Category Archives: language

by | 11 June 2025 · 1:31 am

Origins of Ryukyu People & Culture

From Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650, by Gregory Smits (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 58-61:

The flow of people, culture, and technology into Okinawa, Kumejima, and Sakishima was mainly from north to south. Some of this flow came from Michinoshima, some from Korea, and most of it from Japan, especially western Kyushu and nearby islands. Tanigawa Ken’ichi has metaphorically called it an “attack of northern culture.” Subsequent sections and chapters explore this topic further. Here I mention several physical manifestations of the north-to-south flow.

The climate in Okinawa is not suited to preserving skeletal remains, but there has been sufficient excavation and testing to warrant several conclusions. One is a significant break between the physical structure of prehistoric residents of Okinawa and those of later eras. Okinawan skeletal remains from about the eleventh or twelfth centuries onward begin closely to resemble their counterparts in Japan during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. As Thomas Pellard points out, “The bearers of Gusuku [castle walls] culture expanded within the whole Ryukyu Archipelago, and preexisting foragers, who were few, simply died out or were assimilated without leaving a significant trace.” Omoro descriptions of the clothing and other aspects of the appearance of local rulers suggest that at least some were direct arrivals from Kamakura-era Japan. Furthermore, excavations of Okinawan weapons and armor reveal that they were the same as those used in Japan during the era of the Northern and Southern Courts (ca. 1335–1392) and the Muromachi period. In general, most military items excavated in Okinawa were made in Japan.

DNA evidence from recent studies is consonant with this situation. Studies of both modern and ancient DNA “tend to show that Ryukyuans form a group closely related to Mainland Japanese.” Moreover, despite geographical proximity, “Southern Ryukyuans do not show any particular affinity with the Austronesian populations of Taiwan, and they form a clear subgroup with Northern Ryukyuans.” Genetic diversity in the Ryukyu islands is relatively low, which indicates a lack of long-term isolation. In other words, the Ryukyu islands were part of a larger network, and the migration from regions to the north that populated the Ryukyu islands and brought Gusuku culture, “agriculture, ceramics, and the Proto-Ryukyuan language,” took place between approximately the tenth and twelfth centuries. Most likely the [turbo] shell trade was the major economic driving force behind much of this migration.

…

Early Okinawa’s ties with China are well known and frequently discussed, whereas ties with northern areas typically receive less attention in survey histories. China played a vital role in early Ryukyuan history as a conduit of material wealth. Nevertheless, prior to the seventeenth century, Chinese high culture had little impact on Ryukyu. Early Ryukyu’s technology (metallurgy, agriculture, weapons), literary and aesthetic culture (including oral traditions), religious culture (including Buddhism), the various Ryukyuan languages, and the vast majority of Ryukyu’s people came from the north. Much of the region’s economic activity also took place north of Okinawa. One additional indication of the interconnectedness of the northern routes was the fact that distinctive Ryukyuan place-names found in the Omoro [ancient poems] were known to Hakata merchants and to Koreans and appeared on their maps.

The Takase-Fujian route mentioned above became popular around the 1340s, diverting maritime traffic from the previous route, a line from Hakata to Níngbō. The new route greatly increased traffic through the southern Ryukyu islands, but smaller-scale private trade, piracy, and smuggling based at locations in Okinawa and points to the southwest had been occurring since the twelfth century and probably earlier.

During the thirteenth century, Chinese ceramics began to appear at major gusuku sites in Okinawa and the southern Ryukyu islands. Fragrant wine and other products from as far away as Thailand and Vietnam also began to make their way into the Ryukyu islands at this time. For example, a four-eared jar from the Khwae Noi River in Thailand was excavated at Nakijin. After the start of formal tribute relations with Ming China in 1372, the material wealth of several major gusuku sites such as Kumejima, Katsuren, Shuri, and Nakijin increased dramatically. Celadon (green ware) ceramic dolls, Buddhist statues, candleholders, and other specialized products have been excavated at these sites, as well as a wide variety of metal goods. China was a source of great wealth, both directly and indirectly. To understand Ming China’s role in the development of Ryukyu, it is necessary to undertake a close study of wakō, the topic of the next chapter.

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Filed under China, economics, Japan, Korea, language, migration, military, Taiwan

by | 8 April 2025 · 9:49 pm

Zhang Deyi, Qing Ambassador to U.K.

