Pacific Crossing: Californian Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong

Conclusion

297 Conclusion It would be hard to exaggerate the immense impact of the California gold rush on Hong Kong history. By expanding horizons in terms of new geographical frontiers, new navigation routes, new markets, and new potential for networking , the gold rush brought far-reaching economic and social consequences. Whereas Hong Kong’s function up to this point had been mainly to link the China market westward to Britain and Europe, and to North America via the Atlantic, through Southeast Asia and India, a good part of its attention was now diverted eastward to the emerging market across the Pacific. (For twenty-first century readers, think BRIC.) Although for years to come the raw opium trade continued to dominate Hong Kong’s economy, this was greatly diversified as new cargoes and services appeared on the scene. The trickle of eastward shipping in the mid-1840s, taking China goods from Guangzhou to the Sandwich Islands, and occasionally to California itself, turned into a flood as vessels, heavy with a wide range of goods, sailed for San Francisco to satisfy the army of gold rushers arriving from all corners of the earth. Gold Mountain fired the imagination of people in the Pearl River Delta, the region in China with the oldest and closest association with the West. Hong Kong, where the infrastructure of an entrepôt and shipping hub had been evolving for almost a decade, made the dream of gold possible. Together with the growing cargo trade, passengers boarding at Hong Kong for California turned the formidable Pacific into a superhighway between South China and the West Coast of North America. To a large extent, the Pacific became a Cantonese ocean. In the way that emigrants from Fujian and Chaozhou regions had earlier carved out enclaves for themselves in Southeast Asia, men from the Pearl River Pacific Crossing 298 Delta began spreading their dominance throughout the gold-rush countries— Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand—and beyond, fanlike, from the North Pacific to the South—almost always through Hong Kong. Gold was the beginning of the story, but by no means the whole of it. By the end of the century, decades after the gold rush was over, Hong Kong was still thriving as a world-class Pacific port, the terminal for all major Pacific liners. With ever-widening and ever-deepening flows of people, goods, information and funds, coffins and bones, Hong Kong demonstrated that it was an enormously porous and fluid space, capable of generating amazing energy and mobility. Shipping—whether cargo or passenger—with its attendant trades and occupations including provisioning, insurance, ship repairing and fitting, warehousing , and stevedoring meant investment opportunities for businessmen and employment for thousands of working men and women. It was a heady time when the sense of the possible was infinitely heightened. Stretching in all directions, the effect of the California trade stimulated other trades, particularly the Nam Pak trade. With increasing density, old shipping and trade routes that ran from north to south intersected and overlapped at Hong Kong with new ones that ran from east to west. Goods from North and South China, Southeast Asia and India—rice, medicines, dried marine products , sugar, tea, and much more—were transshipped to feed the high-end consumption market of California, sometimes for redistribution to South America and the rest of the United States. In return, Hong Kong became the redistribution hub for ginseng, bullions, quicksilver, wheat, flour, and other exports from California. The bond between Hong Kong and San Francisco grew tighter with every transaction, be it the chartering of a ship, the collecting of a debt or the granting of an advance on cargo. Passage money and emigrants’ remittances were extraordinary sources of capital that added special vibrancy to the traffic. Networks among merchants, particularly Chinese merchants, expanded and became ever more complex. The consumption habits of the Chinese community in California, to a large extent, dictated the composition of the trade. The emergence of the highincome , big-spending Chinese emigrant, popularly dubbed the “Gold Mountain sojourner,” had long-term consequences. Trade in Hong Kong was upgraded across the board because of the high value of the California trade. Likewise, as Conclusion 299 a result of the sojourner’s taste for fine, expensive California flour, for instance, flour found a market in China and Southeast Asia, and Hong Kong rose as the unlikely distribution hub for the product...