The legend of Loong Hung Pung and the history of his successors in the leadership of the Chinese Masonic network opens a rare window onto social networks operating among Chinese communities in rural Australia in the colonial period. Loong’s story illustrates networking across Chinese native-place communities, networking between Chinese-Australian community leaders and European-Australian elites (as I have shown elsewhere), and networking across international boundaries of the Australian colonies, British Hong Kong, and the Chinese Empire.^[43] To be sure, we have yet to estimate the role of the early lodges in facilitating labour migration to the colonies, yet to define the kinds of relationships that were maintained among rural lodges in NSW and Victoria over the period, and yet to understand how colonial Australian lodges related to others on the Pacific rim. Nevertheless the transition from the legendary era of Loong Hung Pung to the historical era of Moy Sing and James A Chuey highlights a number of important issues in Australian and Chinese social history, and invites reflection on the causes and consequences of the consolidation of scattered rural lodges into urban-based statewide lodges around the turn of the century.

As I have suggested elsewhere, archival and family records support the basic outline of legendary accounts of the founding of Chinese Masonic lodges on the western goldfields and northern tin-mines of NSW in the mid-nineteenth century under the leadership of Loong Hung Pung. The same sources help us to trace the extension of this network into a republican brotherhood based in north-eastern NSW later in the century, and to observe its further elaboration into a modern revolutionary organisation centred in Hong Kong and Canton at the turn of the twentieth century. By Vivian Chow’s account this network survived, in attenuated form, through his own efforts and those of his comrades in Hong Kong, Canton and Shanghai into the 1920s and 1930s.

By this time however the Chinese Masonic network on the eastern Australian seaboard was moving in a different direction, indicated among other things by the English title the Chinese Masonic Society impressed on the façade of its new headquarters in Mary Street. Why did it call itself the Masonic Society? In one sense the term is a cross-cultural translation – the predominant sense in which the term appeared in early English and European accounts of Chinese secret societies. Commenting on their elaborate rituals and imagined traditions in 1925, J. S. M. Ward and W. G. Stirling observed that ‘like Freemasons in the West, the Hung or Triad Society seems justly entitled to claim that it is a lineal descendant of the Ancient Mysteries’. Gustav Schlegel made a similar observation four decades earlier: ‘Every person who has read anything of the secret societies in China must have been struck with the resemblance between them and the Society of Freemasons.’ Earlier still, in 1855, Howqua engaged in cross-cultural translation when he told the Victorian goldfields commission that the rebels who were known to Chinese miners as Hung League or Taiping rebels were ‘Freemasons’. This was translation by analogy.

Analogous features of the two institutions aside, there has been little attempt to identify concrete sets of relationships that may have developed between the two autonomous networks, or to explore their wider implications for the social and political orientation of Chinese secret-society networks outside of China.^[44] One exception is C. F. Yong’s pioneering study of Chinese-Australian history of the period, which hints that the League’s adoption of the title Chinese Masonic Society was not merely an act of translation. There were, he noted, networks of personal associations linking Chinese Masons and European Freemasonry at the time. Nevertheless the details of personal and institutional relations remain largely unexplored.^[45]

In colonial Australia the relationship between the two networks was more concrete. The reorganisation of the Hung League in the 1890s and early 1900s followed closely on the consolidation of European Freemasonry as an urban-based network in Sydney in 1888, when many scattered rural and urban lodges of European Freemasonry merged to form the NSW United Grand Lodge. The Chinese brotherhood followed suit, first moving toward colony-wide consolidation in the 1890s, building offices for its state headquarters in Mary Street over the following decade, and finally proclaiming itself the headquarters of the Chinese Masonic Society of NSW.

The analogous sequence of Masonic consolidations, involving both the Chinese Masonic Society and the United Freemasons, could be regarded as fortuitous were it not for a number of identifiable connections linking the two fraternal networks. Chinese-Australians were among the first people of Chinese descent in the world to gain entry to the international order of Freemasons. Some time before the successful consolidation of colonial Freemasonry, the Sydney tea merchant and teashop entrepreneur Quong Tart (Mei Guangda) was admitted into the Order of Oddfellows under the English constitution. On 8 October 1885 he was initiated to the Lodge of Tranquillity which convened at Bondi in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. Quong rose to the second degree in the Lodge of Tranquillity on 11 March 1886 and was elevated to the status of Master Mason on 12 July 1886. Quong Tart was not, to my knowledge, a member of the Hung League when he joined the Freemasons. He was however on close terms with a number of Chinese Masonic leaders and he remained an active Freemason until his death in 1903, when forty members of the fraternity accompanied his funeral procession, in full regalia, processing behind an oak coffin draped with his Master Mason’s apron.^[46]

