Recruiting Chinese to South Africa

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 199-200:

THE IDEA OF RECRUITING Chinese to South Africa was not entirely novel. During the nineteenth century, nearly sixty thousand Chinese indentured workers labored on French plantation island colonies off the east African coast and in German, British, and French colonies on the continent. The Chinese presence in South Africa dates to the eighteenth century, when the Dutch East India Company shipped Malay and Chinese convicts from Batavia to the Cape Colony. During the 1870s and ’80s a few hundred Chinese artisans and workers arrived in the Cape Colony and Natal, along with greater numbers of Indians, contracted for infrastructure construction after the opening of the diamond fields. Voluntary merchant emigrants from southern China followed in their path. By 1904 there were 2,398 Chinese in all of British South Africa, more than half of them living in the Cape Colony. Chinese in the Cape worked mostly as small traders and also as cooks, carpenters, basket weavers, fish sellers, and wagon drivers.

There were hardly any Chinese in the former Afrikaner republics. The Orange Free State excluded Chinese from settlement altogether. The ZAR excluded from citizenship “any of the native races of Asia, including ‘Coolies’ [Indians and Chinese], Arabs, Malays and Mohammedan subjects of the Turkish Dominion.” It forbade Asiatics from walking on footpaths and pavements; from driving public carriages; from riding in first- and second-class railway compartments; and from buying or possessing liquor. The anti-Chinese laws of the former Afrikaner republics remained in place when power transferred to the British after the South African War.

Notwithstanding these restrictions and discriminations, Chinese carved out small niches in Johannesburg. By 1890 there were more than a hundred Chinese in the town, shopkeepers, laundrymen, and market gardeners; by 1904 the Chinese population of the Transvaal was about nine hundred. Chinese often did business in poorer white districts. Unlike white-owned shops, the Chinese sold at low prices, in small quantities, and on credit.

The Chinese in Johannesburg at the turn of the century followed the same patterns of social organization Chinese practiced across the diaspora. In the 1890s, they formed a huiguan called the Kwong Hok Tong (guanghetang) or Cantonese Club. It built a “clubhouse” on leased land in Ferreirastown, the original settlement of Johannesburg, which now lay at the city’s fringe. The house had several reception rooms, six bedrooms, a kitchen, and a latrine. Membership cost five pounds for initiation and dues according to one’s occupation. The club rented rooms at two pounds a month; kept a library of books and periodicals; and held social events and meetings that drew as many as 150 people. Yeung Ku Wan (Yang Feihong), a collaborator of Sun Yatsen who arrived in South Africa in 1896, formed a second group, the Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society). Photographs of members of both groups show educated men dressed in Western-style clothing.

Thus in 1903, when the idea of importing Chinese labor for the gold mines circulated, there was already a history of Chinese migration to South Africa and a small but established Chinese community in Johannesburg. These served as both precedent and warning—for both Chinese and whites.

Effects of Witwatersrand Gold

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 193-195:

THE MINING OF Witwatersrand gold had both global and regional effects. At the level of world trade and finance, the economic historian Jean-Jacques Van Helten argues that expansion of international trade in the 1880s and ’90s required an enlargement of the overall money stock and hence the world supply of gold. The gold standard was not yet universal, but since the 1870s it had become the basis of international payments among the leading industrial countries. Witwatersrand gold, along with gold discoveries in the 1890s in Western Australia and Canada, increased the global supply of gold and strengthened the position of Britain, which was already the center of the international financial market.

Van Helten presents the late-century gold discoveries as a fortuitous meeting of a demand, but it also might be considered a stimulus, a new phase of capital accumulation, that powered the expansion of trade and foreign investment. Although this accumulation built on previous decades of gold discoveries in North America and Australasia, South African gold helped inaugurate a new period of capitalist development, the so-called New Imperialism, in which monopoly and finance capital came to the fore; when the great powers scrambled to carve up Africa, the last continent to fall to European colonialism; and Germany and the United States nipped at Britain’s heels for position at the top of the world economic order.

The supremacy of the pound sterling (i.e., gold) in international finance and trade lay at the heart of Great Britain’s strategy to maintain global dominance. The City of London reaped handsome profits from international investment and trade, both within the empire and without: the British compensated for desultory investment in domestic industries by exporting “old” English manufactures to sheltered markets within the empire. The colonies were induced to buy these products (often at artificially high prices) while they in turn sold primary products to the rest of the world (wool from Australia, cotton from India). These enabled Great Britain, in turn, to offset its trade deficits from importing wheat from the United States and Argentina for domestic consumption.

In southern Africa, labor patterns that had been established on the diamond fields carried over to the Rand. The rapid capitalization of diamond mining had reduced independent diggers to wage workers while the industry relied increasingly on African migrant laborers contracted on meager wages and confined to compounds. White miners adopted an aggressive racism to police the color line in order to protect their superior position and wages.

The mining of gold also shifted the center of economic power from the Cape Colony to the heretofore isolated and undeveloped Transvaal. Lord Selborne, who served as undersecretary to Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, considered the Transvaal “the richest spot on earth,” the key to South Africa’s future. “It is going to be the natural capital state and centre of South African commercial, social and political life,” he wrote in 1896.

By then, Johannesburg had grown to a cosmopolitan city of 100,000, with a large population of uitlanders (foreigners), British and other Europeans, who were aggrieved over political exclusions (fourteen years residency for naturalization and the franchise) and high taxes. Mine owners agitated against high railway tariffs and inflated prices set by state monopolies over essential resources (especially dynamite). More broadly for the British Empire, political instability in the Transvaal threatened to unravel the assumptions of its superior position in southern Africa based on commercial and financial domination, British immigration, and geopolitical power. After the failed Jameson raid of 1895 (a botched coup d’état backed by Cecil Rhodes and other leading mine magnates), ZAR president Paul Kruger stiffened his resolve. The British did not want the vote, he said. They wanted his state.

Australia's Afghan Crisis, 1888

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 178-181:

THE CONFLICT IN AUSTRALIA reached a climax in 1888 when officials in Melbourne and then Sydney, backed by public agitation, refused to allow 268 Chinese passengers arriving from Hong Kong on the Afghan to disembark, including some sixty Chinese who held British naturalization papers. The crisis paralyzed British officials in London, while hysteria that the Afghan represented the leading edge of a new “invasion” swept Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. Cheok Hong Cheong led a committee of Chinese merchants to protest the agitation surrounding the Afghan affair, which tried to meet with Victorian premier Duncan Gillies but was continually rebuffed.

Cheong went on to deliver a public address and publish it. He rebuked Australia for waging a shameless campaign rooted in “the selfishness, the prejudices, and the shams, which form the warp and woof of the present agitation.” He asked, “Is it possible that common human rights, accorded to other civilized peoples, are to be denied to us? That it is to be a crime, punishable by imprisonment with hard labor, if man or woman of the Chinese race travels over the line separating any of the colonies without a permit?”

Cheong and his colleagues were constructing a rhetoric about China and Chinese rights on the world stage that mirrored the perspective articulated by Qing diplomats. Cheong echoed Marquis Tseng’s assertion of China’s awakening: “That such a time may come, nay, probably will come sooner than is supposed, when the presence and power of China as a great nation will be felt in these seas, and it lies with you to say, as wise men or otherwise, if this is to be for good or evil.”

Victoria placed the Afghan in quarantine and declared the passengers’ travel documents to be fraudulent, barring their entry. The ship then ventured to Sydney, where authorities also refused to land the Chinese, goaded by a crowd of five thousand demonstrators shouting “Out with the Chinamen” in front of the New South Wales Parliament. South Australia pledged that it would also refuse the ship. With three colonies vowing to refuse admission of the Chinese aboard the Afghan, the Chinese Question took center stage in intercolonial politics.

Taking advantage of the crisis, Premier Parkes rushed legislation through the NSW assembly that exponentially increased poll taxes and residence fees on Chinese and declared that NSW would no longer recognize naturalization papers, including those previously issued by NSW. He backdated the law so it applied to the passengers on the Afghan. It was not a full victory, however, because the courts heard the habeas cases of naturalized Chinese and ordered their disembarkment. The Afghan then returned to Hong Kong with the remaining passengers.

The Afghan affair raised disturbing questions. When the Chinese passengers aboard the ship obstructed the unloading of cargo, they threw open the idea that Australia could refuse people while welcoming goods. From a simple business calculus, Hong Kong shippers considered the Australian trade finished, as passenger fees had kept cargo rates down. In London, officials struggled over how to sever migration from trade, that is, how it might possibly accommodate Australians’ demands for immigration restriction while protecting its broader commercial interests in Asia.

The Afghan crisis also accelerated the movement to federation. Parkes had long been a proponent of federation, a strategy to strengthen Australia’s position in Asia and within the British Empire. The Chinese Question provided a racial urgency that rallied the masses and brought divergent colonial interests into closer alignment. In June 1888 an intercolonial conference in Sydney discussed the need for the uniform restrictions on Chinese immigration. Much was riding on the outcome. The southern colonies hoped to bring the tropical colonies firmly to the side of restriction and to present a united front to London. The Colonial Office hoped that the conference would produce an agenda reasonable enough—or at least not as obnoxious as standing colonial policies—to take to the Qing as the basis for a new treaty. London asked the colonies to behave as responsible imperial partners, expressing to them the hope that the “Conference will endeavour to conciliate the susceptibilities of [the] Chinese Government as far as practicable.”

