Sun Yat-sen nunca terá pertencido à Maçonaria, mas sim à “maçonaria chinesa” uma organização genuinamente chinesa que apenas adoptou o nome, nomeadamente na Austrália e nos Estados Unidos no seio das comunidades emigrantes, mas nunca foi reconhecida como tal.
Aqui ficam dois textos. Um sobre a filiação de Sun Yat-sen e outro sobre as ligações da “Maçonaria chinesa” à Maçonaria como contributo para o esclarecimento da questão que me parece estar longe de esclarecida.

Dr. Sun Yat-sen --------------------------------------------------------------------------------November 12, 1866 - March 12, 1925
Chinese revolutionary and political leader, Sun Deming, often referred to as Guofu or "Father of the Nation", played a prominent role in the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 under the pseudonym Sun Zhongshan. The history of that overthrow, and the myth-making accompanying it, has lead to some confusion as to Sun's relationship with Freemasonry. While never a member of regular Craft Freemasonry, Sun appears to have been active in at least one society commonly referred to as Chinese Freemasonry. Through his writings Sun attempted to depict the earlier Tiandihui Society as anti-Manchu, a perspective without historical merit but with great political value in mobilizing support for his revolution. Sun is believed to have joined the Zhigongtang (Chee Kung Tong) in Honolulu. It is also said that he "was a Triad official of long standing and is reported to have been a 426 "Fighter" official of the "Kwok On Wui, as it was called in Cantonese, in Honolulu and Chicago; this society came under the general supervision of the Cantonese-named Chi Kung Tong, a mainly overseas section of the Triad Hung Mun." The terms Tong and Triad, generally used in reference to criminal gangs, also incorporates a grouping of mutual aid societies under the name Tiandihui or Hangmen Society. Non-freemason --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Source: Teng Ssu-yu "Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Chinese secret Societies." In Robert Sakai, Studies on Asia. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1963, pp. 81-99 ; W. P. Morgan, Triad societies in Hong Kong, Hong Kong Government Press, 1960, p. 25. Image : cover. Cosmorama Illustré, August 1971

O Que é a chamada Maçonaria chinesa?

Chinese 'Masonic' Society
The Alleged Chinese 'Masonic' Lodges in Australia.
Liang A-fa, a Christianised resident and citizen of China (1789-1855) printed certain ‘Christian books’ which introduced Hung Hsiu-ch’uan (1814-1864) to the European religion, and inevitably to related ‘Christian’ ideas, perhaps including fraternalism, in 1836. Hung later founded a religious and political movement which, manifesting as the Taiping Rebellion, convulsed China between 1850 and 1864. From mainland China, it has often been said, the movement’s adherents fled as political refugees known as Hung Mun to offshore havens including to Australia from where reports of ‘a new gold mountain’ were circulating. More recent scholarship disputes this claim, asserting that the bulk of migrants were deliberately brought by agents established in Australia and that this was a major function of the ‘lodges’.It has been estimated that about 20 million Chinese migrated overseas during and since the 19th century. Most worked as labourers in mining, on road construction and as farm hands and were members of what have been easily categorized as ‘secret societies’. In contrast to extensive material published on these societies in South East Asia and North America, very little has been made available with regard to their history in this country, partly because of few known primary resources. They are known to have had extensive presences in a number of Australian States.
In 1992, the Bendigo Chinese Association found a ‘Hongmen cabalistic tract’. This has now been translated. With work on gravestones, other records and surviving temple artifacts comparisons have begun of the Australian situation with the broader international one.
In addition to providing a breakthrough in research on the history of Chinese secret societies in Australia, Cai Shaoqing, scholar at Nanjing University, believes the tract ‘has important academic values and can provide explanations on many important issues.’ For example,
any Hongmen member possessing such a manuscript ‘can propogate the association.’ Whether the tract held was a transcribed copy or had been purchased or inherited, whoever ‘possessed’ it ‘could disseminate the society and become a headman.’ The author concludes that this tract was possibly the basis for the expansion of Hongmen in Australia and probably explains the society’s flourishing condition in the Bendigo area in the later part of the 19th century. 1
Not that Bendigo was a naturally receptive environment.
Carol Holdsworth, curator and researcher at the Goldfields Research Centre, Bendigo in 2006, believes that Bendigo was unusual amongst Victorian towns with Chinese ‘lodges.’ Being an extremely ‘unionised’ town, for example, the original source of the Amalgamated Miners’ Association, a trade union which also spread around the continent, Bendigo was the last amongst Victorian towns to accept Chinese involvement in cultural life. It was also the home base of the architect of legislation disenfranchising Chinese residents, the man who later became Sir John Quick.
