1849 - Chinese Immigration
Major waves of immigration from Asia began shortly after the discovery of gold in California in 1849. Soon thereafter the Taiping Rebellion in China created massive death and dislocation; emigration to earn money became an important element of survival for many Chinese who arrived in the U.S. by the thousands in the 1850s and 1860s.
In the 1840s, the news circled the globe: There was gold in California, and fortunes could be made by anyone who seized the opportunity. Within weeks, dreamers from all over the globe came streaming into America's port cities, hoping to stake a claim and strike it rich. China was not immune to this new gold fever. Word of a mountain of gold across the ocean arrived in Hong Kong in 1849, and quickly spread throughout the Chinese provinces. By 1851, 25,000 Chinese immigrants had left their homes and moved to California, a land some came to call gam saan, or "gold mountain".
Historically, the Chinese had never been strangers to emigration. For long centuries, Chinese travelers had crisscrossed the world and made new homes for themselves in faraway lands. Colonies of Chinese merchants, bankers, miners, and artists established themselves in countries from Polynesia to Peru, bringing their families with them and building thriving communities. In America, though, things would turn out differently.
Once the Chinese immigrants arrived in California, they found that the gold mountain was an illusion. Mining was uncertain work, and the gold fields were littered with disappointed prospectors and hostile locals. Work could be scarce, and new arrivals sometimes found it difficult to earn enough to eat, let alone to strike it rich. Even worse, they soon discovered that they were cut off from their families: With no source of money, the immigrants could not pay for their wives and children to make the long voyage from China, and could not go back home themselves. As the dream of gold faded, these men found themselves stranded in a strange new land far from home. It was a land that did not welcome them, a land that afforded them few means of survival, and a land in which they were very much alone.
Before the Civil War there were mutterings portending a great storm, there was hostile legislation, for the most part neutralized by Court decisions. But if there had been a wall erected in 1865 around the Pacific States as there had been around China, the Chinese question would not have loomed large enough to attract the historian's attention. And toward the end of the decade, 1860-1870, California, so to speak, shook hands with the Orient across the Pacific.
Anson Burlingame, who had been sent as minister to China, had, with the consent of both countries, become Chinese envoy to the United States and in 1868 he, with a Chinese deputation, arrived with power to negotiate a treaty. The Burlingame treaty, one of the eventful steps, opened the door of the United States to the Chinese, as it permitted their voluntary immigration and declared that they should enjoy the same privileges in respect to residence as "the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation."' Burlingame and his associates were received with great enthusiasm and their treaty was ratified with hearty assent [1868]. There is room for a million Chinese laborers on the Pacific coast, Burlingame told the Chinese in Peking. True enough, but little did he suspect that the arrival of a tithe of that number would create a political and social problem of considerable importance.
If the "good times" had continued, the absorbing power of California for the Chinese might, in some degree, have equalled that of the eastern part of the country for the horde of Europeans seeking better conditions than prevailed at home;2 but the throwing out of employment of a number of laborers due to the completion of the Central Pacific Railroad in 1869 proved for California the forerunner of adversity.
About 20,000 Chinese comprised most of the labor force for the Central Pacific Railroad's portion of the first Transcontinental Railroad, which began construction in Sacramento, California and blasted its way over and through the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the dead of winter and over the desert until it reached Promontory Summit in Utah where it joined the Union Pacific Railroad to connect the two coasts in 1869. When the celebratory photograph of the symbolic joining of the railroads with the "golden spike" was taken at what is now the National Park Service-administered Golden Spike National Historic Site, the Chinese workers were deliberately kept out of the picture.
Once they realized how difficult their situation was, the first generation of Chinese immigrants scrambled to find some way to earn a living wage. The vast majority of this first group, in the 1840s and 1850s, was young and male, and many of them had little formal education and work experience. Once in California, they had to find work that required little facility in English, and that required skills that could be learned quickly.
The railroads were tailor-made for this new pool of Chinese labor. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the U.S. railroad companies were expanding at a breakneck pace, straining to span the continents as quickly--and cheaply--as they could. The work was brutally difficult, the pay was low, and workers were injured and killed at a very high rate. For Chinese laborers, though, it represented a chance to enter the workforce, and they accepted lower wages than many native-born U.S. workers would have. On the Central Pacific Railroad alone, more than ten thousand Chinese workers blasted tunnels, built roadbeds, and laid hundreds of miles of track, often in freezing cold or searing heat. When, in 1869, the final spike was driven into the rails of the Transcontinental Railroad, after a record-breaking five years of construction, few Chinese faces appeared in photographs of the event. But the railroad could never have been completed as quickly as it was without the toil of Chinese railway men--unknown hundreds of whom lost their lives along its route.
The Union Pacific ran from Omaha, Nebraska, to Ogden, Utah: the Central Pacific thence to San Francisco. The building of both was done at high speed and the efficient work on the Central Pacific was performed in great part by Chinese laborers who had been brought to California by the Pacific Mail steamers. The Central Pacific and the Pacific Mail Company were the creatures of California capitalists and the working of the two, together with their adjuncts and other investments made these men immensely rich.
Once the rail construction was completed, Chinese immigrants found work in a variety of industries, from making shoes and sewing clothes to rolling cigars. Since language barriers and racial discrimination barred them from many established trades, however, they often created opportunities for themselves and launched new businesses. Many of the shops, restaurants, and laundries in the growing mining towns of California were operated by Chinese immigrants. Chinese immigrants also played an important role in developing much of the farm land of the western U.S., including the plantations of Hawaii and the vineyards of California.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
