Table of Contents
On October 1, 1868 three Chinese men appeared before His Honour, Judge Forbes at the Castlemaine County Court in Victoria. [1] One Goon Cheum was the plaintiff in ‘an action to recover the value of Chinese Temple taken down by the defendants’, namely Hoa Ah Pang and Laong Oun Hung. Goon claimed seventeen pounds, ten shillings and sixpence. The Mount Alexander Mail, the local newspaper, reported the next day that Goon had claimed in court, ‘On September 29 of last year I purchased from Hoa Ah Pang a temple and all its contents for £5’. [2] According to him, and several witnesses, Hoa had sold the temple fair and square, intending, as one witness said, to go to New Zealand. Subsequently, it was claimed that Hoa and others had pulled the temple down and taken it elsewhere.
The defence case rested, said their barrister Mr Leech, on credibility. Hoa, when called to the stand, said that he had not sold the temple but rather had let it for six months, for which he had been paid five pounds. The witnesses he produced were his co-defendant Laong Oun Hong, a Wesleyan minister, and The Rev. Mr Dubourg, and they corroborated his stance. The Mount Alexander Mail reported that, ‘His Honour … give the verdict to the defendants, with £3 7s costs’. [3]
This is a minor case by any account but The Mount Alexander Mail does not tell the full story. The case gains greater significance because Hoa Ah Pang, the former temple keeper, had recently been converted to Christianity, Laong Oun Hung (who rendered his own name as Leong On Tong, as I will refer to him hereafter) was the Wesleyan catechist who had won his soul, and The Rev. Mr Dubourg was a Wesleyan minister in the mission to the Chinese of Castlemaine and other parts of Victoria. An examination of records from the Uniting Church archives enables us to place this strange little case in a wider context, that of the meeting of Chinese popular religion (by which I mean the religion of the masses of the Chinese people as opposed to orthodox Buddhism or Daoism) and Protestant Christianity on the goldfields, and in turn to relate it to the locus classicus of that encounter, China itself. What I will present takes the form of microhistory, but perhaps cases such as this enable us to ground our conclusions about cross-cultural encounters in the minutiae of quotidian experience and historical specificity.
In The Wesleyan Chronicle for 20 October 1868 (three weeks after the case), a letter appeared from The Rev. Ed. King under the title ‘Chinese Mission in Castlemaine – a Joss House Transformed into a House of Christian Worship’. [4] King supervised the mission to the Chinese. His letter gives the following account of the same case from a rather different point of view:
Some few months since, Ah Pang, the keeper of a joss-house, was converted through the instrumentality of Leong-on-Tong. For about ten years he had kept a joss-house, but about nine months previous to his conversion he let his temple to an old man named Goon Chin, and became a gold-digger. Having embraced Christianity, he felt that he could not consistently continue the proprietorship of the temple, and resolved to present it to Leong-on-Tong, that it might be converted into a house of prayer.
He goes on:
Having given due notice to the tenant of his intention to resume possession of the building, on Monday July 20, a number of the Chinese Christians met in the house of their teacher, and from thence they proceeded to Five Flags, Campbell’s Creek, where stood the idol house.
Hoa, as we shall see below, had established his temple around 1857. King then passes over the account to Leong On Tong. Leong continues:
About three months since, my countryman, Ah Pang, was converted to Christianity. Eleven years since he built a joss-house, but, on his conversion, he resolved to remove the idol temple to Moonlight Flat, for the use of the Christian Chinamen. Monday July 20, was the day appointed for its removal, and I, accompanied by nine of my countrymen, went, with two horses and drays, to Five Flags, and, as I expected great opposition from the Pagans living in that neighbourhood, I asked the Revs. E. King and C. Dubourg to be present on the occasion. We also secured the presence of a policeman. During the time the house was being taken down there were great excitement and angry threats, but the presence of the ministers and the policemen happily prevented a breach of the peace. The rain came down very fast; and Mr Dubourg for about two hours held joss under his arm. My county men expected every moment to see him fall down dead, or some judgement to come upon him.
