page_title: Chinese Peruvians
section_title: Early history
hierarchical_section_title: Chinese Peruvians / History / Early history
caption_attribution_description: INAUGURACIÓN DE MUESTRA FOTOGRÁFICA SOBRE INICIOS DE INMIGRACIÓN CHINA AL PERÚ EN PABELLÓN NACIONAL EN EXPO SHANGHAI
context_page_description: Chinese Peruvians, also known as tusán, are Peruvian citizens whose ancestors came from Guangdong Province in China. They are people of Overseas Chinese ancestry born in Peru or who have made Peru their adopted homeland.
  Most Chinese Peruvians are multilingual. In addition to Spanish or Quechua, many of them speak one or more varieties of Chinese that may include Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, and Minnan.
  Outside of the predominant Amerindian, mestizo, and white populations, black, Chinese, and others are estimated to constitute 3% of the Peruvian population. Other sources estimate that the population of Peruvians with Chinese ancestry is as high as 20% when people of mixed heritage are included in the statistics.
context_section_description: Asian coolies who were shipped from the Spanish Philippines to Acapulco via the Manila-Acapulco galleons were all called Chino ("Chinese"), although in reality they were not only from China but also other places, including what are today the Philippines itself, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, East Timor, and further afield such as India and Sri Lanka. Filipinos made up most of their population. The people in this community of diverse Asians in Mexico were called "los indios chinos" by the Spanish. Most of these workers were male and were obtained from Portuguese traders, who obtained them from Portuguese colonial possessions and outposts of the Estado da India, which included parts of India, Bengal, Malacca, Indonesia, Nagasaki in Japan, and Macau. Spain received some of these coolies from Mexico, where owning a Chino coolie showed high status. Records of three Japanese coolies dating from the 16th century, named Gaspar Fernandes, Miguel and Ventura who ended up in Mexico showed that they were purchased by Portuguese slave traders in Japan, brought to Manila from where they were shipped to Mexico by their owner Perez. Some of these Asian slaves were also brought to Lima in Peru, where it was recorded that in 1613 there was a small community of Asians, consisting of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Malays, Cambodians and others.
  Chinese immigrants, who in the 19th century took a four-month trip from Macau (then a Portuguese territory), settled as contract laborers or coolies. Other Chinese coolies from Guangdong followed.
  80,000 to 100,000 Chinese contract laborers, 95% of which were Cantonese and almost all of which were male, were sent mostly to the sugar plantations from 1849 to 1874, during the termination of slavery. They were to provide continuous labor for the coastal guano mines and especially for the coastal plantations where they became a major labor force (contributing greatly to the Peruvian guano boom) until the end of the century. While the coolies were believed to be reduced to virtual slaves, they also represented a historical transition from slave to free labor. A third group of Chinese workers was contracted for the construction of the railway from Lima to La Oroya and Huancayo. Chinese migrants were barred from using cemeteries reserved for Roman Catholics, and were instead buried at pre-Incan burial sites. Between 1849 and 1874 half the Chinese population of Peru perished due to abuse, exhaustion, and suicide caused by forced labor.
  There were almost no women among the nearly entirely male Chinese coolie population that migrated to Peru and Cuba. Peruvian women were married to these Chinese male migrants. African women particularly had mostly no interactions with Chinese men during their labor as coolies, while Chinese had contact with Peruvian women in cities; there they formed relationships and sired mixed babies. These women originated from Andean and coastal areas and did not originally come from the cities; in the haciendas on the coast in rural areas, native young women of indígenas ("native") and serranas ("mountain") origin from the Andes mountains would come down to work. These Andean native women were favored over Africans as marital partners by Chinese men, with matchmakers arranging for communal marriages of Chinese men to young indígenas and serranas. There was a racist reaction by Peruvians to the marriages of Peruvian women and Chinese men. When native Peruvian women (cholas et natives, Indias, indígenas) and Chinese men had mixed children, the children were called injerto; once these injertos emerged, Chinese men sought out girls of injerta origin as marriage partners. Children born to black mothers were not called injertos. Peruvians of low class established sexual unions or marriages with the Chinese men, and some black and Indian women "bred" with the Chinese according to Alfredo Sachettí, who claimed the mixing was causing the Chinese to suffer from "progressive degeneration". In Casa Grande, highland Indian women and Chinese men participated in communal "mass marriages" with each other, a
caption: Peru and China celebrate 160th anniversary of diplomatic ties
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