John Fitzgerald, now at La Trobe University, disputes much of this, pointing to recent research 2. He argues that this shows that in Bendigo the white community leadership worked closely with the Chinese community to ensure continuous participation in local affairs, though not always without tension. Holdsworth argues that a number of friendly societies objected and withdrew their support in the late 1870’s when local authorities gave the Chinese ‘lodge’ money to participate in community events but none to them.Fitzgerald believes there is no evidence that Chinese ‘lodges’ subsequently started calling themselves ‘Masonic’ to ward off racist attacks. The newly-opened archives of NSW’s United Grand Lodge are providing insights into connections between Freemasonry and the Yee Hing networks in late 19th and early 20th century Sydney 3. However, the label ‘Masonic’ remains problematic. Fitzgerald suggests it was more likely a case of ‘uneducated country folk’ attempting to attain a cloak of greater respectability by adopting the name, with no attempt made to formalize a connection with official Freemasonry.
The Hongmen Tiandihui was more accurately a fraternal mutual benefit society utilizing the distinguishing features of oaths, secret ritual and regalia, all directed at obligating members to help one another especially at times of hardship and calamity. I am tempted to refer to it as a Friendly Society of the ANA kind, because it had explicitly political objectives.
As Cai Shaoqing has it:
The numerous Chinese labourers were away from home, helpless and isolated. They joined the Hongmen as sworn brothers for mutual support to protect their livelihood and mutual interests, and to counter racist discrimination and mistreatment by the colonial government and the white colonialists. 4
This author describes three stages in the society’s development. The first, from 1851 to 1875, was, roughly, the period of arrival, establishment and expansion. Cai Shaoqing deduces around half the Chinese population in the country were members. From 1875 to 1900, all Chinese were harshly treated and the Society was inactive or very circumspect. Many Chinese moved to the cities and took up other occupations. The third stage, 1901 to 1921 was marked by rising Chinese nationalism and transformation of the Society into a social and political force. Its organisation actively opposed the ‘White Australia’ policy, set up a newspaper and agitated for the establishment of a Chinese Consulate in Sydney. It was in this period that Clubs were established and the title ‘Masonic’ adopted.It is certainly the case, that the Bendigo and the British Columbian ‘Rules’ (above) vary greatly from one another and that neither show any resemblance to, or any textual connection with, official Freemasonry.Another disputed assertion is that unlike their countrymen in other countries, the Chinese in Australia were culturally homogeneous and inter-racial battles between ‘lodges’ were rare. One widely acknowledged exception was a fierce armed conflict in Melbourne in 1904 between Hongmen and the Bao Liang Society over opium and gambling interests, after which the Bao Liang lost credibility and dissolved around 1912. 5 In his recent book, Chinese Lodges in Australia, the Bendigo tract’s translator, Kok Hu Jin has concluded: firstly, that the overseas pursuit of gold had to be a group enterprise, involving mutual dependency and support; second, that lodges generally reflected pre-migration bonds and associations, and thirdly, that each lodge maintained its own temple for the local membership, and was directly involved in sponsorship of more immigrants. The temple was therefore, ‘office, headquarters, meeting place and ceremonial centre.’His research approach exposes clear similarities to fraternals drawn from Europe, and thus suggests paths not yet pursued by scholars of those lodges. For example:
Many artefacts…identify the lodges with which the temple followers who donated them were affiliated. In turn, one may then trace links, whether of common geographic origin, ancestry, clan or language, between groups of immigrants scattered far and wide around the Australian continent. 6
Dr Kok Hu Jin sets out the various names under which the Hung League family of brotherhood associations have been known – ‘the Heaven and Earth Society’, ‘the Heaven-Earth-League’, ‘the Three United Society (Heaven, Earth, Man)’ and the ‘Triad Society of Heaven and Earth Society.’ Thus, after the British Government ordered the breaking up of the Society on the Malay Peninsular in the late 19th century, some surviving factions went underground and degenerated into gangsterism, the now dreaded ‘triads’.He believes that it was Sun Yat Sen, 20th century nationalist and republican, who undertook from mainland China the reorganization of the Hungmen which resulted in the adoption of the label ‘Masonic’ in Australia, and presumably elsewhere. Fitzgerald finds this connection unlikely, especially for Australia. Interestingly, Dr Sun’s emblem, adopted by the Nationalists in China, was a 12-rayed rising sun, and in the North American case, researchers have claimed that
