Yi Li - Chinese in Colonial Burma

Department of History, SOAS, University of London, London, UK

The current unsatisfying situation of scholarly works does no justice to the long and rich historical exchange between Myanmar and China. The lands that today belong to the Republic of the Union of Myanmar are by no means a strange place for the Chinese. Textual and archaeological evidence indicates that Sino-Burmese interactions, via overland routes Unfortunately, records on Chinese activities in interior and coastal Burma remain too insufficient for the time being to allow for anything more than speculation about the scale of Chinese settlement.

Nonetheless, being adjacent to Chinas southwest frontier, various ancient kingdoms in Burma experienced continuous inflows of Chinese peoples and products. These interactions were often peaceful, but there were occasional bouts of violence: the invasion by the Yuan (Mongol) army of Pagan in the 1270s and 1280s; the tragic ending of the fleeing Yongli, the last Ming Emperor, and his entourage outside the capital of the Toungoo Dynasty near Sagaing in 1661; and the Sino-Burmese War launched by the Qing Emperor Qianlong in the 1760s, to name just a few episodes, all brought waves of Chinese soldiers, officials, and ordinary people to Burma. Shortly before the British arrival, a Chinese traveler in the late eighteenth century observed that western products were assembled in Rangoon before being transported to Canton and Hokkien.

Despite the longevity of the Chinese presence in Burma, this book focuses only on the colonial period, beginning in 1826, the end of the First Anglo-Burmese War (18241826), and the start of British rule in parts of Burma that ushered in the transition of Burma from a pre-modern Southeast Asian kingdom to a European colony. More importantly, this was also the era when Chinese arrived in significant numbers over a sustained period of time, for many beginning a period of permanent settlement in the area even though these waves of Chinese migrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, partly due to the European colonial expansion in the region, were not the first of their kind. The investigation ends in 1942, when the Japanese army occupied Burma along with most of Southeast Asia. From the close of WWII, colonial regimes throughout the region were replaced with independent nation-states one after another. This radically changed the prevailing dynamics of migration from China, and the flow of migrants never returned to its previous level. To some extent, 1942 marked the end of several centuries of Chinese migration as well as British imperial control over this region, even though the colonial government in Burma would not see its official end until the beginning of 1948.

There are, of course, historical milestones during this long, 116-year period, in Burma, in the British Empire, and in China. For the British overseas territories in the East, the Indian Rebellion of 1857 not only marked the end of the East India Company but also restructured the administrative system of British India, of which (Lower) Burma was then a part. The next administrative reform, known as Diarchy, aiming to encourage indigenous political participation in light of the pressure of Indian nationalism, was introduced to Burma in 1923. Beyond the borders of British India, pubic engagement in and opposition to empire-building at the turn of the twentieth century in Britain, regime changes, regional warfare, and foreign invasion in China inevitably made their respective impacts on the Chinese in Burma, however far away these events were, demonstrating the extension of linkages beyond national and continental borders.

The most important and direct influences on the formation and development of the Burmese Chinese community came from within. The annexation of Rangoon and Lower Burma after the Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852) saw the arrival of colonialism to the region and its multiethnic residents, including an increasing number of southern Chinese recently sailing from coastal China and other nearby Southeast Asian ports. Rangoon was chosen as the provincial capital for the newly established Burma province of British India in 1862, where the largest Chinese quarter in Burma, the Rangoon Chinatown, was designated and flourished thereafter. In 1886, the British completed its final annexation, thus officially bringing Upper Burma and its peoples (including the southwestern Chinese who had plied cross-border caravan routes from Yunnan for centuries) into the British colonial world. Over the next few decades, the Sino-Burmese border was secured in the north, and large-scale development projects, especially the opening of rice fields in the Irrawaddy Delta, were implemented with considerable success in the south. All of these not only redefined the social and economic landscapes of the new colonial state but also supported, in every aspect, an expanding migrant society for the Chinese.

Table and 1911, during which the number of Chinese increased nearly tenfold. However, throughout the colonial era, the Chinese remained an absolute minority in the total population, reaching slightly over 1 percent in 1931, the last time the census was taken before WWII.