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 204-206:

DESPITE ANOTHER ROUND of protest—including a trade union rally of eighty thousand in London’s Hyde Park—the Chamber of Mines and the Transvaal government moved with dispatch to set up a program. Transvaal agents, who had already laid the groundwork for recruiting in China, went into high gear. In fact, recruitment in Yantai (Chefoo) in Shandong province had started in January, before the ordinance was finally approved.

But there was just one problem: China had not approved the program. The lapse violated long-standing diplomatic protocols, established in 1860, regarding the recruitment of Chinese labor to territories within the British Empire. The Foreign Office did not show Ordinance no. 17 to the Chinese ambassador in London, Zhang Deyi, until mid-February. Zhang promptly intervened via the Foreign Affairs Department in Beijing (Waiwubu, the successor to the Zongli Yamen). Everything ground to a halt while Zhang Deyi and the Foreign Office commenced negotiations in London in March. The Transvaal Chamber of Mines called the delay “quite unexpected” and “much to be regretted.”

When Harry Ross Skinner had recommended importing Chinese indentured labor for the gold mines, he had predicted that China would respond “passively” to such a project. The Foreign Office should have known better. Zhang Deyi was no naïf—he was a seasoned diplomat with forty years of experience in the Qing foreign service. His appointment as Qing ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in 1902 was his eighth assignment abroad. He had begun his career as a young translator on the Qing’s first overseas mission in 1866 and in the Burlingame delegation in 1868; he had then served in various capacities in Chinese embassies, mostly in Europe. Zhang was also one of China’s most prolific diplomat-diarists, who wrote and published eight books chronicling his trips (Figure 20).

Nor was Zhang a stranger to South African affairs. From 1896 to 1900, he had served as councilor in the Qing legation in London, and from there he closely followed the South African War. As ambassador, Zhang was well aware of the debates taking place in South Africa over proposals to import Chinese labor. He worried that the mining companies would abuse Chinese workers in the manner that had made Peru and Cuba the most notorious destinations of the nineteenth-century coolie trade. He further worried that ill treatment of indentured Chinese in South Africa would have negative effects on overseas Chinese communities throughout Africa, from Mauritius to Tanganyika to the Cape Colony. He knew indentured Chinese labor emigrants were vulnerable to the “three harms”—low wages, tight controls, and poor benefits. As early as February 1903—nearly a year before the Transvaal passed Ordinance no. 17—Zhang reported to Beijing that South Africa was likely to recruit Chinese labor. He wrote repeatedly throughout the year that China should forbid labor from going to South Africa without a convention with Great Britain. He was furious when he learned that recruitment was already taking place in Yantai before China had agreed to the program.

On May 13, after three months of negotiation in London, Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne and Ambassador Zhang Deyi signed the Emigration Convention of Great Britain and China of 1904. The convention underscored the distance traveled from the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of the coolie trade. It stipulated a minimum age of twenty for emigrants and inspection to ensure that laborers were of sound body and mind. Contracts were to be written in Chinese and English and specify wages, hours, and rations; free passage and return; and the right to free medical care and medicine. It required witness from both Chinese and British officials. It gave China the right to station a consul or vice-consul in the colony and gave Chinese workers “free access to the Courts of Justice to obtain the redress for injuries to his person and property” as well as access to postal facilities for sending letters and remittances to their families.

Zhang pressed hard for a prohibition on corporal punishment, but he was unable to insert an outright ban into the agreement because, the Foreign Office informed him, Transvaal law provided for corporal punishment for certain offenses for “everybody, including whites.” The British assured Zhang that floggings would be administered only by order of a magistrate or judge after trial and conviction, and only with government-approved instruments, and that it would not exceed twenty-four lashes. Although the agreement showed improvement in China’s ability to negotiate protections for its emigrant workers, enforcement of the terms of the ordinance would be determined on the ground.

Brief articles about Zhang Deyi (張德彜) can be found in Chinese, Japanese, and German Wikipedia, but not in English Wikipedia.

