Today the triangle of lanes that encloses the Chinese Masonic building at the eastern end of Campbell Street has been left behind in Sydney’s conversion into a world city. At the western end, Paddy’s Market now encases a three-star hotel, a four-star university, and a five-star residential development emblazoned with advertisements in Chinese characters. When the building opened in 1911 the eastern end was almost as prosperous as the west. A parade of storehouses, restaurants, and civic associations bearing Chinese characters ran along Campbell Street between the new Masonic Hall and the brick colonnades of Paddy’s Markets. Just around the corner from the new building, at the eastern tip of Campbell Street, sat the small but popular Chinese Christian mission church of the Rev. John Young Wai. The opening of the Mary Street headquarters placed the Chinese Masonic Society at the heart of Chinese-Australian community life in the recently federated states of Australia.

Today the Masonic Hall stands as a monument to a time when the Hung League was an organisation of some standing in the community – a time when Chinese-language newspapers were edited and printed on its ground floor, when business was transacted over Oolong Tea on the second, and when secret rituals were enacted and vendettas plotted in the closeted chambers of the third floor. None could cross the threshold to the third floor but sworn brothers who had vowed to keep the secrets of the fraternity and to defend each other’s honour unto death. The ground floor reception hall of the Mary Street headquarters bears little trace of the partitioned offices and printing presses that once marked out its busy floor plan. The floorboards have been resurfaced, the walls repainted, and tables and chairs are laid out to welcome guests. But a number of old images pinned to the walls still bear messages conveying the spirit of solidarity, justice, patriotism, masculinity, and egalitarian defiance that characterised the Chinese Masonic network from its earliest days in Australia.

To the right of the reception hall hangs a framed photograph of General Cai Tingkai, the general who defied Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek when he took on battalions of Japanese military invaders in 1931 and founded an independent People’s Government in Fujian in 1934. The Australian Masonic Society invited General Cai to tour Australia in March 1935 and meet with Chinese-Australians who shared his contempt for Chiang Kaishek’s strategy of fighting Communists in preference to resisting Japanese invaders. The photograph on the wall bears a signed message from General Cai thanking the Sydney Masonic headquarters for its assistance in arranging his visit.

To the left hangs a large framed watercolour of the legendary 108 outlaws of the Liangshan marshes, one of the many fabulous sources to which Chinese lodges trace their eclectic liturgy of beliefs and rituals. Legend has it that seven centuries ago this band of outlaws professed principles of loyalty and justice while upholding an ideal of universal brotherhood – that ‘all men are brothers’ to borrow the title of Pearl Buck’s popular translation of the legend.^[6] The 108 outlaws swore oaths of loyalty to one another that they would struggle for justice in the face of corrupt authority.

Like their outlaw heroes, members of the Chinese Masonic network were partial to the trappings of higher orders albeit domesticated into ritual hierarchies of honour and loyalty to which any member could aspire. They also practised collective discipline. A member found guilty of breaking the code of conduct was liable to receive 108 beatings with a cane, a form of punishment that was possibly more familiar to colonial readers of court columns in nineteenth century Australian newspapers than it is to kung-fu movie fans today. In 1896, for example, Victorian newspapers closely followed a case involving 108 beatings which came before the local bench in Bendigo, Victoria, after a certain Lee Fook gave evidence for the prosecution in a criminal case against a sworn brother. For this violation of the code Lee was allegedly summoned before a meeting of 200 brothers and sentenced to a punishment of 108 lashes.^[7] Similar punishment was possibly inflicted in ritual spaces on the third floor of the Sydney headquarters. The painting of 108 heroes of Liangshan which hangs prominently on the ground floor serves as a reminder to members of the egalitarian and heterodox values that bound them together and of the punishments that awaited them if they violated the code.

On the far wall, facing the entrance, hangs a set of framed scrolls boldly scripted in large characters. Two vertical scrolls hang left and right, the one on the right reading ‘Exert effort for the Hung League through commitment to loyalty and justice’, and the one on the left, ‘Sacrifice personal interests for the common good in working for the Lodge’. Between the two vertical scrolls hangs a large horizontal work of calligraphy framed behind glass. It reads:

Tracing the history of the Australian Chinese Masonic network to the ‘Two Grand Lodges’ in China leaves unanswered many of the questions we might like to ask about the arrival and expansion of the network in colonial and federation Australia. For this we need to consult local legend and Australian historical records.

