Chinese market gardens and fruit shops were once scattered throughout the country and helped feed Kiwis for decades. In turn the fertile New Zealand soil helped Chinese New Zealanders build a life in Aotearoa through hard work and toil.

Reporter Sally Kidson and visual journalists Virginia Woolf and Braden Fastier explore the role Chinese market gardens have played in New Zealand.

It’s been bucketing down in Gisborne. 

It’s so wet the dark soil at Yet How Ng’s market garden clings to gumboots like clay.

But neither Ng nor his plump veggies seem to mind. He flashes a shy toothy smile, pulls a peanut plant out of the soggy ground, cracks a brown hull and offers a nut to taste. 

His peanuts, grown amongst his orderly rows of veggies, are one of his favourite snacks.

Ng, now 70, sells vegetables at the Gisborne market. 

It is hard, relentless work. Days off and holidays are few and far between.

However, life was a thousand times tougher in the impoverished and non-mechanised rural China he and his family left in the 90s.

Ng, who followed his uncle Dick to New Zealand, is one of a long line of humble Chinese families who have worked the New Zealand soil to provide a better life for their whānau.

The first Chinese market garden was set up in 1866 and by the early 20th Century Chinese market gardens were found across NZ. 

By the 1940s Chinese growers were producing 60 to 80 per cent of New Zealand’s greens and were growing veggies for forces serving in the Pacific.

But the story of the Chinese market gardeners is far more than the economic contribution the community has made to Aotearoa.

It is a tale of brave humble men and women who escaped unimaginable poverty in China and arrived in New Zealand with nothing.

It is also a story about the discrimination they experienced.

Drive five minutes from downtown Ashburton, north west towards the majestic Southern Alps, and you arrive at a historically significant site for the New Zealand Chinese.

There’s not a lot left at the site now. Just an old brick pig oven and two rows of badly weathered buildings that stand wonkily under the wide southern sky.

But the old Ng King Brothers Historical Settlement has historians fizzing. It helps tell the incredible story of hardy Chinese settlers who built a new life via the rich New Zealand soil.

It is perhaps the only Chinese market garden settlement in New Zealand with its original buildings, and the pig kiln is one of a few original ovens left in Australasia.

In its heyday the respected King Brothers Market Garden was the largest market garden in the South Island. It sold fruit and vegetables around mid-Canterbury and more than 80 people lived at the garden.

Siblings Yep and Tong King and their relation Robert King know the King Brothers’ settlement in Ashburton intimately.

Their forefathers played a central role in establishing and running the business.

Tong says the men came from Taishan (Hoisan/Toishan) in Canton (Guangdong) and set up the garden in the 1920s.

They later set up fruit and vegetable shops and also sold fruit and vegetable crates.

The men worked hard and the business was highly successful. Many Ashburton residents became loyal customers and lifetime friends.

It was far more than a market garden though. It was the hub of the Chinese community.

The garden was a multi-generational place where those from the Seyip clan based themselves, made contacts, learned about New Zealand before setting out by themselves.

It was gold, not greens, that first drew the Chinese to New Zealand.

The Chinese were invited to New Zealand to rework the abandoned goldfields by The Otago Chamber of Commerce in 1865.

Author and social historian Ruth Lam, who co-authored the historical book Sons of the Soil, says the fortune-seeking miners were peasants from Guangdong (Canton) in southern China. 

They came to New Zealand to send money home to families living against a backdrop of war, banditry and starvation in mainland China.

They came from small self-sufficient villages and were “well-used to and experienced” in growing vegetables.

Miners quickly established small gardens on the goldfields and before long some turned to farming full time.

The first gardens were set up in Dunedin and Alexandra in 1867. By 1871 there were six Chinese Gardens in central Wellington; while Auckland’s earliest Chinese gardens were set up in the 1870s.

As the gold ran out in the 1890s the Chinese had to find other ways to support themselves and swapped mining for gardens, laundries and fruit shops. 

By the early 20th Century market gardens were set up in every district in New Zealand with nearly 50 per cent of the Chinese population in Aotearoa tilling the soil. 

It was hard physical work, which is why growers often had large families and formed bonds - such as the King Brothers - based on clan connections.

“You needed a lot of manpower.”

Lam says while some market gardeners, like the King brothers, also had fruit shops - it was not common.

You needed a good level of English to run a shop as you were dealing with customers.

“If you were a market gardener you pretty much stayed a market gardener.”

Race relations commissioner and former mayor Meng Foon has soil under his fingernails. 

Dressed in his trademark casual attire of rugby shirt and speaking from his comfortable Gisborne home overlooking Tūrangi-a-Kiwa/Poverty Bay, Foon says his father’s family “literally ran off to Hong Kong” during the Japanese invasion of China. 

His father was sponsored to New Zealand through his sister and arrived with nothing in 1947. After working on a market garden he eventually saved enough money to buy seven acres.

But that purchase was controversial and steeped in racism, Foon says.

The European farmers in the area told the landowner not to sell to the Chinese. So his father could only secure the land by paying more money than the European farmers.