The conference agreed that immigration restriction should be secured simultaneously through imperial diplomacy and by uniform colonial legislation. But it could not get unanimous support for all its resolutions. Tasmania and Western Australia abstained on a general statement in support of exclusion and on specific legislative models, which included the continued criminalization of unauthorized intercolonial travel and stricter shipping regulations. Tasmania balked at the blatant disregard for the home (British) government’s authority and discrimination against Chinese who were British subjects. Western Australia’s reticence lay in the territory’s use of Asian labor in the northern maritime industries, although in 1886 it had banned Chinese from work on the huge goldfields discovered at Kalgoorie. South Australia agreed to all points in the interests of intercolonial unity, but it insisted that restrictions should apply only to Chinese and not to Indians or Pacific Islanders, who continued to work in the Northern Territory, which South Australia administered. Although unanimity eluded the conference, the basis was laid for further negotiations toward a full White Australia policy.

In 1891 the Privy Council, the official advisory body to Queen Victoria, conceded broader discretion to the colonies over Asiatic restrictions, ruling that foreign aliens had no legal right to enter British territories. Although the rule did not cover Chinese in Hong Kong or Singapore, who were British subjects, it confirmed the colonies’ use of local legislation to restrict Chinese immigration.

First Chinese Laborers in Australia

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 111-114:

THE FIRST CHINESE WHO arrived in the Australian colonies in the late 1840s were, in fact, indentured workers, contracted to work on the huge sheep runs of New South Wales. As convict transportation declined and, with it, the use of “assigning” convicts for shepherding and other rural work, the pastoralists—Australia’s first big capitalists—turned to indentured Asian labor from India and China. In the late 1830s and early ’40s, pastoralists imported several hundred contract laborers from West Bengal; between 1847 and 1853, Australians brought another 500 Indians and 3,608 Chinese, the latter recruited overwhelmingly from Xiamen on the South China coast of Fujian province. Australians likely recruited in Xiamen because that port was a major source of Chinese labor emigration to Singapore, another British colony. Indentured Chinese went to Australia to work as shepherds, hut-keepers, farmhands, and domestic servants under contracts of four to five years. They earned about ten pounds a year (less than half the average European wage) and were subject to the colonies’ masters and servants laws, which imposed penal sanctions for absconding or disobedience.

From the outset, Australian colonists were skeptical about the use of Asian indentured labor. Many believed free British emigrants should settle Australia and not unfree labor, whether convicts or coolies. They feared that Australia would come to resemble the British plantation colonies of the Caribbean, where the use of indentured Indians as a replacement for enslaved Africans seemed to barely diminish the evils of slavery. In 1843 four thousand people in New South Wales, self-described working people, signed a petition declaring that the importation of “coloured workers” would be a “grave injustice to freemen who had come to better their condition.” A contemporary warned that British emigrants, even the poorest Irish laborers and servants who came on government assistance, would find their wages reduced to 20 rupees a year or be “trampled into beggary and ruin.” The antitransportation movement, modeled on the British antislavery societies, deemed the importation of indentured coolies even worse than that of convicts, whom they considered at least potentially redeemable. But the Colonial Office in London conceded, “The supply of really eligible Emigrants, that is, of those of the proper age, and possessing the requisite health and knowledge of some useful description of labor, is limited. . . . [It] is doubtful whether the requisite number will be obtainable.”

The sheep ranchers were defensive about using indentured workers but adamant that they had no other recourse to labor. As on other settler frontiers, indigenous people resisted working for Europeans. A Port Phillip pastoralist, Charles Nicholson, declared, “The fact is that we must have labour in some shape or other—free labour if we can get it; if not, prison labour; and failing either, coolie labour.” The Melbourne Age echoed that rationale with the view that importing Asians was the “dernier resort.”

By the early 1850s the opponents of indentured labor had largely prevailed, owing to the association of coolies with convict labor and the penal origins of the colonies, beyond which proper settlers wished to progress. Many settlers argued that replacing convict labor with indentured Asians would create vast inequalities and thus would make democracy impossible. A critic of the wool capitalists asserted, “Chinese laborers were the offspring of that morbid craving for cheap convict labor, which cannot be appeased while hope remains that it may be supplied. Chinese emigration is merely an extension of the slave trade.” When the Port Phillip District separated from New South Wales as the new colony of Victoria in 1851, it founded as a free colony and banned all indentured labor, regardless of origin. In New South Wales, where the pastoralists wielded considerable political clout, the use of indentured Chinese continued, albeit modestly and not without public criticism.

But the onset of the gold rush in the early 1850s shifted the framework for how white Australians imagined the Chinese question. The gold rush was an unexpected answer to Australians’ prayers for free labor, and much more. It promised a level of prosperity previously unimaginable and brought tens of thousands of people to Australia. In general, they were free emigrants of diverse social background who hailed mostly from the British Isles but also from continental Europe (especially Germany), the United States, and China.

Chinese arrived on the Victorian goldfields in 1853, about a year and a half after the initial rush. By 1854 there were ten thousand Chinese in the colony, a relatively small number, but their presence sparked controversy. Historians have recounted the animosity of Europeans toward the Chinese, and some have compared it to the racism on the California goldfields. But the Chinese Question in Australia began quite differently than it did in California.

Sad Fate of Sihanoukville

From Sihanoukville: Rise and Fall of a Frontier City, by Ivan Franceschini, with photos by Roun Ry, Global China Pulse, September 2024:

From quiet seaside town known mostly as a backpacker destination, the place turned first into a booming frontier city with aspirations to become the ‘new Macau’ and then into a notorious haven for online scam operations. How did it come to this? How did a city once famous as a destination for low-end tourism turn into a hub for human trafficking and modern slavery linked to cybercrime?

Founded in the mid-1950s around a then new deep-water port funded by France and named after the late Cambodian king and long-term ruler Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012), the Sihanoukville of old [once known as Kampong Som] is often remembered as an enchanted place. Youk Chhang (2021), director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) that played a fundamental role in documenting the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, has described how, when he was growing up in Cambodia in the 1960s, he used to hear about the city in popular music. Although he had never visited the place, his youthful fascination was also fuelled by the fact that Jacqueline Kennedy had travelled there in 1967 to inaugurate a boulevard named after her late husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As his words in the epigraph to this essay show, his first visit to the city in the early 1990s did not disappoint.

I had a chance to visit Sihanoukville myself in the early 2010s and have some very distinct memories of a somnolent town of low-rise buildings, with seaside resorts beside white-sand beaches where one could lie in a hammock and simply relax. The temptation to nostalgia is strong. Yet, even at that time, it was widely known that, behind the beautiful scenery, the city was an imperfect paradise. Not only were certain areas a haven for sex tourists, including several notorious paedophiles, it was also a favourite haunt of a handful of Russian oligarchs and gangsters, who for years dominated the city with their extravagant behaviour and penchant for violence.

In the early 2010s, Sihanoukville was the long-term home of a growing community of about 200 former Soviet citizens and attracted as many as 5,000 to 6,000 Russian-speaking tourists every year (Plokhii 2011). They had their own Russian-language newspaper, a monthly Russian community meeting, at least six Russian restaurants, street signs in Russian, and a Russian-owned beachside disco. There were also plans to build the first Russian Orthodox church in the city, which came to fruition a few years later (Orthodox Christianity 2014). Money—often of uncertain provenance—was pouring in. Yet, the situation on the ground was quickly shifting as new Chinese investors began to eye the lucrative opportunities in the city.

In fact, China’s presence in Sihanoukville goes way back. Under the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79), the city was the site of one of the main Chinese aid projects in what was then known as Democratic Kampuchea: the reactivation and expansion of an oil refinery that had been built by a French company in the 1960s and abandoned due to continuous attacks from Cambodian and Vietnamese communist insurgents and US bombing in May 1975.

In Brothers in Arms, Andrew Mertha (2014: Ch. 5) documents in painstaking detail the bureaucratic and personal challenges that Chinese workers faced as they attempted to rebuild the refinery—their long-ago voices resonating with the complaints of some of their successors of today as they bemoan the lack of skills of Cambodian co-workers and the impossibility of understanding who is in charge of what (Franceschini 2020). The refinery would never be completed, the project reaching a premature end due to the onslaught of the internal purges in the Khmer Rouge bureaucracy and then the Vietnamese invasion. As the Vietnamese forces entered Kampong Som, the place ‘became noteworthy’ as a ‘site of the disorganized and panic-ridden retreat of the Chinese’ (Mertha 2014: 117). Convinced by Khmer Rouge propaganda into believing that all was well on the Vietnam front, Chinese technicians and workers took a while to realise the impending danger. It was then too late for them to escape and as many as 200 became de facto prisoners of war.

Fast forward two decades. In the newly pacified Cambodia of the 1990s, Sihanoukville gained renewed importance as the country’s only deep-water port, which made it an important hub for international trade. In the new millennium, Chinese businesses began to gain a foothold in the city and the surrounding Preah Sihanouk Province. An important event in this sense was the establishment of the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone—a development that would later be branded a landmark project of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Cambodia (IDI 2021). A priority of both the Chinese and the Cambodian governments since its approval in 2006, the project showcased the alignment of their agendas in that period, with Cambodia prioritising the zone’s development to attract foreign capital to build its export capacities, and China eager to push its well-established manufacturers to head overseas and seek lower-cost production bases and explore access to foreign markets (Loughlin and Grimsditch 2020; Bo and Loughlin 2022).

