Qualla: Wing Hing Long & Co. Store

Wing Hing Long & Co. Store: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jenni Drewitt (FlingSinging), CC BY-SA 4.0. Pull the cord at the counter and a small wooden box of money still rides a wire across the ceiling to the cashier's office, exactly as it did a hundred years ago. The shelves are stocked, the signs hand-painted, the wood-fired stove cold but in place. Wing Hing Long is not a recreation of a country store - it is the store itself, on the same patch of Ruby Street in Tingha where Chinese immigrants opened it in 1881 and ran it, family after family, until 1998. Few places in Australia hold the memory of the Chinese tin miners so completely, or so honestly.

Image: Jenni Drewitt (FlingSinging) | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wing Hing Long & Co. Store: The Tin That Drew a World

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Tingha exists because of tin. Rich deposits found in the early 1870s turned this corner of the New England tablelands into the largest tin-producing district in New South Wales, and people poured in. At the boom's height in the 1880s, the area held four to five thousand people - ...

Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wing Hing Long & Co. Store: One Store, Many Hands

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FlingSinging, CC BY-SA 4.0. The store passed through a chain of Chinese owners whose names map the migrant world of the goldfields and tin fields. Ah Lin, an Inverell storekeeper, bought the site in 1881. After him came Ding Chee, a butcher from Vegetable Creek; Jock Sing from Glen Innes; Ah Bow, a Tingha m...

Image: FlingSinging | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wing Hing Long & Co. Store: Everything Under One Roof

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mokgen at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. A country general store had to be everything at once, and Wing Hing Long was. Mavis Pratt remembered the stock of her 1920s childhood: grocery and drapery, hats and children's wear, shoes and wallpaper, furniture and linoleum - and, this being a mining town, explosives for the dr...

Image: Mokgen at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Wing Hing Long & Co. Store: The Last of Its Kind

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heritage Division, CC BY 4.0. Chinese-owned stores once stood in country towns across New South Wales. Almost all are gone. When experts assessed Wing Hing Long, they found only about four Chinese-Australian stores still identifiable anywhere in the state - and of those, this was the only one that kept its or...

Image: Heritage Division | CC BY 4.0