Category Archives: religion

by | 3 July 2025 · 5:56 am

Poland and Lithuania Unite

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 105-107:

In 1411 a peace between the Polish-Lithuanian state and the Teutonic Order was finally achieved at Toruń. At that time, Jagiełło managed only to secure Žemaitija for Lithuania and Dobrzyń for Poland. Thus, ultimately, Lithuania benefited much more than did the Crown of Poland—somewhat paradoxical in a state that purportedly was dominated by the Polish half. While Lithuania regained all that it sought, the Poles remained unsatisfied. Notably, however, these were the territories that the Order had refused to give Poland-Lithuania to keep the peace only a year earlier. Still, this left many formerly Polish lands along the Baltic coast in the hands of the Teutonic Order, including the important towns of Gdańsk and Toruń. And the Crown of Poland still had no outlet to the sea.

However, in a way, the Battle of Grunwald [= the First Battle of Tannenberg in what is now named Stębark] did have an important outcome for Poland-Lithuania. The joint fight against a common enemy brought the subjects of the two halves of the state closer together, proving to Poles and Lithuanians alike that they had mutual interests. Together, they could accomplish much, even if separately each (especially Lithuania) was weak.

Within a couple of years, Poles and Lithuanians took another step on the road to becoming closer. This was in the so-called Union of Horodło, signed in the Volhynian town of that name in 1413. What had previously been a personal union cemented solely by the person of Jagiełło would now have a solid dynastic connection. To be sure, the position of grand duke in Lithuania would be hereditary (Vytautas agreed to be dux [no modifier], under Jagiełło), while the king of Poland would be elected. But the latter—that is, Jagiełło’s successor—would come from the Lithuanian dynasty, to be elected upon consultation of Vytautas and the Lithuanian boyars.

One of the most interesting provisions of the tripartite document called for a special union of (Catholic) Lithuanian and Polish nobility and clergy. Some fifty years after their conversion to Roman Catholicism, forty-seven Lithuanian noble families were embraced by and included in Polish heraldic clans. In this way, the palatine of Kraków, for example, accepted into his Leliwa clan the palatine of Vilnius. The Polish castellan of Sącz would be united with the Lithuanian castellan of Trakai (Polish: Troki). The numerous Półkozic clan embraced a Lithuanian noble family, while the protoplast [progenitor] of the Lithuanian Radvila family (better known under their Polonized name, Radziwiłł) became part of the Sulima clan. In essence, a joint Polish-Lithuanian noble estate was established. Henceforth, there would be a single nation for the united state.

The Preamble to the Union of Horodło gives evidence of the lofty principles undergirding the union: “Whosoever is unsupported by the mystery of Love, shall not achieve the Grace of salvation. . . . For by Love, laws are made, kingdoms governed, cities ordered, and the state of the commonweal is brought to its proper goal.” The love between the Poles and Lithuanians would truly have a familial (clan) basis now. Yet the union was not complete. It did not include the Orthodox nobility—for the most part, Ruthenes. They were, in a way, second-class citizens—something that would not bode well for the future.

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Filed under Baltics, Belarus, migration, nationalism, Poland, religion, Ukraine

by | 2 July 2025 · 6:11 am

Dilemmas of Pagan Lithuania

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 88-90:

The pagan Lithuanians had managed to conquer the western Ruthenian territories (roughly today’s Belarus and Ukraine) at the time of these lands’ greatest weakness. In a relatively short space of time, they made huge advances. Lithuania gained control over Polatsk in 1307, over Minsk in 1340, over Smolensk (a mere 230 miles from Moscow) in 1356, and even over the far-distant Kyiv—the former, great capital of Kyivan Rus’—in 1363.

This tremendous expansion was in part facilitated by the protoplast [= progenitor] of the great Lithuanian dynasty, Gediminas (1315–1341). He was ably assisted by his numerous sons, the most important Kestutis and Algirdas. While Kestutis’s presence could be felt in the Polish southeast in 1376, it was Algirdas who earlier defeated the Golden Horde at Syni Vody (Blue Waters; Polish: Sine Wody) and gained control over Kyiv. The two formed a sort of diarchy—a kind of dual rule that would be inherited by their sons, Jogaila (Algirdas’s favorite son) and Vytautas.