The transformation of Sihanoukville began abruptly in the mid-2010s, accelerating around 2017, as online gambling operators set up shop in the city. They soon spread rapidly across Cambodia, but Sihanoukville was the perfect location: relatively good access to the capital, Phnom Penh, a functioning airport, and plenty of land—much of it already grabbed by local elites—available for purchase or rent; an already thriving in-person gambling industry; and very lax law enforcement. Possibly, it was made even more desirable by the impending construction of China-funded infrastructure, especially a new expressway that would connect the city to Phnom Penh, dramatically cutting travel time between the two cities.

Given these considerations, industry operators began to descend en masse on the city, investing not only in their online activities, but also in a host of new casinos, hotels, and entertainment venues, most of which were targeting the rapidly growing Chinese market. This generated a bubble that, at its peak in 2019, produced annual revenue conservatively estimated between 3.5 and 5 billion USD a year, 90 per cent of which came from online gambling (Turton 2020). The Chinese population in the city grew exponentially, as did the percentage of businesses owned by Chinese nationals, which in mid-2019 was a staggering 90 per cent of the total in the city (Hin 2019).

...

In January 2018, authorities in China launched a three-year campaign known as ‘sweeping away the black and eliminating the evil’ (扫黑除恶), to root out ‘underworld forces’ (Greitens 2020). Destinations like Sihanoukville likely presented an enticing prospect to gangsters trying to avoid the crackdown. It was around this time that reports of kidnappings, human trafficking, and forced labour to fuel the burgeoning online gambling and online scam industry in Sihanoukville started appearing with increasing frequency in Chinese-language media. As the presence of illicit online operations became better known, in July 2018, the Chinese Embassy in Cambodia released a warning about the ‘high-paying traps of online gambling recruitment’—one of the earliest instances of such advisories that we were able to locate (Chinese Embassy in Cambodia 2018). The embassy encouraged Chinese nationals who planned to come to Cambodia, especially young people, to be vigilant about offers of well-paid jobs as ‘typists’, ‘network technicians’, ‘network customer service’, and ‘network promotion’, regardless of whether these were promoted in online advertisements or introductions by friends or relatives.

...

The day in 2019 when then prime minister Hun Sen announced the online gambling ban, 18 August, was a watershed moment for Sihanoukville. No-one was more aware of this than the Chinese nationals in Cambodia, who began to refer to the event simply as ‘818’—a supposedly auspicious number transformed into a symbol of doom. If up to that point the city’s economy was soaring, afterwards the edifice showed hints of cracking. Signs began to emerge that many operations had closed and rushed to relocate, dragging with them not only their workforce but also that of ancillary industries. According to some reports, an estimated 10,000 Chinese fled Sihanoukville in the space of a few days after the ban was announced (Inside Asian Gaming 2019). Reports followed of more Chinese leaving the city and Cambodia and, in January 2020, Cambodia’s Immigration Department revealed that about 447,000 Chinese nationals had left the kingdom (Ben 2020). While this is a huge number, there was no breakdown of how many of these departures were residents and how many were short-term visitors. During the same period there were 323,000 inbound Chinese travellers, meaning the net influx of Chinese was down by more than 100,000 people. While it is not possible to isolate any other potential factors that could have caused this drop, it can be assumed that 818 had an impact.

...

Many Chinese developers decided to write off their losses and flee. Having lost faith in the future of the city and worried about the contractual obligations that bound them to pay exaggerated rents even in the face of an economy that was collapsing, many chose to evade their legal obligations and return to China. In so doing, they left behind hundreds of buildings at different stages of completion. On one hand, this spelled the ruin of local landowners, many of whom had sought to capitalise on the gambling-fuelled boom. As one of them complained to a journalist from Voice of Democracy (VoD) in July 2022: ‘I borrowed money to buy land worth more than $200,000 because I thought it was a great opportunity … We could earn $7,500 [per month]—why wouldn’t we dare to pay $2,000 per month [in loan repayments]? The banks were happy to lend money between $200,000 and $300,000’ (Mech 2022b). On the other hand, this caused mayhem among the Chinese and Cambodian workers employed on these sites, many of whom were not notified that their bosses had fled and continued to work for weeks or even months without being paid.

...

I was in Sihanoukville between December 2019 and January 2020, right before the pandemic hit, and encountered several of these workers. While by that time many Cambodian workers had already returned to their homes in the provinces, having received the back salaries they were owed—which were much lower than those of their Chinese colleagues—or having given up on being paid at all, many of their Chinese counterparts were still stuck in the city. Many were living in conditions of destitution in the half-finished construction sites, unable to go home either because they did not have the money or because they were still clinging to the hope of retrieving the often-significant amounts they were owed. As I recounted at length elsewhere (Franceschini 2020), this was a heartbreaking experience.

... 

Although the online gambling ban had clear immediate impacts, paradoxically, this marked a point when awareness of the scale of the online industries and their associated crimes really came to the fore. Scam operations had existed for years in the city, discreetly hosted within the same operations that were home to ostensibly more legitimate gambling activities. As news emerged of the hardships occurring in Sihanoukville, it became clear that business was still booming in many of the larger hotel and casino-based online scam operations, and in the major compounds that proliferated across the city. Many companies providing real online gambling services (rather than rigged games or scams) likely left, and recently arrived scam operators and smaller players with less well-established connections probably got cold feet. However, at the same time, the compounds became increasingly secretive, and failing casinos converted premises to provide more space for online operations. In both cases, security increased and the movement of workers in and out became tightly restricted.

Gold Rush Translation Needs

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 51-52:

The huiguan [会馆] were Chinese versions of the mutual aid organizations that virtually all immigrant groups formed on the basis of a common regional origin, known among eastern Europeans as Landsmannschaften and among Mexicans as mutualistas. In China huiguan dated at least to the Ming Dynasty, when traders and sojourners in big cities formed hostels and guilds where they could commune among people from their home districts, speaking their own dialect. Chinese formed native-place huiguan wherever they emigrated abroad, including North America and Australasia.

Chinese in America translated huiguan as “company,” not in the narrow sense of a business but more generally as a corporate entity. The first huiguan to organize in California were the Siyi (Sze Yup) Company and the Canton Company or Sanyi (Sam Yup) Huiguan, both in 1851. The Siyi people were the most numerous, but the Sanyi Huiguan’s concentration of cosmopolitan merchants from Guangzhou and its three surrounding counties gave it disproportionate influence. In the 1882 the California huiguan formed a coordinating body called Zhonghua Huiguan, formally translated as Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association but familiarly known as the Six Chinese Companies. In Victoria, Siyi and Sanyi people also formed huiguan, as well as associations for people from Xiamen in Fujian province (Figure 9).

Huiguan served as organizations of both solidarity and social control. A new immigrant arriving at San Francisco or Melbourne would find a representative from his home district at the dock, who would take him to the huiguan’s headquarters in the Chinese quarter. There he would find a place to sleep, a hot meal, information about mining and other job prospects, and where he might find his cousins and village friends. The individual merchants who financed credit-tickets that covered emigrants’ passage collected debt payments through huiguan. The associations adjudicated disputes among members, cared for members who were sick or indigent, buried those unlucky enough to die in America, and at a later date, sent their bones back home. Some huiguan provided translators and paid legal fees for members who ran afoul of the law.

Huiguan leaders represented the community to white society in public discourse, in formal meetings, and in bringing civil rights lawsuits. The larger and wealthier huiguan bought land and erected buildings in San Francisco and Melbourne for their headquarters. Their offices boasted full-time officers and staff, including a secretary, a treasurer, clerks, a translator, cooks, servants, and altar-keepers. They often had representatives in the goldfield towns wherever there was a concentration of Chinese.

Merchants traditionally ranked at the bottom of the Confucian social hierarchy, below farmers, workers, and soldiers. But through their leadership roles in emigrant communities, Chinese merchants found prestige and power. Their social status would filter back to China as well. But Euro-Americans imagined that huiguan were despotic organizations that brokered slave labor and exercised total control over their members. White Americans and Australians who were actually familiar with the Chinese community understood that huiguan were mutual aid associations similar to those organized by other immigrant groups. Chinese themselves considered their membership in huiguan not as enslavement but as integral to the networks of trust forged through native-place and clan lineage. They also considered the repayment of debts a matter of honor, and most Chinese cleared their debts fairly quickly, in less than a year in Australia.

The Role of Chinese Huiguan

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 51-52:

The huiguan [会馆] were Chinese versions of the mutual aid organizations that virtually all immigrant groups formed on the basis of a common regional origin, known among eastern Europeans as Landsmannschaften and among Mexicans as mutualistas. In China huiguan dated at least to the Ming Dynasty, when traders and sojourners in big cities formed hostels and guilds where they could commune among people from their home districts, speaking their own dialect. Chinese formed native-place huiguan wherever they emigrated abroad, including North America and Australasia.

Chinese in America translated huiguan as “company,” not in the narrow sense of a business but more generally as a corporate entity. The first huiguan to organize in California were the Siyi (Sze Yup) Company and the Canton Company or Sanyi (Sam Yup) Huiguan, both in 1851. The Siyi people were the most numerous, but the Sanyi Huiguan’s concentration of cosmopolitan merchants from Guangzhou and its three surrounding counties gave it disproportionate influence. In the 1882 the California huiguan formed a coordinating body called Zhonghua Huiguan, formally translated as Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association but familiarly known as the Six Chinese Companies. In Victoria, Siyi and Sanyi people also formed huiguan, as well as associations for people from Xiamen in Fujian province (Figure 9).

