1848 
AH TOY - INDEPENDENT CHINESE MADAM
Just like other noteworthy prostitutes of the West such as Sarah Bowman or Dona "La Tules" Gertrudis Barcelo, Ah Toy succeeded by adapting to the changing conditions of her environment. Many historians hypothesize that she was the first Chinese prostitute in America. She arrived in San Francisco in late 1848. Ah Toy maintained her independence and freedom from perils of most Chinese prostitutes brought to the US. She became the most popular and successful courtesan in San Francisco who set up her own brothel of Chinese women.

AH TOY'S BEAUTY AND BUSINESS She gave no favors to anyone but charged an ounce of gold dust (at $18 an ounce) just for the privilege of looking at her face. Men lined up in an queue that stretched for a block or more. At the height of her fame in the early 1850s, when the boat from Sacramento touched shore men would leap from their ships/boats and race to her courtyard in hopes of catching a glimpse of her. She was as famous in her day as Lola Montez the dancer was in hers.

Tall and with an ivory complexion, Ah Toy in her youth was so beautiful that when news of her arrival reached the goldfields in that land bereft of women, miners put away their picks and shovels and traveled a hundred miles to San Francisco just to look at her. Her English language skills and her understanding and employment of the American judicial system set her apart as a most unusual Chinese woman. Ah Toy used the court system to win legal battles and defend herself and her flourishing practice. This very public and smart person was capable of manipulating the very system which made her a victim, just like the many other Chinese immigrant women!

Ah Toy was a successful entrepreneur. Unlike most Chinese prostitutes, she independently operated establishments of "commercial vice" and resisted attempts by the male-dominated society (i.e. tongs) to control her business or extort "protection money from her." Ah Toy began her business from a humble residence in a small shanty on an alley off Clay Street (near Kearny). As her business grew she was increasingly sensationalized in newspapers and was described as "strangely alluring" by foreign visitors to San Francisco.

In 1850 - Ah Toy expanded her business employing two recently arrived prostitutes. Within two or three years, she was doing sufficiently well to move into bigger quarters. In 1852, she was listed as being the proprietor of two "boardinghouses." That year, she was also blamed for the immigration of several hundred Chinese prostitutes. Despite the increasing involvement of Tongs in the industry, Ah Toy maintained control of her business operations for at least two more years. Benson Tong notes that she even "procured prostitutes for other Chinese brothels."

Ah Toy, the second Chinese woman in San Francisco, joined the ranks of prosperous immigrant prostitutes who had such professional names as Bowlegged Mary and Squirrel Tooth Alice (who got her moniker posing for photographs with her pet squirrel) - along with the other "Madams" listed above.

Click HERE to Purchase   One of the greatest achievements of Yung's Unbound Feet is the more complete life story of Ah Toy through oral interviews of witnesses and careful search of local newspapers. She was the second Chinese woman to arrive in the United States in 1855. Speaking English and having bound feet, she came to the United States from Hong Kong to "better her condition", and had a rather long career from 1848 to the 1860s. She was last seen selling clams on a beach in Santa Clara before she died. Yung also recovers Ah Toy's obituary in a local newspaper in 1928 that shows Ah Toy lived a long life (almost one hundred years old when she died). Judy Yung also identifies her picture in one of Genthe's photographs taken in San Francisco's old Chinatown.

Around 1854, Tongs began importing women for prostitution, marking the beginning of the end of the period of "laissez-faire" practices, and the increasing rarity of prostitutes operating as autonomous entrepreneurs. While competition and tong control eventually brought about Ah Toy's downfall and removal from the spotlight in San Francisco prostitution, her story indicates that the dynamics and foundations of the industry are much more complicated than is commonly assumed. After a few years in the Bay Area, Toy departed San Francisco in 1854, leaving litigation in her wake. In one suit, she accused a client of trying to pay her with brass filings instead of gold dust. She left before it came to trial.

Madam Ah Toy, several times married, lived to a venerable age. Unlike tens of thousands [of women] in her line of work, she is now enshrined in the hall of famous memories of this remarkable city, which admires enterprise, courage, and the sort of character that could cope with the hazards of survival in the Wild West. It is a commentary on the times that the business she engaged in was one of the very few that in those days could give her an independent living.

1849 
HAWAII'S MERCHANT PRINCE: CHUN AFONG (1825 - 1906)
Chun Afong, the first Chinese millionaire in Hawai'i, came to Honolulu from the Pearl River Delta region in China in 1849 and within six years he became well known because he made a fortune in retailing, real estate, sugar, rice and opium. He was a member of King Kalakaua's privy council, married Julia Fayerweather, of royal Hawaiian blood and became one of the richest and most prominent members of Hawaii's Chinese community. Together they had thirteen daughters and three sons while living on their home located close to Ka'ihikapu loko, the largest fishpond in Waikiki on thirteen acres - in addition to his mansions in Macau, Oahu's Nuuanu Valley and his villa on Waikiki.

