Early Chinese on Maui played an important role in creating a foundation for the island’s future: in agriculture, economy and infrastructure. 

The first Chinese people arrived in Hawai‘i in 1788 as workmen aboard European and American trading ships. Chinese sailors soon learned that Hawai‘i was blessed with forests of fragrant sandalwood, prized in China for incense and carving. They called Hawai‘i “Tan Heung Shan,” the Sandalwood Mountains, and many Chinese men immigrated here, despite being forbidden to do so by the Imperial Chinese government. Escaping poverty and political turmoil, they came to Hawai‘i with the plan to make their fortunes and then return to their villages to help their families.

The earliest Chinese in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i were called “the sugar masters.” Although unknown in Hawai‘i, sugar making was centuries-old in China. In 1802, Wong Tze Chun built the first sugar mill in Hawai‘i on Lāna‘i. Wong ground only one crop of sugar before he returned to China. But not long after, two Chinese businessmen organized the Hungtai Company and established a sugar mill in Wailuku.

Beginning in 1852, thousands of indentured Chinese plantation workers were brought over to work the sugar plantations and sugar mills. Many risked their lives to help build the irrigation system of bridges and tunnels through the mountains to bring water to the thirsty sugarcane fields.

By the 1880s, Chinese laborers were arriving in Honolulu by the thousands every year, then shipping out to Maui and other islands to work the sugar and pineapple plantations. Both Chinese men and women immigrated, and men were encouraged to bring their wives and families. American planters recruited Chinese workers because they worked industriously in poor conditions for low wages. Five-year contracts allotted the workers $3 a month, as well as passage, lodging, clothes and food. Chinese immigrants continued to come to Hawai‘i until 1898, when it was annexed by the U.S. 

In many areas, like Wailuku, the shift to a Chinese labor force changed the composition of the land. When Wailuku Sugar Company brought in Chinese plantation workers in the 1880s, a large portion of Wailuku’s abundant lo‘i evolved into rice paddies.

Intelligent, hard-working and motivated, the Chinese laborers were a valuable workforce that continued to grow over the years, rising to 18,254 Chinese in the islands by 1884 (up from 6,045 in 1878). When their ag contracts were fulfilled, many Chinese went to work as peddlers, domestics, laborers, artisans or farmers—and many turned to storekeeping. From 1877 to ’89, more than half of Hawai‘i’s retail stores were Chinese-owned or operated. 

In Lahaina, prominent Chinese merchants like the Goo Lip Tailor store and the Sing Fat Company store sold groceries, dry goods and “fancy goods.” With Sing Fat just across Front Street from the Wo Hing Society building, a strong Chinese influence grew up around this bustling area. 

Those Chinese migrants who stayed and had families laid the groundwork for many generations of Hawai‘i-born Chinese in the islands.