Huiguan served as organizations of both solidarity and social control. A new immigrant arriving at San Francisco or Melbourne would find a representative from his home district at the dock, who would take him to the huiguan’s headquarters in the Chinese quarter. There he would find a place to sleep, a hot meal, information about mining and other job prospects, and where he might find his cousins and village friends. The individual merchants who financed credit-tickets that covered emigrants’ passage collected debt payments through huiguan. The associations adjudicated disputes among members, cared for members who were sick or indigent, buried those unlucky enough to die in America, and at a later date, sent their bones back home. Some huiguan provided translators and paid legal fees for members who ran afoul of the law.

Huiguan leaders represented the community to white society in public discourse, in formal meetings, and in bringing civil rights lawsuits. The larger and wealthier huiguan bought land and erected buildings in San Francisco and Melbourne for their headquarters. Their offices boasted full-time officers and staff, including a secretary, a treasurer, clerks, a translator, cooks, servants, and altar-keepers. They often had representatives in the goldfield towns wherever there was a concentration of Chinese.

Merchants traditionally ranked at the bottom of the Confucian social hierarchy, below farmers, workers, and soldiers. But through their leadership roles in emigrant communities, Chinese merchants found prestige and power. Their social status would filter back to China as well. But Euro-Americans imagined that huiguan were despotic organizations that brokered slave labor and exercised total control over their members. White Americans and Australians who were actually familiar with the Chinese community understood that huiguan were mutual aid associations similar to those organized by other immigrant groups. Chinese themselves considered their membership in huiguan not as enslavement but as integral to the networks of trust forged through native-place and clan lineage. They also considered the repayment of debts a matter of honor, and most Chinese cleared their debts fairly quickly, in less than a year in Australia.

First Australian Gold Rush

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 26-27:

THE POLYNESIAN also circulated to Sydney, Australia, via Pacific whaling ships, bringing news of California gold to the antipodes. Between April 1849 and May 1850, some eleven thousand people left Australia for California. Mostly they came from Sydney, a combination of fortune seekers and former convicts. White Americans on the goldfields disliked the Australians, considering them to be criminals of rough and immoral character, claim jumpers and “hardened thieves and robbers.” The stereotype contained an element of truth in the predations of a San Francisco street gang known as the Sydney Ducks, so called for the convicts’ bowed legs and peculiar gait that resulted from years of wearing leg irons. But most Australian gold seekers were not former convicts; the California census of 1852 showed that Sydney men were more likely to be married with children, working, and noncriminals than Americans.

...

Colonists in New South Wales had noted the presence of gold since at least the 1840s, but authorities had not encouraged prospecting. In 1844 Governor FitzRoy quashed news of gold discoveries in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, believing it would inflame rebellion and disorder among the large population of convicts and former convicts; in 1849 Charles LaTrobe, the superintendent of Port Phillip district, broke up a minirush near Melbourne on grounds of trespass on crown lands. But news of California gold convinced colonial leaders that Australia’s future prosperity might lie in gold, not least to spur “a healthy emigration” of miners and workers to diminish the influence of convicts and paupers. FitzRoy appointed a geological surveyor in 1850 and announced his offer of a prize.

Hargraves set out to find gold. “I knew I was in gold country for 70 miles,” he wrote, before finding water to wash the earth at Auroya Goyong, near Bathurst, in February 1851. He enlisted three young men to help him, teaching them how to use a pan and build a rocker, skills he had learned in California. Hargraves claimed the reward (cutting out his three assistants), renamed the spot Ophir, and publicized his findings broadly. Within a few months there were several hundred people at the diggings, farmers and shepherds from the countryside and clerks and mechanics from Sydney.

The Australian gold rush was on. Observers remarked that Sydney virtually emptied of people as carpenters dropped their tools, merchants shuttered their shops, and house servants fled their masters’ homes. Not a few people from Port Phillip (Melbourne) trekked north up to Bathurst, but prospecting spread westward in earnest. In July 1851 the Port Phillip district of New South Wales separated and founded the new colony of Victoria. A month later gold seekers hit a rich strike north of Geelong. By mid-October upward of ten thousand people made their way to the central midlands of Victoria; many diggers were taking out an ounce of gold a day (£3). Most important, perhaps, Hargraves had introduced the “California rocker” to Australia, which enabled more efficient washing than tin pots and dishes. Over the next decade 170,000 colonial settlers (nearly half the entire nonnative population) moved to the goldfields, and another 573,000 gold seekers arrived from abroad, mainly from the British Isles, as well as continental Europe, California, and China. Chinese called Victoria Xinjinshan, or New Gold Mountain, and renamed California Jiujinshan, Old Gold Mountain. To this day Chinese call the city of San Francisco Jiujinshan.

Honolulu was, and still is, called Tanxiangshan (Sandalwood Mountain) in Chinese.

South China's Gold Rush Diaspora

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 32-36:

THE VAST MAJORITY OF Chinese gold diggers in California and Victoria hailed not from Shanghai but from southern China, especially the Siyi, or four counties, that lay on the western side of the Pearl River delta in Guangdong province. Remarkably, the vast majority came from just one county, Xinning [= Taishan]. Xinning was a poor place, owing to its rocky soil and hilly terrain, its cycles of drought and flood, and its relative isolation from the market. The land produced only enough rice to feed its people for half the year, so farmers grew sweet potatoes and peanuts on the hillsides to supplement their crops. Instability from British economic penetration and local political violence made conditions worse. Families sent sons and brothers to nearby cities for seasonal work as laborers, peddlers, and factory workers. No one knows who were the first Chinese from Xinning to venture to California, but they had probably already migrated from their home villages to Guangzhou or its environs. What is clear is that they established a classic pattern of chain migration to California and Victoria and, soon afterward, to the goldfields of Canada and New Zealand. Gold seekers from the Siyi founded the Chinese diaspora in North America and Australasia.

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THE GOLD RUSHES BROUGHT large numbers of Chinese and Euro-Americans into contact with each other on an unprecedented scale, far surpassing the limited experience of European colonial enclaves in Chinese port cities or the occasional Chinese visitors to the United States and England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The San Francisco Customs Office noted 325 arrivals from China in 1849 and 450 in 1850; in 1850 Chinese comprised only one percent of the California mining population. But 2,700 Chinese arrived in 1851 and 20,000 in 1852. Chinese comprised about 10 percent of the total population of California by the late 1850s, and upward of 25 percent in the mining districts. A similar pattern exists in Australia. By 1859 there were at 40,000 to 50,000 Chinese in Victoria, roughly 20 to 25 percent of the mining population. Historians of the Australian rush have remarked that many Britons had never “mixed so freely with foreigners, especially the Chinese.”

Pacific Trade Growth in 1849

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 23-25:

Even as the forty-niners poured in from the eastern United States, California’s Pacific connections grew. Who would feed and provision the masses of gold seekers? There were entrepreneurs among the forty-niners, like Robert LeMott, who quickly sold a stock of pants and nails he had brought from Pennsylvania. But emigrants from the East could bring only small amounts of goods with them, and there was little farming in California to support the forty-niners, least of all in the hills. Most American merchants who sold provisions and amenities during the gold rush dealt in imported goods—dried fish and beef jerky, canvas and clothing, tools, lumber, candles, coffee, livestock, and even prefabricated houses—from Honolulu, Valparaiso, and Oregon; from Hong Kong and Sydney. LeMott, who speculated broadly, invested in clothing, especially that which was “heavy, well made, and of dark colors.” He wrote that merchants were making a 50 percent profit on everything they sold. Or more: in 1851 over 300,000 barrels of foreign flour—mostly from Chile—entered San Francisco, selling at an average price of thirteen dollars per barrel, compared to one dollar a barrel in New England.

The schooner Julia exemplified the changing Pacific trade of the era. She was a prize ship seized during the Mexican war, bought at auction by an American in December 1847 and registered in Honolulu. A decline in the number of Pacific whaling ships calling at Hawaiian ports had created an economic slump there in the spring of 1848, but the gold rush opened new opportunities, according to the Polynesian, for “an immense market for our products.” From June to October 1848, nearly thirty ships left Honolulu for San Francisco, carrying all manner of goods and provisions. The Julia’s voyage that summer commanded payments of $30,000 for cargo shipped by the Honolulu firm of Skinner and Company, which chartered the ship, and hefty sums from consignees, including $50,000 for Starkey Janion and Company and $6,700 for the Hudson’s Bay Company—all paid in gold. Soon the Julia would add a Honolulu-Guangzhou leg to her journeys across the Pacific.

The Julia’s transpacific travels linked Old and New World trade by connecting California to a longer history of British and American interests in China. The Hudson’s Bay agent in San Francisco who sent the gold sample to Hong Kong for advice on its quality knew it was much faster to get from San Francisco to Hong Kong than to London. The San Francisco-Honolulu-Hong Kong connection also was one of the main ways that people in both Hong Kong and California received news about each other. Just as the Hong Kong paper Friend of China reprinted news from California that was reported in the Honolulu Polynesian, the San Francisco newspaper the Californian reprinted news from the Friend of China, which traveled via Honolulu.

The gold rush dramatically changed the nature of the U.S.-China trade. Yankee merchants in Guangzhou and Hong Kong, anchored in the traditional U.S.-China trade to Boston and New York via the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, had already begun to establish transpacific routes in the 1830s and ’40s. They linked China to Hawaii and then to California, which was less a final destination than a transshipment point for goods headed to Acapulco, Valparaiso, or, via the Horn, New York. The gold rush represented a new opportunity for merchants in Hong Kong—both Euro-Americans and Chinese—to export diverse goods to California.

