Bound for California: The Migration of Chinese Women to California in the 19th Century

The Fairbank Center at Harvard University presents Elizabeth Sinn on the migration of Chinese women to California.

Speaker: Elizabeth Sinn, University of Hong Kong

The migration of women to California in the nineteenth century differed greatly from that of men. Very few women migrated, and most of them had been bought and sold for the highly profitable American market. Hong Kong was the major embarkation port for San Francisco. Elizabeth Sinn will discuss how a British colony, where slavery and human trafficking were theoretically illegal, could have allowed such activities to take place openly. Professor Sinn will explain how Hong Kong’s Chinese merchants, with their largely patriarchal values, played a role in shaping the movement of women. Ironically, though the merchants won the day by persuading the colonial government to tolerate Chinese patriarchal practices – such as the selling of daughters by poor families as bonded servants and concubines – their actions ended up empowering American politicians in their fight against Chinese immigration and led almost directly to the Exclusion Act.

Elizabeth Sinn is a historian with a general research interest in modern China and Hong Kong and special interest in the history of charity, business, culture, the press, and migration. Before she retired in 2004, she was the deputy director of the Centre of Asian Studies, Hong Kong University, and a member of the Humanities Panel of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. Her books include Power and Charity: A Chinese Merchant Elite in Colonial Hong Kong and The Last Half Century of Chinese Overseas. Her latest work, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration and the Making of Hong Kong, will appear in late 2012. Currently, she is the lead scholar in the Hong Kong Memory Project, which aims to build a website for archiving and showcasing records related to Hong Kong’s history, culture, and heritage.