By one account, Quong Tart was the third Freemason of Chinese descent to be admitted to the order anywhere in the world.^[47] By the time of his death in 1903 he was far from the sole Chinese-Australian member of the Order. ‘Chinese and Western’ Freemasons marched side by side in his funeral cortege according to a contemporary Chinese-Australian newspaper account.^[48] Others admitted into the order between his initiation in 1885 and his death in 1903 include Sun Johnson, W. R. G. Lee, and his son William Lee, in NSW, and Way Lee in South Australia – each at the same time a prominent member of the Hung League who played a role in translating its idioms and rituals into the wider English-speaking world of Federation Australia.^[49]

It would be misleading to suggest that local Freemason lodges embraced Chinese-Australians as freely as they did Australians of European descent. Chinese-Australians were no more widely welcomed into the Order of Freemasons in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia than Chinese in colonial Asia or North America. Very few Chinese names are recorded on Australian membership rolls before the mid-twentieth century. In cases where Minute Books do refer to Chinese nominees they occasionally record blackball attempts at exclusion. Records of the inner-Sydney Wentworth Lodge record a case in 1903 when a Chinese nominee was withdrawn before his name came up for voting:

While some lodges discriminated against nominees on racial grounds other lodges appear to have been founded to accommodate minorities. The invitation for Quong Tart to join in 1884 was issued by a Jewish lodge. Although raised by a Scottish family in rural NSW, and living in the western suburb of Ashfield while expanding his Sydney business interests, Quong Tart was initiated into a lodge that had been established with an exclusively Jewish membership in June 1875. Three years elapsed before the first non-Jewish member was admitted, in May 1878, and no more than a dozen members were admitted to the brotherhood in any one year when Quong was initiated in the 1880s.^[51]

Despite these limitations on membership, invitations to join Freemason lodges were issued to some of the most prominent Hung League members in the 1890s and early 1900s. In consequence, the transformation of the Hung League into the Chinese Masonic Society over the first decade of the twentieth century came to mirror the institutional history of the NSW United Grand Lodge of Freemasons in the late 1880s and early 1890s. European Freemason lodges came together to form the NSW United Grand Lodge in the third year of Quong Tart’s membership of the fraternity. Under the leadership of Moy Sing and James Chuey, rural Hung League lodges converged to form the NSW Chinese Masonic Society, and refocused their energy from the political emphasis that had characterised rural lodges associated with Loong Hung Pung, towards social, economic, and domestic political priorities related to their members’ immediate concerns in colonial and federation Australia. Its leaders built a statewide organisation on a substantial urban base to mobilise support for reform of Australian laws and regulations governing Chinese immigration, for promotion of business ties between Chinese and European Australians, and for the expansion of Australian imports and exports with colonial Hong Kong and Malaya and with the treaty ports of imperial and republican China.

They also took advantage of the resources of the consolidated European network. As early as January 1896 Chinese-Australian community leaders were convening public meetings in the Sydney Freemasons Hall, and in 1901 community members gathered in the Masonic Hall to celebrate the Emperor Guangxu’s birthday. Chinese Masonic leaders also made use of the hall. In November 1911, for example, Masonic leader James Chuey convened a meeting of the Young China League with leading Sydney merchant George Bew in the United Freemason’s Hall.^[52] As individuals, prominent Masonic members such as James Chuey held partisan political views and took part in a range of reformist and revolutionary organisations, including the Young China League and, at a later date, the Chinese Nationalist movement. From the turn of the century, however, the Chinese Masonic network no longer sponsored its own political party. It worked instead to forge links with other community organisations including European-Australian institutions and Chinese-Australian ones.

These institutional innovations were grafted onto the early foundations of rural Hung League networks long operating in NSW, in the sense that the politics of the early lodges forged regional colonial ties that sat alongside ties of kin and native place in China. The year of Loong Hung Pung’s death falls into the earliest period for which we can find written records of pan-Chinese associations rooted on colonial Australian soil. By one account, Loong Hung Pung was laid to rest under a tombstone that recorded the gratitude of the ‘Chinese Community of NSW’ to their departed leader in 1874.^[53] If true, this was a significant gesture. We are accustomed to thinking of Chinese immigrants as organising themselves along lines of kinship and native-place associations for mutual aid and social advancement in the mid-nineteenth century. Most of the consolidated organisations that appeared around the Pacific rim from the mid nineteenth century were loose confederations of native place and surname associations referring to China.^[54] As early as the 1870s, however, some Chinese institutions in Australia were organising regional colonial networks that were not only unrelated to native place or kinship ties in China but specifically related to their place of domicile in Australia. Those who mourned the death of Loong Hung Pung in 1874 did so through the agency of a pan-Chinese community of an Australian colony – a secret society network with an organisational locus in New South Wales.