Hong Kong was a British colony and a free port—that is, imported goods from one place could be unloaded and reloaded for export to another place without payment of customs duty—and as such it quickly became the premier Asian entrepôt for both goods and emigrants headed for the gold mountains. For the year 1849 alone, twenty-three vessels exported nearly five thousand tons of goods from Hong Kong to San Francisco, including sugar, rice, and tea; beer, coffee, cigars, and chocolate; hats and clothing; furniture and canvas; tools and implements; timber logs and planks, window frames, bricks, and marble slabs. In 1849 Chinese imported and erected some 75 to 100 buildings, modular designs of premade frames and constructed with interlocking camphor wood panels. Most of these were built in San Francisco—including John Frémont’s home—but some were erected in the interior. One such “Chinese house” built in Double Springs, Calaveras County, was used as the county courthouse, then as the post office, and later as a chicken coop. In the early 1850s, Hong Kong merchants shipped thousands of blocks of granite, along with Chinese workers, for building the homes and businesses of San Francisco’s new elites.

First Hong Kong to California Gold Rush

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 19-21:

California gold arrived in Hong Kong at Christmas, 1848. It came as a packet of gold dust sent by George Allan, the San Francisco agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The envelope contained a small sample taken from a payment that Allan had made for a shipment of goods, sent from the company in Hawaii to San Francisco—$6,720—payment that was made entirely in gold dust, about 420 ounces of it (two and a half cups in volume). Allan wrote to his counterpart in Honolulu, “No one here seems to doubt for a moment the purity of the Gold Dust,” but he asked that the sample be sent “forward with all dispatch” to British experts in China for evaluation.

The same ship that brought gold dust to Hong Kong also carried recent issues of the Polynesian, a Honolulu newspaper. Hong Kong’s English-language weekly, Friend of China, often reprinted articles from the Polynesian for local consumption. In the January 6 edition, Hong Kong readers learned that six thousand people had taken gold valued at $4 million out of the earth in the six months since its discovery in California. The account predicted at least twenty thousand more arrivals in the coming year and the production of $62 million of gold in 1849, one-third of the world’s total product of gold and half of the world’s silver product in 1846. If the numbers (just predictions, really) weren’t exciting enough, the paper reported that digging for gold was not complicated. It involved simply collecting gravel in the bed of a stream and separating gold from the dirt by means of gravity and a little mercury. The arrival of the latest news and of gold itself sent a wave of excitement throughout the British colonial port. The following week the English brig Richard and William carried the first gold seekers from Hong Kong to California. They were not Chinese but Americans, including a former opium runner, a tavern owner, and a livery stable keeper.

Chinese gold seekers were not far behind. Yuan Sheng, a businessman, left Hong Kong on May 6 on the English bark Swallow, along with two other passengers and a cargo of Chinese goods. Yuan Sheng was from the Zhongshan region of Guangdong province. He was born on Sanzao, one of the small islands off the coast, near Macao. Yuan had actually been to the United States before: he had traveled to New York in 1820, probably on one of the clipper ships of the early China trade, and from there he had gone to Charleston, South Carolina, where he became a merchant. While in the United States, Yuan Sheng became a Christian and a naturalized American citizen. It’s not known when he returned to China, but in 1849 he decided to go back to America, this time to California, most likely not to dig for gold but to find business opportunities in San Francisco, another kind of golden fortune. He already knew English and something of the ways of American life, notwithstanding the differences between New York, South Carolina, and California.

Yuan Sheng went by the Anglicized name of Norman Assing. His selection of this name is intriguing. His surname is a homophone for the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) that was founded by Kublai Khan, the son of Genghis Khan. He might have chosen Norman after the medieval Europeans, a contemporary analogue of the Yuan. The Normans and Mongols were formidable conquering forces of their time. Sheng, his given name, means “birth”; Assing is a rendering of “Ah-Sing,” the familiar form of address of his name in Cantonese. Yuan Sheng means “born of the Yuan”; Norman Assing suggests “born of the Normans.” His choice was a clever point of pride even if it remained opaque to his American acquaintances. An English-speaking merchant, Yuan Sheng was one of the few Chinese headed for California who were named in the ship’s passenger manifest. We are not certain of those who ventured before him. Only seven Chinese arrived in San Francisco in 1848. When Yuan Sheng arrived in July 1849, there were barely fifty Chinese in California. Euro-Americans writing about exciting polyglot scenes on the streets of San Francisco in 1849 invariably commented on the Chinese they encountered, both high-cultured men in flowing silk robes and miners carrying bamboo poles strung with tools, straw hats, and gigantic boots.

Chinese Gold Rush Destinations

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 14-15:

GOLD MINING IS famously risky, with high stakes, often compared to gambling. Driven by the desire for wealth, gold seekers took great risks that were explainable only by the potential for reward. Gold fever drove daring, hard work, technological invention, and political experimentation, as well as violence against humans and against the environment. The cold calculus of business, banking, and geopolitical interests harnessed gold fever for profit and advantage. For companies and nation-states, the desire for gold led to enormous expenditures of capital for digging and operating deeper and deeper mines. But the deeper the ore, the scarcer it was and the lower its grade, such that more and more rock had to be excavated for smaller and smaller yields of the precious metal. In the Witwatersrand gold mines in South Africa, for example, in 1905 it took on average 2.3 tons of ore to yield one ounce of gold worth $20.67. Hence the relentless drive for cheap labor in order to make gold mining payable.

Thus, at the turn of the twentieth century, South Africa recruited sixty thousand indentured Chinese mine laborers to work in highly capitalized and industrialized, deep underground mines. Their indenture marked an important difference in experience from that of the independent prospectors who went to North America and Australasia. But there were also broad similarities in the patterns of Chinese workers’ culture and resistance. This book tracks the migration of Chinese gold seekers to California, to the Australian colony of Victoria, and to the deep mines of the Witwatersrand. It considers how their experience and reception contributed to the evolution of their identity as “Chinese,” to China’s identity as a nation, and to their identification in the West as a global racial danger.

Chinese Empire Demand for Silver

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 9-10:

AT THE TIME OF the gold rushes, China was already in the grip of European colonialism. China was never directly colonized by a Western power; in fact, by the mid-eighteenth century the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) had built an empire of its own, having expanded China’s boundaries to the west, most notably by annexing Tibet and Xinjiang. But in the mid-nineteenth century China was battered by European aggressions: the opium trade, gunboat diplomacy, and the forced opening to Western trade and missionaries. China’s humiliation stood in stark contrast to the position it had once held, even relatively recently.

For two hundred years, from 1550 to 1750, China had been arguably the most important economic actor in the world. It was not only the single largest domestic economy; it was also at the center of global trade, both with its Sino-centric tributary and trading networks in East and Southeast Asia and as the premier destination market for silver produced in Spanish America and Japan. Europeans shipped silver to China not as “money” but as commodity arbitrage: the Ming Dynasty’s (1368–1644) demand for silver for fiscal and commercial purposes fetched the highest silver prices in the world, double its price in Europe. China was the world’s great “silver sink” that not only drew but also stimulated its production in the New World.

Through the seventeenth century, Europeans traded silver for luxuries, including gold. For example, the British East India Company’s first direct transaction with China in 1637 exchanged 60,000 Spanish dollars for sugar, silk, spices, porcelain, and “loose gould.” Chinese traders also made handsome profits by buying low and selling dear, earning gross profits of 100 to 150 percent on silk and silk textiles sold to Europeans. Economic historians Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giràldez describe these late sixteenth-century dynamics of global trade as “multiple arbitrage.”

Europeans began trading silver for tea in large quantities in the early eighteenth century. Like silk, tea was a luxury item in Europe, but it had greater potential for mass consumption. The creation of a mass market for tea in Europe coincided with the rise in consumption of sugar from the plantation-slave colonies of the Caribbean in the late seventeenth century. Indeed, tea and sugar, along with tobacco, undergirded a global trade in stimulants—“food drugs”—based on a symbiosis of colonialism and slavery, on the one hand, and new mass-consumption economies in European metropolitan societies, especially Britain, on the other.

By 1800 silver’s arbitrage advantage in China had ended. The British, now hooked on tea, looked for a different means of exchange. The East India Company had already drained India of much of its silver to sell in China; now it turned to India for the mass production of opium for export to China.

Chinese Gold Rush Emigration

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 2-4:

THE CHINESE WHO WENT to the gold rushes were part of an expanding population of Chinese living abroad in the nineteenth century. Since at least the thirteenth century of the Common Era, people from China’s southeastern coastal provinces had traded in Southeast Asia, from Indonesia and the Philippines to Vietnam and the Malay Peninsula to Thailand. But in the nineteenth century they traveled much farther from home, spurred by both need and opportunity. A quarter-million Chinese went as indentured laborers to European plantation colonies in the Caribbean as part of the notorious coolie trade that exploited Chinese and Indian workers after the abolition of slavery.

An even greater number of Chinese, more than 300,000, went as voluntary emigrants to the United States and to British settler colonies in the nineteenth century, attracted first by the gold rushes. The Chinese gold seekers were not, of course, the first to cross the great ocean—that distinction is held by the Polynesian peoples whose seaborne migrations began over one thousand years BCE. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish ran a yearly galleon trade between Acapulco and Manila, the long middle leg of a journey that traded New World silver to China for silks, porcelain, and other luxuries for Europe. By the early nineteenth century, a budding U.S.-China trade of northwestern American furs and pelts and Hawaiian sandalwood drew new routes across the ocean.

