Haining St, Wellington’s Chinatown
The grey, single lane of Haining St is surrounded on both sides by nondescript apartment buildings and office blocks. There’s little evidence of its storied history as Wellington’s Chinatown.
Tong Yan Gaai, or Chinese People’s Street, was a vibrant area where immigrants banded together to create a sense of community in a foreign land. It was also home to discrimination, police profiling, scaremongering, and a brutal race murder.
There was significant European pressure to keep the Chinese settlers confined to the area.
The Anti-Chinese League, a significant political force at the time, wrote to the Wellington mayor and council in 1896 urging them to support a policy to push ‘‘the location of Chinese in[to] onequarter of the city’’.
Many Europeans were afraid of the street. Wild (and false) rumours that young white girls would be kidnapped if they went down the street were particularly damaging.
In his book Old Wellington Days, historian Pat Lawler wrote: ‘‘We were told that even if we went near that drab, narrow little street with its congestion of tumbledown houses, we might be kidnapped, boiled in a copper and made into preserved ginger.’’ Police aggressively targeted the area, raiding houses almost every weekend on suspicion of opium possession and gambling.
The darkest period of Haining St’s history was the murder of 70-year-old Joe Kum Yung in 1905 by white supremacist Lionel Terry. Terry was obsessed with ‘‘yellow peril’’ and hoped the murder would send a political statement. Terry was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted and he spent the next 47 years in a range of psychiatric institutions.