Coolie Trade Ships and the Americas: Cuba, Peru, Jamaica

The Crossing

Between 1847 and 1874, roughly a quarter of a million men from the Wuyi (五邑, Wǔyì) counties of Guangdong were carried across the Pacific under contracts that made them neither fully free nor fully enslaved. They went to the sugar plantations of Cuba, the guano islands of Peru, and — in smaller, harder numbers — the estates and later the shops of Jamaica. The ships that carried them were called floating hells (浮动地狱, fúdòng dìyù), and the trade those ships served would reshape both the villages that sent the men and the Americas that received them.

The era’s word for these men was coolie (苦力, kǔlì), a term that carried a century of argument in its two syllables. To the colonial governments that licensed the trade, they were contract laborers filling a labor vacuum left by the abolition of slavery. To the recruiters who filled the holds, they were cargo. To the families who waited in Guangdong, they were sons, husbands, and brothers — most of whom would never come home.

The numbers sketch the system’s scale. Roughly 125,000 to 150,000 men were shipped to Cuba, about 100,000 to Peru, and about 1,300 to Jamaica. All three flows drew from the same four or five counties of the Pearl River delta, passed through the same holding depots in Macau and Hong Kong, and crossed the same ocean in the same kind of ships. Yet each destination turned the trade into something different: mass plantation bondage in Cuba, lethal quarry work in Peru, and — against all odds — a small, regulated indenture that became a merchant class in Jamaica.

This is the story of that single machine and its three destinations — a migration that emptied villages and seeded cities. For the long view, see our overview of the coolie trade and the two hundred years of the Wuyi diaspora; here, we follow the ships.

The Machinery of the Trade

Why did Guangdong supply the men? The sending region was the Siyi (四邑, Sìyì) — the four counties of Taishan (台山, Táishān), Xinhui, Kaiping, and Enping — together with Heshan, with Taishan alone the largest single source. These were districts of dense population and scarce arable land, where clan debt could bind a family for generations and one bad harvest could tip a young man toward the coast. By the 1850s, the turmoil of the Taiping Rebellion and the Punti–Hakka clan wars (土客械斗, tǔ kè xièdòu) had added violence and displacement to the pressure. Men between fifteen and thirty, the age of obligation and desperation, were exactly the recruits the trade wanted.

The demand came from the Americas. When Britain abolished slavery in 1833 and emancipation rippled through the Caribbean and the Spanish colonies, plantations that had run on enslaved labor suddenly needed workers. Spanish colonial governments in Cuba and Peru answered by licensing export companies to recruit in China. The result was the credit-ticket system (赊单, shēdān): a broker advanced the cost of passage and the recruit signed a contract repaying it from future wages — a debt that followed him across an ocean and rarely ended as the paper said it would. The brokers (客头, kè tóu) were paid per head, which made the mathematics simple: the more men delivered to the depot, the more money changed hands.

Some men signed willingly, driven by hunger or family need. Many did not. Recruiters used fraud, gambling debts, and opium to trap men — methods Evelyn Hu-DeHart documents in her essay on the trade — and the era’s slang recorded the moral scale of the enterprise. Recruits were called piglets (猪仔, zhūzǎi); the holding pens where they waited for ships were piglet houses (猪仔馆, zhūzǎi guǎn); the whole trade was selling piglets (卖猪仔, mài zhūzǎi) — language that treated human beings as livestock long before they were loaded aboard. The Qing government had banned emigration, but the bans of the 1860s criminalized the trade without stopping it, driving it into the tolerated back channels of Macau. When Hong Kong passed its emigration ordinance in 1870, Macau became the trade’s central depot, and it stayed so until Portugal shut it down in 1873–74.

The machinery was not a single crime but a chain of legal fictions — licensed recruiters, signed contracts, paid fares — each link plausible on its own, coercive in combination. The deep history of how abolition created this labor vacuum is told in our article on the end of slavery and Chinese labor migration, and the hidden ports where the men assembled are traced in our account of Wuyi migration’s secret harbors.

