Stories from Deli

Making arrangements for the direct emigration of Chinese workers or ‘coolietrade’ from China to the Indies was one of the most important special assignments for the sinologists. In the 1860s and 1870s, this was done to provide for temporary needs; in the 1880s and 1890s it was aimed at regular emigration to the Indies.

After 1900, to this were added the inspection of Chinese labour conditions in the Indies and the repatriation of coolies. From the 1830s on, and even more after 1842, large numbers of Chinese emigrants had left China, driven by hunger and poverty in search of a better life. After gold was discovered in America (1849) and Australia (1851), these places attracted even more Chinese. In Chinese these places were simply called “Gold Mountain (Gold Mine),” later distinguishing “Old Gold Mountain” 舊金山 (Jiujinshan, San Francisco) from “New Gold Mountain” 新金山 (Xinjinshan, Australia). The advantage of Chinese labourers was soon discovered by Europeans. China could provide the most hardened workers for the cheapest price.

Later, Chinese were for instance employed for building railroads in the United States and exploitation of the guano islands in South America. However, the demand being high, and both push and pull factors being strong, emigration of coolies was accompanied by many evils. These ranged from press-ganging (ronselen) and kidnappings in China by the coolie brokers, to cruel treatment and virtual slavery overseas. Atrocities in Cuba, vividly described in a Chinese booklet Sheng diyu tushuo 生地獄圖説 (Illustrated stories from living hell),76 led to the first Chinese Inspection Mission to the Americas in 1874. Afterwards the emigration of contract workers was prohibited in China, since the system of indentured labour was not much different from slavery. But this ban was sometimes lifted and the emigration of free workers was at times still allowed, resulting in an insecure labour supply.

There was also emigration to Southeast Asia, as there had been for centuries. Emigration to the Straits Settlements was organised by Chinese emigration brokers there together with Mandarins in China. The work force needed for the Netherlands Indies, such as the tin mines on Banka from 1825 on, and the tobacco plantations in Deli starting in 1864, was usually obtained from the brokers at the coolie markets in Penang and Singapore. This trade entailed not only all kinds of abuse of coolies (although not as serious as in Cuba), and squeeze and fraud by the brokers, but also higher prices and lesser quality than if the workers could be directly shipped from China. For these economic reasons, which also involved a certain humane element, interpreters were several times sent to China to arrange for direct emigration of Chinese workers to the Indies.

The first interpreter sent to China on such an assignment was De Grijs. In March 1866 he went to Hong Kong for the Netherlands Indies Railway Company, having obtained three months of leave. Workers were needed for the railroad to be built from Semarang to Yogyakarta. This was, together with the line Batavia-Buitenzorg (Bogor), one of the two earliest railways built in the Indies; both lines were completed in 1873.78 In Hong Kong, De Grijs requested the Governor, Sir Richard Graves MacDonnell, who always took Chinese opinions into account, not to obstruct him, with which the latter agreed. De Grijs first chartered a ship for 400 coolies, but then there appeared 800 candidates. Together with a Dutch doctor he selected 400 men, who signed a contract in the presence of the British Harbour Master and were brought to Java.

In the meantime, he received orders from the Indies Government to recruit workers for Banka’s tin mines. But when he had about one thousand men, the order was suddenly cancelled. At that time, he later stated, he could have had thousands or ten thousands of men. Twenty years later, he acknowledged that this entailed press-ganging (ronselen), and buying and selling of people, but he also remarked that the whole world was full of buying and selling.79 After his mission in 1866, in order to save costs, he advised the Government to charge the Consuls with the task of recruiting workers. Later shippings were indeed organised by the Dutch mercantile consul in Hong Kong, Bosman.

In 1867, the railway section from Semarang to Tanggung (25 km) was the very first in the Indies to be opened to the public. In August 1875, within a year after his return from China to the Indies, Groeneveldt was also sent to Hong Kong to arrange for the emigration of coolies, now for Atjeh. The first Atjeh War in 1873–5 had not been successful for the Dutch and had taken a heavy toll both of the military and of the labour force needed for public works such as harbours and roads. About 38% of the coolies had died or fled, and replenishment was urgently necessary.

At that time, just after the discovery of the atrocities in Cuba, emigration under contract had been forbidden in Hong Kong. Just as had been done ten years earlier, the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Arthur Kennedy, promised Groeneveldt not to obstruct the free emigration of workers. Diplomatic initiatives in London resulted in permission to ship 1,500 coolies “on faith of assurance of good treatment.”

