An event on April 10 will read out the names of 499 Chinese gold miners, whose remains were being returned to their homeland aboard the SS Ventnor when the ship sank in 1902 near Hokianga Harbour.

The event will be in the tradition of Ching Ming (清明節), also known as tomb-sweeping day, a traditional Chinese festival when people honour their ancestors.

It will also recognise the 13 people who died in the sinking, as well as the local Māori who found some bones (kōiwi) when they washed ashore, and cared for them as they would their own.

Tāne's grandfather, Te Ataarangi Paniora, was among the kaumātua who found remains on the coast and decided to bury them at Kawerua as a sign of respect, he said.

“It was important to Māori to follow on with their traditional beliefs and cultural practices. When kōiwi were unearthed, they were always taken back and interred.”

Tāne said knowledge of where the kōiwi were buried was passed from one generation to the next, with the expectation their ancestors would eventually want to find them.

The situation was similar north of Hokianga, where some remains also washed ashore, said historian Claire Kaahu White​, whose husband Paul is from Te Rarawa​ iwi.

While the sinking of the SS Ventnor was big news in Ōmāpere, there was no media to spread the word to the isolated Māori communities, she said.

“It would've been quite distressing for the people who found the bags of bones, as they were in calico bags or little coffins.”

Sadly, the work of the Chinese to meticulous prepare the remains for the repatriation came undone in the sinking, with some bones coming out of their bags as they washed ashore, White said.

A chance encounter with Chinese-New Zealander Wong Liu Shueng​ in 2007 helped put the pieces of the 100-year-old puzzle together.

The two were doing a short film course when Wong explained her plans to do a documentary on the SS Ventnor.

“I said, ‘I’ve heard the stories about the bones’. The stories had gone through the generations of the bones being buried, not just in the sand dunes but also in the urupā.”

Through the New Zealand Chinese Association (NZCA), Wong’s documentary helped enlighten descendants of the Chinese gold miners, with representatives first coming to Hokianga in April 2009 to pay their respect and thank tangata whenua.

The local Māori went above and beyond to host the descendants that day, despite a flood, said Lynette Shum, an oral history advisor and descendant of Matthew Ching Hoi Shum​, who was secretary of the repatriation organisation, Cheong Sing Tong.

“I remember just the manaaki; they understood what these bones meant and how important it was for us to be there. They were so loving.”

The relationship has since flourished and is an important part of the SS Ventnor story, Shum said.

“It’s the relationship between us and the people who looked after the bones. They didn’t know who we were; they knew one day we were coming.

“We need to acknowledge that they did such an amazing thing ... the reverence they held for the people whose bones they were looking after.”

In early 2014, the Ventnor wreck was found by documentary makers and, in May 2014, Heritage New Zealand made the area a protected archaeological site.

A memorial was built at Opononi, at the Manea Footprints of Kupe visitor attraction, opening in December 2020, with the help of a $100,000 Provincial Growth Fund grant.

But Shum said it had not been easy finding the descendants of the Chinese gold miners, as all that was recovered was an Anglicised list of names.

“The tragedy is who these people are, we don’t know if they had descendants or not.”

Also lost is information about their villages, many of which have since been taken over by housing estates and shopping malls in the modernisation of China, she said.

Gordon Wu’s family is one of the few families in NZ who are able to trace their ancestral connection to one of the miners on the SS Ventnor ship.

Wu had been involved in collecting the names of the 499 Chinese miners through his participation in the Ventnor project with the NZCA, but it took a chance phone call with a relative in 2018 to prompt him to look for his great-grandfather’s name in the list.

He said he was “very emotional” and “sentimental” when he found a close match.

Wu found “Ng Joy Ching” on the registry which had a one letter difference to his great-grandfather’s name “Ng Jor Ching”, but it was close enough for him to believe that his great-grandfather was on the ship.

Since his discovery, Wu has been searching government records to learn more about his great-grandfather.

From family stories, Wu knows that Ng Jor Ching came to NZ for a better life.

He said his great-grandfather went back to China briefly to marry, but had passed away before his wife Ng Foon Ping could join him in NZ.

Wu said his grandfather was adopted by Ng Foon Ping following her husband’s death, and came to NZ around 1908. But it wasn’t until 1939 that Ng Foon Ping herself gained entry into NZ as a refugee.

“He must have died of sickness or accident,” said Wu, though he has been unable to find records of his great-grandfather’s life in NZ..

“All those men were probably lonely, [as] in those days they had no relations in NZ.”

Lynette Shum, as secretary of the Poon Fah Association, considers herself a surrogate family to those lost.

The association was established in 1870 to serve Chinese miners and workers, many who came from the districts of Poon Yu and Poon Fah in the southern province of Guangdong.

Today, it continues to bring together descendents of migrants from the two districts.

Shum said the gold miners would have had a hard life in New Zealand, sending all their money back to families in China, and dying without enough money for their remains to be returned home.

Many were buried outside the cemeteries of the time, because they were not Christian.

“It was their sacrifice to enable me to be what I am today, it was their investment ... I’m grateful for that,” Shum said.

Stories stayed alive thanks to tangata whenua

The first Ching Ming ceremony at the new memorial will be a chance for Emma Moon to thank iwi for the manaakitanga shown to the Chinese ancestors.

Like Wu, Moon traces her ancestry to Ng Jor Ching, whose remains were lost on the ship.

“The fact that the bones that washed ashore were strangers unknown to the mana whenua but were cared for, that's incredibly humbling, and a really profound relationship has come out of that show of care,” Moon said.

“It's a pretty incredible story that brings together two communities that are not often brought together in history, or history as it's recorded in a Pākehā context.”

Moon is a member of Asians Supporting Tino Rangatiratanga and as tangata te tiriti – a person of the treaty – she said it was important for her to know her own origins.

“The stories haven't been lost because they [iwi] have kept them alive,” she said.

While the history of tangata whenua contrasts with the Chinese gold miners yearning for home, Taoho Tane said there were many cultural parallels.

“I see the way that they respect their ancestors and the way that they acknowledge them," he said.

“Māori are the same; it’s important to us to acknowledge our ancestors or mātua tūpuna​, and we can go back multiple generations.”

She added the memorial and Ching Ming ceremony were a fitting end to what had been a traumatic story.

“It acknowledges a really important part of Hokianga history, that over a century has been sort-of forgotten, in part because of the trauma – for the Chinese, certainly, but also for Māori because at the time nobody understood what was happening and where the bones had come from.”