In the process of conquering this large swath of Eastern Europe, the Lithuanian Gediminid dynasty inherited a sizable population that was Slavic and Orthodox—a population that outnumbered the Lithuanians themselves eight to one. The Lithuanians figured mainly as rulers and elites. Most of the East Slavic inhabitants—most notably, the boyars (nobles) of Ruthenia to the south—were members of the Orthodox faith. In other words, they were Christians, but not followers of the Church of Rome.

The pagan Lithuanians within this large multiethnic entity were the nobles and villagers of the north—that is, residing in the core Lithuanian territories, before the decline of Rus’ allowed the Lithuanians to gain control of a good chunk of the Ruthenian lands. This was a small but not insignificant population, especially as it included members of the ruling family, such as the future king of Poland. This expanded Lithuanian state was a completely decentralized entity, with descendants of Gediminas ruling over various sections of the state (and often quarreling among themselves).

Although Lithuanians ruled, the rapid expansion of the state left the initial population, which had yet to establish a written language, with real challenges. How could they rule over Christian, and lettered, peoples? In part this imbalance was ameliorated by the Lithuanians availing themselves of a ready-made state language—the language of the conquered Ruthenes. Intermarriage with Ruthenian princes led to the spread of Ruthenian culture within the Grand Duchy. Many Gediminids became converts to Orthodoxy and otherwise found the culture of the conquered Slavs to be attractive. Some went so far as to ally themselves with the Muscovite state to the east. This most certainly was true of the numerous sons of Algirdas and his first wife, Maria, all of whom embraced Orthodoxy and ruled in the eastern section of the Grand Duchy. (Their half-brother Jogaila long remained a pagan, as did the other children of Algirdas and his second wife, Juliana of Tver—this notwithstanding her Orthodox provenance.)

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by | 1 July 2025 · 5:44 am

Polak, Węgier dwa bratanki

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 74-75:

But the Hungarian and Polish king found himself in the same situation as had Kazimierz. He too had no male heir—only daughters, and these were born to him late in life. They included the previously mentioned Maria and her younger sister, Hedwig. (An older sister, Catherine, also figured in the picture until her death in 1378.) As already noted, Maria was betrothed to Sigismund of Luxemburg, whose father was king of Bohemia as well as Holy Roman Emperor. Hedwig—born only in the year 1374—also awaited a princely husband, having been promised in marriage since early childhood to Wilhelm of Habsburg.

…

All of this might have been enough to inspire a degree of friendliness between Hungarians and Poles. Historically they were on good terms. They did not figure as much of a threat to each other, as they were both just one step removed from Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire. The Carpathian Mountains served as a boundary between the two countries, but it was a porous one. There was much contact across that border. Furthermore, it is important to note, the clanlike structure and the substantial role played by the nobilities in the two countries were similar. It is not for nothing that, even today, Poles know the ditty “Polak, Węgier dwa bratanki—tak do szabli, jak do szklanki” [emphasis added] (The Pole and the Magyar like brothers stand / Whether with sword or with tankard in hand), whereas the corresponding Hungarian rhyme affects the same brotherly affection for the hard-fighting—and drinking—Poles. (The verse, however, dates from a much later period.)

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Filed under Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, language, migration, nationalism, Poland, religion

by | 30 June 2025 · 1:13 pm

King Kazimierz III the Great

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 62-63:

King Kazimierz III the Great encouraged Jewish settlement in the Polish lands. The recent incidence of the so-called Black Death in Europe’s west had led Jews there to be turned into scapegoats, leading many to flee eastward. Kazimierz’s reception of the Jewish communities led some even to label him “king of the Jews”—and led Jews to revere his name. In charters granted in 1334, 1364, and 1367, Kazimierz made it clear that Jews were subjects of the Crown, and as such they were protected by it.

