The Tuia Mātauranga Pōkai Whenua GeoTour follows the footsteps of early explorers of Aotearoa New Zealand taking you to places where leaders of the past searched for food, resources and ways to adapt and survive in this new land.
Use the Pōkai Whenua GeoTour as your classroom to explore the stories of the past, in the present, to preserve what is unique in Aotearoa New Zealand for the future.
Collect the codewords to get the Geocoin puzzle pieces.
To be able to complete this GeoTour and receive your special Geocoin collectable, remember to take a note of the codeword placed in the cache. This will need to be recorded in your passport which can be downloaded here.
63 of the 150 Pōkai Whenua GeoTour caches will contain a randomly placed special FTF token (a replica of the Tuia Mātauranga GeoTour commemorative coin). This is yours to keep! If you find more than one, you might consider leaving it for the next person who finds the cache.
Canton was the southernmost Chinese settlement in the world. It was unique as the Chinese could maintain their self-sustained lifestyle with little contact with the European world. It was the only goldfield where, for a long time, Chinese outnumbered Europeans.
Gold deposits were first worked in the 1860s on the beaches at Orepuki and Colac Bay, but claims further inland were soon abandoned because of the difficulties of working them. The area around Round Hill was first worked by Italian miners who soon abandoned the area. When the Chinese miners arrived in about 1871, they discovered that the Europeans had not been successful because they had been working on a ‘false bottom’. Beneath this false bottom was a large quantity of gold.
The township, named after the home province of most of its miners, had a population as high as 500 by 1882. There were 38 buildings at the heart of Canton - of which 20 were for opium smoking and gambling. About 120 huts surrounded the "business centre" spread over about 5 acres. The settlement lasted just 15 years and no evidence of this township remains today – only photographs.
Four Chinese men usually worked a claim for two or three years. Then it was transferred to another four miners. The departing men sold their gold and took their fortune (£300 to £500 in those days), back to their wives and families in China. Only a few miners stayed permanently.
When gold seams were found, water races were built and the earth sluiced away. The Chinese were masters of the art of using water, gained from centuries of practice, letting let the water do the work for them.
Small dams were constructed to feed races dug only centimetres into the forest soils. These were so perfectly engineered that when discovered, and the forest litter was cleared away, water flowed just as it had done a century before. Discovered in the forest undergrowth have been stone walls and mining shafts as deep as six metres, hand-dug, with steps down which miners would have climbed to try and pick up the gold-bearing black sands.
Round Hill was commonly called ‘Long Hee-Lee’ by the Chinese, perhaps a reference to the dragon-like form of the hill from a distance. ‘Long Hilly’ is the English version of the name.
By 1891 a London-backed mining syndicate had bought up most of the water rights, and some of the Chinese moved east to work claims on new land.
A waypoint shows the approximate location of the Canton settlement. The land the township sat in has since been sluiced away and the ground level is now about 20m lower than it was.
The cache is located about 10km along a forest walk where you can discover the remains of the Chinese Water Races, sluicing and a logging tram cutting. If you have the time it is well work completing the loop walk.
Take time to read the information panel near the beginning of the track. A pamphlet showing the location of some of the historic features is available at Te Hikoi museum. These are marked along the track with a red number on a slanted stump. There is a toilet at the start of the track. This track is part of Te Araroa Trail. There is no need to leave the track, but if you choose to be aware of unmarked mine openings and hidden water races.
The cache is at number 3, where you can see Ly (Lai) Chong's Race. Depending on the weather, your GPS reception may be sketchy. Look in a hollow at the base of a tree within 500mm of the number, and carefully extract your nugget of gold.
Where a text is written in horizontal format, pages are read in the same order as English books, with the binding at the left and pages progressing to the right. Vertical books are printed the other way round, with the binding at the right, and pages progressing to the left. Although you will likely use horizontal text in the log book, the first page (with the require code) is at what we refer to as the back.
Thanks to the volunteers at Te Hikoi museum in Riverton for their assistance in locating the original location of Canton.
Sources: https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/southern-gold-rush
https://discover.stqry.com/v/Round-Hill/s/00f5ceb4ab21de1421f1d2128830b73c