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…
In the Siyi (四邑) counties of southern Guangdong — Taishan, Xinhui, Kaiping, Enping — there are villages the old people still call 寡妇村 (guǎfù cūn, "widow villages"). Not because the men died in war. Because they walked to the coast one morning in the 1850s and were never seen again.
In one such village, a…