Chapter 6 - “Boys,” “Mandarins,” and “Coolies” : Searching for Hong Kong’s Chinese Community in the Colonial Archive

Summary

Abstract

The Heard Family Archive, containing tens of thousands of papers relating to American trade in China, is not a logical place to search for Chinese narratives. If mentioned at all, the Chinese community described therein was often reduced to the appellatives “boy,” “mandarin,” or “coolie.” Some clues to the Chinese world of commerce and labour that underpinned foreign enterprise remain, however, embedded in offhand comments and documentary ephemera. I argue that the erasure of Chinese individuals occurred through a specific colonial vernacular which inhibits profiling their community and the forms of Sino-foreign networking that took place, suggesting in turn strategic approaches to working through the colonial archive to project a sense of the wider Chinese community with whom Hong Kong's foreign merchants were in daily contact.

Keywords: colonialism, Hong Kong, China, race, methodology, networks

Encounters with the Chinese community abound in John Heard's recollections of his time trading in mid-nineteenth-century China. Heard embellished descriptions of commerce with anecdotes of “mandarins” speaking pidgin, the Cantonese-English patois, as they argued port duties, enigmatic compradors indispensable to foreign enterprise, ubiquitous “boys” attending to the foreign merchants’ domestic needs, “coolies” performing countless jobs, and – inevitably – “mobs” threatening foreign security. Chinese individuals are everywhere one looks in such accounts. Yet they are also faceless, made abstract through generic titles that reinforce racial tropes while eliding the described individuals’ agency. As a result, while it is accepted that Chinese networks and Chinese labour were central to foreign enterprise in China, historians are only starting to uncover who these actors were.

Such efforts have been most successful where elite individuals such as compradors and businessmen are concerned, but for the wider Chinese community described in the colonial archive, underutilised or unsatisfactory materials impede deeper readings of their history. Some historians, including Elizabeth Sinn, Carl Smith, and Christopher Munn have adopted creative and thorough approaches to colonial materials to present marginal Chinese narratives and nuance understandings of Chineseness and identity in Hong Kong. In general, however, such records provide few details that can be used to identify individual agents such as age, physical description, native-place, or specific occupation. Even names, when recorded, are phonetically approximated.