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by | 3 April 2025 · 8:23 pm

Effects of Witwatersrand Gold

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 193-195:

THE MINING OF Witwatersrand gold had both global and regional effects. At the level of world trade and finance, the economic historian Jean-Jacques Van Helten argues that expansion of international trade in the 1880s and ’90s required an enlargement of the overall money stock and hence the world supply of gold. The gold standard was not yet universal, but since the 1870s it had become the basis of international payments among the leading industrial countries. Witwatersrand gold, along with gold discoveries in the 1890s in Western Australia and Canada, increased the global supply of gold and strengthened the position of Britain, which was already the center of the international financial market.

Van Helten presents the late-century gold discoveries as a fortuitous meeting of a demand, but it also might be considered a stimulus, a new phase of capital accumulation, that powered the expansion of trade and foreign investment. Although this accumulation built on previous decades of gold discoveries in North America and Australasia, South African gold helped inaugurate a new period of capitalist development, the so-called New Imperialism, in which monopoly and finance capital came to the fore; when the great powers scrambled to carve up Africa, the last continent to fall to European colonialism; and Germany and the United States nipped at Britain’s heels for position at the top of the world economic order.

The supremacy of the pound sterling (i.e., gold) in international finance and trade lay at the heart of Great Britain’s strategy to maintain global dominance. The City of London reaped handsome profits from international investment and trade, both within the empire and without: the British compensated for desultory investment in domestic industries by exporting “old” English manufactures to sheltered markets within the empire. The colonies were induced to buy these products (often at artificially high prices) while they in turn sold primary products to the rest of the world (wool from Australia, cotton from India). These enabled Great Britain, in turn, to offset its trade deficits from importing wheat from the United States and Argentina for domestic consumption.

In southern Africa, labor patterns that had been established on the diamond fields carried over to the Rand. The rapid capitalization of diamond mining had reduced independent diggers to wage workers while the industry relied increasingly on African migrant laborers contracted on meager wages and confined to compounds. White miners adopted an aggressive racism to police the color line in order to protect their superior position and wages.

The mining of gold also shifted the center of economic power from the Cape Colony to the heretofore isolated and undeveloped Transvaal. Lord Selborne, who served as undersecretary to Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, considered the Transvaal “the richest spot on earth,” the key to South Africa’s future. “It is going to be the natural capital state and centre of South African commercial, social and political life,” he wrote in 1896.

By then, Johannesburg had grown to a cosmopolitan city of 100,000, with a large population of uitlanders (foreigners), British and other Europeans, who were aggrieved over political exclusions (fourteen years residency for naturalization and the franchise) and high taxes. Mine owners agitated against high railway tariffs and inflated prices set by state monopolies over essential resources (especially dynamite). More broadly for the British Empire, political instability in the Transvaal threatened to unravel the assumptions of its superior position in southern Africa based on commercial and financial domination, British immigration, and geopolitical power. After the failed Jameson raid of 1895 (a botched coup d’état backed by Cecil Rhodes and other leading mine magnates), ZAR president Paul Kruger stiffened his resolve. The British did not want the vote, he said. They wanted his state.

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Filed under Australia, Britain, Canada, China, economics, language, migration, nationalism, Netherlands, South Africa

by | 24 March 2025 · 12:05 pm

Gold Rush Translation Needs

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 72-74:

THE PROBLEM OF TRANSLATION shaped Chinese interactions with Euro-Americans from their very arrival at the two gold mountains. Among the earliest emigrants, those who were bilingual had usually acquired their linguistic skills in China or Southeast Asia. The San Francisco merchant Yuan Sheng went to a missionary school in Macao, and the Australian impresario Lowe Kong Meng attended an English private school in Penang; both men had experience in business dealings with Europeans and Americans before arriving on the goldfields. The first Euro-American missionaries in California and Victoria had previously served in China or Southeast Asia.

Chinese who went to the goldfields in groups often included one person who spoke English. Headmen accompanying Chinese emigrants to Australia all knew enough English to navigate their groups’ travel to and settlement on the goldfields. The same pattern existed in California. For example, the American miner Timothy Osborn wrote in his diary that a group of Chinese miners who were camped near him included a friendly English speaker, who wrote down various Chinese words and their translations for the curious American. Few Americans went so far as to learn Chinese. Jerome Millard was a rare exception.