Kazimierz was a nearly model medieval monarch. He did more than consolidate and make secure the country’s expanding borders and provide for further economic development. He truly established the Corona Regni Poloniae—the Crown of the Polish Kingdom. No longer were the Polish lands simply the property of the Piast dynasty. As the Crown of the Polish Kingdom, they existed independently, outside the person of the monarch. In this way, one can see parallels between the formation of other states in the region. The united Bohemian lands were also referred to as the Crown of Saint Wenceslas, which Charles IV declared distinct from the fate of the Luxemburg dynasty; a similar understanding took hold in Hungary, which was also known as the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen.

Kazimierz drew up a number of statutes that would help shape the administration of the state, especially insofar as laws and the functioning of a judiciary were concerned. He also upheld the country’s defense. Even today, any Polish child can recite the ditty (unpoetically rendered here) that Kazimierz “inherited wooden towns and left them fortified with stone and brick” (Kazimierz miasta zastał drewniane i zostawił murowane). The country underwent a great program of construction. It was funded in part by a land tax paid by peasants (who nonetheless had a favorable view of the monarch, who was also known as “king of the peasants”), in part by income that came from the rich salt mines of Wieliczka and Bochnia in the south of the country. (Even today, the salt mine at Wieliczka—quite a tourist destination—is a testament to the technological feat undertaken in this early period.) Growing exports and tax revenues funded the construction of some fifty castles, and fortification walls were supplied to nearly another thirty towns.

Another major and far-sighted achievement of King Kazimierz the Great was his establishment, in 1364, of a studium generale (variously titled an academy or a university) in his capital of Kraków. Pope Urban V gave his permission for instruction to be provided in canon and civil law and all other faculties except for theology. Nonetheless, Kazimierz’s academy was a secular institution, like the universities of Padua and Bologna. Its establishment boded well for education in the Polish lands. Furthermore, it was a rare distinction in this part of the world: in Central Europe, only Prague can boast of having obtained a university earlier.

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by | 28 June 2025 · 9:59 am

Poland Becomes Catholic, 966

From Poland: The First Thousand Years, by Patrice M. Dabrowski (Cornell University Press, 2014), Kindle pp. 28-31:

Mieszko seems to have led the Polanie as of about the year 960. The reason we know of him and his state is that, like the Moravians to the south, the Germans (that is, the Christian population to the west, which was part of post-Carolingian Europe, the eastern part of which was ruled by the German emperor) were beginning to pay attention to this emerging state centered around Gniezno [cf. gniazdo ‘nest’]. Early recorded mention of Mieszko’s doings has come down to us from a Jewish trader, Ibrahim Ibn Jakub, who, while on business in Magdeburg in 966, learned of the existence of a well-organized state that was conquering some of the Slavic tribes to its west. A Saxon monk noted the existence of the dynamically expanding state, which likewise caught the attention of Otto I. Titled Emperor of the Romans by the pope only in 962, the German Otto had pretentions to the same region. Before long, Mieszko’s realm came to be referred to as Poland, or the land of the Poles.

It is customary to date the beginnings of the history of Poland to 966. This choice of date reflects a momentous decision made that year. Until this point, the Polanie and the neighboring tribes in the vicinity of Central and Eastern Europe were for the most part pagans. This was not true of the Germans further west, who had already converted to Christianity in late antiquity or the early medieval period; nor was it true for the Moravians, who had witnessed the ninth-century ministry of Cyril and Methodius, the missionaries to the Slavs, although by this time—a century later—they were under German influence. (Note that Kyivan Rus’, lying further to the east, was baptized only as of 988, but its baptism came from Greek sources, that is, Constantinople.) In this part of the world, of world-historical significance was what religion these pagan rulers chose, and at whose hands they were baptized.

It is in 966 that the baptism of Mieszko—head of the Gniezno state, this nascent Polish polity—took place. It is both interesting and important that this was facilitated not by the Germans but by a Bohemian (Czech) connection. A Czech state had emerged around the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries; first baptized by Saint Methodius, the Czechs relatively quickly came under Bavarian influence, their church under the bishop of Regensburg. In 965 Mieszko strengthened the connection with this Slavic neighbor by marrying a Bohemian princess, the daughter of Boleslav I. This Dubravka, known variously also as Dąbrówka or Dobrava, was a Christian, and she likely brought some Christian clergy with her to Gniezno. The next year, Mieszko accepted baptism at their hands.

