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 Henley avowed the existence of the Triad Society of China on the Victorian gold fields. Henley translated the name of the Association as the “United Three – Heaven, Earth and Man” and asserted that “full seven-eighths of the Chinese here are members of that Society”.[3]
When building surveyor and city valuer George Knight conducted a survey of buildings in Sandhurst (Bendigo) in 1876, he also made the distinction between joss houses and Masonic halls, reporting that there were four joss houses and one Masonic Hall in the Chinese camp.[4] Knight’s inventory of the Chinese camp, also counted 250 Chinese Freemasons in the City of Sandhurst.[5]
In 1877, the Shanghai British consulate staff member James Dundas Crawford toured Australia to inspect the condition of Chinese immigrants in the colonies. He reported that “the religious society of the “Sheathed Sword” exercises a wide and wise influence over all classes of society.”[6] Crawford observed the Sheathed Sword Society had erected a public building at Ironbark Camp. He described it as:
tripartite, a central hall, flanked by two wings, well-situated geomantically on the south side of the village-at its entrance, in fact, and overlooking a small pond.[7]
According to Macgregor, the location of the building at the southern end of the Ironbark Camp, the area then known as Emu Point, makes Crawford’s account “the earliest known unambiguous reference in the historical record to what is now called the Bendigo Joss House Temple.”[8] The Bendigo Joss House temple which opened in 1871 was part of the Chinese Ironbark Camp, established in 1855.[9]
A photograph of the Bendigo Joss House Temple, circa 1914, showed a sign above the entrance which reads “Chee Kung Tong”, another name for the Yee Hing. The sign can still be seen above the entrance today.
Photo of the Bendigo Joss House Temple courtesy of Leigh McKinnon 2025
As Macgregor points out, in 1908 the Gee [Yee] Hing are mentioned as occupying a building in the Emu Point Chinese Camp, likely the Emu Point Joss House, as it is only a few years before the 1914 photograph of the building with their new name on it.”[10]
Cronin wrote that the Sheathed Sword Society (later known simply as the Ghee Hing, ‘Justice and Prosperity’ Society) adopted the aims and organisational framework of its parent Triad Society.[11] Macgregor points out that the Gee Hing Society may have taken over the Emu Point Joss House from a declining Sheathed Sword Society, then later renamed itself the Chinese Masonic Society.[12] Fitzgerald sees greater consistency in the use of names, stating that “the organisation retained its informal titles of Hung Men and Yee Hing in colloquial Chinese parlance and retained its formal English title of Chinese Masonic Society without interruption.”[13] Whether the relationship between the Sheathed Sword Society, the tian-di-hui, the Hung League the Yee Hing, the Chee Kung Tong and the Chinese Masonic Society was one of evolution, unification or takeover is not entirely clear.
The content in this article is the copyright of Juanita Kwok and cannot be reproduced without her permission.
[1] Macgregor, P. Joss houses of colonial Bendigo and Victoria in An Angel by the Water: Essays in honour of Dennis O’Hoy, Bendigo, Holland House Publishing, 2015, 102.
[2] Macgregor, 111, citing ‘Chinese Riot’, Bendigo Advertiser, 15 September 1856, 2. Four districts refers to See Yup, ie the counties of Sunwui, Toisan, Hoiping and Yanping.
[3] “Triad Society of China”, Mount Alexander Mail, 13 June 1859, 2.
[4] Macgregor, 2015, 102.
[5] Macgregor, 2015, citing Bendigo Advertiser, 19 February 1876, 1.
[6] Dundas J. Crawford, ‘Notes by Mr Crawford on Chinese Immigration in the Australian Colonies’, 1877, 10. Great Britain Foreign Office Confidential Print 3742, National Library of Australia, 10.
[7] Dundas J. Crawford, ‘Notes by Mr Crawford on Chinese Immigration in the Australian Colonies’, 1877, 10. Great Britain Foreign Office Confidential Print 3742. National Library of Australia.
[8] Macgregor, 2015, 102.
[9] Bendigo Joss House Temple, website, viewed 30 July 2025, https://www.bendigojosshouse.com/history/
[10] Macgregor, 2015, 116-118.
[11] Kathryn Cronin, Colonial Casualties: Chinese in early Victoria, Melbourne University Press, 1982, 32.
[12] Macgregor, 2015, 118.
[13] John Fitzgerald, Revolution And Respectability: Chinese Masons In Australian History, in Marilyn Lake and Ann Curthoys (eds) Connected Worlds: History In Transnational Perspective. Canberra: ANU Press, 2005.