Arrowtown and its beautifully restored Chinese settlement is the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of Chinese miners. But it was the Lawrence Chinese Camp that was the first big centre for Chinese in Otago. Situated near Gabriel Read’s 1861 strike at nearby Gabriels Gully, Lawrence was the earliest of the Otago goldfield towns. Logically many headed straight there, including Chinese miners.

The first Chinese arrived in Lawrence in 1866. They'd just started to put down roots when in April 1867 all the Chinese in the town were given seven-days notice to move to a piece of swampy land outside the town boundary. The Bruce Herald took a critical approach. It noted that some had gone to considerable expense to build substantial places of business, and it would have been well if they’d been told they were encroaching before they began to build. It was, as they said, ‘a hardship’, the cause of which was due to complaints from ‘two or three petty dealers’ who disliked having Chinese so close.^[1]

Nonetheless, the Chinese moved and by 1868 had drained the piece of swamp that had been set aside for their use. The Chinese Camp as it was called, now boasted a double row of comfortable houses and shops, some with manuka windbreaks. In the middle was a main street formed at a cost of £20 and paid for by the inhabitants. When winter came a writer for the Otago Daily Times visited the camp and found quite a community.

In the first place I entered, there was a very intelligent looking man, who is teaching himself—I fancy with but little assistance—to write English. I was rather surprised . . . that he did not make a better fist of it especially as to the formation of the characters. The writing was, however, perfectly legible. There was a small vessel, of a form I have not noticed before in a considerable experience of Chinese utensils, containing sugar-candy, of which he politely asked me and my companion to partake.

Having passed judgement on the man’s writing skills and inspected his jar of lollies, the writer moved on to a food shop.

. . . we saw a man engaged in making a very thin paste . . . It was wound round two rollers, and seemed almost as tenacious as a roll of some textile fabric, and nearly as thin; he used also a third smaller roller, with which he finished it, and he appeared to take a pride in making it exactly of the same breadth all over its length. We were told that they make it into little puffs, enclosing a morsel of meat or fat, which puffs are immersed in their soups.

The visitor stopped by a gaming house with two large tables and dominos, but there was no-one playing, possibly because he was visiting during the day. The visit ended at the He Tie and Co. store.

. . . we were hospitably entertained. Several persons were sitting there, a few sitting around the stove, it being a bitter cold day. Most of them spoke English more or less, and on my asking one of them if he felt ill he replied at once, 'No fear,' showing acquaintance with the language even to the extent of Colonial slang.^[2]

Heritage New Zealand states that at its height the camp housed around 500 miners.^[3] This high point may have been in the early 1870s when the number of Chinese in the Tuapeka region as a whole was 1,083.^[4] However later censuses from 1874 to 1896, put the number of people living at the camp between 100 and 120.^[5]

Despite a fluctuating population, the Lawrence Chinese Camp was the main service centre and an important gathering place for all the Chinese in the outlying areas right up until the turn of the century. In 1869 there was a Chinese hairdresser, several shops selling cooked food, a baker, a jeweller, several gaming houses, lodging houses and a public hall or joss house.^[6]

There were also several general stores. One of these was described by the Otago Daily Times, which commented that despite having more jars of preserves and condiments, the store was remarkably similar to a European store.

Chests of tea are piled up against trusses of sugar. Bags of flour and other bread stuffs are propped by long handled shovels, picks, and sluice forks, built one above the other on every available corner of the floor, while the ceiling is literally draped with flitches of bacon, nests of American buckets, water-tight boots, oil skins, &c.^[7]

The busiest days were Saturdays and Sundays when miners would come in to buy their week’s supplies and catch up on news. They could then visit one of two clubhouses catering to men from different counties. Most who lived in and around the camps were Sam Yap men (the Three Counties: Poon Yue, Nam Hoi and Shun Duk). Others were from Heung Shan (now Zhong Shan), Tung Goon and Jung Seng, or were Hakka.^[8],[9]

The two clubhouses catered to the three counties within Sam Yap. One was for Poon Yue men and the other was for Nam Hoi and Shun Duk men - the Nam Shun clubhouse.^[10] Each served as temples and dedicated community spaces. Here a penniless man could find lodgings, although he was expected to repay the clubhouse when he came into money.

For a bit of relaxation, the miners might have a bowl of wonton soup – supplied by one of the food shops – and visit a gambling house with its opium saloon. All of this made for good business. Volumes were so great that one man spent three years raising pigs for slaughter. In 1869 he returned home with £500 – a small fortune.^[11] Others developed market gardens and supplied the townsfolk of Lawrence.