But the gold rushes were of another order. They exploded the early modern Pacific maritime world. Vibrant new routes and networks of trade and migration were established, nourished by gold first in California, then in Australia. Three new and lasting nodes of the transpacific rose to prominence: Hong Kong, San Francisco, and Sydney.

The goldfields were international contact zones on the frontiers of Anglo-American settler societies. The rushes attracted gold seekers from around the world—from the eastern and southern United States; from the British Isles and Continental Europe; from Mexico and Chile and Hawaii; from Australia and China. The gold seekers’ arrival to the frontiers of white settlement made them participants, to one degree or other, in the elimination of indigenous peoples and in the formation of new communities and nations. How would these new polities reckon with the diverse character of the goldfield populations? Who would be included and who would be excluded? And who would decide, and by what means?

The gold rushes occasioned the first mass contact between Chinese and Euro-Americans. Unlike other encounters in Asian port cities and on Caribbean plantations, they met on the goldfields both in large numbers and on relatively equal terms, that is, as voluntary emigrants and independent prospectors. Race relations were not always conflictual, but the perception of competition gave rise to a racial politics expressed as the “Chinese Question.”

Inspecting Ust Kara Mines, 1885

From Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin's Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 166-169:

Greek mining engineers advised Peter the Great in the late seventeenth century that mineral wealth lay underground in the regions east of Lake Baikal. Hard labor convicts were soon digging down to the silver veins in the vicinity of Nerchinsk. Gold mining began later near the Kara River, a name derived from a Tatar word meaning “black.” The Nerchinsk Mining Region, as it became known, eventually stretched over thousands of square miles from the eastern shore of Lake Baikal to the Chinese border.

In late October 1885 Kennan and Frost rode their horses through the valley of the Kara River to the prison complex at Ust Kara, or Kara mouth, the first of the prisons, convict settlements, and open placer gold mines stretching twenty miles up the valley. In addition to Ust Kara, there were the Lower Prison, the Political Prison, the Lower Diggings, Middle Kara and Upper Kara convict settlements, and the Upper Prison. Their total exile population was around twenty-five hundred, of whom two-thirds were hard-labor convicts and the rest women and children who had accompanied their husbands and fathers to the mines. Many of the political convicts in Eastern Siberia were held at Kara.

...

Kennan and Frost went directly to the prison commandant’s residence where they were greeted by Maj. Potuloff, who was in charge of Kara’s common-law convict prisons. Potuloff, a tall, cordial man in his fifties with a bushy beard and soldierly bearing, explained that he had been alerted by telegram to expect Kennan and Frost, but he never thought that the two would make it through from Stretinsk at this time of the year. He laughed when Kennan inquired where they could find a place to stay for the night. Other than the accommodations for criminals, he explained, the only place to stay was in his home, which they were welcome to do. Kennan and Frost had no alternative than to accept his offer “and in minutes [we] were comfortably quartered in a large, well-furnished house, where our eyes were gladdened by the sight of such unfamiliar luxuries as long mirrors, big soft rugs, easy-chairs, and a piano.”

They found themselves effectively under twenty-four-hour surveillance in Maj. Potuloff’s home. He never left them alone, in fact, he seemed to have relinquished his official duties during Kennan and Frost’s stay in order to keep an eye on them. Once, when Kennan moved in the direction of his overcoat, Maj. Potuloff asked, “Where are you going?”

“Out for exercise.”

“Wait a minute and I will go with you.” Kennan’s bedroom, which was on the ground floor across the front hall from the sitting room, had no door but only a thin curtain. The sentries posted night and day outside the house could even look in his bedroom through its curtainless windows.

Under Maj. Potuloff’s watchful eye, Kennan inspected prisons that were the now-familiar “perfect hell[s] of misery,” from the impossible overcrowding to the filth and vermin to the lack of any bedding for the inmates. “Civilized human beings put straw even into the kennels of their dogs.” But no matter how many Siberian prisons Kennan inspected, he always marveled at the unendurable smell. His descriptions of prison odors steadily grew more vivid and literary the farther east he went. Of the air in the Ust Kara prison, which Maj. Potuloff readily acknowledged was repulsive, Kennan later wrote, “I can ask you to imagine cellar air, every atom of which has been half a dozen times through human lungs and is heavy with carbonic acid; to imagine that air still further vitiated by foul, pungent, slightly ammoniacal exhalations from long unwashed human bodies; to imagine that it has a suggestion of damp, decaying wood and more than a suggestion of human excrement—and still you will have no adequate idea of it.”

During Kennan’s prison inspections, convicts complained to Maj. Potuloff and even approached Kennan on the assumption that “I must be an inspector sent to Kara to investigate the prison management.” Several convicts pleaded with Maj. Potuloff that they had been imprisoned for months but still did not know what they were charged with. Another insisted that he had already finished his sentence. One man explained that he had gotten drunk on the exile march and exchanged names with another convict and ended up at Kara serving a hard labor sentence when, had he kept his name, he only would have been sent to a settlement as a forced colonist.

Bartering names for food, drink, or clothing was a common practice among the exiled convicts and not easily detected since the convoy and prison guards could hardly familiarize themselves with the faces of hundreds of convicts. The exchange, which the artels ruthlessly enforced, invariably improved one barterer’s position to the distinct disadvantage of some hapless exile who had spent his money or gambled away his clothing, and thereby gotten himself, as Kennan explained, “into such a condition that for five or ten rubles and a bottle of vodka he will sell his very soul.” Maj. Potuloff ignored the convicts and their complaints.

Early Siberian Exile System

From Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin's Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 121-124:

The Siberian exile system was not planned to be loathsome and vile. For much of its existence, little planning went into it. The system was the product of imperial ambitions, bureaucratic incompetence, corruption, and inadequate funding; Siberia’s vast size and harsh terrain and climate; and the extraordinary Russian capacity to inflict and endure suffering. Centuries of grotesque penal evolution had spawned disease-ridden prisons, exile parties driven like cattle, virtual enslavement, and lunacies like the punishment of the Bell of Uglich [by Boris Godunov]. Other countries have exiled their criminals, but none on the scale of the Russian exile system. Between the 1780s and 1860s, the British transported about one hundred and sixty thousand convicts to Australia. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the French overseas penal population was between five and six thousand. Russia stands out because between 1801 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the tsarist regime exiled more than a million of its subjects to far-flung destinations within its own vast borders, creating what has been called “an enormous prison without a roof.”

As Siberia’s vast natural resources became apparent, the regime began employing the penal code as a tool for supplying Siberia with a labor force because too few Russians would go voluntarily. The offenses punishable by Siberian exile grew to include not just common-law crimes but political offenses, religious dissent, army desertion, and vagrancy. In 1753, the death penalty was formally abolished, and instead of being hanged, capital offenders underwent a public mutilation followed by “eternal penal labour” in Siberia. The death penalty would reclaim a place in the Russian judicial system in the nineteenth century, most notably in cases involving assassination plots against tsars.

...

For centuries convicts began marching to Siberia from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities in European Russia, often starting their march on the Vladimirka road. At the first post station, which was called Gorenki, from the word gore, meaning grief, family members who were not accompanying a convict to Siberia could get a last glimpse of their loved one. In his iconic Vladimirka, the Russian artist Isaac Levitan painted the view ahead of a marching exile: a dirt road stretching to the horizon under a vast sky. By the time of Kennan’s investigation, trains and then barges transported convicts into Siberia but many of them still had to march more than halfway across a continent to their final destinations in parties of three hundred or more guarded by Russian soldiers on foot and by mounted Cossacks.

The sight of an exile party stunned travelers in Siberia. In January 1828, a young woman making her way through Siberia in subzero temperatures to join her exiled fiancé heard a strange noise from her carriage. “It was the noise of the fetters … an entire party of people was in chains—some were even chained to a metal pole. These unfortunates were a terrible sight. To protect their faces from the cold they had covered them with some dirty rags into which they had cut holes for their eyes.” On an overcast morning in 1856, an English traveler observed, beneath a double row of birch trees on the Great Siberian Post Road, “a long line of drab-clad figures marching in the same direction as ourselves. We instinctively know what it is but can still hardly believe that a story so sad, so strange, so distant, is being realised before our eyes.” Kennan never carried out his plan to march with an exile party, possibly because he was denied permission but equally likely because he had observed the experience of the exile parties to be so dreadful.

No one seemed to question or care whether, after a forced march of thousands of miles, cold-blooded killers and an assortment of thieves, incorrigibles, misfits, malcontents, and regime enemies could become productive workers in the Siberian mines and factories. In fact many of the convicts who reached Eastern Siberia, according to one report from local authorities, “arrived exhausted, prematurely enfeebled, having contracted incurable diseases, having forgotten their trades, and having grown quite unaccustomed to labour.” Local Siberian officials regularly commandeered the healthiest convicts from the marching parties to meet their own needs, which further aggravated the shortage of able workers.

So many exiled convicts died on Siberian roads that the peasants, who had to dispose of the bodies, protested to the government in St. Petersburg, which only sent back orders to the local authorities to pay for the burials. Some convicts took years to reach their destinations but their time on the journey did not count as part of their sentence. One convict was on the road for eight years, but his eight-year sentence did not start until he finally entered a prison factory in Irkutsk. The authorities did not want the convicts to run out their sentences by feigning illness or otherwise finding ways to delay their arrivals at the prisons, factories, and mines.