Legend has it that the precursor of the Chinese Masonic Association, known variously as the Yee Hing or Gee Hing Company as well as the Hung League, came to Australia in the trail of the Taiping and Red Turban rebellions that shook south China in the middle of the nineteenth century. One fable that circulated in Melbourne, Victoria, tells of a Taiping leader by the name of Tock Gee (Huang Dezhi) who fled with his followers in a fleet of small boats from South China to Darwin, before leading them south to seek their fortunes on the goldfields of western Victoria. Tock Gee was known colloquially in Melbourne as the King for Pacifying the South in the Chinese rebel forces.^[9] In the Victorian version of the legend Tock Gee is remembered as founder of the southern goldfields chapters of the order in Australia. Another legend emanating from New South Wales tells of an anti-Qing leader by the name of Loong Hung Pung (Long Xingbang) who led hundreds of his comrades to goldfields in the western districts of the colony and there laid the foundations for the NSW lodge of the fellowship.

Historians are properly sceptical of legend. In the Victorian case, there was certainly a man by the name of Tock Gee who passed under the nickname of King for Pacifying the South within the Melbourne Masonic organisation. But there is little evidence to support the claim that Tock Gee led rebel forces in south China before migrating to Australia. Historians are also sceptical of the NSW legend of Loong Hung Pung. In a path-breaking study of Chinese-Australian history, C. F. Yong noted in passing that a certain Loong Hung Pung was rumoured to have headed a group of anti-Manchu revolutionaries in Australia in the 1850s and to have cultivated a group of devoted followers who oversaw the development of the underground NSW network over the second half of the nineteenth century. There Yong leaves the legend much as he found it. Loong Hung Pung rates no further mention in his history of Australian Chinese communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.^[10] In Yong’s view ‘better documented accounts’ confirm the pedigree of two other leaders, John Moy Sing (Mei Dongxing) and James A Chuey (Huang Zhu), as founders and organisers of the brotherhood in New South Wales from the 1850s to the 1920s.^[11]

To date, the founding of the parent lodge in nineteenth century New South Wales has been attributed to these two community leaders who brought the underground rural network into the open in Sydney and built the grand Masonic Hall in Mary Street over the first decade of the twentieth century. Around the turn of the century the NSW Masonic network went under the name of the Hongshuntang (Hung obedience hall) which was derived from the title of the Cantonese Lodge in China.^[12] Within a decade, we noted, the organisation ventured into the wider English-speaking arena under the English title of Chinese Masonic Society.^[13] In June 1916, the Hongshuntang adopted another Chinese title, the Zhonghua minguo gonghui (Chinese Republican Association) to keep pace with a similar change of name on the part of the organisation’s general headquarters in Hong Kong.^[14] Three years later, the Sydney office adopted yet another Chinese name, the Chee Kong Tong (Exert Public Benefit Lodge) in keeping with the title adopted some years earlier by the United States branch office based in San Francisco.^[15] Despite these changes to its formal Chinese designation, 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.

These changes in the English and formal Chinese titles of the Masonic network coincided with the leadership transition from Moy Sing to James Chuey, who between them oversaw the transformation of the network from a loose rural affiliation of secret-society lodges into a more tightly focused urban institution with a prominent public profile. Moy Sing is credited with founding the parent organisation around the mid-nineteenth century. C. F. Yong regards Moy Sing as the founder of the organisation from its establishment in 1858 to his retirement in 1913, when James Chuey is assumed to have succeeded him in office.^[16]

Elsewhere I have questioned the claim that Moy Sing was the sole founder of the NSW Chinese Masonic network and have pressed a rival (or complementary) claim for the legendary figure of Loong Hung Pung.^[17] Put simply, I have suggested that a number of loosely-related lodges were founded at different goldfield sites and tin mines from the middle of the nineteenth century. Moy Sing certainly played a key role in consolidating these rural lodges into a statewide network based at his Sydney headquarters over the federation period. Indeed he based the lodge at his private home for a spell before the Mary Street headquarters was completed.^[18] There is little evidence to suggest that any significant lodges operated in Sydney before this time. There were however a number of lodges in rural NSW. Up to the 1880s almost ninety percent of Chinese immigrants lived in rural settlements and regional townships in the Australian colonies. They based their lodges at the same rural sites.^[19] The early history of the Masonic network is bound up with the experience of these rural community networks, an experience readily overlooked in retrospective reconstructions of leadership genealogies constructed from the perspective of the metropolis. Without retrieving something of the diversity of this early history it is difficult to appreciate the equally varied political and social history of the movement.