The Ships: Floating Hells

Between the barracoons and the plantations lay the crossing itself — weeks or months in the hold of a ship never designed for passengers. The voyage from Macau to Havana ran 147 to 168 days on average, sometimes stretching past 200, according to Jiangmen’s government archive; the run to Callao took 72 to 180 days. Men were packed into holds below decks, given minimal food and water, and left to disease. Chinese government accounts put average mortality on the Macau–Havana run at 20 to 30 percent, with far worse on individual voyages.

The worst voyages are recorded with the terrible precision of shipping manifests. The Saliz Madier (沙利斯·麻迪尔号) left Macau in 1860 with 950 men aboard; 100 landed in Cuba. The Augustina (奥古斯丁纳号) left Macau in 1861 with 350; 11 reached Callao, and six more died ashore. Chinese accounts document at least fifty-two mutinies on coolie ships — men who decided that the ocean was no worse a death than the contract. The most famous is the Don Juan in 1852, when more than three hundred coolies rose against their captors mid-voyage. In 1872, aboard the Facai (发财号) with 1,005 men aboard, the mutiny was abortive; the ship went on, and so did the trade.

Survivors’ testimony filtered back in fragments. The reformer Yung Wing (容闳) witnessed coolies being loaded at Macau in 1865, chained together by their queues, with letters burned into their chests to mark their destinations. Some ships never arrived at all: county histories record the wreck of the Flora Temple (弗洛拉·坦普雨号) in 1859, with 850 men drowned. The horror was named by the men who lived through it and the officials who counted the dead: these were floating hells (浮动地狱), and the name stuck because it was accurate.

For the full account of one such voyage — the hundred-day ordeal of the Norway on the Macau–Havana route — see our deep dive on the coolie ships between Macau and Havana.

Cuba: The Sugar Route

Cuba received the trade’s largest share, and it began early. In June 1847, the Spanish brig Oquendo landed the first Chinese workers from Xiamen — a month before the royal decree that legalized the traffic. Over the next twenty-seven years, roughly 125,000 to 150,000 men followed, about 143,000 by the count of embarked passengers, nearly all of them male. They were sold into eight-year contracts on the sugar estates, the great plantations of the island’s interior, where the cane fields were called 糖寮 (tángliáo).

The contracts promised what no contract delivered: days capped at twelve hours, Sundays and holidays off, regular rations of meat and rice — terms written into the 猪仔纸 (zhūzǎi zhǐ, piglet paper) indentures now held by the Overseas Chinese History Museum. The reality, recorded in testimony and in the colonial government’s own reports, was fourteen- to sixteen-hour days, wages that secondary accounts put at roughly one-fifteenth of what ordinary Cuban workers earned, whipping as discipline, and contracts renewed under coercion when they expired. The mortality figures are contested and should be read with care: some estimates hold that as many as 70 to 75 percent of coolies died before completing their contracts, while Cuban colonial records from the 1860s and 1870s reported annual mortality of 12 to 15 percent — figures that were themselves two to three times the rate among enslaved Africans. What is not contested is the direction of the numbers. Men died in Cuba at rates that shocked the people who were profiting from them.

The reckoning came in 1874, when the Qing court, pressed by its own diplomats, sent Chen Lanbin (陈兰彬, Chén Lánbīn) to investigate. Accompanied by a British customs officer and a French interpreter, Chen took 1,176 oral depositions and 85 written petitions signed by 1,665 workers. The commission found that more than 80 percent of the men had been decoyed, kidnapped, or bought; that roughly a tenth had died on the voyage; that virtually all had been sold to plantations or sugar mills; and that their treatment amounted to slave-like abuse. The findings became a fourteen-volume report — a document so damning that it helped end the trade it described.