At the turn of the century Sun Yat-Sen obtained considerable financial support from chapters of the ‘Chih-kung T’ang in North America. In San Francisco over 2,000,000 dollars in revolutionary currency was printed. In British Columbia the chapters mortgaged their buildings to raise money for the republican cause’. 7
all of which suggests there is more to be learnt about the local scene.In 2003, an article to the London-based Masonic research journal, AQC, reported that
In 1935, Masonic Brother Clive Loch Hughes-Hallett, an Englishman living in Melbourne, sought expressions of interest in surveying the ritual of the Hung, or Heaven and Earth Society with some esoterically minded Masons in the Victorian Lodge of Research No 218 (VC). 8
A one-time ABC radio announcer and artillery officer, Hughes-Hallet, had, it seems in 1937, gathered a small group of Royal Arch Masons to, in his words, ‘investigate the history, teachings and rituals of the Chinese Triad Society.’ From this statement by the convenor himself, it can be guessed that none if any of the actual history of the Hungmen in Australia was known at this time, and that Hughes-Hallet, for idealistic rather than informed reasons, had assumed that a clear connection existed between Chinese Triadism and formal Freemasonry as practiced in England and Australia. Another of the group wrote to NSW’s Grand Secretary in November, 1947 about long-term intentions:
…the regeneration of a very old society, which under political pressure had fallen on hard days, to a place and function in Asiatic life in some measure resembling that of the Craft today, is work which only freemasons can do…
Believing that the originating society and ritual were much older than the time of Hung Hsiu Ch’uan, the group had attempted ’re-constitution’ of what they believed were only fragments of the original ritual, then had carried out demonstrations and set up ‘lodges’ chartered from an ‘Australasian Provincial Grand Lodge’ in both Victoria and NSW, last meetings of which had occurred by 1948. It appears Hughes-Hallett himself became absorbed into ‘mainstream’ Freemasonry and the Communist takeover in 1949 of China made any return there impossible.
The Australian version of ‘their’ ritual had as ‘officers’ - ‘Five Founders…each styled Provincial Grand Master’, one for each continent’, a ‘Commander-in-Chief’ called ‘Wan Yun Lung’ and ceremonial involving ‘crossing the bridge.’ For what it’s worth, newspaper reports of Chinese participation in, for example, the Beechworth (Vic) Festival from 1872, included ranked ‘officers’:
Chief of the LiteratiChief of the Second LiteratiChief of the Third LiteratiSecond of the LiteratiThird of the Highest RankMembers of the Imperial Academy 9
A Beechworth vegetable merchant, Fun Ho, at the time wrote a letter home:
…In place of honour the children of the sun…appeared, preceded by their standards. First came the members of the colleges, and those who had served in the armies of the Emperor, arrayed in costumes as prescribed by the great Imperial Court; the braves wore their tails coiled, as if about to enter into battle; the men of peace allowed theirs to flow behind; next came the mandarins of the various Orders, and last…came Fun Ho, with his tail trailing gracefully at his heels, like that of a fat sheep of Manchuria… 10
As the Taiping Rebellion had failed it may be reasonable to suppose that some overseas Chinese parading and representing their nation would be guided by imperial rules rather than by fleeing political rebels so perhaps only ‘loyalists’ marched, Hungmen members remaining aloof. Fitzgerald believes that the truth is more likely that these civic parades, for the Chinese, were about having fun, in particular, mimicking and often mocking the pomp and ceremony of Imperial displays. Many questions clearly remain.
Further information is at:A series of books including the Bendigo tract’s translation by Kok Hu Jin and his Chinese Lodges in Australia, Golden Dragon Museum, Bendigo, 2005;CF Yong, The New Gold Mountain, and JSM Ward, The Hung Society.
1. Cai Shaoqing, ‘Analysing Chinese Secret Societies in Australia’, translation made available to Goldfields Research Centre, June 2000.
2. A Rasmussen, ‘Networks and Negotiations: Bendigo’s Chinese and the Easter Fair’, Jnl of Australian Colonial History, 6 (2004): pp.79-92.
3. J Fitzgerald, Abstract to ‘Politics and Networks in the Transition from Rural to Urban Organisation of the Hung League of Colonial and Federation Australia’, Paper to CSAA Conference, Bendigo, 2005.
4. Cai Shaoqing, 2000, as above, p.7.
5. Cao Shaoqing, pps.8-10.
6. Kok Hu Jin, Chinese Lodges in Australia, Golden Dragon Museum, Bendigo, 2005, p.10.
7. S Lyman, W Willmott, B Ho, ‘Rules of a Chinese Secret Society in British Columbia’, Bulletin of the School of Orental and African Studies, Uni of London, Vol 27, No 3 (1964), pp.530-539.
8. G Love & N Morse, ‘The Re-Formed Triad League’, AQC, 2003, p.248.
9. Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 5 Nov, 1873.
10. Letter at Goldfields Research Centre, Bendigo captioned ‘From Fun Ho, vegetable merchant…dated 11 November, 1872.’