Mauritian of Chinese origin
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| Total population | ||
|---|---|---|
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35,000 3% of the Mauritian pop. (2010) |
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| Regions with significant populations | ||
| Half in Port Louis, with small numbers all over the island | ||
| Languages | ||
| Mauritian Creole, French, English,Chinese (predominantly Hakka, Hokkien and small minority Cantonese) | ||
| Religion | ||
| Roman Catholicism, Taoism, Buddhism, Others | ||
| Related ethnic groups | ||
| Chinese people in Madagascar, Sino-Réunionnais, Sino-Seychellois, Chinese South Africans | ||
Mauritians of Chinese origin, also known as Sino-Mauritians, are Mauritians who trace their ethnic ancestry to China. Sino-Mauritians form about 3% of the local population.
Like members of other communities on the island, some of the earliest Chinese in Mauritius arrived involuntarily, having been "shanghaied" from Sumatra in the 1740s to work in Mauritius in a scheme hatched by the French admiral Charles Hector, comte d'Estaing; however, they soon went on strike to protest their kidnapping. Luckily for them, their refusal to work was not met by deadly force, but merely deportation back to Sumatra. In the 1780s, thousands of voluntary migrants set sail for Port Louis from Guangzhou on board British, French, and Danish ships; they found employment as blacksmiths, carpenters, cobblers, and tailors, and quickly formed a small Chinatown, the camp des Chinois, in Port Louis. Even after the British takeover of the island, migration continued unabated. Between 1840 and 1843 alone, 3,000 Chinese contract workers arrived on the island; by mid-century, the total resident Chinese population reached five thousand.
The earliest migrants were largely Cantonese-speaking; but, later, Hakka-speakers from Meixian, further east in Canton (modern day Guangdong), came to dominate numerically; as in other overseas Chinese communities, rivalry between Hakka and Cantonese became a common feature of the society. By the 1860s, shops run by Sino-Mauritians could be found all over the island. Some members of the colonial government thought that further migration should be prohibited, but Governor John Pope Hennessy, recognising the role that Sino-Mauritians played in providing cheap goods to less well-off members of society, resisted the restrictionists' lobbying. I
In the late 19th to early 20th century, Chinese men in Mauritius married Indian women due to both a lack of Chinese women and the higher numbers of Indian women on the island. At first the prospect of relations with Indian women was unappealing to the original all male Chinese migrants yet they eventually had to establish sexual unions with Indian women since there were no Chinese women arriving in the country. The 1921 census in Mauritius counted that Indian women there had a total of 148 children fathered by Chinese men. These Chinese were mostly traders. It was much more common for Chinese and Indians to intermarry than within their own group. Intermarriage between people of between different Chinese and Indian language groups is rare; it is so rare that the cases of intermarriage between Cantonese and Hakka can be individually named. Similarly, intermarriage between Hakka Chinese and Indians hardly occurs.
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Wikipedia