What survived the system survived in the people. Chinese Cubans fought in Cuba’s independence wars, and the monument in Havana honors them; José Martí, Cuba’s national poet, wrote of the Chinese who “did not want to be slaves.” A name sometimes offered for a coolie who became a national figure — José Wong — circulates in popular accounts, but his identity remains unverified, and we flag him as an open question rather than a fact. The deeper legacy is Havana’s Barrio Chino, one of the Americas’ oldest Chinatowns, and a Chinese Cuban community whose history runs from the estates through the revolution and into the present. For the full route history, see our account of the Chinese in Cuba, and for the personal story of one county’s men in Cuba, the Enping–Cuba connection.

Peru: The Guano Route

Peru’s trade ran almost parallel to Cuba’s in time and scale: roughly 100,000 men shipped between 1849 and 1874, with estimates ranging from about 92,000 to 120,000. Most left from Macau on the long run to Callao. The contracts were eight years, signed by men who could not read the Spanish in which they were written.

The destination that made Peru’s route distinct was the Chincha Islands (钦查群岛, Qīnchá Qúndǎo), a chain of rocks off the southern coast buried in centuries of seabird guano (鸟粪, niǎofèn) — at the time, one of the most valuable commodities on earth. Men quarried the dried guano with picks in air thick with ammonia dust, meeting daily quotas of four to five tons, whipped for shortfalls, worked on Sundays. The Chinese called it the white death. Suicides were frequent enough to be recorded as a category: men who jumped from the cliffs, men who buried themselves in the guano to suffocate. At the peak of the guano age, the export brought in as much as 80 percent of Peruvian state revenue — a fortune built on a rock dusted with human remains. The 1861 voyage of the Augustina, which landed eleven survivors of 350, was this route’s emblem.

When the guano ran thin, the surviving men were shifted to coastal sugar and cotton plantations — about 90 percent of them — and to nitrate fields and the brutal construction of the Lima–Oroya railway. Abuse drew international attention: an American minister called the treatment slave-like, and Li Hongzhang’s memorials to the Qing court, according to Chinese accounts, described more than a hundred thousand Chinese laborers suffering in Peru. The 1874 Sino-Peruvian treaty nominally protected the workers and allowed their return; records suggest only a few dozen chose to go back.

Yet out of this wreckage grew one of the Americas’ great Chinese communities. In 1886, the imperial court decreed the founding of the 通惠总局 (Tōnghuì Zǒngjú), the umbrella association of Lima’s Chinese — the only overseas association ever honored with an imperial plaque. Lima’s Barrio Chino grew into the largest Chinatown in Latin America, and Chinese media today estimate as many as three million Peruvians of Chinese descent. The route’s full story, including the white death on the Chincha Islands, is told in our deep dive on the coolie trade and Peru’s guano.

Jamaica: The Different Route

Jamaica took the smallest share of the trade, and its trajectory could not have differed more from Cuba’s and Peru’s. The first Chinese arrived in 1854 under British colonial recruitment: the Epsom sailed from Hong Kong in April with 310 contract laborers, of whom 267 landed — 43 dead on a voyage of roughly two months. They were joined by 205 veterans of the Panama railway who arrived on the Vampire and the Theresa Jane, making 472 arrivals in all. The men were placed on sugar estates at Clarendon and Caymanas near Kingston.

The origins of these first arrivals were predominantly Hakka, from the coastal districts of Xin’an (新安, Xīn’ān — now Shenzhen), Huiyang, and Dongguan, with Taishan and Siyi streams documented in later migration. A second small wave of about 200 came in 1864–70 from Trinidad, British Guiana, and Suriname. The third and last wave arrived in 1884: 680 to 694 men shipped directly from China, leaving Hong Kong in May, transiting Macau, and landing at Kingston on October 12. Only 481 remained after their discharges — the rest scattered, died, or moved on. That 1884 voyage was the last coolie ship to the British West Indies, the tail of a trade that had officially ended a decade earlier.