Many Chinese merchants learned enough English to conduct business with local whites, or they employed a young clerk who learned enough to do so. Most were barely proficient in English, learning key words and phrases but rarely grammar. Often they inserted English words into Cantonese sentence structure. For example, Jung Ah Sing, a gold digger in Victoria, wrote a journal while imprisoned after a knife fight. Because the journal was actually a brief attesting to his innocence, he wrote in English: “My buy that hatchet that day months of January 1867 Cochran Diggings Chinamen gone away sell the my, my buy that hatchet that time my been Chinamen tent go home.” (“I bought that hatchet in January 1867 from Chinamen at Cochran Diggings. They were moving away and sold it to me. Then I left the Chinamen’s tent and went home.”)

Missionaries in California offered English classes to bring Chinese to Christianity, a strategy that attracted many students but few converts. The Rev. William Speer conceded that the young men who came for English classes stayed long enough to learn a few words and phrases. It would be fairer to say that, apart from well-educated men like Yuan Sheng and Lowe Kong Meng, most Chinese communicated with Euro-Americans not really in English but in pidgin. The limits of pidgin were most clearly displayed when Chinese tried to express themselves in the courtroom and in other legal matters, usually to sad outcomes.

It was necessary, therefore, to use interpreters when there was important business to conduct. The larger huiguan had “linguists” on their staffs to assist individual members as well as to represent the association to mainstream society. San Francisco’s police courts employed on an ad hoc basis not only Chinese but also French, German, Russian, and Spanish interpreters, reflecting the city’s international population. But even in San Francisco, few Chinese could speak English well enough to meet the needs of the police and the courts; the situation did not improve until a second generation of Chinese Americans came of age in the 1870s.

During the 1850s and ’60s, the city’s interpreters included Euro-American missionaries and educated Chinese merchants. Yuan Sheng frequently appeared in court when Chinese faced criminal charges and acted as both interpreter and as advocate. In one case of larceny, for example, Yuan successfully persuaded the judge to discharge A-He, who was accused of stealing ten dollars, on grounds that he was a “crazy man.” Yuan promised to send him back to China.

In Australia the goldfield commissioners in each district hired Chinese interpreters and “scribes” to support the heavy work of issuing mining licenses and compliance with goldfield regulations. Two brothers, Ho A Low (He Yale) and Ho A Mei (He Yamei), were typical of the first Chinese interpreters in Victoria. They had been educated at the Anglo-Chinese school at the London Missionary Society station at Malacca. Ho A Low first came to Victoria as a missionary worker in 1857 and was fast recruited to work as an interpreter by the Beechworth resident warden. Both brothers held positions as interpreters, but neither stuck with the job.

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by | 23 March 2025 · 10:48 pm

Roles of Chinese Huiguan

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 51-52:

The huiguan [会馆] were Chinese versions of the mutual aid organizations that virtually all immigrant groups formed on the basis of a common regional origin, known among eastern Europeans as Landsmannschaften and among Mexicans as mutualistas. In China huiguan dated at least to the Ming Dynasty, when traders and sojourners in big cities formed hostels and guilds where they could commune among people from their home districts, speaking their own dialect. Chinese formed native-place huiguan wherever they emigrated abroad, including North America and Australasia.

Chinese in America translated huiguan as “company,” not in the narrow sense of a business but more generally as a corporate entity. The first huiguan to organize in California were the Siyi (Sze Yup) Company and the Canton Company or Sanyi (Sam Yup) Huiguan, both in 1851. The Siyi people were the most numerous, but the Sanyi Huiguan’s concentration of cosmopolitan merchants from Guangzhou and its three surrounding counties gave it disproportionate influence. In the 1882 the California huiguan formed a coordinating body called Zhonghua Huiguan, formally translated as Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association but familiarly known as the Six Chinese Companies. In Victoria, Siyi and Sanyi people also formed huiguan, as well as associations for people from Xiamen in Fujian province (Figure 9).

Huiguan served as organizations of both solidarity and social control. A new immigrant arriving at San Francisco or Melbourne would find a representative from his home district at the dock, who would take him to the huiguan’s headquarters in the Chinese quarter. There he would find a place to sleep, a hot meal, information about mining and other job prospects, and where he might find his cousins and village friends. The individual merchants who financed credit-tickets that covered emigrants’ passage collected debt payments through huiguan. The associations adjudicated disputes among members, cared for members who were sick or indigent, buried those unlucky enough to die in America, and at a later date, sent their bones back home. Some huiguan provided translators and paid legal fees for members who ran afoul of the law.

