Triad Societies: Western Accounts of the History, Sociology and Linguistics of Chinese Secret Societies

Abstract

The international media has traditionally reported on the triad secret societies in terms of a mythic Chinese Mafia ruling a transnational criminal empire, and accounts of their criminal activities have often been sensationalized, even by serious writers and international law enforcement agencies. Academic historians, sinologists and sociologists in the 1980s and 90s have taken a rather different view of the development of such societies in South China and Southeast Asia. Some historians of the 1970s saw them as primitive revolutionaries who played an important, although indirect, role in the 1911 revolution in China. Others tended to conceptualize Chinese triads in terms of brotherhood associations and mutual aid societies, the significance of which is best understood in terms of the economic and political history of the late Qing. The set comprises a comprehensive selection of colonial Western scholarly texts on Chinese secret societies from the early-19th century to the mid-20th century.