Oqui Adair: First Chinese Resident of South Carolina, Part 1

In Macau, China, in the autumn of 1854, a young man boarded a U.S. naval vessel and embarked on an American adventure. Arriving first in New York, he worked briefly in Washington D.C. before moving to South Carolina to create a formal plantation garden on Edisto Island. Displaced by the ravages of the American Civil War, he found asylum at the State Hospital and raised a family in Columbia. Today we’ll follow the first half of the story of Oqui Adair, master gardener and South Carolina’s earliest-known resident of Chinese ancestry.

Recently, while compiling demographic data for a future podcast, I became distracted by a single, curious fact buried within the Ninth Census of the United States, compiled in 1870. A published synopsis of that census illustrates that the population of South Carolina included 705,606 people, comprised of 415,814 “colored” inhabitants, 289,667 “white” people, 124 people identified as “Indian,” and one Chinese resident. Comparing this data with other synopses published by the U.S. Census Bureau, I learned that the state’s lone Chinese resident of 1870 was the first of that nationality to be recorded in South Carolina since the beginning of the Federal Census in 1790.

  

  

Further statistical data extracted from the 1870 Census indicates that this pioneering citizen of Chinese extraction resided in Richland County, in the center of the state. Eager to learn his or her identity, I turned to that part of the census enumerating the names of individuals within Richland County. Here I found South Carolina’s first recorded Chinese resident: a thirty-five-year-old man named “O. Odair,” who was employed as a “flower gardener” at the South Carolina “Lunatic Asylum” in the capital city of Columbia.[1]

A few days after discovering this information, I was at the library chatting with the staff of the South Carolina History Room about the curious Mr. Odair. I had no knowledge of his backstory, but I was hoping to find more information about how he came to reside in the Palmetto State. Then my colleague, Lish Thompson, spoke up. “You mean Oqui Adair,” she said, “the Chinese gardener from Edisto Island?” Lish, I then learned, is related to the family that once owned Bleak Hall Plantation, and had once employed Oqui to create a formal Japanese or Chinese-style garden on Edisto Island in the years just before the Civil War.

This conversation led me down a rabbit hole of research to learn more about the history of Oqui Adair. Because he was neither rich nor famous, I did not expect to find many details about his long-forgotten life in South Carolina, his childhood in China, or the chain of events that brought him to this state. Thanks to a number of unique circumstances within his interesting narrative, however, I was able to find a long trail of clues enabling me to trace his story from the garden of the Lunatic Asylum in Columbia back to Edisto Island, Charleston, Washington D.C., New York, Macau, and finally to the city of Guangzhou.

Oqui’s journey from China to the United States occurred within the context of an international expedition funded by the U.S. government in the early 1850s. President Millard Fillmore was determined to open diplomatic and commercial relations with Japan, despite that island nation’s strong tradition of cultural isolation. To force the Japanese government to open its borders to Americans merchants, Fillmore authorized in 1852 a naval expedition led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry.[2] Besides armed vessels to intimidate the Japanese, the U.S. government also loaded supply ships with samples of American products, and enlisted a physician and botanist, Dr. James Morrow (1820–1865) of South Carolina, to gather samples of Japanese plants for scientific study and for propagation at a new greenhouse on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

The bulk of Perry’s naval squadron embarked in November and arrived at the British colonial port of Hong Kong in April 1853. The U.S. Navy sailed to Japan the following month with their “black ships” and issued demands for American access to Japanese markets. Perry withdrew to Hong Kong in July to allow the Japanese government some time to consider its response to the American overture. Dr. Morrow did not participate in Perry’s first visit to Japan because he did not receive his appointment as botanist to the expedition until February 1853. After departing from Delaware Bay in early March aboard USS Vandalia, Morrow’s arrival at Hong Kong coincided with the return of Commodore Perry’s squadron from its first visit to Japan.[3]

When Perry’s naval squadron steamed back into Japanese waters again in February 1854 to force the negotiation of a trade agreement, James Morrow followed and supervised the exhibition of various American implements, including a miniature steam locomotive. After completing that work, Dr. Morrow and an American-born translator spent nearly eighteen weeks collecting samples of many hundreds of native plants that were unknown to Western science at that time. Commodore Perry and his Japanese counterparts signed a formal trade agreement on July 11th, and the entire American entourage soon withdrew to Hong Kong. Because Dr. Morrow lacked an official berth aboard an American warship, however, he checked into a hotel in the nearby city of Macau, across the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong.[4]

