Accounts that place Moy Sing at the centre of Chinese Masonic history in Australia make little mention of his politics. Moy Sing’s achievements, it appears, were largely administrative. He consolidated the lodges into a statewide network and elevated the status of the old brotherhood to something akin to freemasonry in Australia; that is, respectable, formidable, and above sectarian politics. Loong Hung Pung, by contrast, is identified in legend as the founder of a revolutionary tradition in Australia that long predated the Sydney consolidation and which extended the local Masonic network well beyond Australia.
In 1958, two Taiwanese scholars published an unsourced account of Loong Hung Pung’s place in the history of the greater Chinese revolution in the period preceding Sun Yatsen’s arrival on the scene. In a chapter of their book on Chinese-Australian history, Liu Daren and Tian Xinyuan state that Loong Hung Pung was the inspiration behind a radical movement based in Australia that helped to set up the earliest of Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary organisations, the Revive China Society (Xingzhonghui). Loong Hung Pung, they reported, ‘was the head of the secret societies in Australia, and advocated opposition to the Manchus and restoration of the Han people while advocating fairness and freedom’. Liu and Tian trace a revolutionary genealogy that bears out many of the claims made for Loong Hung Pung in other sources that recount his influence on the radicalisation of nineteenth century Chinese-Australian communities. These include the claim that Loong inspired Chow Toong Yung and others to set up a revolutionary organisation which was to form a pillar for the erection of the revolutionary Revive China Society in Hong Kong in the 1890s.[20]
In 1933 the serving Grand Master of the Chinese Masonic movement, writing under the cryptic title of ‘19 1/2’, published a eulogy for ‘The Great Leader’ Loong Hung Pung in the Shanghai magazine United China.[21] Loong, he wrote, was the embodiment of the literary and artistic genius of his race. His writings and speeches were ‘faithful to the noblest traditions of the ancients’. At the same time they were highly original, making a lasting ‘contribution towards the enrichment of the general mass of mankind, and towards the creation of a New China in the New World’. This reference to Loong’s writings touches a treatise associated with his name and known in English as ‘The Reconstruction of China as a Modern State’. A pamphlet under this title is reported to have circulated internationally among anti-Manchu activists in the nineteenth century and to have reached Sun Yatsen some time before Sun penned his famous Three Principles of the People. Assuming it ever existed, the text is no longer extant. According to one not wholly reliable source, Sun Yatsen drew upon Loong’s work in drafting his famous Three Principles: ‘Sun Yatsen procured a copy of Loong’s great masterpiece … and started to copy and transpose it. He was unlucky to lose his copy in a fire, and could not procure another, though he tried hard.’[22]
The source for this claim, an Australian journalist by the name of Vivian Chow, proceeded to the less credible claim that Sun tried to pass off as his own what he recalled of Loong’s work from memory. ‘Thus we have the pot-pourri of the Great Leader, Loong Hung Pung, advanced under the name of Sun Yatsen, “The Three Principles of the People”.’ Although tendentious this claim finds indirect support in Sun’s own writings. Sun Yatsen complained at one point that he could not access his collection of books and manuscripts when he drafted the Three Principles of the People in 1924 because his library had been recently destroyed in a fire.[23] Still, the key claim that Sun passed off Loong’s writings as his own is unverifiable. It is worth noting all the same that Sun included in his final manuscript a curious Australian story about a land speculator who made his fortune by bidding for property at auction, in Melbourne, while gesturing aimlessly in a drunken stupor. The moral of this Australian tale was that the state should capture increases in property values because land speculation was an immoral source of wealth.[24] To this day, the source for the Melbourne episode in Sun’s Three Principles remains a mystery.