What is important for the future history of Poland is that this was Western, and not Eastern, Christianity—that is, Mieszko was baptized into the Church of Rome, as it was then known. No less important is that baptism came from Bohemia, not from the imperial power to the west. Mieszko furthermore took care to ensure that his state was placed under the care of missionaries. As missionary priests were directly subordinated to the papacy and not to a bishop within any given territory, this gave the nascent Polish church more flexibility because it was not placed under another sovereign state.

Thus began the Poles’ connection with Roman Catholicism, one that dates back a millennium. It is a connection that has stuck. Until very recently, many people around the world associated Poland above all with the man who, until not so long ago, was head of the Universal Church—Karol Wojtyła, better known as Pope John Paul II. During his first trip to Poland after he became pontiff, John Paul II famously declared to his countrymen that “it was impossible, without reference to Christ, to understand the history of the Polish nation, this great thousand-year-old community that so profoundly shapes my existence and that of each of us.” While clearly there is much to this statement, one cannot say that the Christianization of Poland or the Poles’ historic identification with Roman Catholicism were inevitable. Nor (as we shall see) is the belief that all “real” Poles have always been, or must be, Roman Catholics borne out by the country’s history, certainly not if one examines that history in its entirety. (Such Polish paradoxes await the patient reader.)

So what motivated Mieszko’s conversion? The baptism of “Poland” into the larger Roman Catholic family appears to have been, above all, a political decision and not simply (if such matters are ever simple!) a matter of spiritual conversion. It likely extended originally only to Mieszko’s court and entourage, who through the person of his wife and her entourage were pulled into the Christian orbit. Surely Mieszko realized that, by accepting Christianity, he would no longer be subject to incursions from the west—at least, the types of incursions from the eastern marches that doubtless had long been intended to turn these Slavic peoples from paganism to Christianity. By converting, he would deny the Holy Roman Empire the pretext to interfere with his state. The fact that the baptism came at the hands of a missionary who was under papal jurisdiction proved important. The Polish church thus would not be subordinated to the Holy Roman Empire or any other lay power. Moreover, as denizens of a Christian power the Poles could now seek to spread Christianity to other pagan tribes in the region (for example, the Pomeranians or the tribes further east), thus expanding their own influence.

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Filed under Bohemia, Germany, migration, nationalism, Poland, religion, Russia

by | 23 June 2025 · 11:47 am

Buddhism in the Ryukyus

From Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650, by Gregory Smits (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 326-328:

Ryukyu’s temples were either Shingon or Rinzai Zen. Until approximately the sixteenth century, all or most of their abbots and priests came from Japan. During Shō Shin’s reign, native Ryukyuan priests became increasingly common, although the leadership posts in large temples typically remained in the hands of priests from Japan. As part of their training, Ryukyuan priests often resided in Japan. Therefore, Buddhist temples constituted an important network linking Ryukyu with Japan. Geographically, the most important of these priest-mediated connections to locations in Japan were Kagoshima, Suō Province in western Honshu (the domain of the Ōuchi), and especially the Kyoto Gozan temples.

Buddhist priests served as Ryukyu’s diplomats to powers in Japan, and they typically drafted and transmitted diplomatic correspondence. Because well-trained Buddhist priests could write classical Chinese, they were also in a position to facilitate trade and diplomacy with China. When in 1525 Ryukyu intervened to reduce tensions between Japan and China, priests served as the envoys. During the sixteenth century, priests performed many of the functions that resident Chinese had performed in the previous century. Recall that the population of Kumemura declined significantly during the sixteenth century.

Priests with diplomatic experience sometimes served as foreign-policy or general political advisers. For example, it is likely that the Ryukyuan Rinzai priest Kakuō (dates unknown) of Tenkaiji served as a political adviser to Shō Sei circa the 1530s. We have seen that the Satsuma Rinzai priest Nanpo Bunshi was an influential political adviser and diplomat during the years leading up to the 1609 war. When that war broke out, the king called on the Ryukyuan priest Kikuin (d. 1620) to serve as lead negotiator, in part because he had lived in Satsuma and was on good terms with Bunshi and several leaders of the invading force. Trusted by both Satsuma and the king, Kikuin served as Ryukyu’s prime minster (kokusō) until 1616.