Jamaica’s contracts were shorter and British-regulated — typically about three years, against Cuba’s and Peru’s eight — and enforcement, while far from gentle, was less lethal. The decisive difference came after the contracts expired. Men left the estates, set up vending carts, and moved into retail, founding the “Chinese shop” — the small grocery that, as the Chinese embassy in Jamaica observed in its 170th-anniversary address, was often the first business in poor neighborhoods willing to extend credit. By the early twentieth century Chinese Jamaicans had become a merchant and professional class, despite immigration restrictions in 1905 and riots in 1918, 1938, and 1965. Today, people of Chinese descent make up roughly 1.2 percent of Jamaica’s population — roughly thirty thousand, most of them locally born — and the community’s descendants include the musicians Sean Paul and Shenseea and the founders of VP Records, Vincent and Patricia Chin.

Jamaica is the route this article treats as the trade’s different path: arrivals, contracts, and the climb from estate labor to shopkeeping. The community’s deeper culture and heritage — its associations, its family stories, its place in Jamaican life — is told in our history of Chinese Jamaican heritage since 1854, and the wider Guangdong context in our account of the five-county diaspora.

Three Routes, Side by Side

Laid side by side, the three routes show the same machinery producing three different outcomes.

The comparison makes visible a spectrum rather than a single category. At one end, Cuba and Peru functioned as de facto slavery under de jure contracts — the coercion the 1874 commission documented. At the other, Jamaica’s regulated indenture, brutal though it could be, sat closer to the free migration that would follow. Historians of the trade, notably Evelyn Hu-DeHart, have argued that the coolie system occupied exactly this middle ground between slavery and freedom — a labor regime whose legal form was voluntary and whose lived reality ranged across the whole span. The men who signed those contracts were neither slaves nor free migrants; they were something the nineteenth century had to invent, and something the twentieth would outlaw.

The Reckoning: 1874 and the Ban

The trade ended the way it had run — through a convergence of exposure, scandal, and diplomacy. The trigger was the 1874 Cuba Commission. When Chen Lanbin’s report reached the world, its fourteen volumes of testimony made the trade an international scandal. Britain and France could not ignore a documented system of kidnapping and bondage operating under European licenses. The 1872 Maria Luz incident had already shown the new mood: Japanese authorities freed the coolies aboard a Peruvian ship in their harbor, and the outcry pushed the Qing court toward investigation.

The machinery came apart piece by piece. Portugal closed the Macau traffic in 1873–74, cutting off the trade’s central depot. The 1874 Sino-Peruvian Treaty of Tientsin gave nominal protection and repatriation rights to Chinese laborers. Negotiations with Spain produced the 1877 terms on Cuban laborers. And the Qing state, which had spent decades banning emigration, reversed course: in 1875 Chen Lanbin was made minister to the United States, Spain, and Peru, and consular protection of Chinese workers abroad was inaugurated. The era of licensed coolie shipments was over — Jamaica’s 1884 voyage, the last of its kind, was the trade’s epilogue.

The word itself outlived the system. Coolie had been a label imposed from outside, and the men it named carried it as a stigma: the phrase 卖猪仔 (mài zhūzǎi) — sold like piglets — was a wound in family memory, and many returned survivors refused to speak of the crossing at all. The trade’s abolition did not end Chinese migration; it ended the licensed version of bondage, and free migration rebuilt the diaspora on different terms — the second stage of a two-phase history of overseas labor that Hainan’s provincial government records. The generation of Chinese diplomats who followed Chen Lanbin — men who argued for their countrymen’s rights in courts and capitals across the Americas — carried the reckoning forward; their story is told in our account of the five-counties immigrants who fought racial discrimination.

