Later nineteenth-century large-scale Chinese overseas emigration to America is generally well-known, where masses of poor desperate Chinese people (mostly young men) left home in Southern China to seek economic opportunities in America and elsewhere. Despite this fact, it has long been a mystery why both research specialists and interested readers alike have seldom, if ever, asked such critically important questions such as: If later nineteenth-century Chinese emigrants were so poor and desperate... then "How did they know where to go? How did they arrange to get there and back? and perhaps most importantly, How did they pay for their long journey?"

This book is the fourth volume of the new series, entitled The Gum-Shaan Chronicles: The Early History of Cantonese-Chinese America, 1850-1900. It is the first scholarly work to examine "the nuts and bolts" of the complex technical process orchestrating Cantonese Chinese overseas emigration. It examines in detail the various financial, technological, logistical, demographic, geographical, political-economy, and historical constructs supporting and guiding later nineteenth-century Cantonese overseas emigration from British Hong Kong to America.

About the Author

Douglas W. Lee, PhD is a second-generation Cantonese-Chinese American, trained as a historian of Modern China, with a special research interest in early Chinese American History. He earned a BA at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon (1967); an MA at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1969); a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1979); and JD from Lewis and Clark Law School, Portland, Oregon (1988). In 1979-1980, Lee was the cofounder and first national President of the National Association for Asian American Studies. In 1981, he was cofounder of the Chinese Historical Society of the Pacific Northwest, and the first editor of its journal, The Annals of the Chinese Historical Society of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, Washington). This book is the result of forty-five years of research and writing.