page_title: Chinese immigration to Sydney
section_title: Chinatown in the Rocks
hierarchical_section_title: Chinese immigration to Sydney / Chinatown in the Rocks
caption_attribution_description: English: cartoon depicting the fear of chinese immigration to Sydney, Australia
context_page_description: Chinese immigration to Sydney dates back almost two hundred years, with Mak Sai Ying being the first recorded settler in Australia. The 2006 census showed that 221,995 people in Sydney reported Mandarin or Cantonese as the language they used at home.
  Chinese immigration was seen as part of a solution for a labour shortage in New South Wales from 1828 onwards, though the scale of immigration remained low until later in the nineteenth century.
  What came to be known as the White Australia Policy saw a series of restrictive legislation passed at both a state and later a federal level. The climate of fear and distrust eased somewhat from the 1950s onwards, and today Chinese communities form a vibrant and important part of Sydney's character.
  Chinese immigration has increased continuously from the 1990s and today the Chinese are the third largest group among immigrants. Since the mid-1990s, migration has become less permanent than it used to be, and goes in more than one direction, a trend that pertains also to the Chinese. Students and academics are examples of this pattern.
context_section_description: By the 1860s, Sydney's business directories listed Chinese premises, especially in The Rocks, with a concentration of Chinese shops, cook-shops and boarding houses on Lower George Street, close to the wharves. By 1870 there were also at least five furniture stores listed in this area, indicating more integrated economic activity. One of the largest was the workshop of Ah Toy, which not only manufactured cheap furniture but also filled orders for the up-market David Jones department store.
  In 1878 an upsurge of violence against Chinese traders led them to petition the colonial government for protection from 'larrikins'. This anti-Chinese behaviour was linked to trade union meetings calling for a halt to immigration, where speakers had openly advocated violence. The unions opposed the low wages paid to Chinese workers by Chinese employers, but their solution was not to work for better pay and conditions, as some organised Chinese furniture workers urged, but to advocate exclusion. In November, the Seamen's Union struck against the Australian Steam Navigation Company's use of cheap Chinese labour. Several public rallies were held, and following a large anti-Chinese torchlight meeting in Hyde Park, a group of protesters decided to march on Parliament House to demand exclusion of the Chinese. A different group, reported by the police as numbering around 2,000, headed up Pitt Street to Bridge Street and thence to Ah Toy's furniture shop in Queen's Place (now Dalley Street). Here the mob attempted to torch the building, probably aware that many Chinese workers were asleep upstairs.
  Chinese men were found living with 73 opium addicted Australian white women when Quong Tart surveyed the goldfields for opium addicts, and a lot of homeless women abused by husbands and prostitutes ran away and married Chinese men in Sydney after taking refuge in Chinese opium dens in gambling houses, Reverend Francis Hopkins said that 'A Chinaman's Anglo-Saxon wife is almost his God, a European's is his slave. This is the reason why so many girls transfer their affections to the almond-eyed Celestials.' when giving the reason why these women married Chinese men.
  White men in Australia were afraid of the sexual and racial threats they thought came from Pacific islander and Asian men and it was written that the Chinaman "marries, or cohabits with the mean white woman, jostles and competes with the white man, and when it comes to labouring in the tropics, supplants him." in the Sydney Morning Herald, with interracial sex and prostitution booming in Northern Australia because of the racial sexual imbalance due to the fact that Australia hardly ever permitted the immigration of non-white women.
  Around Melbourne's Little Bourke Street precinct and Sydney's Lower George Street grew majority Chinese male enclaves and in total in Australia there were 50,000 Chinese labourers and ministers by 1870, with opium dens being a standard thing found around the Chinese ghettos, the Chinese men were married by poor white women or serviced by poor white women prostitutes, who filled the missing female niche in the Chinese community and this led to condemnation of the white women as opium users and inflamed anti-Chinese sentiment.
  A parliamentary commission was held regarding Sydney's Chinese gambling which brought white European women to testify on 14 December 1891, such as 27-year-old Minnie, who had long term relationships with two Chinese men whom treated her kindly after she engaged in "casual" sexual relations with multiple Chinese men.
  Minnie ended up having sex with Chinese men after meeting them with friends who were also doing it, after she ran away from an abusive alcoholic husband when she was 16, seven other women were interviewed besides Minnie, girls and women escaped a dangerous street life by taking sanctuary in the inner city and The Rocks with the Chinese, another woman interviewed was Hannah who escaped her jailed brutal European husband to go live with a Chinese man, explaining that 'I thought it was better to have one man than be knocking about the
caption: The Mongolian Octopus: his grip on Australia 1886
exif: {}