The Hopetown Chinese settlement

The Hopetown settlement at Kamuni Creek (a creek more well-known for the present-day Santa Mission and Santa Aratak villages) began in 1865 as an effort by colonial authorities to induce Chinese indentured labourers to remain in British Guiana after their contracts were up.

With the meagre salaries of the sugar plantations and limited economic opportunities after their indentureship period came to an end, a large number of Chinese workers were thinking of leaving the colony.

Many had heard of the Chinese in Trinidad accumulating wealth from engaging in rice cultivation and commerce there, and saw no prospects for this in British Guiana.

A Christian missionary in British Guiana known as O Tye Kim (Wu-Tai-Kam), recognised the dissatisfaction among them and devised a plan to encourage them to stay.

According to F.O. Low, a “barrister-at-law” writing in the 1911 Timehri Journal, there were two reasons the Chinese migration would have been disastrous for the planters and the colony.

One was that the planters would “have lost a floating supply of free and trained labour, which on account of their being practically no other channels of employment, could be obtained at a nominal rate”; two was that news reaching China of the dissatisfied labour market on the colony would gravely affect labour arriving from that country.

O Tye Kim’s solution was to establish a “Christian Chinese settlement” not only to spread Christianity but also to create a place where the former indentured labourers could work and live independently to accumulate their wealth and improve their future prospects.

He petitioned then Governor Hincks for a free land grant at Camoonie (Kamuni) Creek, and a small loan to establish the settlement on the left bank of the creek, a tributary of the Demerara River.

Enthusiastic about the idea, Governor Hincks granted the request and the petition was carried in 1865.

Immediately, some 25 settlers were taken to the area, and by the end of the year there were about 70 Chinese settlers. Some historians put the original settlers at 12, with about 170 by year end.

The settlement was named Hopetown in honour of Vice Admiral Sir James Hope who had visited the settlement after he had arrived on the colony just a few days earlier (some historians say he visited in October that year).

The settlers began to cultivate rice, plantains, eddoes and other cash crops, establish poultry and pig farms, while charcoal soon became a major industry, eclipsing agriculture. Soon the settlement was producing charcoal and shingles to be sold in Georgetown shops. By the following year (1866) it is said that Hopetown was producing about 1700 barrels of charcoal per month.

Reflecting the partial aims of O Tye Kim, a large church was built soon after and was described in 1915 as “a monument to attest the evidence of a once thriving Chinese town”. Little else is known of the church.

The decline of the settlement came soon after.  In 1866, just a year after the settlement was created, allegations of improprieties by O Tye Kim arose with regard to the settlement’s accounts and his own financial enterprises. Then in 1867, an inappropriate relationship further reduced his reputation and he is said to have secretly departed the settlement and eventually the colony.

Nothing is known of him since and Hopetown is considered to have degenerated after he left, due to what some historians call a lack of effective administration, as well as the exhaustion of wood from the immediate area for charcoal production; periodic plundering of crops by wild animals and birds, along with flooding.

F.O. Low writes of several (other) reasons for its decline, after speaking with some of its older residents as well as former settlers.

He states that after settlers had accumulated wealth, they moved to the city of Georgetown where work was “less arduous and the profits greater”.

Additionally, he points out, younger generations of Chinese were reluctant to work long and hard in the fields when it was more lucrative to work in the city and eventually “be the owner of his own shop”.

He also points to the fact that the lack of females among the settlers meant that many of the settlement’s males died childless, further reducing the population.

According to “Mission Life; Or Home and Foreign Church Work, Volume 5” of the 170 persons in 1866, 40 were women and 20 were children.

Low states that he considered the failure to plant permanent crops as “one of the principle reasons for the decline of the settlement”.

According to him, that failure stemmed from the lack of knowledge of the crops suitable for the lands, the unwillingness to wait for the returns from the crop, along with the lack of individual land titles to encourage a motivation of inheritance.

Finally, Low suggests, the Boeraserie Scheme, which began around 1867 to create a reservoir for the agricultural lands of the West Coast and West Bank Demerara, “was also largely instrumental in bringing about the decline of the settlement” because it would during the rainy season allow for flooding of the settlement’s agricultural lands.

In 1903, according to one source, title to the land at Hopetown was given to the Trustees of the Anglican Church at Hopetown, for the Chinese immigrants then settled at Hopetown and such other Chinese as may settle there, and their descendants.

This land was subsequently entrusted in 1954 to the Incorporated Trustees of the Anglican Church in the Diocese of Guyana.

Then, in 1972, it was agreed by Dr. Alan John Knight, then Bishop of Guyana, who was also the Archbishop of the West Indies, that the land should be leased for 99 years to the Chinese Association.

At its peak in 1874, Hopetown is said to have a population of about 800 Chinese. By 1891 that number was reduced to 240; by 1901 it had dwindled to 198, mostly the old and infirm.

By the time the 1911 census came around, the settlement was not mentioned, only the fact that among the settlers along Kamuni Creek, there were 73 Chinese.

In 1914, blacks, East Indians and mixed races began appearing in Hopetown to make up about one-third of the population, among 46 pure Chinese.

Cecil Clementi, author of “The Chinese in British Guiana” (1915) proved prophetic when he writes at the end of his chapter on Hopetown settlement: “Two villages of Aboriginal Settlement Indians—Aritak and Santa, eight and a quarter and nine miles respectively from the mouth of the creek—appear today to have better prospects of success.”