Foon vividly remembers working on the market garden.

They worked before school and their dad would pick them up bang on midday, they had a bite of lunch and worked till one.

“We were always late coming back and we told Dad the Principal Pax Kennedy, said ‘Please bring your kids back on time’.

“Then as soon as half past two came, which was the end of school, the truck was waiting.”

Foon recalls hating school holidays as they worked full time, and their classmates would be camping, hunting or fishing, or off to Lake Waikaremoana.

They also got a telling off from the principal as they were driving the tractor from about eight.

“I said; ‘Hey Dad. The headmaster said you’ve got to be 12 before you can drive the tractor …. And he said; ‘Well, he doesn’t know what he is talking about. Just carry on, son.”

His parents later bought a fruit and vegetable shop which is where he learnt te reo - by mimicking Māori customers.

Foon and his brother Richard inherited the business from his parents and ran it for some years before selling.

“I don’t think many market gardening family parents actually want their children to continue market gardening. 

“Generally they encourage their children to get an education, get a profession …and not struggle like they do as they know how difficult market gardening is.”

The Chinese have attracted disproportionate fear, suspicion and discrimination throughout their 180 year history in New Zealand.

Laws that singled out the Chinese included the poll or entry tax. The tax started at 10 pounds and was raised to 100 pounds or a year’s wages or about $18,000 in today’s terms. 

Other attempts to stop the Chinese entering in large numbers included a cargo tax - restricting the numbers of Chinese that could travel to New Zealand on the same boat, and an English reading test on arrival. 

Helen Clark apologised for the poll tax and other government sanctioned discrimination in 2002, but the hurt caused by this institutionalised racism remains raw.

Lam says up until WW2 the Chinese mostly intended to stay in New Zealand for a few years and earn money to send home. They were then replaced by other male family members.

This changed however with the rise of Communists to power in China. The New Zealand Chinese realised then they could not return to China as they would be persecuted.

“That was a bit of a turning point. That’s when they decided, “Well, New Zealand has to be home for us now.”

WW2 also meant other big changes. For the first time women and families were allowed to enter New Zealand as refugees and the Chinese market garden community changed from being a community of men to a community of families. 

(Men initially had to pay a bond and deposit for their families equivalent to $75,000 today, to support the family and ensure children born here returned to China.)

Lam says there were so many growers by the 1940s the Chinese “grew about 60%” of green veggies on the auction markets.

The post war years were good ones for growers who worked hard to build a life for their families and give them the educational opportunities they never had.

The rise of supermarkets in the 1980s and the decline in the vegetable auction system meant small family-run businesses found it hard to compete with bigger growers and Chinese market gardens are not as common as they once were.

The first time former Dunedin mayor Peter Chin visited Shanghai he made a speech.

It was “hugely emotional” as it hit him that his parents had come from China with nothing and there he was back “to his roots” in China as mayor of the city where he was raised.

“It was huge.”

Chin, an erudite and affable 80-year-old, was one of the first Chinese children to be born in New Zealand, his mother arrived in New Zealand as a refugee around the time of WW2.

“I think somewhere about 200 Chinese women came to be with their husbands and once they all got together, they all started having children and I was kind of one of those children.”

His father came out in 1920 and his grandfather well before then. His father ran a laundry until the late 40s.

“Most of the Chinese I think right through New Zealand really either had laundries, fruit shops, market gardens.”

Chin grew up working, not in a market garden, but in his family’s fish and chip shop on Stuart St, Dunedin. 

Preparing chips, peeling potatoes, serving customers, and cooking food was a huge part of his upbringing.

There was a sizable Chinese population in Dunedin in the 40s - but few Chinese pupils at Chin’s school.

He didn’t speak English until he went to school. 

“My home life was very Chinese, to the extent that I didn’t know how to use a knife and fork until late in my high school years.”

Chin trained as a lawyer following the path of second generation Chinese getting an education and learning a profession. 

He is clear that the long and unique history of New Zealand Chinese needs to be taught in NZ schools to facilitate understanding of a little known part of NZ’s history - and the hardships the Chinese faced.

“So they came out here to the san gum saan, New Gold Mountain to be able to make money to take back and raise their families. 

“And for many that didn’t happen, that’s kind of why we’re here.”

The once bustling Ng King Brothers Chinese Market Garden Settlement is now surrounded by the black and grey of new steel roofs of houses and retirement villages.

But it’s still easy to imagine the clang and clatter of the trucks being unloaded and workers calling to each other in the changing pitch of Cantonese.

There are big plans for the settlement, which is still owned by descendants of the five original garden owners, but is now managed by the Ashburton District Council.

The garden is going to be made into a reserve for people to access and learn about the site.

For the elder King brothers and Robert it is a wonderful way to give back to the Ashburton community.

It’s also a way to show the story of the men from southern China who came to New Zealand with nothing, established a very successful business, built goodwill in the community and a better life.

“We won’t always be around to tell the story. But it's great to tell the story,” Robert says.