Titled “A coolie of Hongkong”, this postcard presented an unusually stylish and calm posture of a coolie. The sender of the postcard explained the coolie’s duties: “This is a common sight here – everything is carried by coolies they put the pole over their shoulders & a basket on each end. That’s how my coal & groceries & everything carries up the hill!” Therefore, a coolie was a person employed for carrying things or people for very little money. The term is now regarded as offensive; some countries consider its use racist when referring to people from Asia. The Chinese translation of coolie is 苦力 (fu2 lik6, literally fu2 means ‘bitter, hard’ and lik6 ‘labour, strength’). The translation captures not only the English pronunciation but also the nature of their work. Another translation 咕喱 (gu1 lei1), which is more common in Hong Kong, only represents the sounds in English.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a coolie (also spelt cooly) originally referred to a hired labour who was employed to perform menial tasks.A later usage of the word develops the sense of labourers of Asia ancestry who went to work in European colonies. This early Indian English word may have been modelled on multiple languages - Gujarati koḷī, Portuguese cule, Hindi kūlī, kulī, Bengali kuli, etc., and Tamil kūli.
Before coolies became the main source of cheap labour, enslaved Africans were the backbone of European exploitations of colonies. Transatlantic slave trade which spanned from the 16th to the 19th century transported about 12 million Africans to the Americas. Britain outlawed slave trade when the Parliament passed the Slave Trade Abolition Act in 1807. However, slavery itself was not abolished throughout the British colonies until 1833.1
Slave trade was replaced by coolie trade. Contract or indentured labourers, called coolies, from Asia, in particular India and China were recruited. Many Indians were transported to work on plantations in Africa and the Caribbean. Chinese coolies were countertraded in North and South Americas and British colonies. In America, they contributed to the building of the first transcontinental railroad. In the Straits Settlements, the newly arrived Chinese were known as singkeh/sinkeh 新客, meaning “new arrival” in the Hokkien (Min Nan 閩南) language. They worked in various sectors like in mines, farms, construction sites, and as rickshaw pullers, etc.2
Most contract or indentured Chinese labourers came from Southern provinces of Chia and spoke languages such as Cantonese, Hakka, and Hokkien. Macau, Hong Kong and Canton were the main centres of Chinese coolie trade in the 19th century. Such trade was also known as maai6 zyu1 zai2 賣豬仔(‘sale of piglets’) – maai6 means ‘sell’; zyu1 means ‘pig’ and zai2 is a diminutive marker indicating ‘small’). Chinese coolies were seen as zyu1 zai2,waiting to be “slaughtered”. Due to harsh treatment, many died before arriving at their destinations; those survived had to work in inhumane conditions.
In the middle of the 19th century, thousands of Chinese labourers arrived in South American countries like Peru and Cuba. As these overseas Chinese were virtually all male, inter-marriage between Chinese men and indigenous women was common. Some Chinese who decided not to return to their homeland even adopted Spanish names. Therefore, a considerable number of Peruvians have Chinese ancestry. Recent Chinese immigrants were no longer coolies but skilled workers or businessmen who often maintained close connection with family members in their homeland. Remittance of money as shown in the bank check below was a common practice to support the poor relatives at home.
In Hong Kong, the term coolie was used to in the sense of unskilled workers who relied on their strength to transports goods or engage in manual works. Besides the boy, coolies were also indispensable in European households as laborious tasks were regarded as “coolie pidgin”. An anonymous English mentioned different types of coolies in China. However, as the writer explained the responsibilities of the coolies were not as clearly defined as the boy.3
“Turn we now to coolies, —I mean those attached to your house. If we go by names, we shall have plenty,—house-coolies, chair coolies, garden-coolies, Comprador’s coolies, office-coolies, lamp-coolies, bedroom-coolies, water-coolies, —in fact, ad libitum you may go on enumerating them. But when you sift the matter, it is different. If you inquire for the lamp-cooly, it is just likely a man will appear who, the next moment, will say “Here!” to the title of water-cooly, while, later in the day, he will be hard at work sweeping and raking, having transformed himself into an impromptu garden cooly. Therefore, although in each house at Shanghai we have, as in all Eastern countries, crowds of servants, yet it often occurs that a cooly receives a title which is only honorary, and caused by his present occupation.”
In a household where “crowds of servants” worked together, a certain hierarchy among the servants seemed inevitable. The pride of the houseboy or “number one boy” came from the fact that he was the personal attendant to the master. This gave him the privilege to designate what tasks were “coolie pidgin”. The following exchange between a European master and his boy was a clear demonstration of how the “boy” exercised his right.4
“I [Ball] asked my boy to do something which happened to be the work of a cooly, and he answered,
“No can; that no my pigeon” (business). “My talkee that cooly man; he belong that pigeon.”
“But,” said I, “you can do it much quicker than to call for the cooly.”
“No can, no can. I no sarvy that cooly man pigeon. I talkee he, — he come chop-chop.”
Despite Ball’s explanation, the boy insisted on upholding his dignity as the “number one boy”, i.e. the head of servants. Often time, pidgin sentences were created on the spot. Therefore, as long as the other party could understand the message, variations in sentence structures between speakers and even within the same speaker were acceptable. An important difference between my and I was the former had multiple functions (as subject and object pronoun and possessive adjective as in my pigeon); however, I was only used in subject position. For example, the boy used both my and I as first person subject pronouns. Similarly, unlike English pronouns he/him/his, she/her/hers, it/its, which makes distinctions in function and gender, pidgin English only used he. A single word no served all types of negation such as No can, which was a typical way to indicate rejection or inability. Chop-chop, meaning ‘quick, quickly’, can still be occasionally heard today. Since coolies had little direct interaction with the Europeans, their proficiency in pidgin English was restricted to understanding instructions.
1 Thomas, Hugh. 1997. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440 – 1870. New York: Simon & Schuster.
2 Vaughan, J.D. 1879. The Manners and Customs of the Chinese of the Straits Settlements. Singapore: Mission Press.
3 Anonymous. 1860. Englishman in China. London: Saunders, Otley, and Co.
4 Ball, B.L. 1855. Rambles in Eastern Asia, Including China and Manilla. Boston: James French and Company.