But as soon as Groeneveldt had chartered a ship, many protests arose among the Chinese population in Hong Kong, putting the affair in a bad light, and Governor Kennedy gave no permission for boarding. According to the Dutch Colonial Report over 1876, the protests came from wealthy Chinese merchants who supported the coolie brokers in the Straits Settlements. In the end Groeneveldt only succeeded in obtaining 190 coolies from Hong Kong for Atjeh, and his mission was considered a failure. Afterwards, coolies for Atjeh were acquired in Penang and Banka with the assistance of local Chinese brokers.

Ten years later, in 1886, De Groot was charged to arrange for the regular emigration of Chinese workers to Banka and Deli, in the latter case at the request of the Deli-Maatschappij and other tobacco companies.85 The subject of his contribution to emigration has been treated in more detail by Bool, Van Dongen, and Werblowsky, and will only be summarised here, also using some other sources.

On 14 March 1886, when De Groot was sent to China by Governor-General O. van Rees for two years to study its languages, geography and ethnography, he was at the same time charged to travel via Mentok and consult with the Resident of Banka about measures for promoting emigration of Chinese coolies for Banka – the tin mines on Banka were a government enterprise – and he was allowed to visit Deli, Penang, and Singapore to study immigration, as far as was needed for the promotion of emigration from China to Deli.87 On Banka, he stayed with Resident Sol at his home and visited several mining districts, gathering information about the situation of the Chinese miners and their emigration. Via Singapore, he went to Deli, where he stayed with F. Gransberg, secretary of the Deli-Maatschappij, and visited several tobacco plantations.

In 1886, De Groot received a mandate (volmacht) from the Deli-Maatschappij and a few other companies to promote emigration. Travelling via Singapore and Hong Kong, he arrived in Amoy on 11 June 1886. A year and a half later, on 6 January 1888, in his request to Van Rees for the prolongation of his mission to China by another two years, De Groot explained what difficulties he had encountered in his attempts to arrange the emigration of coolies. The Mandarins were strongly opposed to emigration in general, and there were no Dutch Consuls to persuade them to concessions. None of the Netherlands Consuls were Dutchmen; they were all foreign merchants, who were not eager to exert themselves, and being merchants were not respected by the Mandarins, while De Groot himself was not entitled to correspond directly with the Mandarins.

All he could do was to ask German trade firms for assistance, since these had no connection with the interests of the Straits coolie brokers, who would oppose by all possible means any infringement upon their monopoly. Moreover, they were protected by German career consuls against the Mandarins’ tricks and devices. He first tried Pasedag & Co., now led by A. Piehl, in Amoy – a company with which he had become well acquainted during his studies in Amoy. De Groot wrote in his request:

After a long struggle I succeeded in getting Pasedag & Co. here to venture a trial shipment in March of last year [1887]. There had already been recruited six to seven hundred workers for Banka, who were ready to board ship when, mostly due to interference by the firm’s hostile competitors, among them all kinds of fabrications were spread about slavery, human trafficking, beri-beri, Atjeh, etc., scattering all recruited men to the four winds but for a small number.

De Groot announced that a second attempt with Petersen & Co. in Amoy was about to succeed. Recruiters had already been busy for three months in the interior. And if it failed again, one should persevere by all possible means. In any case, he had tried every means and could not be blamed for the failure.92 No more information about this shipment to Banka could be found, but the emigration from Amoy to Deli was in general no success because of the lower quality of the workers, and in 1890 De Groot was charged to stop the shipments from Amoy.

In the same request for prolongation, De Groot stated that he was confronted with an even larger obstacle for recruiting workers to Deli: there was an official order from the Governor-General of Guangdong and Guangxi, the famous reformer Zhang Zhidong 張之洞, to his subordinates to prevent all emigration to Sumatra, even indirect emigration via the Straits Settlements. His appeal for help to Minister Resident J.H. Ferguson was also rejected.

De Groot followed the same course he had tried for Banka, and on the basis of his mandate from the Deli-Maatschappij and other companies, he promised the agency of recruiting and shipment of workers to Lauts & Haesloop, a German company in Swatow. This was the region where the best quality workers were found, the so-called first class workers, who were called Teochius or Hoklos, while Hakkas and others were second class. The prospect of great profits for this German firm induced the German Consuls in Canton, H. Budler, and in Swatow, E. Freiherr von Seckendorff, to request Zhang Zhidong to lift the ban on emigration. Official reports about the situation and the treatment of workers on Sumatra’s East Coast were of great help in persuading Zhang Zhidong to change his opinion, and subsequently the local Mandarins were worked on so energetically by Von Seckendorff that they submitted positive advice to their superior. And indeed, the ban was lifted and emigration was allowed in April 1888.

