Once laborers arrived in the Americas, the horrific conditions experienced on their voyage did not improve. Coolie laborers faced grueling work in plantations, guano pits, and infrastructure projects, abuse by project overseers, and harsh living and weather conditions.1 Estimates suggest that between 1847 and 1874, the mortality rate for Chinese laborers ranged from fifty to sixty percent. In Peru, between 1849 and 1876, nearly half of the Chinese population aged nine to forty died from exhaustion, suicide, or ill-treatment.2
The pamphlet “Illustrated Description of the Living Hells,” published in 1875 by a prominent Cantonese publisher, vividly depicts the harsh conditions endured by coolies. Senior Lecturer Pierre-Emmanuel Roux of the University of Paris delivered a lecture on the publication, exploring its significance and highlighting ongoing kidnappings, mistreatment, and deaths of Chinese laborers.3 Roux describes the piece as a means to draw attention to a new form of slavery that persisted even after its supposed abolition in the Americas.
The first image below shows a Chinese man being forced onto a ship bound for Cuba. The second depicts a scene titled "Latrines as prison," illustrating recruiting agents who used humiliating, coercive means to "voluntarily" compel Chinese workers to sign an employment contract.
Roux explains that the format and style of the pamphlet is heavily influenced by the Yuli Chaozhuan (Jade Calendar Manuscript), a renowned moral text depicting severe punishments for sinners in Buddhist hells. Roux describes the piece below as picturing “refining sugar with human bones.” This death penalty scene represents the height of horror in Cuba’s sugar plantations. The concept depicted was all the more unbearable for the Chinese of the 19th century, whose rituals of the dead included preserving the body of the deceased and returning them, if far from home, to be buried in their native land.
Roux stresses the intended purpose of the pamphlet: as a warning. He notes that that “the author adopted a similar approach to better serve his purpose and thus reach as wide a readership as possible: the texts and illustrations depict Cuba and Peru as terrestrial hells and expose the means not to sink into it.” Although the pamphlet initially sold widely in bookstores across southern China, its success was fleeting. Spanish representatives in the Qing Empire demanded its censorship to prevent any potential anti-Western sentiment, and the pamphlet was taken out of print circulation.
Fortunately, several copies were rediscovered in recent years, where they had languished unnoticed in a handful of European and American libraries for over a century. Roux emphasizes the significance of this rediscovery for historians, noting that the illustrations offers "new primary material for understanding the coolie slave trade, as well as offering insights into various aspects of Chinese society" during the period.
Chinese Coolie Resistance
The verb mutiny refers to rising against or refusing to obey authority. Despite Western stereotypes of Asian people as passive and submissive, often perpetuated by the model minority myth, our community has a long history of resistance. During the period of the Chinese coolie trade, several documented mutinies occurred against oppressive conditions.
Two illustrations by Edgar Holden from Harper’s Monthly Magazine in 1864 depict a rebellion aboard a ship carrying Chinese laborers from Macau to Cuba: the illustration above depicts Chinese coolies preparing to mutiny, while the illustration below depicts rebelling laborers writing their demands in the blood of those who had fallen before them during the mutiny.
Although the revolt was ultimately unsuccessful, these images challenge the notion of Chinese laborers as passive victims and reveal their agency in the face of adversity. Moreover, resistance continued beyond shipboard mutinies. In Latin America, Chinese laborers faced severe control through debt bondage and harsh physical punishment but continued to resist. On plantations, many coolies employed tactics similar to those of enslaved African-Americans: confronting Chinese contractors, stealing, escaping, faking illness, striking, and disrupting production to protest their unfair conditions. In some cases, they also formed cross-racial alliances with African workers.
Because written accounts of the mistreatment within the coolie trade had been suppressed, as in the case of “Illustrated Description of the Living Hells,” public awareness of the extent of the abusive practices was low. This began to change in the 1870s. In 1872, Chinese coolies on the Peruvian ship María Luz escaped while docked in a Japanese port and reported their mistreatment to military authorities, who ultimately found that the conditions aboard the ship were on par with enslavement.4 In 1874, government officials dispatched by the Qing dynasty to Peru and Cuba, among other locations, found evidence of widespread abuse. These two events were critical to putting the spotlight on and ultimately ending the exploitative trade, as international pressure mounted. The question then became, what would happen to the Chinese workers who lived in places like Peru or Cuba?