The Chinese soldiers who fought in the American civil war
The American civil war's bloody turning point will be commemorated this week and, thanks to a small band of dedicated historians, the involvement of a handful of Chinese combatants - as well as their shameful treatment afterwards - is also being remembered. Stuart Heaver goes in search of long-lost heroes
The 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloody turning point of the American civil war, will be widely commemorated this week, but the role played by Chinese soldiers in that historic conflict will remain largely ignored, as will the war's broader legacy of exclusion and discrimination for Chinese Americans.
Thanks, though, to the efforts of a small number of dedicated American authors, historians and civil war buffs, largely of Asian heritage, many Chinese soldiers who served in the "war between the states" have been identified, including some who fought at Gettysburg, and at least one of those so-called Chinese Yankees was from Hong Kong.
It is hard to imagine how a 19th-century Hongkonger could find himself fighting in one of the costliest conflicts (620,000 lives were lost over four years) in American history. As Hong Kong historian Elizabeth Sinn reminds us, though, in her recent book, Pacific Crossing, by the time the first shots of the civil war were fired, in 1861, the US was already an important destination for the Chinese diaspora. Many Chinese boarded ships in the rapidly expanding maritime hub of Hong Kong bound for Gold Mountain, as San Francisco was known, the terminus for the world's first truly international gold rush.
Says Sinn: "The gold rush triggered one of the most dramatic migration movements of the 19th century," creating what she refers to as a "blind frenzy" of shippers in Hong Kong for the gold rush market.
Even prior to the California gold rush, Chinese sailors, cooks and stewards served on ships plying their trade between the Pearl River Estuary and the eastern seaboard of America. Many of these seafarers settled in east coast ports such as New York, a city built largely on the spoils of this lucrative China trade. In 1856, a New York Times article headlined "Chinamen in New York" estimated that there were about 150 Chinese men living in lower Manhattan, "mostly employed as sailors".
It was the maritime links with the Pearl River Delta that led, indirectly, to one Chinese Yankee being part of a key moment: the momentous Battle of Gettysburg, on July 3, 1863.