Huiguan leaders represented the community to white society in public discourse, in formal meetings, and in bringing civil rights lawsuits. The larger and wealthier huiguan bought land and erected buildings in San Francisco and Melbourne for their headquarters. Their offices boasted full-time officers and staff, including a secretary, a treasurer, clerks, a translator, cooks, servants, and altar-keepers. They often had representatives in the goldfield towns wherever there was a concentration of Chinese.

Merchants traditionally ranked at the bottom of the Confucian social hierarchy, below farmers, workers, and soldiers. But through their leadership roles in emigrant communities, Chinese merchants found prestige and power. Their social status would filter back to China as well. But Euro-Americans imagined that huiguan were despotic organizations that brokered slave labor and exercised total control over their members. White Americans and Australians who were actually familiar with the Chinese community understood that huiguan were mutual aid associations similar to those organized by other immigrant groups. Chinese themselves considered their membership in huiguan not as enslavement but as integral to the networks of trust forged through native-place and clan lineage. They also considered the repayment of debts a matter of honor, and most Chinese cleared their debts fairly quickly, in less than a year in Australia.

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by | 23 March 2025 · 11:43 am

First Australian Gold Rush

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 26-27:

THE POLYNESIAN also circulated to Sydney, Australia, via Pacific whaling ships, bringing news of California gold to the antipodes. Between April 1849 and May 1850, some eleven thousand people left Australia for California. Mostly they came from Sydney, a combination of fortune seekers and former convicts. White Americans on the goldfields disliked the Australians, considering them to be criminals of rough and immoral character, claim jumpers and “hardened thieves and robbers.” The stereotype contained an element of truth in the predations of a San Francisco street gang known as the Sydney Ducks, so called for the convicts’ bowed legs and peculiar gait that resulted from years of wearing leg irons. But most Australian gold seekers were not former convicts; the California census of 1852 showed that Sydney men were more likely to be married with children, working, and noncriminals than Americans.

…

Colonists in New South Wales had noted the presence of gold since at least the 1840s, but authorities had not encouraged prospecting. In 1844 Governor FitzRoy quashed news of gold discoveries in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, believing it would inflame rebellion and disorder among the large population of convicts and former convicts; in 1849 Charles LaTrobe, the superintendent of Port Phillip district, broke up a minirush near Melbourne on grounds of trespass on crown lands. But news of California gold convinced colonial leaders that Australia’s future prosperity might lie in gold, not least to spur “a healthy emigration” of miners and workers to diminish the influence of convicts and paupers. FitzRoy appointed a geological surveyor in 1850 and announced his offer of a prize.

Hargraves set out to find gold. “I knew I was in gold country for 70 miles,” he wrote, before finding water to wash the earth at Auroya Goyong, near Bathurst, in February 1851. He enlisted three young men to help him, teaching them how to use a pan and build a rocker, skills he had learned in California. Hargraves claimed the reward (cutting out his three assistants), renamed the spot Ophir, and publicized his findings broadly. Within a few months there were several hundred people at the diggings, farmers and shepherds from the countryside and clerks and mechanics from Sydney.

The Australian gold rush was on. Observers remarked that Sydney virtually emptied of people as carpenters dropped their tools, merchants shuttered their shops, and house servants fled their masters’ homes. Not a few people from Port Phillip (Melbourne) trekked north up to Bathurst, but prospecting spread westward in earnest. In July 1851 the Port Phillip district of New South Wales separated and founded the new colony of Victoria. A month later gold seekers hit a rich strike north of Geelong. By mid-October upward of ten thousand people made their way to the central midlands of Victoria; many diggers were taking out an ounce of gold a day (£3). Most important, perhaps, Hargraves had introduced the “California rocker” to Australia, which enabled more efficient washing than tin pots and dishes. Over the next decade 170,000 colonial settlers (nearly half the entire nonnative population) moved to the goldfields, and another 573,000 gold seekers arrived from abroad, mainly from the British Isles, as well as continental Europe, California, and China. Chinese called Victoria Xinjinshan, or New Gold Mountain, and renamed California Jiujinshan, Old Gold Mountain. To this day Chinese call the city of San Francisco Jiujinshan.

Honolulu was, and still is, called Tanxiangshan (Sandalwood Mountain) in Chinese.

