Chinese Community and Places of Worship, Johannesburg约翰内斯堡华人社群与信仰场所

Type

Overseas Daoist Temples

Location

South Africa · Gauteng · Johannesburg · The first Chinatown was on Commissioner Street; today's Chinatown is in Cyrildene and around Bruma Lake.

First built

Chinese arrivals from the 1870s · Over sixty-three thousand indentured mine laborers arrived at the Witwatersrand between 1904 and 1910; the Transvaal Chinese Association was founded in 1903.

Overview

The history of the Chinese in South Africa can be traced back to convicts exiled to the Cape by the Dutch East India Company from Batavia in the 1660s, yet from 1660 until the end of the nineteenth century the Chinese population of the Cape Colony never exceeded a hundred. From the 1870s, Chinese came for the diamond and gold mining districts, turning to small trading because of discrimination. Between 1904 and 1910, following the Second Boer War, more than sixty-three thousand indentured mine laborers were brought in to work the Witwatersrand goldfields; owing to opposition from white labor, most were repatriated by 1910, making this the largest yet shortest-lived episode of Chinese labor importation in South African history. Johannesburg's first Chinatown was on Commissioner Street, forcibly demolished and relocated during the apartheid era; today's Chinatown lies in the eastern suburb of Cyrildene and around Bruma Lake, an area that by 2013 already had fifty-seven distinct native-place and clan organizations. The Transvaal Chinese Association was founded in 1903. It must be honestly noted: no surviving nineteenth-century Chinese temple building has been recorded in South Africa, and religious activity has instead relied on associations and households.

Highlights

• Chinese presence dates to the 1660s, but the population remained under a hundred for a long time
• Over 63,000 indentured mine laborers, 1904–1910, most repatriated
• The first Chinatown was forcibly demolished during the apartheid era
• Today's Chinatown is in Cyrildene, with 57 associations as of 2013
• No surviving early Chinese temple building has been found