Lamsey, James - Biographical entry - Chinese-Australian Historical Images in Australia

Born: 1831
Canton [Guangzhou], Guangdong Province, China
Died: 1912
Bendigo, Victoria, Australia
Occupation: herbalist

Details

James Lamsey was born into a family of respected and successful physicians in Canton in 1831. He trained at King’s College Canton and Canton Hospital until 1851.

Following his arrival in Victoria in 1853, he worked for two years in Geelong, five years in Melbourne and practised in Beechworth for eleven years, where he met and married a Scottish woman, Jane Morrison. He then moved to Heathcote for two years, and settled permanently in Bendigo in the mid 1870s.

He soon became a prominent member of the Chinese community as part of welcoming committees for important visitors to Bendigo, organization for the Easter Fair, and through benevolent gestures to impoverished, sick and convicted Chinese. In the 1890s he was grand master of the Chinese Masonic Society. He owned at least one garden at Marong, and a row of small houses in Bridge St. In 1889, he built ‘Jubilee Villa’, a comfortable double-fronted six-room brick house. When he died in 1912, his body was embalmed and sent back to China. He was survived by his adopted daughter, Kitty Boyd (d.1915).

Sources used to compile this entry: Bendigo Golden Dragon Museum collection; Bendigo Advertiser, 6 May 1912.

Prepared by: Amanda Rasmussen, La Trobe University