The people who pass through Afong's life are a historical Who's Who of Hawaii. Afong arrived during the reign of Kamehameha III and left during the final days of King David Kalakaua. Other familiar names of prominent people in Hawaii such as Dole, Davies, Alexander, Baldwin, Bishop, Dillingham, Judd, Schofield, Spreckles, Wilder, Castle, Cooke and more are integrated within Afong's everyday life.

Afong prospered in businesses that bankrupted others. Where other entrepreneurs saw Hawaii to be at the periphery of empire, Afong saw the Islands as the strategic center of a dynamic East-West market, free from the costly revolutions and wars that plagued other regions." Afong had 20 children (16 by his Hawaiian-American wife, Julia, four more born in China); his son Alung was the first Chinese student to attend Hawaii's famous Punahou School. A part owner of the Pepeekeo Sugar Plantation on the island of Hawai`i for many years, he eventually sold his business holdings and in 1890 returned to China to spend the rest of his days, a goal desired by most men who came from China.

In 1893 (the year Queen Lili'uokalani was illegally deposed by American businessmen), one of the Afong daughters, Henrietta Patrinella Kealaiki, married naval officer William Henry Whiting, a descendant of George Washington and a Civil War hero.

Bob Dye's book "Hawaii's Merchant Prince" describes the life of Chun Afong.

KA'IHIKAPU LOKO - The loko was named for one of Waikiki's pre-contact chiefs and celebrated in the legend of `Ouha and Mamala. `Ouha went to ka'ihikapu loko after the great surfrider Mamala left him for Chief Honokaupu. At the pond, `Ouha offered a basket of shrimp and fish to the women of the area. When he opened the basket, the creatures leaped out, and `Ouha fled in shame as the women laughed at him. He shed his human form and became the great shark-god who patrolled the coast between Waikiki and Koko Head.

1849 
1ST ASIAN VS. ASIAN LAW SUIT
The second Chinese woman arrived in San Francisco and the first civil law suit filed by a Chinese against another Chinese in California happen in 1849. The Chinese female, 20 years old sing-song girl name Ah Toy, arrived by masted ship in San Francisco in 1849. She was also known as China Mary, and later, Madam Ah Toy. She accused two of her Chinese men customers each paid her one ounce of brass fillings instead of one ounce of gold dust as agreed upon, on the business transaction. Judge George Baker heard her case. This is the first civil law suit filed by a Chinese against another Chinese in California. (Source: Silvia Anne Sheafer, Chinese and the Gold Rush, Historical Califirnia Journal Publications,1977.)

1849 
CHINESE CAMP
Chinese Camp is the site of the first outbreak of anti-Chinese violence in the United States. Depression in mining leads to the attempted expulsion of Chinese miners in more than a dozen mining communities.

1850s 
CHINESE BECAME CALIFORNIA FARMERS
In the 1850s, farmers hired Chinese farmers that left the gold fields to drain the marshlands in the Sacramento and San Joanquin valleys and paid each worker $1 a day. The Chinese helped to develop agriculture. They have had discovered many different kinds of fruits. It was a great contribution to American agriculture. The Chinese's agriculture helped to grow up United States economic.

They brought new kinds of food. At first the farmers in California only planted wheat. Later, they grew large quantities of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. Some of the food were grew more and sold all over the country, such as plums, sugar beets, peanuts, chrysanthemums and peas.

Because Chinese farmers contributed their expertise to the infant fruit and vegetables agribusiness, they saved California from economic disasters that hit the rest of the nation. Often the seeds of many fruits and vegetables as from cherries and teas to celery and asparagus-made the botanical journey from China to America easily.

Villagers or farmers were sometimes brought to the Americans specifically for the purpose of planting and growing tea and only the Chinese grew it. These Chinese farmers contributed their knowledge of agricultural science and technology as well.

The Chinese were not only forced to work for next to nothing - they proved to be extremely capable. "They are the mainstay of the orchardist," said the Pacific Rural Press, "The only supply of labor he can depend upon. They are pickers and packers of fruit. It is difficult to see how our annual fruit crop could be harvested and prepared for market without 'Chinaman'." By the 1870s, 75% of farmers in California were Chinese. In the vineyards, they harvested the grapes, and they dug the underground wines cellars. They picked apples, peaches, pears, cherries olives, citrus fruited, and cotton. They grew pumpkins celery, asparagus, and cabbages. Most Chinese worked as field hands. They were employed as field pickers, pears, and strawberries. The Pacific Rural Express on September 16, 1893, wrote, "It is difficult to see how our.. Nevertheless, they were often poorly paid for their talent and hard work."