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Filed under Australia, China, economics, Hawai'i, labor, language, migration, Pacific, U.S.

by | 19 March 2025 · 6:28 am

First Hong Kong to California Gold Rush

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 19-21:

California gold arrived in Hong Kong at Christmas, 1848. It came as a packet of gold dust sent by George Allan, the San Francisco agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The envelope contained a small sample taken from a payment that Allan had made for a shipment of goods, sent from the company in Hawaii to San Francisco—$6,720—payment that was made entirely in gold dust, about 420 ounces of it (two and a half cups in volume). Allan wrote to his counterpart in Honolulu, “No one here seems to doubt for a moment the purity of the Gold Dust,” but he asked that the sample be sent “forward with all dispatch” to British experts in China for evaluation.

The same ship that brought gold dust to Hong Kong also carried recent issues of the Polynesian, a Honolulu newspaper. Hong Kong’s English-language weekly, Friend of China, often reprinted articles from the Polynesian for local consumption. In the January 6 edition, Hong Kong readers learned that six thousand people had taken gold valued at $4 million out of the earth in the six months since its discovery in California. The account predicted at least twenty thousand more arrivals in the coming year and the production of $62 million of gold in 1849, one-third of the world’s total product of gold and half of the world’s silver product in 1846. If the numbers (just predictions, really) weren’t exciting enough, the paper reported that digging for gold was not complicated. It involved simply collecting gravel in the bed of a stream and separating gold from the dirt by means of gravity and a little mercury. The arrival of the latest news and of gold itself sent a wave of excitement throughout the British colonial port. The following week the English brig Richard and William carried the first gold seekers from Hong Kong to California. They were not Chinese but Americans, including a former opium runner, a tavern owner, and a livery stable keeper.

Chinese gold seekers were not far behind. Yuan Sheng, a businessman, left Hong Kong on May 6 on the English bark Swallow, along with two other passengers and a cargo of Chinese goods. Yuan Sheng was from the Zhongshan region of Guangdong province. He was born on Sanzao, one of the small islands off the coast, near Macao. Yuan had actually been to the United States before: he had traveled to New York in 1820, probably on one of the clipper ships of the early China trade, and from there he had gone to Charleston, South Carolina, where he became a merchant. While in the United States, Yuan Sheng became a Christian and a naturalized American citizen. It’s not known when he returned to China, but in 1849 he decided to go back to America, this time to California, most likely not to dig for gold but to find business opportunities in San Francisco, another kind of golden fortune. He already knew English and something of the ways of American life, notwithstanding the differences between New York, South Carolina, and California.

Yuan Sheng went by the Anglicized name of Norman Assing. His selection of this name is intriguing. His surname is a homophone for the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) that was founded by Kublai Khan, the son of Genghis Khan. He might have chosen Norman after the medieval Europeans, a contemporary analogue of the Yuan. The Normans and Mongols were formidable conquering forces of their time. Sheng, his given name, means “birth”; Assing is a rendering of “Ah-Sing,” the familiar form of address of his name in Cantonese. Yuan Sheng means “born of the Yuan”; Norman Assing suggests “born of the Normans.” His choice was a clever point of pride even if it remained opaque to his American acquaintances. An English-speaking merchant, Yuan Sheng was one of the few Chinese headed for California who were named in the ship’s passenger manifest. We are not certain of those who ventured before him. Only seven Chinese arrived in San Francisco in 1848. When Yuan Sheng arrived in July 1849, there were barely fifty Chinese in California. Euro-Americans writing about exciting polyglot scenes on the streets of San Francisco in 1849 invariably commented on the Chinese they encountered, both high-cultured men in flowing silk robes and miners carrying bamboo poles strung with tools, straw hats, and gigantic boots.

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by | 7 March 2025 · 11:23 am

George Kennan’s Siberian Adventures

From Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia, by Gregory J. Wallance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 3-5:

George Kennan is a little-known American whose achievements have been overshadowed by a much younger, distant cousin, the diplomat George Frost Kennan, who was the chief architect of America’s Cold War containment strategy. The George Kennan of this story was an intrepid explorer, a leading American journalist, and after his Siberian exile investigation, a moral force whose writings and lectures about the inhumanity of the exile system compelled Russia to implement reforms.