Notwithstanding the human wastage, enough productive convicts reached their destinations to justify the exile system to the St. Petersburg and Siberian bureaucracies. As Kennan wrote, “One is surprised not that so many die but that so many get through alive.” Factories, salt works, distilleries, farms, and mines in Siberia continued to demand more workers and the regime continued to send them by, for example, allowing landowners and monasteries to turn over their troublesome serfs to the state for exile. Siberia became the jewel in the Romanov crown and played a role in the rise of the Russian Empire comparable to that of India in the ascension of the British Empire.

Siberian Postal System, 1880s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin's Press, 2023), Kindle p. 121:

The Siberian postal system was well organized. Carriages plied the Siberian roads between cities, villages, and towns carrying leather pouches filled with mail. Each day Irkutsk, the largest city in Siberia, received mail from Moscow, which was twenty-six hundred miles away, and delivered it back three times a week. The system allowed Kennan’s and Frost’s wives and friends to send them letters care of the post offices in larger Siberian cities, based on their expected itinerary, and for them to send letters back to the United States. Kennan mailed a letter to Century publisher Roswell Smith reporting that their success in gaining access to the Tiumen prison was “beyond my expectations” and that Frost had made numerous sketches and taken many photographs despite the balky equipment. Kennan had seen the prison in its “every-day aspect” and was confident that “nothing was fixed for my inspection” because “such a prison as that cannot be temporarily fixed.”

Overall, it was a positive report but for a note of self-doubt. Kennan described the forwarding prison as “the worst” he had ever encountered and, if it turned out to be representative, “I shall have to take back some things that I have said and written about the exile system.”

U.S.–Russian Tensions, 1880s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin's Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 95-96:

Alexander’s assassination at first drew the United States and Russia even closer because of the still traumatic American memory of Lincoln’s assassination. The US Senate passed a resolution of sympathy for Russia emphasizing the “relations of genuine friendship that have always existed between the people and governments of Russia and of the United States.” Former president Grant recalled fond memories of his 1878 meeting with the late tsar. The New York Times ran an editorial attacking the “Nihilism” of the assassins as the “chief foe of the liberty of the Russian people.” The Russian government reciprocated the sympathy when Charles Guiteau mortally wounded President Garfield a few months after Alexander’s assassination.

But the policies of the new tsar, Alexander III, managed to blunt the American sympathy for Russia generated by his father’s assassination. A foreign diplomat anonymously reported that the tsar and his advisers were preparing to “adopt rigorous repressive measures, having no example in Russian history.” Among the measures was a decree allowing the regime, without a trial, to jail or exile to Siberia anyone whose presence in Russia was deemed “prejudicial to the public order” or “incompatible with public tranquility.” A former head of the Department of the Police remarked that the decree caused the fate of the “entire population of Russia to become dependent on the personal opinions of the functionaries of the political police.”

Simultaneously with political repression, Alexander III tolerated, if not encouraged, a wave of brutal pogroms against Jews in European Russia. In some places Russian soldiers, mobilized to restore order, joined the mob in ransacking Jewish homes and businesses, and raping Jewish women. As historian Edward Crankshaw observed, “it was under Alexander III, and thanks to Alexander III, that anti-Semitism in Russia became institutionalized, respectable—and violent.” Influential Americans began to debate the true nature of the Russian regime. Harper’s Weekly, which previously had run issue after issue with festive illustrations of Russian life, editorialized that there is “no question as to the existence of the most cruel, arbitrary and oppressive despotism in Russia.”

Just as he had defended Russia’s role in the Great Game in Central Asia several years earlier, Kennan again came to Russia’s defense. He publicly addressed only the emerging criticism of the Siberian exile system, and not the pogroms, but privately he expressed the belief that the Russian government had been “grossly misrepresented” in the reports of the mistreatment of Jews even though he did not then have “the facts” to prove it. In a widely publicized lecture in 1882 at the American Geographical Society, Kennan argued that while the exile system was hardly without flaws, “whatever exile may have been in the past, it is not now, in any just sense of the words, a cruel or unusual punishment,” but on the contrary should be regarded as a “more humane punishment than that inflicted upon criminals generally in other European states.”

Siberian Transit Before Rail

From Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin's Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 54-57:

The first leg, to Yakutsk, took Kennan and his companions through a wilderness of mountains and evergreen forests inhabited by the Tungus, a nomadic tribe. The Russian government paid the Tungus in tea and tobacco to set up camps at intervals between Okhotsk and Yakutsk to supply government mail carriers, and the occasional private traveler, with food and transportation. At their first stop at a camp, where wolfish-looking dogs gnawed on the severed heads of reindeer, the Tungus stocked Kennan’s sleighs with reindeer meat, replaced their dogs with reindeer, and took over as drivers. On November 16, after twenty-three days of nonstop travel, Kennan sighted columns of smoke rising from the chimneys of Yakutsk and slept that night in a Russian merchant’s house. “The sensation of lying without furs and between sheets in a civilized bed was so novel and extraordinary that I lay awake for an hour, trying experiments with that wonderful mattress.”

The Russian government had set up a remarkably well-organized transportation system that operated year-round in Siberia. Ten thousand horses, several thousand drivers, and seven thousand sleighs and horse-drawn carriages were stationed at more than three hundred and fifty post stations. Typically, post stations were the homes of local villagers who earned money by keeping and feeding the horses and furnishing lodging and food to both drivers and travelers. Unlike the American stagecoach network, the sleighs and carriages did not depart and arrive at fixed times. Depending on the season, the traveler simply bought or hired a sleigh or carriage, changed fatigued horses and drivers at the post stations, and went as slowly or rapidly as the condition of the roads and the traveler’s physical endurance allowed. Kennan planned to travel day and night.

In Yakutsk, Kennan purchased two pavoskas, partly enclosed traveling sleighs resembling a “burlap-covered baby carriage on runners.” He and Price put their luggage at the bottom of their sleigh’s passenger compartment, which had no seats, spread on top of the luggage a seven-foot-long, two-person, wolfskin sleeping bag and soft feather pillows, and stowed their food under the driver’s seat. After a farewell toast of vodka and champagne with their merchant host, Kennan, Price, and the two Russians, dressed head to foot in thick furs, climbed into their sleighs. The drivers snapped their whips, and, in clouds of snow kicked up by the three-horse teams each pulling a sleigh, they raced out of Yakutsk to the merry jingle of the large bells hung from the wooden arches suspended over the middle horses in each team. The primary purpose of a sleigh’s bell was not musical but to warn other sleighs at night or in a snowstorm of its oncoming presence. A short distance past Yakutsk, the two sleighs descended a gentle slope and turned onto the frozen Lena River, which would be their road for nearly a thousand miles.

The Lena, one of the world’s longest rivers, flows twenty-seven hundred miles north to the Arctic Ocean from its mountain pond source near Lake Baikal. Traveling upriver, the party stopped every two or three hours at post stations on the riverbanks to change horses. “Boys! Out the horses! Lively!” the drivers shouted as the sleighs pulled up to the post stations. Kennan crawled out of his warm fur bag and went into the station. He displayed a padarozhnaya, a travel pass he had purchased in Yakutsk that directed post station masters to provide his party with fresh horses and drivers and, if needed, food and lodging. The nights were clear and cold, sometimes minus forty or minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and the snow-covered ice was smooth and fast. Kennan lay in his fur bag listening to the jingling bell and watching the moonlit silhouette of the river’s forested shoreline as it flew by.

...

On December 13, 1867, leaving their two Russian companions behind in Irkutsk, Kennan and Price set out in a single sleigh on the Great Siberian Post Road, a central Siberian road extending three thousand miles from the Ural Mountains to the Amur River. Their sleigh overtook and passed slow-moving westbound caravans of two hundred sleighs loaded with tea from China and convoys of Cossacks transporting gold from Siberia. From the opposite direction came marching exile parties of convicts on their way east to hard labor prisons and mines. Their circumstances would become of intense interest to Kennan when he returned to Siberia eighteen years later, but now he paid them not much more attention than he did the white Yakut ponies in the fields pawing at the snow to uncover grass. They crossed the Ural Mountains, and on January 7, 1868, Kennan reached Nizhny Novgorod, which was then the eastern end of the Russian rail network. Kennan and Price sold their sleigh and boarded a train. Two days later, having traveled nearly six thousand miles since leaving the Sea of Okhotsk and changed horses, reindeer, and dogs two hundred and sixty times, they stepped off the train in St. Petersburg to behold a dazzling, snow-dusted, golden-trimmed fairy tale of a city, part architectural confection, part Potemkin village.

First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable

From Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin's Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 52-54:

The failure in 1865 to lay the Atlantic cable hardly deterred the directors of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. With the bitter learning experience of the earlier failed attempts, the engineers improved both the cable’s design and manufacture and made modifications to the gargantuan cable-laying ship, the Great Eastern, which sailed on June 30, 1866, from the Thames Estuary. Day after day, for the most part in calm waters, the Great Eastern steamed west, steadily paying out its cable. The ship anchored in late July in Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, in sight of the wildly cheering inhabitants of the flag-draped hamlet of Heart’s Content. The Great Eastern trailed two thousand miles of undersea cable, which was spliced into undersea lines that ran to mainland Canada. “All well. Thank God, the cable is laid and is in perfect working order,” went the telegraphed message from Heart’s Content, which set off worldwide celebrations.

