Between 1849 and 1874, roughly 100,000 Chinese men from Guangdong province were shipped to Peru under contracts they could not read, to work the coastal guano islands and the sugar plantations — and the fusion cuisine their descendants would eventually create is why the city of Lima today has more than 6,000 Chinese-Peruvian restaurants called chifas

The most beloved fusion cuisine in modern South American gastronomy was invented by the survivors of one of the more brutal indentured-labour systems of the 19th century. Between roughly 1849 and 1874, about 100,000 impoverished Cantonese peasants were trafficked across the Pacific to Peru under contracts that historians have since concluded functioned as slavery in everything but name. Mortality rates among Chinese contract workers on the Peruvian guano islands reached 40 to 60 percent across the standard eight-year term. Employers routinely extended contracts through debt bondage. Corporal punishment was standard. On arrival, workers were stripped of their Chinese names and assigned Spanish ones by their patrons. Most spoke no Spanish and had no means of enforcing what few protections their formal indenture agreements contained. The tradition their descendants eventually built now sustains roughly 6,000 restaurants in the single city of Lima.

According to Roots of China’s historical reconstruction of the mid-19th-century Chinese coolie trade and its impact on the Guangdong sending communities, the substantive push factors that made the Peruvian coolie trade demographically possible were the specific conditions in Guangdong province during the 1840s and 1850s. The First Opium War (1839-1842) had devastated the Cantonese coastal economy. The Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) — the largest single conflict of the 19th century by casualty count, killing between 20 and 30 million people across southern China — was progressively depopulating the Pearl River Delta throughout the peak years of the coolie trade. The specific recruiting agents known as kètóu (客头) operating in the Cantonese port towns of the 1850s and 1860s exploited these conditions systematically, offering desperate peasant families cash advances against multi-year overseas labour contracts that promised passage to destinations that the recruiters described in substantially aspirational terms — passages that were, in practice, one-way tickets to indentured labour operations in Peru, Cuba, the American West, and other destinations across the emerging Pacific Rim colonial economy. The specific contractual terms — eight years of labour at approximately £75 total remuneration plus food and housing, at wage rates approximately 20 percent below the local Peruvian labour market and without any right to leave the assigned employer during the contract term — were substantially unfavourable to the workers even under the terms as written. In practice, the terms as executed were substantially worse.

The forty percent who survived

The specific working conditions the Chinese coolies encountered on the Peruvian guano islands and coastal sugar plantations were, by every available account of the period, substantially catastrophic. As detailed in the French academic archive HAL Open Science’s historical study of the Chinese community in Peru and the changing composition of Peruvian Chinatown, the Chincha Islands (three small guano-covered rocks approximately 21 kilometres off the Peruvian coast, whose accumulated seabird excrement constituted the substantial majority of the fertiliser exports that produced Peru’s mid-19th-century economic boom) were the most substantially lethal of the coolie labour assignments. The ammonia-rich guano dust burned the workers’ lungs. The extraction operations proceeded in direct equatorial sunlight without shade. The workers slept in barracks on the rock islands and were provisioned with food that was substantially inadequate to their caloric needs. Coolies who attempted to escape by swimming to the Peruvian mainland drowned in the Humboldt Current. Suicide rates among the Chincha Islands Chinese coolies were, per contemporary Peruvian government records, substantially high. Peruvian export earnings from the guano trade reached approximately 700,000 tons per year at the industry’s 1870 peak — an economic scale that, in essentially the same year, was requiring approximately 40 to 60 percent of the Chinese contract workers assigned to the guano operations to die during their eight-year terms in order to sustain.

The 1874 Sino-Peruvian Treaty, signed under diplomatic pressure from the Qing dynasty government amid broader international scrutiny of Chinese labour abuses across the Americas (including the contemporaneous 1874 Qing investigation into the Chinese contract-labour system in Cuba led by the diplomat Chen Lanbin), formally ended the Chinese coolie trade to Peru. Per the Chinese Food History institutional research archive’s summary of the Peruvian chifa cuisine and its historical origins, the treaty provided that Chinese labourers in Peru would henceforth have the legal status of “free subjects” with full contractual protections, that the coolie trade in its existing form would be prohibited, and that Chinese immigrants who had completed their existing contract terms would be permitted to remain in Peru as free residents. Of the approximately 100,000 Chinese men who had arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874, approximately 40,000 to 50,000 had died during the passage or the contract periods. Of the approximately 50,000 who survived, the substantial majority drifted from the coastal haciendas and guano islands toward the urban centres of Peru — particularly Lima, where the specific street known as Calle Capón in what would become the Barrio Chino district was already, by the late 1860s, developing into the substantial Chinese commercial and residential district that continues to occupy the same central Lima streets 160 years later.

The 6,000 chifas

The specific culinary tradition that the descendants of the surviving 50,000 developed across the subsequent 150 years of Peruvian residence is, by essentially every measure of contemporary global fusion cuisine, one of the more substantial single national cuisines that has emerged from any 19th-century diaspora experience. As reported in Matador Network’s summary of Peruvian chifa food culture, the term chifa — currently used in Peruvian Spanish to refer both to the specific style of Chinese-Peruvian fusion cuisine and to the restaurants that serve it — derives from the Cantonese phrase chī fàn (吃饭), meaning simply “eat rice” or “have a meal.” The substantive culinary innovations that produced the modern chifa cuisine emerged progressively across the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the surviving Chinese contract workers and their descendants adapted Cantonese cooking techniques (stir-frying in woks, the use of soy sauce and ginger, the pairing of proteins with rice and noodles) to the specific ingredients available in Peru (native Peruvian potatoes, the aji chili pepper varieties that had been the substantive spice base of pre-Columbian Peruvian cuisine, tomatoes, tropical fruits) and the specific culinary expectations of Peruvian consumers (larger meat portions than Cantonese tradition, integration of Peruvian herbs and sauces). The signature dishes that emerged from this fusion process — lomo saltado (stir-fried beef with tomatoes, onions, and fried potatoes served over rice), arroz chaufa (Peruvian-style fried rice), kam lu wantán (fried wontons with tamarind sauce), tallarín saltado (stir-fried noodles) — have subsequently been adopted so completely into Peruvian mainstream cuisine that the substantial majority of contemporary Peruvian consumers no longer particularly identify them as ethnically Chinese. Cantonese loanwords including sillao (soy sauce), kion (ginger), chaufa (fried rice), and wantán have entered Peruvian Spanish as standard vocabulary. The approximately 6,000 chifas currently operating in Lima constitute what is, by essentially every available comparative measure, the substantially highest per-capita concentration of Chinese-origin restaurants of any city outside East Asia — a specific cultural achievement produced by the descendants of the 50,000 Chinese contract workers who, across the 25 years between 1849 and 1874, survived what the international diplomatic community of the 1870s eventually concluded had been one of the more substantial systematic abuses of contract labour in the recorded history of the 19th-century global economy.