"The Chinese actually taught their overloads skills to American farmer how to plant, cultivate, and harvest or chard and garden crops," wrote Carey McWilliams, a historian who has studied California agriculture. It was a skill the Chinese did not pick up overnight in America. They came from a land where intensive cultivation was an ancient tradition.

ACHIEVEMENTS AND PIONEERS
It was Chinese farmers who first tried hatching eggs by using artificial heat. And the Red Bluff Beacon in 1870 said that the Tehama County peanuts which were grown by the Chinese were "the sweetest we ever tasted."

America had copied a lot of things from Chinese agriculture. Not only for the best, for example: Wheat, millet, and barley were grown in China many centuries before Europeans learned about them. All of our cereals but maize, sorghum, and some forms of oats originated in Asia. The common fruit trees of temperate zone, except for pecan and the persimmon, came from Asia, too.

Ah Bing: He was a Chinese Horticulturist who succeeded in crossbreeding a new cherry variety that called Bing Cherry in Oregon.

Lue Gim Gong - Father of Florida's Citrus Industry (1859 - 1925): He got his start while working as a strike breaker in a shoe factory in Massachusetts. On Sundays, he attend a Volunteer school started by the citizens of North Adams to Chinese factory workers English. Through the encoragement of Frances Burlingame, he developed many new and different kinds of Thanksgiving apples that were sweater than the ones other groves produced and raspberries that were a strange salmon pink color. People called him the wizard and in 1911 was awarded the Wilder Silver Medal by the American Pomological Society for his oranges. This orange could hang on tree for more than one year and did not spoil even when it took months to get to the market - it was called the "Lue Gim Gong" orange.

As "Truck Gardeners," the Chinese were rated the best. They worked plots on the edges towns and sold their vegetables form wagons, driving up and down the city streets.

In the 1870s, Polish novelist Henry Sienkieicz stated "labors of the Chinese has transformed the sterile sands into the most fertile blacks earth .... The fruit and vegetables, raspberries and strawberries under the care of Chinese gardens grow to a fabulous size. I have seen strawberries as large as small pears and beads of cabbages four time the size of European beads, and pumpkin the size of our tubs...."

The farmers understood that the key to the profit in any labor-intensive crop was the dependable, hard-working Chinese who were willing to crawl through the fields and give the beets the necessary care and attention.

Watsonville would become the sugar capital of Northern California, thanks in large part to the Chinese workers willing to bloody their knees in the fields.

When the first crews of Chinese farm laborers entered the Sacramento / San Joaquin region in the summer of 1866, they brought the same resourceful attitude toward working the land that they brought to harvesting the abundance of the sea. From 1866 to 1900, the Chinese farm laborer was the mainstay of agriculture on the Monterey Bay Region, providing labor to plant, tend, and harvest crops and reclaim land and his experience to show Yankee farmers the vast agricultural potential of the region.

Strawberries: The Santa Cruz County strawberry industry's first bigger and successful planting of strawberries in the Pajaro Valley came late in 1880 and the introduction of irrigation, totally with the surplus of Chinese farm laborers freed up by the worker of the soquel beet sugar factory, caused the strawberry get jumped to 268 acres from 42 by 1885.

Chinese farm laborers preferred to be paid a piece-rate rather than a daily wage, and sharecropping arrangements were even more desirable. But the most highly prized working arrangements for the capital-poor Chinese were leases under which they reclaimed the land in exchange for its free use for its free use for four or five years.

The Chinese began to employ in highly skilled land reclamation crew in l870. They wielded shovels and worked waist-deep in water, and they drained the tule, swamps and marshes and transformed them into agricultural lands by l877. They had succeeded in creating a full five million acres of valuable farmland. They reclaimed eighty-eight thousand acres of rich delta land from 1860 to 1880.

The Chinese were the first to devise the tule shoe, an oversized horseshoe, which distributed the horse's weight over a large area and prevented it from sinking into marshland. Once the land became fit for agriculture, the Chinese remained in the area to plant, harvest, and preserve the crops.

By the late of 1880s the Chinese were clearing the willows and tules out of the sloughs country west of Watsonille and bringing marginal land into berry and vegetables production.

In 1890 a Chinese crew planted one acre of raspberries on reclaimed land and sold the berries for $1,300. Another piece of reclaimed sloughs land produced 200 sacks of potatoes (one hundred pounds per sack) to the acre in 1888 and 180 sacks to the acre the following year. The crop of choice seem to have been berries.

Whenever Chinese cleared land in the sloughs district they put in raspberries, and they leased desirable tracts of land in different parts of the valley, paying cash rent in advance to cultivate blackberries. When the reclamation leases expired, landowners rarely renewed them on a long-term basis with the Chinese farmers, preferring instead of growing berries or vegetables themselves.