The first shipment of workers for Deli departed from Swatow and arrived in Deli in May 1888. In the meantime, De Groot travelled to Shanghai to consult with Ferguson. In De Groot’s opinion, Ferguson was not at all at ease with De Groot’s success, since he had not been able or willing to tackle this matter for a dozen years. Now he tried to prevent De Groot from continuing his efforts by confronting him with lies: that both the Dutch and the Indies Government did not truly want this emigration, and that the Governor-General of the Indies was cheating him. At least, this is what De Groot wrote in his diary. De Groot then showed Ferguson a copy of his memorial about the deplorable situation of Dutch Consuls in Southern China, with which Ferguson did not at all agree.

Ferguson always warned that the Chinese government would only allow emigration if Chinese Consuls were allowed in the Indies. Actually, this would later prove to be no insurmountable impediment to free emigration. As Van Dongen wrote, nowadays Ferguson would be considered ahead of his time: he considered that in the long run it would be unavoidable to accept Chinese consuls in the Indies, and he was opposed to the unequal position of the Chinese in the Indies, proposing to apply European law to them.

At the time, Ferguson was writing a book entitled The Philosopy of Civilization, which was published in 1889, in which he compared the “Asiatic Coolie-traffic” with “African Slave-trade.” He was later criticised by Minister of Foreign Affairs Hartsen for this.101 But his basic opinion about the emigration of workers from China was not much different from that of the planters. Like them, he was opposed in particular to the coolie-markets in the Straits Settlements, where batches of coolies were sold to the highest bidder, but his opposition was on grounds of inhumanity, not because of the higher cost and poor quality of the coolies. Ferguson was in favour of direct emigration of workers under contract (although forbidden by the Chinese government), if the conditions were clear and were checked by the relevant authorities; he also proposed direct repatriation in order to avoid the brokers in the Straits trying to lure the returning coolies into dependency by means of opium, gambling and prostitution.

There was also a scholarly aspect to the controversy between De Groot and Ferguson. On the one hand, De Groot, who had in his youth broken with the Roman Catholic Church, was now ardently gathering information about Chinese religion, which would later result in his Religious System of China. On the other hand, Ferguson, a deeply religious man, was just writing his Philosophy of Civilization, in which he proclaimed the superiority of Christianity, with respect to the abuses of the coolie trade concluding that “all these are temporary evils which will vanish before the advancing Christian Civilization.”

When a later representative of the Deli Planters Committee, H.C. van den Honert, was sent to China, he agreed with De Groot that from Ferguson not much help for the emigration of workers was to be expected. But he also felt that De Groot was “in a chronic state of anger” towards Ferguson and was “exaggerating.” Since permission for emigration could be withdrawn at any moment, a more stable basis needed to be established.

From now on, the planters acted collectively, united in the Deli Planters Association (established in 1879) under the leadership of the Deli Planters Committee, in order to cope better with the Straits coolie brokers. In May 1888, De Groot travelled to Singapore to consult with representatives of the Deli Planters Committee (F. Gransberg, J.M. Rappard and others), and also with the member of Parliament J.Th. Cremer, one of the leaders of the Deli-Maatschappij. It was then decided to send Rappard to China as agent of the Planters Committee. Various arguments for this were brought forward. De Groot wrote in his diary that it was in order to increase mutual trust,105 but another reason not mentioned by him was that Rappard had to make up for De Groot’s “lack of financial competence,” probably since the prices were too high. A third reason was that De Groot received a summons from the Indies Government dated June 1888 to cease active promotion of direct emigration, and could no longer act alone. Cremer travelled to Shanghai to try to persuade Ferguson, and Rappard went to Amoy, where De Groot would assist him.

In 1888, several shipments of coolies were sent to Deli, comprising in total 1,165 workers, mostly Hoklo, of whom 729 travelled directly from Swatow and 428 by way of Amoy. In this way, De Groot laid the basis for regular emigration of workers from Swatow to Deli. This emigration would continue until 1931, although new problems would often arise. After his initial success, De Groot and the Planters Committee still expressed the need for regular Dutch consular representation in Southern China in order to safeguard a continuous supply of coolies for Deli. This led in the end to the transfer of Ferguson – much against his own wish – from Peking to Swatow, where he arrived on 23 October 1888.