Buddhist temples functioned as academic centers that could provide knowledge and know-how to Ryukyuan rulers. Priests were involved in culture, scholarship, and essential functions of state. Their activities included inscribing Shō Taikyū’s bells, creating the Omoro sōshi by writing down the songs, inscribing many of the monuments of Shō Shin and his successors, and drafting letters from the king to send to powers in Japan. During the sixteenth century, Buddhist priests served as tutors to elite Ryukyuans, Kaiin being the outstanding example (chapter 8). Moreover, we have seen that Enkakuji played a role in the education of the sons of elite families in Amami-Ōshima, and it likely functioned similarly vis-à-vis other islands.

Although Buddhism, Chinese thought, and native religion often occupied separate textual, rhetorical, and ritual realms, Shō Shin and his successors combined all three into a potent synthesis to enhance royal authority and defend the state. Some priests undoubtedly pursued Buddhist enlightenment through their own study and practice. Nevertheless, Buddhism in Ryukyu functioned mainly as a public state institution, not as a private spiritual path.

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by | 19 June 2025 · 9:01 am

Remaking the Ryukyu Monarchy

From Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650, by Gregory Smits (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 237-239:

The unstable condition of Ryukyuan kingship probably constituted Shō Shin’s most pressing early challenge. His own rise to power, of course, had been a violent intervention. During the fifteenth century, reign changes based on personal military power had been the norm. Local rulers maintained their own armies, ships, and trade networks. In Okinawa, perhaps a dozen lords possessed significant military power. Remnants of deposed rulers from the first Shō dynasty and rulers based in other islands constituted additional potential sources of instability. The monopoly on tribute trade was an advantage to whoever controlled Shuri, but it also made that person a target. Shō Shin struggled for supremacy and legitimacy throughout his long reign. Military campaigns included local warfare not appearing in the official histories, as well as invasions of Yaeyama in 1500, Kumejima (1506 and possibly earlier), and continuing military tensions in Sakishima that included an invasion of Yonaguni around 1522 (or earlier) by forces at least nominally allied with Shuri.

Perhaps the greatest act of power consolidation was Shō Shin’s causing Okinawa’s major warlords (aji) to give up their castles and relocate to Shuri in 1525 or 1526 in return for high noble status—at least according to the common story. Survey histories routinely present this relocation as a simple fact, but we have no indication that it happened as a discrete, orderly event. It is not mentioned in any monument, in the 1701 Genealogy of Chūzan, or in any other text until Sai On’s 1725 Genealogy. Even there, the claim occurs with no explanation, only in the introductory material, and not under a specific year. The 1725 Genealogy text states that the presence of warlords had long been a source of uprisings and disorder. Shō Shin relocated all of them to Shuri, disbanded their military forces, and sent his own officials out to govern their territories. Kyūyō goes into more detail, but its only basis is Sai On’s assertion in Genealogy. Perhaps Sai On had in mind Japan’s early modern sankin-kōtai system.

The relocation of the warlords to Shuri makes logical sense within the overall trajectory of Shō Shin’s reign. We know that he stored weapons in a central armory under his control and reorganized military forces and other key state functions into the hiki system. There was plenty of turbulence and factionalism in the royal court after Shō Shin’s time, but there is no indication of an independent regional power elsewhere in Okinawa that could rival Shuri. Shō Shin brought potential regional rivals such as Nakijin, the Sashiki area, and Kumejima into orbits around Shuri. Regardless of whether and how he relocated or displaced regional rulers, Shō Shin succeeded in concentrating power at the capital to such an extent that no other entity in Okinawa or within the rest of the Ryukyu islands could seriously challenge it by the end of his reign.

