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A street in Honolulu's Chinatown, Hawaii, with shops and signs under tropical sun.
Diaspora History Labor Migration

Chinese in Hawaii: The Sugar Plantations That Built the Pacific’s First Chinatown

Chinese in Hawaii: The Sugar Plantations That Built One of America's Oldest Chinatowns Before the gold rushes, before the transcontinental railroads, before the coolie ships that carried laborers to Cuba and Peru, one of the oldest Chinese communities in the United States was forming on a chain of volcanic islands in the middle of the…
September 6, 20260Comments

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World map of nineteenth-century Chinese emigration routes from Asia to the Americas and the Caribbean
History and Culture

The Coolie Trade and Early Migration Patterns (1840–1874)

The mid-19th century marked a dark yet transformative period in Chinese migration history, dominated by the global coolie trade (苦力贸易). Tens of thousands of laborers, predominantly from Guangdong’s Taishan, Xinhui, and Enping counties, were swept into this exploitative system. Between 1840 and 1874, over 200,000 Chinese workers were shipped to destinations such as Peru, Cuba,…
April 9, 20250Comments

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