By Juanita Kwok, November 2025 In 1854, ships from Hong Kong bearing Chinese men from the Pearl River Delta area of southern China began landing at Port Phillip, from where the gold seekers made their way to the Victorian goldfields. Although the goldrushes had begun in NSW in May 1851, it was to the richer Victorian fields that the Cantonese gold seekers initially flocked. As Chinese established settlements on goldfields, they erected temples, club-houses, clan-halls and masonic halls, often referred to under the common rubric of “joss houses”. Paul Macgregor’s research on Chinese joss houses counted over fifty in Victoria alone.[1] An 1856 report on the Chinese in Bendigo quite clearly differentiated between a Masonic Hall and joss houses: “The faction known as the four districts, to whom belongs the joss-house in Long Gully, have also established a species of free-masonry among themselves and erected a Masonic Hall at the 1st White Hill encampment.”[2]  In 1859, Anglo-Chinese linguist James McCulloch...Read More