Shō Shin’s reign marks the first known use of written documents for government administration. He also created an eclectic ideology in support of royal power. These measures had the effect of transforming Ryukyu’s monarchs and their governments. Before Shō Shin, kings of Ryukyu resembled powerful wakō chieftains. After Shō Shin, they resembled Chinese-style heads of a centralized bureaucracy. The official histories, and most modern ones, project this later, sixteenth-century model of the monarchy back to previous generations. Historians often perform this type of maneuver.

Shō Shin’s centralizing project did not stop with his death. His successor, Shō Sei, further enhanced Shuri’s military capabilities and continued to systematize the bureaucracy and official state rituals. He created a new type of military gusuku and developed the religious ideology of royal authority known later as tedako shisō (son-of-the-sun thought). Shō Sei also brought out the first volume of the Omoro sōshi.

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by | 10 June 2025 · 6:31 am

Early Ryukyu Burial Customs

From Maritime Ryukyu, 1050–1650, by Gregory Smits (University of Hawaii Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 50-51:

The practice of placing corpses in baskets or cages and leaving them at the top of trees or poles to decompose was characteristic of the Northern Tier Cultural Zone and regions farther north. Within the Ryukyu islands, the practice has been documented in Amami-Ōshima and in parts of central and northern Okinawa. Nagoya Sagenta was a Satsuma retainer. After residing in Amami-Ōshima between 1850 and 1855, he wrote a detailed description of the local culture, Nantō zatsuwa (Tales from the southern islands). It explains that, after the death of a priestess, “her corpse is placed in a large box, which is suspended from atop a tree for three years. Then the bones are washed and placed in a jar.”

Similar practices have been documented in places along the coastline of the Japan Sea in Akita, Yamagata, and Ishikawa Prefectures. In those places the remains are hoisted aloft after cremation. In Korea, hoisting (non-cremated) bodies into trees was done in the case of deaths from smallpox and other diseases. The practice was both a de facto sanitary measure and was thought to mollify the angry deity who had caused the disease by offering up the body. A broad range of northern Asian peoples, from the Koryaks in Kamchatka west to Mongolia, traditionally disposed of corpses or bones by placing them on platforms or in trees. Bones of humans or hunted animals thus offered up toward the heavens were believed to be reborn.

There is only one known example from Fukuoka, but folklore from the region such as the legend of the “bone-hanging tree” attests to the former existence of the practice. Kashiigū, a shrine in Fukuoka City with ties to Korea, derives its name from the legend that Emperor Chūai’s coffin was hung in a shii [as in shiitake] tree (Castanopsis cuspidata, Japanese chinquapin).

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by | 4 June 2025 · 5:33 am

Catholic Exodus to South Vietnam

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 804-805:

Lansdale also helped facilitate the mass movement of refugees from north to south—though almost certainly his role has been exaggerated in some accounts. Beginning in a serious way in the summer of 1954, waves of refugees, most of them Catholic, went to the south under the provisions of the Geneva Accords permitting civilian regroupment. (Article 14d: “Any civilians residing in a district controlled by one party who wish to go and live in the zone assigned to the other party shall be permitted and helped to do so.”) As hundreds of thousands of refugees descended upon Haiphong in August and awaited evacuation, the French Air Force and Navy, realizing they were unprepared for the onslaught, asked Washington for assistance. The Pentagon ordered the U.S. Navy to mobilize a task force to assist in the evacuation, and in short order, ships were steaming from Subic Bay in the Philippines, bound for Haiphong.

All told, French and U.S. ships would make some five hundred trips in three hundred days, ferrying almost nine hundred thousand people southward, in perhaps the largest civilian evacuation—and largest sea migration—in history to that point. Entire northern Catholic communities abandoned most of their worldly possessions and set off en masse, their priests in the lead, in what the U.S. Navy dubbed Operation Passage to Freedom. The result was a major reordering of the religious balance of Vietnam. Before the exodus, most Vietnamese Catholics lived north of the seventeenth parallel; afterward the majority lived south of it. By 1956, the diocese of Saigon had more Catholics than Paris or Rome. By then, more than a million of Vietnam’s Catholics lived in the south, 55 percent of them refugees from the north.

