Making a life in NZ
Chinese market gardens and fruit shops helped feed Kiwis througout the country for decades. In turn the fertile soil helped Chinese New Zealanders build a life in Aotearoa through hard work and toil. Sally Kidson and visual journalists Virginia Woolf and
It’s been bucketing down in Gisborne. It’s so wet the dark soil at Yet How Ng’s market garden clings to gumboots like clay.
But neither Ng nor his plump veggies seem to mind. He flashes a shy toothy smile, pulls a peanut plant out of the soggy ground, cracks a brown hull and offers a nut to taste.
His peanuts, grown amongst his orderly rows of veggies, are one of his favourite snacks.
Ng, now 70, sells vegetables at the Gisborne market.
It is hard, relentless work. Days off and holidays are few and far between.
However, life was a thousand times tougher in the impoverished and nonmechanised rural China he and his family left in the 90s.
Ng, who followed his uncle Dick to New Zealand, is one of a long line of Chinese families who have worked the New Zealand soil to provide a better life for their whānau.
The first Chinese market garden was set up in 1866 and by the early 20th Century Chinese market gardens were found across NZ.
By the 1940s Chinese growers were producing 60 to 80 per cent of New Zealand’s greens and were growing veggies for forces serving in the Pacific.
But the story of the Chinese market gardeners is far more than the economic contribution the community has made to Aotearoa.
It is a tale of brave men and women who escaped unimaginable poverty in China and arrived in New Zealand with nothing. It is also a story about the discrimination they experienced.
Veteran veggie growers
Drive five minutes from downtown Ashburton, northwest towards the majestic Southern Alps, and you arrive at a historically significant site for the New Zealand Chinese. There’s not a lot left now. Just an old brick pig oven and two rows of badly weathered buildings that stand wonkily under the wide southern sky.
But the old Ng King Brothers Historical Settlement has historians fizzing. It helps tell the incredible story of hardy Chinese settlers who built a new life via the rich New Zealand soil.
It is perhaps the only
Chinese market garden settlement in New Zealand with its original buildings, and the pig kiln is one of a few original ovens left in Australasia.
In its heyday the respected King Brothers Market Garden was the largest market garden in the South Island. It sold fruit and vegetables around midCanterbury and more than 80 people lived at the garden.
Siblings Yep and Tong King and their relation Robert King know the King Brothers’ settlement in Ashburton intimately.
Their forefathers played a central role in establishing and running the business.
Tong says the men came from Taishan (Hoisan/toishan) in Canton (Guangdong) and set up the garden in the 1920s.
They later set up fruit and vegetable shops and also sold fruit and vegetable crates.
The men worked hard and the business was highly successful. Many Ashburton residents became loyal customers and lifetime friends.
It was far more than a market garden though. It was the hub of the Chinese community. The garden was a multi-generational place where those from the Seyip clan based themselves, made contacts, learned about New Zealand before setting out by themselves.
Tilling the soil for decades
It was gold, not greens, that first drew the Chinese to New Zealand.
The Chinese were invited to New Zealand to rework the abandoned goldfields by the Otago Chamber of Commerce in 1865.
Author and social historian Ruth Lam, who co-authored the historical book Sons of the Soil, says the fortune-seeking miners were peasants from Guangdong (Canton) in southern China.
They came to New Zealand to send money home to families living against a backdrop of war, banditry and starvation in mainland China.
They came from small selfsufficient villages and were ‘‘well-used to and experienced’’ in growing vegetables.
Miners quickly established small gardens on the goldfields and before long some turned to farming full-time.
The first gardens were set up in Dunedin and Alexandra in 1867. By 1871 there were six Chinese gardens in central Wellington; while Auckland’s earliest Chinese gardens were set up in the 1870s.
As the gold ran out in the 1890s, the Chinese had to find other ways to support themselves and swapped mining for gardens, laundries