Loong was reputed to have been an organiser and strategist as well as a revolutionary pamphleteer. Vivian Chow credited him with organising ‘great expeditions … numbering thousands per contingent’ to the Australian goldfields, and with cultivating the major ‘goldfields commanders’ including Yeng Lee, Yik Bow, Way Lee, and Kai Koon, who was placed ‘in charge of goldfields affairs’. Some of these names are difficult to trace today; Way Lee as we shall see was an early Freemason as well as Chinese Mason, and Kai Koon was naturalised as a British subject in Grafton in 1857.[25] Much of this early Hung League activity seems to have centred on the town of Grafton and neighbouring townships in northern NSW. Loong’s organisation was also said to have had members in China to whom it sent funds from the goldfields to support anti-Manchu activities.[26]
By one account their contacts in China let the Australian organisers down. Exposure of mismanagement and waste of the funds remitted from the goldfields to brothers in China appears to have shaken and transformed the NSW Masonic leadership. Corruption of the network in China was exposed through an inquiry into the movement undertaken over the period following Loong’s death. The results of this inquiry led to a decision to cease remitting funds to China and encourage instead direct intervention by Chinese-Australians in the anti-Manchu revolution in China. Loong Hung Pung’s successors were directed to leave Australia and carry their ideals back to China.[27]
The decision to commit people rather than funds to the cause in China appears to explain why one activist, John See, returned to China in the 1880s. If so, it also accounts for the involvement of his children James and Thomas See in the avant-garde reform and revolutionary movements that emerged in Hong Kong in the early 1890s. It may also help to explain why Moy Sing, James Chuey, and their consolidated Sydney lodge felt at liberty to plot a new path of civic respectability for the brotherhood from around the turn of the century.
The claim that elements of a revolutionary rural lodge in NSW were relocated to China to promote some kind of revolution appears to have some foundation. One source for the claim, Vivian Chow, enjoyed close family connections with the Hung League.[28] His mother, Jessie Mary King, was the daughter of Stephen King and Annie Lavinia Lavett who married in Grafton in 1877. Vivian recalled that his grandfather Stephen, was the second Grand Master of a rural lodge in NSW and a pioneer revolutionary in what he called the ‘Revolutionary and Independence Association of Australian Chinese’. Vivian’s father Chow Toong Yung is reported to have been co-leader of this Australian revolutionary party with his friend John See. During a brief visit to Sydney in October 1932, Vivian claims to have convened a meeting of ‘the remnants of the Australian Chinese Independence and Revolutionary Society’.[29] At this time he was touring NSW as ‘Official historian of the Chinese Masonic Lodge and Revolutionary and Independence Association of Australian Chinese’ – a grandiose title which nevertheless asserts an explicit link between the later Masonic network and the little-known political association founded by his relatives five or six decades earlier.[30]
Another source for the claim that there was an Australian revolutionary society which pre-dated comparable societies in China and Hong Kong is John See’s son James – better known to historians of China under the name Tse Tsan Tai. After moving to Hong Kong with his father, James played a role in founding the first revolutionary organisation in Hong Kong and subsequently co-founded the first revolutionary party with Sun Yatsen and others in that colony. James himself left a record of these events which revealed that the Australian secret society network was on intimate terms with Taiping rebels in China and with a variety of post-Taiping secret society organisations based in Hong Kong and Canton from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century. He also acknowledges in passing that his father led an Australian revolutionary party which he called the ‘Chinese Independence Party of Australia’. This was presumably his own rendering of the society which Vivian Chow called the ‘Revolutionary and Independence Society of Australian Chinese’.[31]
James See came into the world in Sydney on 16 May 1872 at a time when Loong Hoong Pung was still entertaining visitors at his store in Bathurst.[32] Loong belonged to the generation of James’ father John who was born in Kaiping County in Guangdong Province in 1831, arrived in Australia in the late 1850s or 1860s and, with his wife Que Sam, bore six children over the decade beginning in 1870.[33] On first arriving in Sydney, John See established a business at 39 Sussex Street under the title of the Tai Yick (Taiyi) Firm.[34] He later moved with his family to Northern NSW where he opened the Tse & Co general store in Grafton before finally settling in a tin-mining town not far from Inverell known as Tingha. The family was well-known on the northern tablelands of NSW under the surname Ah See. All six children were raised as Christians. The young Tse Tsan Tai was baptised James See by Anglican Bishop Greenway on 1 November 1879 in Grafton’s Christ Church Cathedral, along with his elder sister Sarah and younger brothers Thomas and Samuel.[35] In 1887 John See moved with his family to Hong Kong where he lived and worked until his death in 1903.[36]
According to Vivian Chow, John See had long been a ‘secret sect member’ and ‘Chinese Freemason’ in Australia before retiring to Hong Kong.[37] Elsewhere, as we noted, Vivian Chow claimed that John See was co-leader of the Revolutionary and Independence Association with Vivian Chow’s father Chow Toong Yung.[38] These claims are supported in a book James See published in Hong Kong two decades after the death of his father. In The Chinese Republic: Secret History of the Revolution, he painted a graphic picture of the involvement of his father’s generation in a revolutionary secret organisation in Australia dating back to the 1870s which continued to maintain links with defeated leaders of the Taiping Rebellion in China well into the 1890s.
