea of a monolithic Chinese diaspora has also been promoted by leaders in China itself, first by revolutionaries looking to raise money to overthrow dynastic rule, and later to reinforce China’s geopolitical standing in the world. 

Meanwhile, the true complexity of the waa4 kiu4 is erased. Which is exactly why, about 15 years ago, Chinese-Canadian historian Henry Yu came up with a term to describe a very specific pattern of migrations: the Cantonese Pacific. This is particularly relevant to many of the articles we’ve published here on Zolima CityMag. From our series on traditional dragons to our many articles about the diaspora, what unites these stories is a thread of migration that tied Hong Kong to the world, beginning in the 19th century.

A sketch of Chinese migrants on a steamship headed for San Francisco, from “Views of Chinese” published in Harper’s Weekly, 1876

“There’s an enduring Cantonese imaginary within the broader Chinese diaspora, but scholars tend to collapse Chineseness into a single category,” he says. “The term Cantonese Pacific is meant to avoid ahistorical uses of the word ‘China’ and ‘Chinese.’ Because virtually none of these people who emigrated were state actors. They were an aggregation of village-based dreaming. They dreamed of gold and wealth and making it big.” 

Journey to the West

When American missionary William Speer toured the counties of Taishan, Xinhui, Kaiping and Enping — collectively known as Sze Yup (sei3 jap1 四邑, “four counties”) — he marvelled at the lush vista of bamboo groves, banyan trees and rice paddies in this Guangdong region about 130 kilometres west of Hong Kong. “The view appears like a great garden bounded by hills,” he wrote in a memoir. But this seemingly bountiful landscape masked a cruel life for many of the region’s inhabitants. Bandits and pirates were rampant and every successful harvest was stalked by the prospect of future famine. 

Speer visited in the late 1840s, shortly after the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) had just lost the first Opium War (1840–1842), cementing European influence in China. Hong Kong Island had been permanently ceded to the British, and in response, Portugal began asserting more direct control over the trading hub it had administered in Macau since 1557. For several decades, young men from Sze Yup had already been passing through Macau to find their fortunes overseas, but Hong Kong’s rapid growth into a thriving free port quickly expanded opportunities for emigration. “It was as Hong Kong developed as a port that you saw the rise of the Cantonese Pacific as a global phenomenon,” says Yu. “It’s a phenomenon tied to capitalism, global industrialisation and the British Empire.”

Steamships connected Hong Kong to ports all across the Pacific, drawing more and more emigrants not just from Sze Yup but also from Nanhai, Panyu and Shunde — collectively known as Sam Yup (sam1 jap1 三邑, “three counties”) — and occasionally further afield. Some of them stayed in Hong Kong, but most simply passed through on their way overseas. The 1853 census included a special line for “emigrants waiting passage to California &c.” which at the time numbered 800 men, about two percent of the island’s total population. 

Many of these migrants were seeking fortunes in the gold rushes that took place at various points in the late 19th century in Australia and along the west coast of North America – either as miners or as entrepreneurs serving the Chinese communities that sprang up around the mines. Some of them were able to send enough money home to support large families, build schools and erect ornate watchtowers known as diu1 lau4 (碉樓) or diaolou, which helped guard their villages against bandits. (About 1,800 diaolou can still be found in an area of Kaiping that has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.) But many others were caught up in systems of exploitation that left them penniless and stranded overseas. 

Hong Kong was a lynchpin in what was then known as the coolie trade, a system of indentured servitude that supplied labour to the transcontinental railways of North America and the sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean and Peru, which had previously been run by enslaved people of African descent. For these indentured servants, life was brutal: of the roughly 100,000 labourers who migrated from Guangdong to Peru in the 19th century, half died from exhaustion, abuse or suicide. In Canada, at least 600 Chinese workers died while building the Canadian Pacific Railway, but many historians argue the actual number is much higher. Despite being paid less than white workers, they were given the most dangerous tasks, including laying explosives. 

Chinatown: a safe haven

The same racist attitudes that made working conditions miserable for so many Chinese migrants informed where they could live. In many cities around the world, local laws restricted Chinese people to specific quarters that eventually became known as Chinatowns. In Chinese, they are generally referred to as Tang People Street (tong4 jan4 gaai1 唐人街), reflecting their Cantonese roots, as people in southern China are more apt to identify the Tang Dynasty (618–907) as their foundational culture, whereas northerners tend to associate themselves with the Han Dynasty (202 BC–220 AD). Far from home, in countries that did not necessarily welcome their presence, migrants sought refuge with their kinsmen. “Village and clan were often synonymous, but language was a broader tie between different villages and counties,” says Yu. 

It’s worth noting that even if the vast majority of these early migrants came from a relatively small part of Guangdong, they spoke many different dialects of Cantonese. (Taishanese is a particularly notable example that was among the most widely spoken dialects.) With limited mutual intelligibility between dialects, migrants banded together with people from their hometowns to support one another. A notable example is the Lung Kong Association, which was founded in 1662 by the Liu, Kwan, Cheung and Chiu families of Kaiping. In 1876, their descendants in San Francisco came together to build a temple and mutual aid society that offered support for newcomers, a space for social activities and religious rituals, and protection from any outside hostility. Similar associations proliferated in Chinatowns around the world. 

“These social institutions tended to be multivalent,” says Yu. “Clan associations, district associations, the Freemasons that were trying to overthrow the Qing empire – they all tended to create social network ties that became institutionalised. They were helping each other out, lending each other money. If you died they’d all pitch in for your body to be taken back to your home village. There was a commitment that you wouldn’t be a wandering ghost.”

Many of these institutions were associated with martial arts clubs. “Kung fu clubs were community centres, credit unions, essentially social services to their community,” says Amy Wang, founder of the Chinatown Community Lion Dance group in Toronto, who has also done historical research on that city’s Chinatown in collaboration with the art collective Long Time No See. “A lot of the clubs would have mahjong parlours and money lending and the kung fu club would be security – or maybe they would be coming after you for not paying back your loan,” she notes. “And they might protect the community from racist attacks.”

Racist attacks were not an abstract threat. In Vancouver, groups like the Asiatic Exclusion League whipped up racist fervour, and in 1907, mobs of white men descended on Chinatown, beating up dozens of people and “wrecking all that was movable and breakable,” according to one observer. It was not the first time white people had attempted such a pogrom: 20 years earlier, a group of 300 white workers had destroyed a Chinese labour camp on the Vancouver harbourfront. Similar attacks occurred in Chinatowns around the world. 

But the martial arts clubs did not only provide security – they brought Chinatown together through cultural practices like lion and dragon dances. “Dreaming of overseas requires the dream to come back,” says Yu. “It created an industry at home that would not have existed. How many times would you create a lion dance head if it was just your village troupe? Once a generation. But when you’ve now got to supply Chinese who are everywhere from Bendigo to Otago to Victoria to Honolulu, all of a sudden you’re constantly making lion dance heads. So even though those [goods and cultural practices] seem to be going outwards from China, it’s actually multidirectional.”

Read the second part of this story here.