During the early weeks of August 1854, James Morrow busily pressed hundreds of dried plants onto paper folios and packed scores of live plants into a number of “cases” for the long return voyage to the United States. Each of these containers was probably a “Wardian case,” a sort of portable terrarium designed for transplanting live plants over long distances. On August 22nd, Commodore Perry steamed across the harbor from Hong King to Macau to collect the botanical cargo aboard USS Mississippi. Morrow informed him the next day that the bulk of the plants were ready for transport, and then set out to meet the commodore. As the doctor recorded in his journal on August 23rd, he was summoned “to meet him [Perry] at the garden where he had engaged a Chinese gardener to be taken to Washington, to be employed in the garden and grounds around the Capitol.”[5]

Returning to his journal later that day, Dr. Morrow recorded the first English-language description of the young man who was to become the first Chinese resident of South Carolina. Morrow did not mention his age or background, but the doctor’s words—augmented by later records—suggest that he was around nineteen years of age and might have been an orphan. “The boy’s name was Oqui,” wrote Dr. Morrow after their first meeting. “The Parsee gardiner [sic] who recommended him said that he was a thor[o]ugh and practiced gardener and had been in his employ for ten years, and that he understood budding and grafting and all the arts of Chinese gardening.”[6]

Neither Commodore Perry nor James Morrow identified the garden in which they found Oqui, but the doctor’s journal entry contains one valuable clue. The word “Parsee” (or Parsi) refers to persons of Persian heritage who later removed to the Indian Subcontinent and who practiced the Zoroastrian religion. A community of Parsis migrated along trade routes from India to China several centuries ago, when the city-state of Macau functioned as a semi-autonomous Portuguese colony. Within this multicultural context, an American naval officer arrived in August 1854 seeking an experienced hand. The “Parsee gardiner” who had apparently supervised Oqui for a decade and recommended him to James Morrow was likely affiliated with a large ceremonial garden in Macau known since the 1820s as the Parsee Cemetery.[7]

Oqui might have been employed by Parsi clerics in Portuguese Macau, but the sparse evidence of his later life suggests that he was both ethnically and culturally Chinese. Dr. Morrow’s spelling of the young man’s name, for example, which was repeated with little variation over the next quarter-century, probably represents a rough transliteration of his proper identity. Americans apparently interpreted this four-letter moniker as his first name, prompting Oqui in later years to adopt an Anglo-American surname. Despite this addition, the two-syllable “Oqui” probably represented his full name in the traditional order of his native Chinese culture. The initial syllable “Oh” is likely a family name, while the second, “Qui” or “Qi,” was probably his given or individual name. In the United States of the twenty-first century, we might call him “Qi Oh.”

Descriptions of Oqui’s youthful appearance do not appear among the journals of Dr. Morrow or Commodore Perry, but we can at least consider his hairstyle. Chinese men living under the ruling Qing dynasty at that time were required by law to shave their forehead and wear the rest of their hair in a long braided queue. Oqui might have been wearing this traditional hairstyle when Commodore Perry hired him in 1854, but it’s also possible that his decade-long residence within Portuguese-controlled Macau enabled him to wear his hair as he pleased. In either case, records of Oqui’s later life in New York, Washington D.C., and South Carolina include no mention of the stereotypical pigtail or queue that identified so many of the Chinese-American immigrants of the mid-nineteenth century.

Oqui’s motivations for leaving his native land were probably similar to that of the tens of thousands of Chinese men (and a smaller number of women) who emigrated to California during the 1850s. Their country had suffered years of famine, natural disasters, political repression, and finally a bloody civil war historians now describe as the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). If he lacked a strong family connection in his native land in 1854 and sought to escape the violence then raging around his home province of Canton (now Guangzhou), Oqui might have embraced the opportunity to practice his pastoral profession in a distant land. Pursuant to orders of Commodore Perry on August 23rd, “the boy Oqui was shipped at once [onboard USS Mississippi,] to receive ten dollars a month and his rations, and have three months advance with good security.”[8]