What the Trade Built at Home

The coolie trade was an Americas story, but its deepest traces may be in the Guangdong countryside. The remittances (侨汇, qiáohuì) that flowed back — sent through the remittance-letter system (银信, yínxìn), in which a letter carried both money and news across the Pacific — transformed the Wuyi villages. Towers rose above the rice paddies: the watchtower houses (碉楼, diāolóu) of Kaiping and Taishan, built with Americas-earned money as homes, fortresses, and monuments. Clan halls were rebuilt, schools founded, and grand emigrant mansions (金山庄, jīnshānzhuāng) went up alongside them. The landscape became what the region still calls a qiaoxiang (侨乡, qiáoxiāng) — an overseas-Chinese homeland, a countryside whose architecture, economy, and memory were shaped by men who left it.

But the trade’s home impact was not only buildings. The kidnapping gangs (拐匪, guǎifěi) that fed the barracoons terrorized Taishan villages in the 1850s and 1860s, and the county’s own histories record the cost: during the Punti–Hakka clan wars, captured young men were sold to Peru and Cuba as piglets, and of the roughly twenty to thirty thousand taken or self-sold from the Chixi district alone, county history says only one or two in a hundred ever returned with savings. The rest died abroad. The terror poisoned village trust for a generation, and the stigma of being sold — 卖猪仔 — clung to families for generations.

And the trade left the women. In villages stripped of their men, wives became de facto heads of household, managing land, children, and the remittance letters that were often the only proof a husband was alive. These left-behind wives (留守妻子, liúshǒu qīzi) waited years, sometimes lifetimes, for men who would never return — the human cost of a migration whose arithmetic counted only the living and the dead, not the ones who waited. The return imperative, 落叶归根 (luòyè guīgēn) — falling leaves return to their roots — shaped everything the men sent home, and the villages they built for the return most of them never made. For the architecture of this landscape, see our history of Taishan’s villages; for the clan networks that organized the migration, our account of Wuyi clans and brotherhoods; and for the women who held the villages together, our portrait of the women of the Wuyi diaspora.

Legacy and Memory

The trade’s real monument is the communities it seeded. Havana’s Barrio Chino, thinned by the mid-century exodus but still standing, keeps its association halls and its monument to the Chinese who fought for Cuban independence. Lima’s Barrio Chino, crowned by the arch of the 通惠总局 (Tōnghuì Zǒngjú), is the largest Chinatown in Latin America, its three million descendants a living counter-argument to the guano pits. In Kingston, Chinese Jamaican families who began as estate laborers and cart vendors now count judges, musicians, and entrepreneurs among their number. Each community remembers the crossing differently — Cuba through monuments and museum walls, Peru through an institution decreed by an emperor, Jamaica through shops that became cornerstones of neighborhoods.

Descendants are researching the trade as never before. The archives that document it are scattered but real: the 银信 (yínxìn) letters preserved in Guangdong museums, the county gazetteers that recorded who left and who did not return, the genealogy books (族谱) that logged coolie-era departures, the 1874 commission’s depositions now studied by historians on three continents. In the Wuyi homeland, museums preserve the memory; in the Americas, family historians and DNA tests are reconnecting the descendants of men who were sold as piglets to the villages that sent them. The historic departure points are being remembered too — the ports where the men assembled, such as Guanghai in Taishan, are documented in our history of the Guanghai port and the diaspora, and the wider pattern of Wuyi labor migration in our atlas of Wuyi workers abroad.

What the trade teaches is not a single lesson but a set of them: that the line between free migration and bondage can be drawn on paper and erased at sea; that a system can be legal and still be monstrous; that the men who survive such systems build more than they were allowed to be. The coolies of 1847–1874 were counted in shipping manifests as cargo, and their descendants count themselves in millions — in Havana, in Lima, in Kingston, in the villages of Guangdong. The ships are gone, the barracoons are gone, the licenses are gone. The families are not. That is the trade’s final accounting: the men were sold like piglets, and their children became the Americas.

Continue Reading

• The Coolie Trade and Early Migration Patterns (1840–1874)
• Coolie Ships Macau Havana: The Norway’s Bloody Hundred-Day Voyage
• Coolie Trade Peru Guano: The White Death on the Chincha Islands
• The Enping-Cuba Connection: Chinese Coolies in the Caribbean

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