The See family became involved in insurrectionist movements against the Manchu imperial government shortly after they stepped ashore in Hong Kong. While a lad of seventeen, James joined a group of like-minded young men to plan the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty. With Yeung Ku Wan (Yang Quyun), in 1891 he formed the earliest revolutionary organisation in China, the Foo Yan Man Ser Kwong Fook Hui (Furen wenshe guangfuhui – Furen cultural society restoration association).[39] It was this association that later merged with Sun Yatsen’s Hawaiian faction to form the Hong Kong chapter of the Revive China Society (Xingzhonghui). Yeung was the inaugural leader of the Hong Kong Revive China Society but within a short time surrendered the position to Sun Yatsen.
James See followed Yeung in preference to Sun, and refrained from joining Sun Yatsen’s later organisation, the Revolutionary Alliance (Tonmenghyui), on account of his loyalty to Yeung. At the same time he maintained his Australian connections and encouraged his patron to consider visiting Australia. Yeung consented. In a letter dated 26 May 1900, Yeung Ku Wan informed Tse Tsan Tai of his plans to visit Australia over the coming year. This visit was possibly prompted by news that Liang Qichao, a leader of the rival Empire Reform Association (Baohuanghui), was intending to visit Australia around the same time. Liang visited Australia from October 1900 to May 1901. Yeung was less fortunate. On 10 January 1901 a gang of hired assassins broke into the school room where he was taking classes and murdered him. The assassins fled to sanctuary in imperial Canton.[40]
Although siding with Yeung Ku Wan in his competition with Sun Yatsen in Hong Kong, James See maintained independent Australian connections that were facilitated by his father’s links with secret society organisations and Taiping rebels through the old Australian Masonic network. On one occasion, James recalled, a nephew of the Taiping Christian King Hong Xiuchuan called by to speak with his father John See at their home in Hong Kong. This nephew of Hong Xiuchuan was said to have trained and fought in Taiping armies in the 1850s and 1860s. He travelled under a variety of names including Hung Chun-fu, Hung Wu, and Hung Chuen-fook. On this occasion Hung called by to seek strategic advice from James’ father regarding plans to mount an anti-imperial uprising in Canton. John See was by this time too frail to take part himself and encouraged his twenty-seven year old son to step forward in his place. James and his younger brother Thomas then set to work with the nephew of the Taiping leader in plotting an armed uprising in China under the guidance of the aging leader of the Revolutionary and Independence Association of Australian Chinese.
The aim of the uprising was to overthrow the imperial system and establish a modern democratic form of government in China. They certainly did not propose to restore the Ming but, significantly, nor did they propose to establish a republic. James See described the 1902 putsch as a ‘commonwealth’ uprising, in contrast to the ‘republican’ uprising organised by Sun Yatsen. He explained the difference: ‘I decided to plan and organize another attempt to capture Canton and establish [a] Commonwealth Government under a ‘Protector’, as I was of the opinion that the ‘Republican’ form of government was too advanced for China and the Chinese.’[41]
Before the uprising took place, James expressed the view that the new commonwealth should be set up under ‘able Christian leadership’.[42] It is not difficult to detect his Australian experience in James’ revolutionary proposal to establish a ‘commonwealth’ (on the model of the new ‘commonwealth’ government of Australia) in which the Chinese people were placed under the care of able Christian ‘Protectors’.