“He was young, active and lively,” wrote Dr. Morrow in his journal at that time, “and was suitable to go on board ship with sailors.” From the beginning of their relationship in August 1854, Oqui’s industry and discipline quickly won the trust of the American botanist. Morrow later identified his young Chinese companion as “the principal assistant in putting the plants in the cases” at Macau and Hong Kong as they readied for departure. “When I asked him if all the plants could live till we got to America,” recalled Morrow of his botanical colleague, “he said that all could not, but perhaps one half might.”[9]

On the sultry morning of August 25th, Oqui helped Dr. Morrow load numerous cases of live plants into “a large boat” and commenced the long journey to the United States. They sailed and rowed seven miles under the “oppressively hot” sun to the USS Mississippi, at anchor in Macau Roads, and finished transferring the cases onto the ship by two in the afternoon. While Morrow returned to his hotel room for the evening, Oqui made a final trip into Macau—perhaps to say farewell to friends and family—before returning to his new home aboard a U.S. naval vessel.[10]

Dr. Morrow boarded the Mississippi on August 27th and the ship steamed back across the harbor to Hong Kong, where the rest of the American naval squadron was anchored. While the botanist resided on shore with a friend in the city, Oqui tended the plants aboard the warship. Morrow returned to the Mississippi the next day and supervised the transfer of all the botanical samples to another vessel, the U.S. Supply Ship Lexington. After receiving orders from Commodore Perry “to proceed to Washington with the plants,” Morrow gathered the last boxes of materials on September 2nd and joined Oqui aboard the Lexington.

The steam-powered vessel cast off from Hong Kong on September 9th and commenced a maritime journey of approximately eighteen thousand nautical miles. Oqui’s voyage to the United States lasted more than five months aboard the proverbial slow boat from China, including pauses to collect additional botanical samples from waypoints along the route. The Lexington sailed and steamed across the South China Sea to the Java Sea before resting at a port on the island of Java. Continuing westward across the Indian Ocean, the mariners paused again at the remote island of Mauritius. The supply ship sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and arrived on Christmas Day at the more-remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. Continuing into the new year, the Lexington sailed northward to the Caribbean Sea and followed the Antilles Current to the east coast of North America. Oqui and his companions arrived in New York Harbor on February 16th, 1855, and docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard the next day.[11]

Commodore Perry’s faster warship had arrived in New York a month before the humble supply vessel, and citizens across the United States were eager for news about exotic discoveries in the mysterious Far East. The government-funded expedition to China and Japan had fulfilled most of its diplomatic and commercial objectives, while the collection of cultural and botanical souvenirs represented an additional bonus. New York newspapers of late February published several notices of the Lexington’s arrival, which other papers across the country repeated. Four days after Oqui’s ship docked in Brooklyn, for example, the Charleston Courier noted that its cargo included “seventeen cases of exotic plants, for the government, collected in China, Loo Choo [Okinawa], and Japan. They are in [the] charge of Dr. James Morrow, agriculturist in the Japan expedition.”[12]

Immediately after their arrival at Brooklyn Navy Yard, Dr. Morrow and Oqui began unloading and dividing the government’s collection of nearly 2,000 botanical samples aboard the Lexington. The dried materials, pressed into large paper folios, were sent to Asa Gray, Professor of Natural History at Harvard University, for classification.[13] The large collection of seeds and live samples, meanwhile, were transferred to another vessel bound for Washington, D.C. While this labor progressed at Brooklyn, a reporter from the New York Times visited the Navy Yard to see the exotic vegetation and meet the botanists. On February 21st, 1855, the newspaper printed a partial list of the flowers, shrubs, and trees packed by Oqui and Dr. Morrow. Most of the plants were described as being “in pretty good condition,” but the reporter noted that “a few of them wilted and died on the passage.” More importantly, the newspaper observed that the Lexington had returned with something then considered a novelty in New York and along the entire East Coast of the United States—“a real live Chinese from Hong Kong. He is a florist and gardener, and goes to Washington to attend to the plants. He is about twenty years of age, and named Oqui. He speaks English a little, which he learned on the voyage, and says he is now an American. He was born at Canton [now Guangzhou], and is tolerably good looking.”[14]

