Dr Adrian Tuitt
It is hard to think of how a transcontinental railroad, a coin, an oil well and a Chinatown could be linked. But they are.
To understand why, we must take a trip to the past and understand the life of an entrepreneur who would forever change the socio-economic landscape of Trinidad.
In 1847, John Lee Lum was born in Guangdong, China. He migrated to California, where he worked with thousands of other Chinese migrants in the gold mines.
He also worked alongside more than 11,000 Chinese migrants to build a Pacific Railroad (Transcontinental Railroad) from 1863-1869. This railroad connected the existing eastern US rail network at Iowa to the Pacific Coast at San Francisco Bay, reducing the time it took to cross the continent from months to days.
In 1885, Lee Lum came to Trinidad, practically penniless. He lived among a community of Chinese immigrants who originally came to Trinidad as indentured labourers, mostly from the Guangdong province, comprising Macao, Hong Kong and Canton (Lee Lum was also born in this province).
The first wave of Chinese migrants arrived in 1806 to supplement the labour force on the sugar plantations, and the second after the abolition of slavery in 1934, between 1853 and 1866, to work on the sugar and cocoa plantations.
Most of the Chinese indentured labourers who remained in Trinidad quickly reverted to being launderers and shopkeepers.
Against this backdrop of Chinese shops and laundries, Lee Lum set up a provision shop on Charlotte Street, Port of Spain, where he traded provisions for dried cocoa beans.
These cocoa beans were then exported, as there was a boom in the price of cocoa at this time.
In addition to cocoa beans, he exported coffee and copra and imported goods from the Far East.
By 1900, he owned a chain of 60 shops in villages throughout Trinidad, and sent for labour from China to staff them. These new immigrants often comprised families and friends of earlier migrants, and worked as mainly merchants, pedlars, traders and shopkeepers.
This undoubtedly contributed to the third wave of Chinese migration, heightened in 1911 as a result of the Chinese revolution against the Qing Dynasty.
In the 1890s, there was a shortage of coins in Trinidad. At his La Brea shop, Lee Lum created his own currency in the form of square metal tokens with a hole in the middle so that the coins could be tied together.
He invested his wealth in buying vast cocoa estates in South Trinidad and in the Montserrat Hills near Gran Couva. These estates paid their workers with IOU slips called "chits" and would be taken to his shop to be exchanged for goods.
Lee Lum also bought land at Pointe Gourde in Chaguaramas for quarrying subsoil suitable for road material.
One of the major contributions of John Lee Lum was his role in the development of the oil industry.
The first recorded oil well successfully drilled in Trinidad was in 1866, by Captain Walter Darwent of the Paria Petroleum Company Ltd, in Aripero, close to La Bread.
Oil production and refining, howev
