In the early 1840s, California was "sparsely populated and almost wholly separate from the rest of the country." Fledgling San Francisco consisted of dirt paths, wooden frames, empty slopes, and a thousand inhabitants. A morning in 1848 changed that with remarkable suddenness. As the story goes, Sam Brannan, a journalist and prominent Mormon, strode down the quiet streets of San Francisco, heralding remarkable news. Brannan waved his hat, held a bottle of dust in his left hand, and shouted: "Gold! Gold! Gold! From the American River!" Indeed, small metallic fragments had been discovered on a riverbank in Coloma, near the present day city of Sacramento. Within a few weeks, miners rushed to California en masse, discovering dozens of additional mines throughout the Sierra Nevada. The so-called Gold Rush was published in newspapers nationwide.
Historians have yet to uncover a precise explanation as to how word of the Gold Rush reached China, but they generally concur that it took some time. Some believe that a merchant, Chum Ming, found gold himself, and proceeded to write back home. While popular interpretations are rooted in story, historian Mae Ngai, a Professor of Asian American studies at Columbia University, offers a more verifiable explanation in her book "The Chinese Question." Dr. Ngai explains that a ship carrying gold dust arrived in Hong Kong in late 1848. News traveled through villages across the Pearl River Delta, a populous area in southeastern China. Families, who had been struggling to make ends meet, were energized by the potential to become wealthy. Like goldseekers from around the globe, Chinese farmers, artisans, and merchants became fixated on the idea of a Gum Shan, or Gold Mountain, and hoped to stake claim. "They find gold very quickly… I think I shall go to California next summer," one man in the Guangdong Province wrote to his brother, echoing the sentiment of hundreds of others. Even if they could not exactly find gold, immigrants perceived a broader demand for skilled and unskilled labor in America – a conception of economic opportunity that is referred to as the American Dream in modern terms. Jobs could pay as much as $26 a month in America, compared to a mere $1 in China. One advertisement simply proclaimed that, "Americans are very rich people… Money is in great plenty and to spare in America."
Two "push" factors offered equally compelling reasons for immigrants to leave their hometowns in China. First, the amount of arable farmland failed to feed the population in urban areas such as Taishan, Enping, and Kaiping. Natural disasters disrupted existing agriculture production, resulting in famine. Second, the Opium Wars (1839-1842, 1856-1840) and prolonged Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) created mass displacement.
Thus, it emerges that an overseas journey to California was an elusive opportunity to those living in China. Men readied themselves for the American frontier and scraped together funds, sourced by using family land as collateral for loans. From October to March, the journey from Hong Kong to San Francisco, which was made by ship, took 100 days. The voyage was considerably shorter, at 75 days, during the months between April and September. Due to the shorter length, summer journeys were universally more popular.
The journey was unquestionably dangerous, primarily due to pirates, typhoons, shipwrecks, thunderstorms, fire, disease, and seasickness. Importantly, disasters struck on the voyage and while passengers were boarding. For example, in March 1852, a thunderstorm destroyed a wooden building in Hong Kong that housed passengers waiting to board a California-bound ship. Six men were reported dead and several others missing. In another instance, a vessel arrived in the San Francisco harbor having lost a fifth of passengers on board. William Speer, a missionary who treated immigrants in the San Francisco harbor upon arrival, wrote that "there can be no excuse before God or man for the terrible mortality which has occurred on some of the vessels containing Chinese passengers."
Based on this evidence, it is tempting to view the journey as an imperilment, and hence conclude there was a total disregard towards the safety of Chinese immigrants. However, this view is unfair as it would undermine critical primary source documentation from the time. As such, a careful distinction must be drawn: while the voyage was far from perfect, three key aspects of ship life – those being passengers’ living space, diet, and access to health services – improved substantially throughout the century. First, each passenger was allotted a sufficient twelve feet of surface space in the 1860s. Second, passengers ate rice, peas, beans, salt, pork, lard, salt fat, fresh fat, pickled vegetables, vinegar, and tea, with beef and fish added to the diet following the Chinese Passengers Act of 1855. In circumstances where foul weather prohibited cooking, two pounds of biscuits were distributed. The menu was well-balanced with a variety of nutrients, and food was available in large quantities. Finally, in addition to the presence of a surgeon working in the onboard hospital, all ships carried basic Chinese herbs, including huo xiang to treat fevers and hen pi for digestion issues. In 1869, The Hong Kong Government Gazette published a list of 104 medicines that were carried on ships. The list is comprehensive, reflecting the Hong Kong government’s attention to improving the passenger experience. Collectively, this evidence suggests that the passenger experience was somewhat satisfactory, albeit far from comfortable or pristine.
In 1849, a mere 325 immigrants passed through San Francisco’s customhouse. In less than a decade, that number skyrocketed. In 1852, it exceeded 20,000, and by the late 1850s, Chinese immigrants constituted nearly ten per cent of the state’s total population. Such data provides sufficient proof to acceptably classify the growth in the Chinese population as a rapid evolution. Immigrants’ occupations varied, but most built railroads, developed fisheries along the Pacific Coast, worked on plantations, and operated laundries. While some immigrants made special trips to visit family back in China, many had neither the interest nor financial means. By 1880, resulting from the cyclical nature of migration, the Chinese population in the United States reached 105,456 and would remain at that level throughout the following decade.
Works Referenced
Primary Sources
Keller, George F. San Francisco’s Three Graces. Illustration. San Francisco: The Wasp, May 26, 1882. From Ohio State University, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. https://hti.osu.edu/opper/lesson-plans/immigration/images/san-franciscos-three-graces.
Meares, John. Annual Report of the Board of Health of the City and Country. Pamphlet. San Francisco: Board of Health, 1877. Accessed July 11, 2024.
Reich, George A. Memorial on Chinatown by an Investigating Committee of the Anti-Chinese Council. Pamphlet. San Francisco: Workingmen’s Party, 1880. From The Museum of the City of San Francisco. Accessed July 11, 2024. http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist2/wpc12.html
United States v. Ju Toy, 198 U.S. (1904). https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep198253/.
Secondary Sources
Hamilton, Marian. "California Gold-Rush English." American Speech 7, no. 6 (1932): 423-33. https://www.jstor.org/stable/452295.
Lee, Erika. "The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882-1924." Journey of American Ethnic History 21, no. 3 (2002): 36-62. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27502847.
Lee, Erika. The Making of Asian America: A History: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Accessed July 13, 2024.
Leong, Jack Hang-Tat. "The Hong Kong Connection for the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America." Stanford University Chinese Railroad Workers of North America Project, 2019. https://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/website/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Leong-Jack-Hong-Kong-Connection.pdf.
Luo, Michael. "America Was Eager for Chinese Immigrants. What Happened?" The New Yorker. Last modified August 23, 2021. Accessed June 24, 2024. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/30/america-was-eager-for-chinese-immigrants-what-happened.
Luo, Michael. "The Forgotten History of the Purging of Chinese from America." The New Yorker. Last modified April 22, 2021. Accessed August 20, 2024. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-forgotten-history-of-the-purging-of-chinese-from-america.
Mckeown, Adam. "Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion, 1875-1943." Journal of American Ethnic History 18, no. 2 (1999): 73-110. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27502416.
Rao, Nancy Yunhwa. Chinatown Opera Theater in North America. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017. muse.jhu.edu/book/49639.
Wong, K. Scott. "Chinatown: Conflicting Images, Contested Terrain." MELUS 20, no. 1 (1995): 3-15. https://www.jstor.org/stable/467850.