Gold Rush Chinese Miners & Discrimination

Salve! Today in Social Science I'll be telling you about the Chinese Miners and Discrimination in the 1800s and onwards. 

Here are four things I discovered about Chinese miners.

- Some Chinese miners became well known in their communities

- Chinese miners were paid less and there were about 7000 of them.

- In a small rural county in the Guangdong province of China, far away from the hustle and bustle of big cities, the homelands of the first Chinese settlers to came to New Zealand. 

- About 5000 Chinese miners migrated to the Goldfields of Central Otago in the 1860s.

- Most of the Chinese didn't speak English, and they preferred to build small stone houses away from the other miners. They often had their own shops, run by their own people. Working patiently through the pile of rocks they left behind, some Chinese miners were rewarded with gold, but mainly remained poor and far away from a home they never saw again.

And, here are four things I learnt about discrimination in the 1800s.

Discrimination is treating someone differently or unfairly because of their skin, race, age, gender, politics, gender identity, religion, the way they look, a past criminal record, the person's lifestyle, their choice of clothing, their age or their disabilities whether they are a member of or fit in with a social group, social class, social status or caste, and many other reasons.

- There was a common belief that the Chinese carried infectious diseases and were dirty and unhygienic.

-  The relatively restrained nature of anti-Chinese legislation and the virtual absence of collective violent protest against them scarcely indicate that the mass of colonists hated the Chinese. 

- The Chinese were also believed to threaten to swamp the European population.

- Also, the immigrants were believed to be associated with gambling, opium smoking and people said that they never contributed to the New Zealand economy.