Kennan went into Siberia twice. The first time was in 1865 when, as a member of a Western Union–backed venture called the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, he explored a route for a telegraph line through the subzero wilderness of northeastern Siberia. It was a classic young man’s adventure filled with challenges and hardships and driven by Kennan’s quest to prove his courage. Twenty years later he returned to Siberia with George Frost to investigate the exile system and found himself on a moral journey. By then he had become one of America’s most prominent defenders of Russia and its centuries-old practice of banishing criminals and political dissidents to Siberia. Kennan, who spoke Russian fluently and was regarded as a leading expert on Russia, believed that a thorough, objective investigation would vindicate his contention that the exile system, while hardly without flaws, was more humane than penal systems in European countries. He also hoped that his articles about the Siberian exile system would make him rich and famous.

Kennan and Frost traveled eight thousand miles in Siberia in horse-drawn carriages, river steamers, and sleighs and on horseback. They suffocated in sandstorms in the summer and endured winter temperatures of minus forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. They inspected dozens of prisons, observed the marching parties of exiled convicts, spoke with Siberian officials, and met with more than a hundred exiled opponents of the tsarist regime. Both men were plagued by disease, vermin that infested their clothing and luggage, the jolting and pounding of carriages without springs or seats (they had to sit on their luggage), and by the stress of police surveillance. Worst of all was the nervous strain caused by their unrelenting exposure to human suffering because the exile system, as Kennan discovered, in fact was a brutal instrument of the Russian Empire’s exploitation of Siberia’s vast natural resources and a means of suppressing and punishing dissent.

Kennan’s investigation discredited his own defense of the exile system, as he was the first to admit, and changed him as a person. When he returned to the United States, his overarching goal was no longer wealth and fame but to end the suffering of the exiles and bring freedom to Russia. His concept of courage, his attitudes toward women, his views on the Russian government’s oppression of its Jews had all changed. “What I saw heard and learned in Siberia stirred me to the very depths of my soul—opened to me a new world of human experience, and raised, in some respects, all my moral standards.”

And Kennan’s investigation changed America. Today it is nearly impossible to conceive of the close diplomatic relations between Russia and the United States and the affection of Americans for Russia at the time of Kennan’s investigation. Many Americans held the benign perception of Russia as a “distant friend” of the United States, a colorful but mysterious land filled with tragically romantic characters. Kennan’s investigative reporting put an end to that. His articles for the Century magazine, a nearly one-thousand-page, two-volume book, Siberia and the Exile System, and a nine-year lecture tour about the exile system left Americans so appalled and angry at Russia’s mistreatment of its citizens that the relationship between the two countries was never the same.

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by | 3 March 2025 · 4:51 am

Problems of Knowing Thine Enemy

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 230-234:

No single individual is held responsible for the people that our planes kill. It’s a crew effort. There is no ammunition without a loadmaster to balance the plane; a FCO [Fire Control Officer] can’t fire that ammunition without gunners loading the weapons; the gunners won’t ready the weapons till the sensor operators find a bad guy; the sensor operators couldn’t find that bad guy without pilots flying the plane; the pilots couldn’t have flown the plane to the location where the sensors found that bad guy without a navigator guiding them across the country; the navigator couldn’t have safely gotten across that country without an EWO [Electronic Warfare Officer] making sure no one hit the plane with a rocket; the EWO couldn’t have used his equipment without a flight engineer making sure everything was in working order.

I didn’t mention the role of DSOs because DSOs, while nice to have around, are not remotely necessary for a C-130 to carry out its mission. And so, if I heard something that proved to be the key piece of information that resulted in us shooting, a piece of information, that, if lacking, would have prevented us from shooting, then didn’t I kill someone on my own? Conversely, if I didn’t hear anything that was related to why we shot, then did I kill anyone at all?

The problem with this argument is that according to my official records I have in fact killed 123 people. The actual wording is “123 insurgents EKIA” (EKIA = enemy killed in action, so not quite people, but definitely killed). These records don’t say that I was part of a crew that killed these people, or that I supported other people who did the killing, just that I killed those 123 humans. I can’t know, and will never know, if all of these kills belong to me. I do know, and will always know, that I belong to all of them.

…

These are the things I wish I hadn’t heard.

