Early Chinese Immigration to Tan Heong Shan: The Sandalwood Mountains

Early Chinese Immigration to Tan Heong Shan: The Sandalwood Mountains. . , The early Chinese were drawn to Hawaii by the economic opportunities that these dramatically beautiful and blessed islands offered. They settled on Maui in the last half of the 1800s and early 1900s. The early Chinese pioneers played a vital role as craftsmen, laborers, and entrepreneurs in developing Hawaii's economy, particularly in agriculture., They found much of Hawaii's climate and geography striking similar to that of their ancestral home in southern China and they easily adapted. Given their experience with crops such as taro, rice and sugar in their homeland, the pioneers made important contributions to the growing Hawaii economy., The third voyage of discovery of Captain James Cook in 1778 opened what he named the Sandwich Islands to the rest of the world through his newly mapped Pacific navigation routes. The first Chinese came on whaling and fur-bearing ships sailing the trade routes between Canton and Hong Kong in China and West Coast ports in North America. The first recorded arrival of Chinese included fifty carpenters, blacksmiths, craftsmen, and sailors aboard the British vessels Felice and Iphigenia in 1788. Both vessels stayed for three months. Chinese workers came not only from commercial businesses developing in the new kingdom but also from the native chiefs. , About 1792, the Chinese learned that Hawaii grew sandalwood trees (iliahi). Word spread in the coastal villages of southeastern China that opportunities for lucrative work could be found in the Sandwich Islands. These Islands soon became known to the Chinese as Tan Heong Shan - the Sandalwood Mountains., Most early Chinese immigrants were from Heong Shan District, later renamed Chung Shan District (l), in Kwangtung Province, an agricultural area in southern China. Smaller groups of Fukien and Hakka were amongst the early contractor laborers. When the first Chinese immigrants arrived in Hawaii, they found the Hawaiians cultivating taro, which the Hawaiians called kalo a plant familiar to them since certain varieties were also grown in southern China. With long experience in rice growing, the Chinese played a key role in the development of the rice industry and thus the growth of the Islands' economy., The rice and later sugar industries enjoyed a duty-free status from the United States during the American Civil War, which disrupted agriculture in the South. From 1867-1872, rice exports reached a million pounds a year from the Islands. Although the Hawaiian acreage amounted to only 2.6 percent of the total land cultivated for rice, it accounted for 11.9 percent of the total rice production. This attests to the high productivity of the Chinese rice farmers, some of whom also established rice mills and became known as "rice kings" in their local areas. In 1909, at the peak of the rice industry, 9,424 acres were cultivated for this crop and over 5,600 Chinese were employed., Among the plants that the Native Hawaiians brought when they navigated to Hawaii to make their new home was a type of sugarcane they called ko, which provided the basis of what became a major industry on the Islands. The Chinese played a key role in the early days of the sugar industry by bringing manufacturing knowledge and much needed labor for the plantations. The first sugar mill on Maui was built in 1828 in Wailuku by Hungtai, a partnership of Ahung and Atai., As the sugar plantations grew, so did the need for large numbers of agricultural workers. The growth of the sugar industry was the key factor that propelled the largest wave of Chinese immigrants to the Islands. The first group of 175 laborers were Fukienese from Amoy, who arrived in 1852 on the barkentine sailing ship Thetis. By 1882, the Chinese made up half of all laborers on sugar plantations in Hawaii. The early Chinese laborers were sent to plantations on the outer islands, where there was adequate water and cultivatable land to grow sugar. They worked for developing sugar companies on Maui, including forerunners of Pioneer Mill, Lahania Sugar, and Hana Sugar., Chinese settled all over Maui, however, the main Chinese community was located in the town of Keokea in Kula, which came to be known as "Kula Chinatown." The Chinese were largely responsible for clearing the land, and building up Kula's infrastructure, including roads, rock walls, and irrigation projects such as the Kula pipeline. The Chinese of Kula engaged in farming and ranching. A prominent member of the Kula Chinese community was Dr. Sun Yat-sen's elder brother Sun Mei, who owned a vast ranch in Kamaole, near Keokea. The Chinese built a thriving community which included the Kwock Hing Society which was a branch of the Hung Men, the St. John's Episcopal Church which was built by the Rev. Shim Yin Chin, which also functioned as a Chinese school, teaching the Hakka dialect and the Kula Congregational Church headed by evangelist Rev. Chong How Fo who was also an experienced Chinese herbalist. The majority of the Chinese residents of Kula were hard working Hakka people, from the mountainous areas of Guangdong province , which may explain why they favored upcountry Kula to settle down., In the last quarter of the 1800s, the demand for agricultural workers, particularly in the sugar industry, drove the growth of Chinese immigration to Hawaii. The Hawaii Board of Immigration authorized Dr. William Hillebrand, the commissioner of immigration to go to Hong Kong to procure Chinese laborers, of which 20-25 percent were to be women. He wrote the Hawaiian minister of the interior that he was impressed by the industriousness of the Chinese and that the Chinese viewed Hawaii with favor because of the stories of good fortune in the Sandlewood Mountains tolkd by the earlier immigrants. Seventeen hundred Chinese were brought to Hawaii as plantation laborers between 1863 and 1872. Their numbers jumped soon after, when 14,000 more came to the Islands to work the fields between 1877 and 1882. By 1884 there were about 18,000 Chinese constituting around 22 percent of the kingdom's population. The Hawaii Chinese population peaked at 37,000 in the late 1890s. By then the majority of the Chinese had left the plantations and moved to town, mostly to Honolulu. , Excerpted by an article by Ken Yee, Chinese Pioneer Families of Maui, Molokai, and Lanai, courtesy of the Hawaii Chinese History Center. , [Caption:] , Portrait of Sun Mei and his ranch home in Kamaole, Kula.