brand logo

A brief history of the Sri Lankan Chinese

07 Nov 2022

  • The journey from colonial rejects, stateless wanderers, and nationality ‘XXX’ to Sri Lankan citizens
BY Ruwan Laknath Jayakody Members of the Sri Lankan Chinese community, who were formally stateless and have had permanent residence in Sri Lanka since 15 November 1948, and were either born in Sri Lanka or had come to Sri Lanka with their parents at a very young age, were granted citizenship under the Grant of Citizenship to Persons of Chinese Origin (Special Provisions) Act, No. 38 of 2008. This observation was made by Professor in Chinese Language at the Kelaniya University Humanities Faculty’s Modern Languages Department Ven. Nedalagamuwe Dhammadinna Thera in an article titled “Sri Lankan Chinese: A fast dying ethnic identity?” which was published in 2021 in the Parliament’s Parliamenthu Sara Sanhitha academic journal. In the colonial period of Sri Lanka, Western rulers pursued the idea of the import of Chinese migrant workers from their colonies to Sri Lanka. When Ceylon was under Dutch rule in the 17th and 18th Centuries, the Dutch East India Company authorities in Batavia (present day Jakarta, Indonesia) would occasionally deport unemployed or illegal Chinese migrants to Ceylon, in order to provide manpower and to limit the growth of the Chinese population there. In July 1740, a plan was drawn up for the mass deportations of Chinese from Batavia to work in cinnamon plantations in Ceylon, while M.J. Armstrong, R.W. Armstrong, and K. Mulliner’s “Chinese populations in contemporary South-East Asian societies: Identities, interdependence, and international influence” elaborates further that: “The Dutch, worried and anxious, began to deport unemployed Chinese to Ceylon, Banda (Indonesia), and South Africa. The Chinese were outraged, and dire rumours swept the Chinese community. The Dutch decided to oust all Chinese from Batavia. The Chinese response was an armed uprising in November 1740. The Dutch began an indiscriminate slaughter of the Chinese. Thousands were killed and their homes and property were burned. Within a very short time, however, the Chinese returned to Batavia.” Rumours spread that the deportees were not taken to Ceylon, but were instead thrown overboard as soon as they were out of sight of the Javanese (Indonesia) coastline, provoking unrest in the Chinese community. This resulted in a conflict between the Chinese and the Dutch, which eventually led to the 1740 Batavia massacre. Chinese people living in Ceylon from the 19th to the 20th Century There were around 80 to 100 Chinese people in Ceylon in 1816. A. Bertolacci, writing A view of the agricultural, commercial, and financial interests of Ceylon in 1816, said: “Of the Chinese, there are only 80 or 100 who have lately arrived in Ceylon, and settled in different parts. The British Government has taken some pains to encourage the Chinese settlers. However, those who have hitherto come to Ceylon have not brought with them that industry and ingenuity for which they are famous in their country. These are, in general, greatly addicted to gambling, and all sorts of dissipation. Many of them have rented the gaming houses and cockfighting pits, of which, the Government, led by a mistaken policy, makes a considerable profit by selling the exclusive privilege of keeping them. These Chinese have not brought women with them, but have formed connections with the Ceylonese.” The British Governors of Ceylon, according to R.B. Allen’s “Slaves, convicts, abolitionism, and the global origins of the post-emancipation indentured labour system, slavery, and abolition”, had also pursued the idea of securing Chinese labour as a workforce in Ceylon, with at least two attempts being made for the import of Chinese labourers to Sri Lanka, with Allen noting: "In October 1816, Ceylon’s Governor [Sir] Robert Brownrigg reported that two earlier attempts to import such workers into that Colony had not had the desired results. ‘They became a burden to the Government without benefit and gradually took themselves to gambling and profligate pursuits or idleness, and have therefore long ceased to be looked upon with any expectation of benefit from their industry, knowledge, or example’.” 
  1. Pathiravitana’s Ceylankan – A mélange of many minds notes thus: “The colonial Government in its early days, not only toyed with the idea of getting down Chinese workers, but actually brought down this labour for agricultural and other work. Governor Frederick North had pursued the idea of securing foreign labour and had brought down Malayalis, Madrasis, Malays, and even Kaffirs as recruits for the armed services. Similarly, he thought of filling the agricultural ranks by getting down Chinese labour. Initially, he brought down 47 Chinese and placed them in Galle and Trincomalee. Governor Thomas Maitland too followed the same thinking, and got down 100 Chinese to reconstruct the Hamilton Canal. Both ventures seemed to have been failures. The name Ja-Ela is a memento from this period, when the common man mistook the Chinese from Penang to be Malays. And China Garden in Galle is where the Chinese were settled.” 
There were some Chinese migrants in Ceylon between 1845 and 1853 who, according to S. Baker's Eight years’ wanderings in Ceylon, used to dry sea slugs and sharks’ fins in Trincomalee.
  1. Lee’s “General report and statements and tables of the census of Ceylon” in 1881 recognised seven ethnic groups as nationalities, including Europeans, Eurasians and Burghers, the Sinhalese, Tamils, Moormen, Malays, and Veddas among the country’s population, while 72 races including the aforementioned seven nationalities were included in the category of “All the races of the population”, with “Chinese” being one of the races named under this category. The same report stated that there were 49 Chinese in Ceylon in 1881, with 19 of them living in the area of the Colombo Municipality, two in the Negombo District, 20 in the Kandy District, one in the Badulla District, three in the Jaffna District, and four in the Galle District. Independent Chinese immigrants had begun to come to Sri Lanka during the 1920s to 1950 as a result of the civil war that erupted in China and also due to World War II.