As one Lawrence resident wrote, 'The Chinese are as persistent and industrious as ever and seem to be doing well. They seem to be the only parties who have any money amongst them, and many of them have it in sums really astonishing.'^[12]

Of course, not all the Chinese had money. The camp had its share of the desperate and destitute. In 1884 the community built a two-storey wooden community hall. Part of its purpose was to house newcomers and those down on their luck, such as the sick and unemployed.^[13] Being outside Lawrence’s town boundaries, all the camp’s amenities were paid for by the miners. The drainage was poor and the smell from the piggeries was said to be bad.^[14] It all contributed to a sense of lawlessness.

As the number of unemployed increased from the late 1870s, so did the problems with gambling. Pakapoo (similar to Lotto) was said to be particularly problematic – reducing the Waipori Chinese ‘almost to pauperism’.^[15] Gambling also attracted European sex workers who appear to have catered to both Chinese and European clients.

The tensions in the camp can be seen in the police reports published in the Tuapeka Times and compiled by the late historian Dr James Ng. In 1879 there were these reports:

• The arrest of a ‘violent and insane’ Chinese miner who imagined himself to be building fortifications in China. He had been brought to the Camp by his friends.
• Six court cases involving disputes over money and property rights. All but one were between Chinese and Europeans
• Two Europeans arrested for throwing stones at a Chinese man, resulting in profuse bleeding from a scalp wound.
• A case taken by the Police against a hotelier. A shop assistant had sold a bottle of porter to two European police informers who asked to drink the beer in store. Although the hotelier had a bottle license he did not have a hotel license and was fined £10.
• The theft of a brooch belonging to the European wife of a Chinese man, for which a European woman was jailed for three days.^[16]

Accusations of police persecution were rife, in particular among the gamblers. One man said in 1877, '[the police] look very sharply after my countrymen because they play quietly by themselves and have small lottery, but they no interfere with hotel-keepers who keep their houses open all night with lots of swells playing euchre and poker . . . [they] no get fined £25.'^[17]

Dr James Ng suggests it was the rise in anti-Chinese racism that led to increasing numbers of Chinese-European families living in and around Lawrence camp. By the late 1870s there were 11 couples, more than any other Central Otago township. For some of them, the relationships between the couples and between the wives themselves were fractious, and there are numerous press reports of obscene language and drunkenness – mostly on the women’s part.

Others had more stable domestic lives. In an otherwise wholly negative report of the camp, an Otago Daily Times reporter took pains to note that the children were: ‘Always cleanly attired, intelligent-looking and mannerly [comparing] favourably with their school companions.’^[18] Prize giving reports are scattered with references to these children receiving certificates for writing, sewing and even ‘attentiveness and manners’.^[19]

Chinese European relationships: bravery, love, security and family
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But the Camp’s fortunes were tied to gold, and as the easily won gold diminished so did the number of gold seekers in the Tuapeka area. Although the census records numbers in the camp hovering around 100-120 until 1896,^[20] the life in the place must have been impacted as machinery gradually replaced manual labour. The camp’s reason for existing began to vanish, although it hung on for many years with an ever-decreasing population. Its last resident was Chow Shim who died in 1945.

Today the Lawrence Chinese Mining Camp is listed as a Category 1 Historic Place. Much of its prominence is thanks to the work of the late Dr James Ng who pioneered research into the Chinese gold miners of Otago and whose trust purchased the site of the Lawrence Chinese Mining Camp in 1990. The site is now cared for by the trust which also owns the original Empire Hotel and the Poon Yue club house or joss house. The latter had been sold and removed from the site in 1947, but was bought back by the trust and returned to its original site in 2016. The Lawrence Chinese Camp has also been the subject of numerous archaeological excavations.  Both the camp and the Tuapeka Goldfields Museum are open for visitors.

In 2021 several hundred descendants of the Lawrence Chinese held a major two-day reunion, unveiling restored headstones and memories.  

Other historical goldfield sites include Arrowtown and Riverton. Arrowtown has the Lakes District Museum and the nearby reconstructed Chinese Village on Bush Creek. Riverton has Te Hikoi Southern Journey Museum and the nearby Long Hilly Track at Round Hill, which passes the remains of earth dams, stacked stone walls lining a water race and a tramway-cutting made by Chinese miners.

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