As the Indian indenture network expanded across the British Empire, the rise of the Chinese diaspora brought into relief new tensions around labour freedom and economic mobility. Chapter 4 examines Hong Kong and Victoria as connected colonies within the British Asia Pacific to consider how global Chinese mobility created different mechanisms for governing the relationship between British subjects and others in this region of the empire. Like colonists elsewhere, Australia’s colonial pastoralists participated in a new ‘coolie trade’ of Chinese indentured labour. By the 1850s that trade had triggered fresh imperial pressure to protect labour freedom through Hong Kong as a British port. But at the same time as the British Empire sought to reinforce its moral authority as the empire that protected personal liberty and labour freedom, the Australian colonies were working to establish legal limits on free Chinese emigration, and to reassert the freedom to move as a white settler privilege.