in 1910. Many of Sydney's Chinese originated from the same Chung Shan village as Dr Sun, and until his death in 1999, Dalton Gokbo (Bo) Liu liked to stress the close connection by telling the tale of visiting Sun's home with his father William (Uncle Billy) Liu in 1921 when he was secretary of the Sydney branch of the Kuomintang. In 1919 a re-formed Kuomintang was setting up branches around the world, and in 1920 a convention with delegates from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific met in Sydney. There was wide coverage in the English language press in Sydney, and a fine welcoming reception aboard the SS Victoria, of the recently formed ambitious China-Australia Mail Steamship Line. Spirits ran high. By mid-1921 the Nationalists had raised the $10,000 promised at the conference for the construction of a new building with reading rooms, lecture hall and residential quarters in Ultimo Road, which opened with great fanfare and the hoisting of the Republican flag in 1922. But China did not prosper, the local steamship line quickly succumbed to a freight pricing war designed to squeeze it out of the market, and over the next decades continuing immigration restrictions generated a plethora of sad stories of people smuggling gone wrong, and harassment by authorities. Lonely old men were unable to marry, unable to return to an increasingly chaotic China and unable to assimilate into the Sydney scene. They are remembered as the 'left-overs', sitting out their days in meagre lodgings in Chinatown. The ongoing primacy of the Sydney community was recognised by the relocation of China's consul-general from Melbourne to Sydney in 1928. Sydney's Chinese population held more or less steady, but as the rest of the nation's Chinese communities shrank in size, there was a general sense of contraction. Business success Perhaps the only upbeat part of the Sydney Chinese story in these decades was the spectacular success of a few of the canniest of the fruit traders. While the Great Depression of the 1930s had a negative effect on the trading of many market gardeners and stallholders, a few firms were able to consolidate. When the City Council constructed new market buildings closer to Darling Harbour in the early years of the twentieth century, the Chinese traders followed. Dixon Street emerged as the hub of Sydney's third Chinatown. A few firms successfully built on their wealth by trading back into