Chinese Settlement Arrowtown

**Stranded in paradise?
**In 2000, George Griffiths and Anthony Ritchie saluted 150 years of organised European settlement in Otago with their musical pageant, From the Southern Marches. Just before the curtain came down they had the ghost of goldfields balladeer, Charles Thatcher, musing about modern Otago. ‘We don’t eat proper porridge/Or haggises for tea’ he sang, ‘it’s dim-sims and chapatti/ Our New Identity.’ A hundred years earlier, many would have taken a dim view of the dim-sims or anything Chinese. The first ‘Celestials’ reached the goldfields in the mid 1860s, initially recruited by provincial authorities. By 1876, 4000 were picking over ground European miners had abandoned (not that that stopped the latter from howling about race contagion). Almost entirely male (only nine of the 5004 Chinese here in 1881 were women), these hardy, mainly Cantonese migrants built their own isolated little communities. Few made enough money to return home triumphantly and most died here old and persecuted. ‘There is about as much distinction between a European and a Chinaman as that between a Chinaman and a monkey’, Premier Richard Seddon once said. A discriminatory poll-tax was still being levied on them as late as 1944. Central Otago had several Chinese settlements. Arrowtown’s was studied extensively by archaeologists in the early 1980s and is the best memorial to these settlers. It is now a mixture of stabilised hut ruins, reconstructions and restorations. The most prominent is what is now known as Ah Lum’s Store, once one of several. Market gardener Wong Hop Lee built it about 1883. It got its name from a later occupant, Ah Lum, who bought the building about 1909. It measures just 7.5 by 4.8 metres, local schist providing the walls and floors and corrugated iron the roof. Inside that tiny box, wooden partitions divided off five rooms. The store occupied half the space, hanging some of the goods from the ceiling by hooks and wires. Behind were a bank/office, kitchen and bedrooms, Ah Lum’s protected by iron bars (since he was also banker to the local Chinese community). Ah Lum died in 1927, one of the last entrepreneurs of an ageing, dying goldfields community.

© 2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.

Further reading: James Ng, Windows on a Chinese Past, Vol. 1, Otago Heritage Books, Dunedin, 1993; Julie Bradshaw, Arrowtown History & Walks, University of Otago Press, Dunedin, 2001.

Image Credits: David Baldock Photographer