The United States and the State of Vietnam reaped significant propaganda benefits from the mass exodus to the south in 1954–55. It seemed a perfect example of refugees “voting with their feet,” a damning indictment of the Viet Minh regime, and it was especially notable for the fact that comparatively few people went in the other direction, from south to north. The evacuation received wide play in the American press, with readers learning that the travelers, once they completed the journey, were given “welcome kits” of soap, towel, and toothpaste, and tins of milk labeled “From the people of America to the people of Viet Nam—a gift.” Left out of the accounts was that the exodus was not altogether spontaneous. Though many Catholics needed no incentive to leave the north, Lansdale and his CIA team initiated a campaign to convince the skeptics. In Catholic areas in the north, they broadcast the messages that “Christ has gone to the south” and “The Virgin Mary has departed the north” in order to be with Diem, a devout Catholic. They promised “five acres and a water buffalo” to every relocated refugee. In another gambit, Lansdale arranged for leaflets to be dropped over the same areas showing a map of North Vietnam with a series of concentric circles emanating from Hanoi. The none-too-subtle suggestion: that Hanoi was a likely target for a U.S. atomic bomb.

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Filed under France, migration, military, nationalism, religion, U.S., Vietnam

by | 6 April 2025 · 2:46 am

Recruiting Chinese to South Africa

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 199-200:

THE IDEA OF RECRUITING Chinese to South Africa was not entirely novel. During the nineteenth century, nearly sixty thousand Chinese indentured workers labored on French plantation island colonies off the east African coast and in German, British, and French colonies on the continent. The Chinese presence in South Africa dates to the eighteenth century, when the Dutch East India Company shipped Malay and Chinese convicts from Batavia to the Cape Colony. During the 1870s and ’80s a few hundred Chinese artisans and workers arrived in the Cape Colony and Natal, along with greater numbers of Indians, contracted for infrastructure construction after the opening of the diamond fields. Voluntary merchant emigrants from southern China followed in their path. By 1904 there were 2,398 Chinese in all of British South Africa, more than half of them living in the Cape Colony. Chinese in the Cape worked mostly as small traders and also as cooks, carpenters, basket weavers, fish sellers, and wagon drivers.

There were hardly any Chinese in the former Afrikaner republics. The Orange Free State excluded Chinese from settlement altogether. The ZAR excluded from citizenship “any of the native races of Asia, including ‘Coolies’ [Indians and Chinese], Arabs, Malays and Mohammedan subjects of the Turkish Dominion.” It forbade Asiatics from walking on footpaths and pavements; from driving public carriages; from riding in first- and second-class railway compartments; and from buying or possessing liquor. The anti-Chinese laws of the former Afrikaner republics remained in place when power transferred to the British after the South African War.

Notwithstanding these restrictions and discriminations, Chinese carved out small niches in Johannesburg. By 1890 there were more than a hundred Chinese in the town, shopkeepers, laundrymen, and market gardeners; by 1904 the Chinese population of the Transvaal was about nine hundred. Chinese often did business in poorer white districts. Unlike white-owned shops, the Chinese sold at low prices, in small quantities, and on credit.

The Chinese in Johannesburg at the turn of the century followed the same patterns of social organization Chinese practiced across the diaspora. In the 1890s, they formed a huiguan called the Kwong Hok Tong (guanghetang) or Cantonese Club. It built a “clubhouse” on leased land in Ferreirastown, the original settlement of Johannesburg, which now lay at the city’s fringe. The house had several reception rooms, six bedrooms, a kitchen, and a latrine. Membership cost five pounds for initiation and dues according to one’s occupation. The club rented rooms at two pounds a month; kept a library of books and periodicals; and held social events and meetings that drew as many as 150 people. Yeung Ku Wan (Yang Feihong), a collaborator of Sun Yatsen who arrived in South Africa in 1896, formed a second group, the Xingzhonghui (Revive China Society). Photographs of members of both groups show educated men dressed in Western-style clothing.

Thus in 1903, when the idea of importing Chinese labor for the gold mines circulated, there was already a history of Chinese migration to South Africa and a small but established Chinese community in Johannesburg. These served as both precedent and warning—for both Chinese and whites.

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Filed under Britain, China, labor, migration, nationalism, Netherlands, religion, South Africa