Zhongshan in Sydney's Chinatown

Many Chinese migrants to Australia in the one hundred years from the midnineteenth century hailed from the villages of Zhongshan county. They formed a significant proportion of Chinese who ended up in Sydney. They congregated in areas in the city that were conducive to their livelihoods, first in The Rocks, close to the harbour, and later in and around Dixon Street in the Haymarket district, where the city's produce markets were located. Restrictions imposed by the White Australia policy, which favoured commercial activity as grounds for exemption, were an important reason why the merchant class came to dominate in the Sydney Chinese community. Their businesses were highly successful, and some of these merchants became fabulously wealthy through their establishment of iconic transnational enterprises. At the same time, they maintained their connections with their ancestral villages in Zhongshan by sending remittances, conducting trade, or sponsoring fellow villagers to come to Australia. Many of them operated from their premises in Haymarket, where their stores, warehouses, and boarding houses were concentrated. Their class privilege also enabled them to put a defining stamp on the social and material fabric of the Haymarket district, which was later officially named Sydney's Chinatown.