In December 1888, the Deli Planters Committee sent a request to Governor General C.H.A. van der Wijck, in which it reported discouraging news from China. Rappard was needed in Deli and De Groot had stated that he would lay down his mandate as soon as Rappard left China. Although their interests had long been represented by De Groot, it had become evident that these could better be taken care of by someone knowing all the ins and outs of the situation in Deli. The Committee firmly believed that the only suitable person who could take on this important task was Hoetink, who had been stationed in Medan for nine years. As a well-appreciated member of the Landraad, Hoetink was fully aware of judicial practice; he knew Chinese, and he was tactful and modest in his contacts with higher authorities. Moreover, he was an outsider to the planters’ world and was willing to proceed to China for one year in the interests of direct emigration and to represent the Deli Planters Committee. This request was supported by the Resident of the East Coast of Sumatra, G.A. Scherer. Director of Justice Buijn also agreed, suggesting that Hoetink could be charged to study the languages, geography and ethnography of China and be helpful in arranging the emigration of workers to Deli. Ferguson should be notified, and Hoetink should be introduced by him to the Chinese authorities, who needed to become better informed about the situation of Chinese immigrants in Deli. Groeneveldt agreed with the mission for arranging emigration, but he considered the need of a study mission to China less evident, albeit useful in itself. Emigration was reason enough to send Hoetink. He suggested sending Hoetink for one year on condition that Ferguson agreed. If he did not, this mission was not advisable.

A week later, Governor-General Van der Wijck informed Ferguson and asked him to reply as soon as possible. On 22 February 1889, Ferguson replied sourly that Hoetink would have to settle in Amoy (which was impractical), and would have to know Mandarin (which he certainly did not). Hoetink fulfilled only the other two conditions: knowledge of Chinese customs and having tact. This reply from Ferguson could have been foreseen, since he had always shown himself to be a firm opponent of Indies sinologists. A few months later it seemed the mission would be cancelled, but on 15 May Ferguson suddenly sent a telegram stating that Hoetink was welcome in Swatow. The reason that he now agreed was doubtless that he wished to take leave to the Netherlands and needed someone to replace him in Swatow. A week later, Van der Wijck decided to send Hoetink for one year to Swatow, to study the languages, geography and ethnography of China and to offer assistance to Ferguson in Swatow for the promotion of emigration of suitable workers to Deli.

On 2 June, Hoetink was mandated by the Deli Planters Association as their representative to promote emigration. Hoetink arrived in Swatow on 8 July; Ferguson also left Swatow during that month, and left China in September. From the end of 1888 on, De Groot seems to have occupied himself less with the emigration question, except for a few new conflicts with Ferguson. He concentrated most of his energy on his studies and research. This becomes apparent both from his diary and from Bool’s, Van Dongen’s and Werblowsky’s studies. Hoetink was successful in Swatow. His main achievement was that he arranged for the emigration from Hoihow (Haikou on Hainan) and Pakhoi (Beihai, West of Hainan).

By now, a regular German shipping line between Amoy, Swatow, Hoihow, and Deli had been established for the emigration and remigration of coolies. According to the data presented by Hoetink in 1899, the total number of emigrants to the Netherlands Indies in 1888, 1889 and 1890 were respectively 1658, 5501 and 7151. From these figures it appears that Hoetink’s contribution put the crown on De Groot’s pioneering success. When Cremer reported in Parliament on 14 March 1890 about the emigration of workers, he praised both De Groot and Hoetink for their contributions. After this mission, Hoetink went on two years of leave to the Netherlands, as did De Groot.

The emigration problem was the main reason for appointing a Dutch Consul in Amoy in 1890, but just two years later the first and only incumbent, P.S. Hamel, had to leave because of illness. From 1895 on, the Dutch were represented by a Consul General in Hong Kong, F.J. Haver Droeze. As a final solution for the emigration problem, during the ‘scramble for concessions’ in 1896 and 1898 the Minister Resident in Peking, F.M. Knobel, and the Consul General in Hong Kong, perhaps inspired sub rosa by the Deli Planters Committee, suggested to the Minister of Foreign Affairs to annex the Swatow region for the Netherlands. These proposals were immediately rejected and remained secret for a long time.

In 1898, Hoetink was at his own request sent for the second time to China on a mission, now in order to translate Indies civil and commercial law into Chinese, to which as usual was added the promotion of emigration. This mission lasted for two years, from 1898 to 1900. He first investigated the causes of declining emigration. From Swatow he reported on 6 June 1888 that Deli did not have a bad name in China. The reasons for the decline in emigration were a succession of extraordinarily good rice harvests which took away the need to leave, and the occurrence of a plague epidemic, inciting men to return home instead of emigrating, in order to guarantee a decent burial in case of death. Hoetink also pleaded for better payment of the coolies, this being the best method to attract new workers. He spent about half of his time in Southern China, but from Tientsin also corresponded about emigration questions with Knobel. In promoting emigration, some sinologists played a primary role as troubleshooters. These were very practical matters, requiring inventiveness and tact, in combination with knowledge about the Chinese. After early missions by De Grijs and Groeneveldt, in 1888 De Groot laid the basis for regular emigration from Swatow to Deli, and Hoetink did the same for the emigration from Hoihow and Pakhoi.