If I hadn’t heard those things, infinity would have remained, well, infinite. I would have been able to tell myself that the Taliban were not men, were not even human, that they were in fact Enemies, whose only purpose was to be Killed in Action. If I hadn’t heard those things, I wouldn’t have loved the men I was listening to. If I hadn’t loved them, killing them would have been easy. If killing them had been easy, my consciousness would have remained intact.

To say that I loved the Taliban is surely anathema to most anyone who reads this. It doesn’t feel good, or right, for me to say it. But I checked, and of the many definitions that exist for the word love, one of them is the following: “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.” I most certainly had personal ties to the men I was listening to; they told me shit they wouldn’t tell their best (non-Talib) friends, their wives, their fathers. And at some point, not because they were Talibs, in fact in spite of that, because they were human, I came to have the strong affection for them that I firmly believe it is impossible not to develop for virtually any other person if you can get past your own bullshit and just accept that they’re people too.

Let me be clear about something here: I in no way support the Taliban, their stated goals, their practices, or really anything about them. Nor do I support the individual men who comprise the greater Taliban. Their movement and many of their beliefs are an affront to modernity in all of its complicated, messy, but ultimately better than the shit that actively and gleefully removes myriad human rights from everyone who isn’t a God-fearing man, splendor. They are not the good guys.

None of these things detract from the fact that they’re still human. They’re still people. I have no desire for you to identify with them or wish for their lives to be spared. What I do ask is that you understand that I did identify with them. I had to. My job required it. All that talking with my teachers in language school, so I could figure out how they think? That’s what made me a good linguist. The translation we did isn’t something that can be done by a computer or a robot, it isn’t the simple transformation of the sounds of one language into another. You have to understand the intent, the tone, the playfulness, the fear, the anger, the confusion, all of the nuances that attach themselves to spoken words and drastically change their meanings.

It was impossible for me to do this without internalizing the speakers’ logic (it’s possible for others, but I don’t understand that process). It was also impossible, despite all this knowing and feeling, for me to wish for their lives to have been spared. To have spared their lives would have been to guarantee that many others would have been taken.

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by | 2 March 2025 · 5:36 am

Pashto Regionalects

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 161-162:

The Whiskeys [MC-130W] were becoming the new hotness. On my first deployment, we were usually just tasked to whichever flight didn’t conflict with our crew rest. Now, as more commanders became aware of the Whiskeys, and the presence of DSOs [Direct Support Officers] on the Whiskeys, we started being requested for specific missions. But there was no way we could fly on every mission that wanted us; there simply weren’t enough DSOs to go around.

As far as we could tell, the people requesting us had no idea that Pashto varies massively depending on where you are in Afghanistan. This was strange, or, really, plain ignorant, as anyone with a cursory knowledge of the language should know that at baseline it has two main dialects that pronounce entire letters differently. Hell, some of the people who speak it don’t even call it Pashto. They call it Pakhto. The second letter in the word پښتو, that little collection of three nubs with the one dot above it and one below it, ښ, can be pronounced as either a sh sound (though you have to curl your tongue to the top of your mouth to get the sh just right) or a kh sound (same tongue movement). There’s another letter that on one side of the country is pronounced as a g and on the other side as a zh. The “o” in Pashto isn’t always an o, sometimes it’s a u, as in Pashtu/Pakhtu.

And those are just the two major divisions, Western and Eastern Pashto/Pakhto/Pashtu/Pakhtu. Realistically there are dozens of dialects, some of which aren’t understood all that well even by native Pashto speakers. So, to expect us to be able to fly over bumfuck Khost and have any clue as to what the bad guys were saying was to have no idea of how the language worked. Which, I guess, we shouldn’t have been surprised by. Unrealistic expectations being the norm in Afghanistan.

Flying in places where we couldn’t understand anything that was being said was both a serious waste of us as a resource and, more importantly, at least to us, boring as fuck. Like anything that you do every day, even flying eventually loses its excitement. After enough missions, all you’re doing is sitting in a tiny chair for six or seven hours waiting for something to happen. The fact that you’re fifteen or twenty thousand feet in the air traveling at two hundred plus miles an hour falls by the wayside. Those hours are short if you’re busy listening to guys planning attacks or actually fighting. They’re a little longer if all you’re doing is listening to them bullshit. But those six or seven hours feel like an eternity if what you’re supposed to be listening to is utterly incomprehensible. What’s a DSO to do?

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