  2. Chelvaratnam’s Migrant Chinese businessmen – A dying breed? observed: “Sri Lanka saw the arrival of Chinese immigrants during 1928 to 1950. These immigrants set up businesses in the island, acclimatised themselves to the country’s culture, learnt to speak the language as well as the natives, and put down very strong roots. Their main areas of business ranged from dentistry and textiles to restaurants. Unfortunately, these old and established groups of Chinese are now fast becoming a dying breed of businessmen in the country.” Many of them, per Chelvaratnam, came from the Shandong and Hubei Provinces in China.
  3. Hettiarachchi’s No more Citizen ‘XXX’ noted: “The very first migrants did not know the language of the country that they had adopted. But, they were enterprising and industrious. Most of them, as small communities do, set up base close to each other in Hulftsdorp, but the menfolk fanned out across the country. With bundles of textiles on their heads or bags full of dentures, they went from town to town. They were either textile sellers or dental technicians. 'They looked at the map of Sri Lanka but as they couldn’t read, spotted the large circles which marked main towns and went to those places to carry out their trade,' says Chwing Chi Chang, who topped the batch when gaining a zoology special degree from the University of Peradeniya. First, they went by train and walked miles on end, and gradually, they became more mobile after buying bicycles, and finally, they set up their own little places, the ‘remnants’ of which, some small, others flourishing businesses, can still be seen in Maradana, Wellawatte, and Negombo.”
A.G. Ranasinha’s “General report, Volume One, Part one, Census in Ceylon, 1946” added that there were 497 Chinese in Ceylon in 1946, according to the category of “other races” included in this report.  The Sri Lankan Chinese population by foreign citizenship in 1963 was 397. The number of the Sri Lankan Chinese population by foreign citizenship increased up to 878 in 1971, according to the Census and Statistics Department's “General report, Census of population, 1971”. There were 576 Sri Lankan Chinese in the country in 1981, according to the Census and Statistics Department's “Census of population and housing” report of 1981. The life of the very first Chinese migrants in Sri Lanka was not very easy due to various circumstances. M.L. Lin-Rodrigo’s “In search of Lin Jia Zhuang” put it thus: “Having hated myself so long for being Chinese, it is still somewhat difficult for me to understand exactly why I went to China a few years ago to find my father’s family. It was not easy growing up as a Chinese in Sri Lanka, particularly in the countryside. My sister and I were the only ‘strange looking’ children in the whole village. Kids at school always called us names. It was I, more than my sister, who resembled our Chinese father. I was always called ‘cheeni’, the 'Chinese girl', which is somewhat similar to being called a n*gger if you are a Black person in the US. I was Chinese only in appearance, as neither my sister nor I spoke a word of Chinese, and we did not cook or eat Chinese food or wear Chinese clothes. Moreover, I always got straight A’s in Sinhala and in Sinhala literature in school. Yet, whenever somebody picked a fight with me, they would call me a ‘damn Chinese’. There were other names such as ‘flat nose’ and ‘yellow face’.” Many Sri Lankan Chinese left the county due to various reasons. Chelvaratnam observed: "Only some of the Chinese who have intermarried continued to stay on in Sri Lanka. Some of the main reasons for the old businesses closing down and the younger generation of the Chinese leaving the country have been the severe political instability and the lack of citizenship in Sri Lanka. Some of the immigrants, unless they have married Sri Lankans, are stateless. Another difficulty is that the professionally qualified Chinese find that the old businesses are unsuited to their qualification.” Before the 1960s, there were several thousands of Chinese in Sri Lanka. Today, it has reduced to a couple of hundred people with many migrating onwards to Western countries. Many Chinese came to Sri Lanka intending only to live and work for a couple of years and then go back, so they did not bother to apply for Sri Lankan citizenship. In the 1960s, the question of citizenship arose, and many left. But some of these Chinese had already obtained Sri Lankan citizenship long before, and were, as mentioned in A. Ferrey’s Mandarins in Colombo, happy to stay. Though they contributed much to the economy of the country, they continued to bear the XXX against the “nationality” line. Stateless, they have over the years been carrying out their different trades. Now, scattered across the country, and numbering not more than 200, the ethnic Chinese have branched away from the work of their parents. Hettiarachchi further added: “The late Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake who was also the Internal Administration Minister at the time, gained a nod from the Cabinet of Ministers to a memorandum to grant citizenship to the stateless Chinese who have lived here for a long period, and a draft Act to grant citizenship to persons of Chinese origin was to be presented in Parliament.” The Grant of Citizenship to Persons of Chinese Origin (Special Provisions) Act further says that, "Any person of Chinese origin, who — (a) has been a permanent resident of Sri Lanka, since 15 November 1948 or (b) is a descendent, presently resident in Sri Lanka, of a person who has been a permanent resident of Sri Lanka since 15 November 1948, shall be entitled to apply in terms of the provisions of this Act, for the grant of the status of a ‘citizen of Sri Lanka’.”


More News..