With the benefit of hindsight, some newspapers criticized Western Union for spending millions of dollars based on the “mere conviction” that the Atlantic cable would never be successfully laid. For a time the Western Union directors insisted publicly that they would not abandon the overland route through Siberia, but they had every incentive to do just that. The month before the Great Eastern reached Heart’s Content, Western Union had hedged its investment in the Russian-American telegraph line by merging with the American Telegraph Company, one of the backers of the Atlantic cable. If the cable was successfully laid, Western Union would receive a share of the profits. In effect, Western Union had put down a bet against its own men in the Siberian wilderness.

Almost as an afterthought, Western Union dispatched a company ship to Siberia, the Onward, which arrived off Gizhiga on July 15, 1867. “We have come up to carry all the employees home,” said the captain. Kennan found it heartbreaking to close a project to which he had devoted nearly three years of his life and endured all possible hardships, but his thoughts were also of home. Maj. Abaza went by an overland route to St. Petersburg, where he hoped to persuade the Russian government to complete the line through Siberia. Kennan spent August cruising along the Siberian coast aboard the Onward to gather up the telegraph line working parties. In September the Onward put in at Okhotsk, where a letter from Maj. Abaza directed Kennan to come to St. Petersburg. The Onward, with almost all the American telegraph workers on board, prepared to sail to San Francisco. On the day of the Onward’s sailing, Kennan and Dodd were both on the edge of tears. “He could only wring my hand in silence.”

U.S. Military Telegraph Corps, 1860s

 From Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin's Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 35-37:

Kennan never attended college because the Rebellion, as it was called in Norwalk [Ohio], broke out in 1861 and “turned all my thoughts, hopes and ambitions into a new channel.”

He was elated by the martial electricity in the air. “Patriotic by inheritance and training, and naturally adventurous, I was completely carried away by a desire to take part in the momentous struggle.” But he was too young to enlist without his father’s permission, which John Kennan was unwilling to give. He could only watch as friends joined the 55th Ohio Regiment, which mustered out in Norwalk in the early days of the war. In a festive atmosphere the ladies of Norwalk offered coffee, pies, and sweet cakes to the young soldiers of the 55th in their light blue trousers, dark blue jackets, and forage caps. Trains left Norwalk taking boys, who not long ago had been playing two-old-cat, to be cut down on battlefields from Second Bull Run to the Carolinas campaign.

Still anxious to prove his courage, George Kennan sought the equally dangerous position as a field operator in the newly formed United States Military Telegraph Corps. Despite the word “Military,” the Corps was a civilian unit whose superintendent reported to the secretary of war. By the end of the war, the Corps had built fifteen thousand miles of telegraph lines and transmitted over six million telegraph messages, which gave the Union a significant communications advantage over the Confederacy with its more limited telegraphic resources. President Lincoln was among the first to grasp the capacity of the telegraph to give him command and control from Washington over his forces in the field, a power no political leader had previously possessed without being on the battlefield.

Throughout the war Lincoln haunted the War Department’s telegraph office. He personally sent nearly one thousand telegrams to his commanders, some asking about troop dispositions in ongoing battles. “What became of our forces which held the bridge till twenty minutes ago, as you say?” Lincoln telegraphed during one battle. The incoming telegrams filled the telegraph office with blood and gore. “The wounded & killed is immense,” a field operator telegraphed to the War Department, where Lincoln paced anxiously during the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862. “The battle rages furiously. Can hardly hear my instrument.”

From the War Department a vast network of telegraph wires stretched to every theatre of the war and onto battlefields. Before a battle, field operators weighed down with telegraphs, relays, and sounders; mules loaded with rolls of telegraph wire; and covered wagons crammed with nitric acid batteries, moved into position. They set up their instruments on hard-tack boxes beneath tent flys, and in just hours men had strung five or six miles of wire along poles, fence posts and tree branches, and sometimes over rivers to connect brigades or divisions with the commanding generals. A field operator once held the ends of a severed wire together in his bare hands and read a transmission from his tongue, which felt the shocks of the incoming dots and dashes.

Field operators were shot, blown up by artillery shells, and, when captured by Confederates, at risk of being executed as spies since they wore no military uniforms. Kennan could not entirely convince himself that he had the courage to be a field operator, but his doubts only made him more anxious to put his nerve to a supreme test. “Had I not camped out many a night—or at least many a morning—in the Big Woods?” he asked himself. “And was I not quite as familiar with firearms as most of the volunteers who were then going to the front?” He wrote Anson Stager, the superintendent of the Military Telegraph Corps, whom Kennan had met before the war when Stager was a senior Western Union official, asking to join as a field operator. Stager was too busy to respond and instead Kennan received a letter from another official advising him to defer joining the Corps and “wait and see what would happen.”

Railroad Telegraph Duties, 1860s

From Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin's Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 34-35:

He became a messenger-boy and trainee in a railroad company telegraph depot in Norwalk [Ohio], working in a different office than his father’s. He was promoted to the position of telegraph operator and manager at a salary of twenty-five dollars a month. In nineteenth-century America, children did menial and exhausting work in factories, farms, textile mills, and mines. Industrialists regarded the ideal machine as one so simple that a child could operate it. It was rare to give a young boy like George Kennan a serious responsibility like the signaling of trains.

As a train came through Norwalk, small boys peered through the depot’s windows to watch Kennan busily work his instrument to alert a central dispatcher of the train’s passing. The dispatcher then sent orders to the telegraph depot ahead of the train to give to its engineer: speed up, slow down (to arrive on schedule), halt at a siding, or make an unscheduled stop to pick up freight or passengers. At the depot ahead, a hapless employee went out to the side of the tracks and held out a five-foot pole with a large wire hoop, to which the dispatcher’s written order was attached. As the steam-whistling, smoke-belching train barreled toward the “hooper,” the brakeman reached down and, unless the hooper flinched, grabbed the wire hoop.

Initially Kennan functioned in a state of panic. “The excitement and responsibility of taking and transmitting orders upon which depended the safety of trains and passengers were a severe trial, at first, to my inexperienced nerves.” But he made no serious mistakes and “gradually acquired self-confidence, as the routine of railroad business became familiar to me.” Once he set up a field telegraph office at the scene of a train wreck, and on one local election night he helped his father receive the telegraphed tallies and announce them to an excited gathering.

American Morse Code (also called Railroad Morse or land-line Morse) in those days differed from current International Morse Code, which latter is better adapted for transmission through undersea cables.

George Kennan's Siberian Adventures

From Into Siberia: George Kennan's Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin's Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 3-5:

George Kennan is a little-known American whose achievements have been overshadowed by a much younger, distant cousin, the diplomat George Frost Kennan, who was the chief architect of America’s Cold War containment strategy. The George Kennan of this story was an intrepid explorer, a leading American journalist, and after his Siberian exile investigation, a moral force whose writings and lectures about the inhumanity of the exile system compelled Russia to implement reforms.

Kennan went into Siberia twice. The first time was in 1865 when, as a member of a Western Union–backed venture called the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, he explored a route for a telegraph line through the subzero wilderness of northeastern Siberia. It was a classic young man’s adventure filled with challenges and hardships and driven by Kennan’s quest to prove his courage. Twenty years later he returned to Siberia with George Frost to investigate the exile system and found himself on a moral journey. By then he had become one of America’s most prominent defenders of Russia and its centuries-old practice of banishing criminals and political dissidents to Siberia. Kennan, who spoke Russian fluently and was regarded as a leading expert on Russia, believed that a thorough, objective investigation would vindicate his contention that the exile system, while hardly without flaws, was more humane than penal systems in European countries. He also hoped that his articles about the Siberian exile system would make him rich and famous.

Kennan and Frost traveled eight thousand miles in Siberia in horse-drawn carriages, river steamers, and sleighs and on horseback. They suffocated in sandstorms in the summer and endured winter temperatures of minus forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. They inspected dozens of prisons, observed the marching parties of exiled convicts, spoke with Siberian officials, and met with more than a hundred exiled opponents of the tsarist regime. Both men were plagued by disease, vermin that infested their clothing and luggage, the jolting and pounding of carriages without springs or seats (they had to sit on their luggage), and by the stress of police surveillance. Worst of all was the nervous strain caused by their unrelenting exposure to human suffering because the exile system, as Kennan discovered, in fact was a brutal instrument of the Russian Empire’s exploitation of Siberia’s vast natural resources and a means of suppressing and punishing dissent.

Kennan’s investigation discredited his own defense of the exile system, as he was the first to admit, and changed him as a person. When he returned to the United States, his overarching goal was no longer wealth and fame but to end the suffering of the exiles and bring freedom to Russia. His concept of courage, his attitudes toward women, his views on the Russian government’s oppression of its Jews had all changed. “What I saw heard and learned in Siberia stirred me to the very depths of my soul—opened to me a new world of human experience, and raised, in some respects, all my moral standards.”

And Kennan’s investigation changed America. Today it is nearly impossible to conceive of the close diplomatic relations between Russia and the United States and the affection of Americans for Russia at the time of Kennan’s investigation. Many Americans held the benign perception of Russia as a “distant friend” of the United States, a colorful but mysterious land filled with tragically romantic characters. Kennan’s investigative reporting put an end to that. His articles for the Century magazine, a nearly one-thousand-page, two-volume book, Siberia and the Exile System, and a nine-year lecture tour about the exile system left Americans so appalled and angry at Russia’s mistreatment of its citizens that the relationship between the two countries was never the same.