Juanita Kwok
23 October 2025
The Hung League/Yee Hing is believed to have originated in Zhangzhou in Fujian Province, China in 1761, from where it spread rapidly through Fujian and Guangdong provinces.[1] Established in opposition to Manchu rule, the slogan of the League was “Overthrow the Qing and restore the Ming”. Outlawed in China, the League became active amongst overseas Chinese emigrants. The Hung League was a brotherhood sworn to secrecy for good reason. As historian C.F. Yong pointed out, the activities of Yee Hing members were highly secret for fear of punishment on their return to China.[2] Consequently sources of information on the Chinese Masons are limited. Evidence of their activities in Australia prior to 1894 relies mainly on the local English language press, as Chinese newspapers were not published regularly in Australia before then. Reports and editorials on Chinese people in the Australian newspapers were more often than not, ignorant and or racist. Besides newspaper reports, however, historical photographs and heritage objects attest to the early presence of the Chinese Masons in Australia.
The existence of the Yee Hing in Australia is dated by most historians from the 1850s when key leaders of the Taiping Rebellion and the Hung League-led Red Turban Rebellions in China joined the Australian goldrushes to avoid the Qing imperial authorities’ punishment of the remnant Taiping army and the Hung League.[3] John Fitzgerald cites a source which claimed that Wong Tock Gee the “King for Pacifying the South in the Chinese Rebel Forces”, fled from South China with his followers in a fleet of small boats, arriving in Darwin before making his way to the Victorian goldfields where he founded the southern goldfields chapters of the Yee Hing.[4]
Kok Hu-Jin asserted that the discovery in 1992 of a Hung League pamphlet amongst documents belonging to the Bendigo Chinese Association provides evidence that Bendigo was once the site of Hung League activity.[5] According to Cai Shaoqing, the format of the pamphlet indicates it came direct from mainland China and as the majority of secret societies in Australia refer to themselves as the Yee Hing Company, it can be concluded that there were two channels for Hung League expansion in Australia – through China and by way of South East Asia.[6]
Bendigo Hung League handbook, Photo courtesy of the Golden Dragon Museum, Bendigo
In his seminal study of Chinese in Australia 1901-1920, C. F. Yong referred to the Hung League in Australia as the Yee Hing, citing two sources as evidence of its existence. The first source he cited was a 1913 report in the Chinese Australian Herald, which stated that Moy Sing, the Grandmaster of the New South Wales Yee Hing, had been occupying the position for the past 55 years. Yong’s other source was Australian journalist John Sleeman, who wrote in his 1933 book White China: An Australasian Sensation, that a man known as Loong Hung Pung was the head of the anti-Manchu revolutionaries in Australia and that he inspired two important followers, Stephen King (Jung Sao) of Grafton New South Wales and Tse Yet-chong of Sydney to carry out the spread of anti-Manchu propaganda in Australia.”[7]
In his book Big White Lie, John Fitzgerald traced Sleeman’s source to conversations he had with Chinese Australian William Liu and to the published writings of Chinese Australian journalist Vivian Yung Chow.[8] Born in Lismore, Vivian Chow moved to Shanghai in 1925, where he founded an English-language newspaper, United China. In an article published in 1933, Chow asserted that the Chinese revolutionary movement, which overthrew the Qing dynasty, began with the arrival in Sydney in 1849 of Chinese scholar Loong Hung Pung, whose revolutionary anti-Manchu activities had forced him to flee China to Malaya.[9] Chow wrote that in 1850, Loong organised the Chinese Masonic Fraternity in Sydney, then, with the advent of the goldrushes, the “Great Leader” sent out great expeditions to the goldfields, united the Chinese in Victoria and New South Wales under the Chinese Masonic Party and collected a tithe of the gold finds “for the promotion of revolution in the Fatherland”, collecting “great quantities of gold” to fund the Revolution.[10]
Fitzgerald identified Loong Hung Pung as a Chinese storekeeper who died in Bathurst in 1874 aged forty-three. Whilst acknowledging discrepancies between the dates of Loong’s arrival and death in Chow’s account with the dates given on Loong’s death certificate, Fitzgerald concluded there was sufficient evidence that the leader Chow wrote of was the Bathurst storekeeper, concluding that “Loong Hung Pun was not just a figure of legend but a Yee Hing leader of note who oversaw the local operation of the credit-ticket system on the western gold fields of New South Wales.”[11]
This is a continually evolving website, and more information will be published as further research is conducted. This research is the copyright of the author and no part of it should be published elsewhere without the express permission of the author.
[1] Cai, From Mutual Aid to Public Interest, 2004.
[2] Yong, C.F. The New Gold Mountain, 165.
[3] See Yong, 157, Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, 57, Cai, 137-139.
[4] Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, 57-8.
[5] Kok Hu Jin, Chinese lodges in Australia, Bendigo, Victoria, Australia, Golden Dragon Museum, Bendigo, 2005.
[6] Cai, “From Mutual Aid to Public Interest, 136.
[7] Yong, The New Gold Mountain, 157.
[8] Chow, V. Y. 1933. In 1850 the Revolution Was Born. United China Magazine. For more information on William Liu, see Barry McGowan, ‘Liu, William Joseph (1893-1983)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography.
[9] Chow, V. Y. “In 1850 the Revolution Was Born”, United China Magazine, 1933.
[10] Chow, V. Y. “In 1850 the Revolution Was Born”, United China Magazine, 1933.
[11] Fitzgerald, Big White Lie, 75.