The word ‘joss’ is a corruption of the Portuguese word ‘deos’, god, thus ‘joss-house’, the building in which the sacred images of Chinese religion are housed and worshipped. [5] When Mr Dubourg is said to hold joss under his arm, he would appear to have been holding the sacred images from the temple. King continues:
As might be expected, the Pagans were much incensed at the dishonour done to their idol, and an incident which occurred a few days after will show the prevailing temper of their mind.
Leong-on-Tong was pursuing his labours amongst his countrymen, and had entered into a tent where nine or ten Chinese were gathered. Suddenly a man entered, and said, ‘I have come to curse you for taking away joss. You preach Christian doctrine very good, but why you take away joss?’ He was willing to tolerate Christianity, but demanded similar tolerance for Paganism.
These comments are both important and revealing, and in some ways also perplexing. Revealing as they demonstrate the attitudes of at least some of the Chinese men to the actions of Hoa and his new comrades. They were clearly not pleased at the removal of their house of worship and the desecration of their sacred images. More than this, King understood the offence given. The comments are important as they show the Chinese reacting to that offence in a serious and meaningful way rather than simply accepting the actions of what must clearly have appeared as the representatives of the colonial powers. If we can trust King’s reportage this anonymous man had come to the place Leong was proselytising specifically to curse him.
Finally King’s response to the statement, ‘You preach Christian doctrine very good, but why you take away joss?’ namely, ‘He was willing to tolerate Christianity, but demanded similar tolerance for Paganism’, is, I suggest, both remarkable and perplexing. It is remarkable as it acknowledges the open-minded attitudes of the Chinese man who distinguishes between the evangelism of the missionaries per se, whom he appears to compliment if only for their mastery of technique, and their actions towards his own religion. It also sums up very neatly a position of mutual tolerance that has echoes of modern ecumenism and indeed multiculturalism. However, the question arises as to whether King endorses such a position or regards it as intrinsically ridiculous. Given that his very next sentence begins, ‘At length Pagan anger and malevolence found vent in a legal prosecution … ’ I suspect King was not a man before his time.
Once the temple was moved, emptied of its religious articles, and Goon Chin (as his name is rendered here) was evicted from both his workplace and his home, it reopened as a ‘house of prayer’. King reported:
It was opened for Divine worship, Sunday, August 2. I first preached to the Europeans who were present, from Isa. xlvi. 1, 4, and was followed by Leong-on-Tong, who spoke warmly to his assembled countrymen from Acts xvii, 30, 31.
These two texts both address the ancient transgression of idolatry, thus, King and Leong were echoing the cries of protestant missionaries in every mission field in the last half of the nineteenth century. [6] The potency of idolatry as an accusation is clear especially in the mission to China.
[1] The case is recorded in the Castlemaine County Court Register for Thursday, October 1, 1868, held in the Public Record Office of Victoria, VPRS 733/5. The spelling of the names of the Chinese participants in this narrative vary according to who transcribed them. However, as it is clear in all sources used which person is referred to, I have rendered the names as they appear in each source. A general survey of the missions to the Chinese in the Victorian goldfields has recently appeared the Victorian Historical Journal: Walter Phillips, ‘Seeking souls in the diggings: Christian missions to the Chinese on the Victorian goldfields’, (72, 1&2, September 2001, pp. 86–104). I would like to acknowledge Ian Welch who first brought my attention to this case.
[2] All references to the case are from The Mount Alexander Mail (hereafter, MAM), 2.10.1868.
[3] The costs, according to the Court Register, were made up of defendant’s costs of three pounds three shillings and sixpence, a two shilling government fee and a two shilling subpoena fee.
[4] The Wesleyan Chronicle (hereafter, WC), 20.10.1868, p. 149.
[5] It should be noted that Chinese religious images may also be painted on paper, and in discussions of Chinese religion in Australia from this period ‘joss’ are sometimes said to be stuck to walls or doors.
[6] The King James version of the Isaiah text reads, ‘Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, their idols upon the breasts, and upon the cattle; your carriages were heavy loaden; they are a burden to the weary beast’, and ‘And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry , and will deliver you.’ The Acts text reads, ‘And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent; Because he hath appointed a day, in which the righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead’.