James Morrow and Oqui did not linger in Brooklyn for long. The doctor’s Asian adventure was sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, and he was obliged to deliver the bulk of his large collection of plants, seeds, and agricultural implements to government authorities. In the spring of 1855, the Federal government maintained a relatively large botanical and horticultural reservation encompassing approximately ten acres on the west side of Capitol Hill. The site was known by a variety of names during its early years, but in August 1856 was officially designated “the United States Botanic Garden.”[15] In 1850, workers had erected here a relatively modest-sized greenhouse or hothouse or conservatory in the Gothic-Revival style fashionable at the time. Extant photographs from the 1850s and 1860s depict this building with a large number of tall windows, each surmounted with a Gothic arch, a high-pitched roof with four ornamental spires, and faux buttresses on the structure’s exterior piers.[16]

Arriving at this site at some point in March 1855, Dr. Morrow and Oqui transferred their materials to William R. Smith, a young Scotsman hired in 1853 as the institution’s “chief gardener.”[17] James Morrow, having completed his obligations to the government, then returned to South Carolina and left Oqui in charge of explaining the botanical collection to his new employer. Although Mr. Smith was just a few years older than his Chinese colleague, he served as Oqui’s supervisor for approximately two years at the Botanic Garden. Both men apparently resided onsite in modest cottages standing within the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. Their first joint task in the spring of 1855 was likely to transplant the live plants from Asia—including flowers, fruit trees, shrubbery, and grasses—into fresh American soil. On April 21st of that year, a Washington newspaper reporter visited the “Government Conservatory . . . near the foot of the Capitol, on the western side of that edifice,” and recommended that “the lovers of plants and flowers may now be gratified by a visit to the green houses.” Besides the great variety of plants within the garden, the reporter was also intrigued by a human curiosity. “We noticed, yesterday,” said the reporter, “the Chinese gardener [Oqui], intently at work. He was brought hither, it will be recollected, to attend to the cultivation of plants, imported into the country, from Asia, by Commodore Perry, the commander of the Japan expedition.”[18]

Meanwhile, within the U.S. Capitol Building next door, Congress appropriated $1,500 in 1855 for “the erection of a suitable house for the plants recently brought from Japan for the United States.” That “house” eventually became a large addition to the existing greenhouse, but construction of that structure did not begin for some time.[19] Work to expand the landscaping around the greenhouse commenced right away, however, as Oqui, Mr. Smith, and their colleagues created space for the new materials brought from China and Japan. Their efforts rendered the path through the grounds to the conservatory “somewhat inconvenient” for visitors in the summer of 1855, but, by the spring of 1856, a journalist reported that the public grounds on the west side of the Capitol formed “an attractive resort of the lovers of rare native as well as exotic plants, and trees, and flowers.” A grainy photograph, tentatively dated to 1856 and recently displayed on the website of the Architect of the Capitol, depicts the Gothic-revival greenhouse at the U.S. Botanic Garden with a group of four employees. Closer inspection of the original image in higher-resolution might provide a unique glimpse of the Chinese gardener named Oqui.

Details relating to Oqui’s removal from the District of Columbia to South Carolina are not as robust as those concerning his path from China to Washington, but that transition seems to have occurred during the year 1857. By January of 1858, for example, we know that Oqui was a familiar face at Bleak Hall Plantation on Edisto Island, tending to a large formal garden that he had created for his new employer, John Townsend. Circumstantial evidence suggests, however, that Oqui’s decision to migrate southward—into a landscape dominated by enslaved laborers—followed conversations with an old friend. Dr. James Morrow of South Carolina, who had retired to his Southern home in the spring of 1855, returned to the nation’s capital in early 1857 to secure compensation for his work with Commodore Perry’s famous expedition to Japan. Dr. Morrow’s sojourn to Washington likely included a trip to the U.S. Botanic Garden, where he might have seen the flowering fruits of his Asian adventure and visited his Chinese-American colleague. In the course of their conversation, which might have included John Townsend, Oqui agreed to quit his government job and embark on a new adventure. He would travel five hundred miles southward to begin a new life on a fertile, seaside plantation nestled within a subtropical climate, surrounded by the familiar flora of his Asian homeland.

Join me again next week for the conclusion of this story as we follow Oqui, the Chinese gardener, southward to the land of Sea-Island Cotton and slavery in the Palmetto State. During the second half of his colorful life, another Civil War forced Oqui to flee far from the fertile coast, but he found asylum, love, and family in the capital of South Carolina.

  

NEXT: Oqui Adair: First Chinese Resident of South Carolina, Part 2 
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