In conclusion, I would like to speculate on the significance of a number of cemetery monuments erected over this period in Victoria and Tasmania. These monuments certainly indicate pan-Chinese sentiments among immigrants in colonial Victoria and Tasmania. The question I wish to pose here is whether they also signify a ‘modern’ sense of China as a political state, in the Victorian case, and as a Confucian national community in the case of Tasmania. If so we may be in a position to trace a transition from revolution to respectability that parallels, monumentally, the narrative history we have been recounting of Chinese Australian history.

From the early 1870s, monumental stele began to appear in colonial Victoria bearing Chinese language inscriptions commemorating the deaths of ‘elders’ from ‘all provinces’ who were laid to rest on Australian soil. These early steles refer to the immigrants’ country of birth not by the contemporary Chinese term ‘Great Qing State’ (Daqingguo) but by the modern idiom ‘Chinese State’ or ‘China’ (Zhonghuaguo). To the best of my knowledge these are among the earliest recorded references to the modern term for ‘China’ to be found on Chinese-language monuments in the world.^[55] In avoiding the term for China used by the Manchu Qing dynasty we might ask whether they also challenged the legitimacy of the Great Qing State. We cannot say for certain. But a banner preserved among holdings of Chinese Masonic artifacts in the Bendigo Golden Dragon Museum suggests that the term circulated within the nineteenth century rural Hung League network. It was possibly members of the Hung League who erected these memorials in the 1870s.^[56]

One of the earliest of these Victorian steles was erected in the Melbourne General Cemetery in 1873. The central column reads ‘Graves of Honorable Elders from all Provinces of China’ (zhonghuaguo). The column on the left reads ‘A common offering from native villagers of the two Guangdong prefectures of Guangzhou and Zhaoqing.’ The right column reads ‘Erected on an auspicious day in the spring of 1873’ (Tongzhi guiyounian). Similar steles were erected in Ballarat, Bendigo and Beechworth cemeteries over the decade, each avoiding mention of the Manchu Qing state in favour of the term ‘Chinese State’ and each referring to elders ‘from all provinces’. The choice of words possibly reflects the development of pan-Chinese nationalism directed against the Qing but not noticeably oriented toward the restoration of the Ming, as standard histories of the Hung League would predict.

By the turn of the twentieth century, political terms of this kind were no longer to be found inscribed on cemetery monuments. Comparable steles erected in cemeteries in Northeastern Tasmania in the early 1900s refer to the ‘Great Qing State’ in preference to the ‘Chinese State’. They also make reference to the teachings of Confucius. One memorial stele erected alongside a ceremonial oven in Moorina Cemetery in 1906, for example, bears inscriptions in Chinese and English. The Chinese reads: ‘Great Qing State, Graves of honorable elders, thirty-second year of Guangxu’. The accompanying English inscription reads: ‘This stone has been erected by the Chinese of Garibaldi, Argus and Moorina as a place of worship of Confusias [sic] religion to the departed Chinese in the Moorina Cemetery.’^[57] An almost identical memorial, erected in nearby Weldborough Cemetery in 1909, begins with the Chinese expression ‘Great Qing State’ and ends in English with the dedication: ‘This stone has been erected by the Chinese as a place of worship of Confusias [sic] religion to the departed Chinese and those connected with the Chinese in the Weldborough Cemetery.’^[58] Such references to the Manchu Qing dynasty and to Confucianism are nowhere to be found among the earlier cemetery monuments in rural Victoria.^[59] In the design of its cemetery steles, Victorian Chinese communities possibly declined to acknowledge the presence of the Manchu Qing Dynasty on the same grounds that Loong Hung Pung and his followers in NSW swore to ‘oppose the Manchus and restore the Han people’.

These differences may indicate varying regional orientations on the part of Chinese-Australian communities in NSW and Victoria, on the one hand, and those of colonial Tasmania on the other. Given the close association between Tasmanian and Victorian Chinese communities this seems fairly unlikely. It is tempting to speculate that the disappearance of the modern term for China found on 1870s memorials in Victoria and its replacement on later memorials with references to departed elders of the great Qing state reflects a new kind of community politics that was emerging around the turn of the twentieth century – a kind of politics more in keeping with the respectable and conservative urban leadership of Moy Sing and James A Chuey, in Sydney, and their counterparts around Australia over the federation era. This was the deradicalised space into which Sun Yatsen and his republican nationalist revolutionaries made their move when they introduced ‘modern’ nationalism to Australia’s Chinese communities over the period up to and succeeding the 1911 Revolution in China.

I wish to acknowledge the assistance of Cai Shaoqing, Phillip Bramble, Sophie Couchman, Mark Finnane, Jack Gregory, Kuo Mei-fen, Kok Hu Jin, Daphne Kok, Li Gongzhong and Adam McKeown in identifying sources and offering helpful criticisms and suggestions for this paper and to offer special thnaks to the Archives of the United Grand Lodge of NSW and the ACT. Research for this chapter was supported by the Australian Research Council and conducted while I was employed in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University.