1850 
CALIFORNIA'S FOREIGN MINER'S TAX
As the vast majority of the early Chinese headed for the gold mines, California's first assertion of white supremacy against the Chinese focused on control of the mines. In 1850, California passed the Foreign Miners Tax. The letter of this tax was nativist and applied to all foreigners. In practice it was mainly collected from the Chinese in an attempt to drive them from the mines. This contradiction undermined its usefulness as social policy or law. Still, once the Hall case (more on this below) and common practice made clear that the Chinese had no protection of any sort, they were regularly victimized by white miners and extorted by tax collectors.

California imposes Foreign Miner's Tax and enforces it mainly against Chinese miners, who often had to pay more than once. The taxes bring in up to 50% of the entire state revenues. The U.S. District Court in Northern California upheld laws against Asian immigrants, including a tax on foreign miners and a bar on Chinese from testifying against whites in criminal cases. Between 1850 and 1870, before the law was voided by an amendment to the United States Constitution, half the state's income was derived from this source. Fishermen were also taxed a monthly license fee of $4.00. California state legislature passed the first Foreign Miners' Tax Law, levying a $20-per-month tax on each foreigner engaged in mining.

This happened in California, an antislavery territory dominated by "free soilers," while they were attempting to determine the precise social status of the Chinese and their place in U.S. society. Whites were divided among themselves between those (mainly capitalists) who desired easy access to cheap Chinese labor and those (mainly labor, that is white labor) who wished them excluded from the country.

They were stymied by the fact that existing law covered only Negroes, Whites and American Indians by the fact that white California's racial conditions and concerns did not completely match those of the federal government. These were conditions they had to sort through, by means of political and ideological struggle, with tremendous, though often overlooked, opposition from the Chinese themselves.

It is this process that constitutes what is here referred to as the "racing," "racialization," or "racial formation" of the Chinese into Asian Americans. This process eventually produced a social category of a new type, one that was neither simply national/ethnic nor strictly racial, but a combination of the two: by the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese were racialized as "aliens (hence national) ineligible to citizenship (based on race)."

At key junctures the U.S. state has defined racial groups and dictated the race relations of which they are part. But it has done so not in a vacuum, but in accordance with racialized socio-economic and political struggles. The culmination of the process of developing the racial category appropriate to the Chinese, not surprisingly, paralleled and eventually settled the fight over whether or not to exclude Chinese from entering the country and/or attaining U.S. citizenship.

1850 
1ST CALIFORNIA CENSUS WITH CHINESE AMERICANS
On September 9, California gains statehood. Some 500 immigrants out of 57,787 arriving in California were Chinese. First US census: 2 Chinese house servants listed: Ali Fou and Ah Luce. It wasn't until the first Chinese woman arrived, on Oct. 22, 1859, that the city's only newspaper, the Los Angeles Star, acknowledged the existence of a Chinese community.

In 1850, approximately 450 Chinese men entered California; in 1852, 2,716 more arrived; and in 1852, 20,000 Chinese men crossed from China to the Pacific Northwest. By 1880, the ratio of male to female Chinese immigrants was approximately 20:1. They lived and worked in Chinatowns, in groups according to their district or region and dialect.

Two years later (1861), when merchant Chung Chick opened the city's first Chinese store, on Spring Street, the population had grown to 21 men and eight women, all working as servants or laundrymen. Within a few years, more Chinese came, most winding up as railroad workers, shopkeepers or farmers.

1852 
FIRST MAJOR WAVE OF IMMIGRATION 
First group of 195 Chinese contract laborers land in Hawaii. Of the 11,794 Chinese living in California, only 7 were women. Chinese immigration increased to 20,000 this year with most individuals proceeding to mining regions. This number decreased to under 8,000 annually during the next two decades. Over 20,000 Chinese enter California. Chinese first appear in court in California. Missionary Willian Speer opens Presbyterian mission for Chinese in San Francisco. Chinese workers being shipped to San Francisco mutiny on the Robert Browne, drawing attention to the "coolie trade." It is San Francisco's first major strike!

Racially Coerced Labor Force to Exclusion
It was into the above situation that the early Chinese immigrants unwittingly thrust themselves. The Gold Mountain had a racial cordon and a developing ethnic/nationality one as well. The experience of the Chinese in California in the nineteenth century was to break new ground.

NOTE: Contrary to the myth that the early Chinese were part of the odious coolie labor trade that flourished between 1847 and 1874, most of the early Chinese immigrants bought their tickets to the United States on credit and were not contract laborers per se. Once they paid off their debts, they were more or less free. And, owing to the rather free-flowing, frontier character of Gold Rush-era California, as well as the crying shortage of labor, racial constraints were not nearly so entrenched or immediate as in the more settled parts of the country.

1852 
CHINESE CAN'T VOTE IN WASHINGTON
Territorial law passed banning Chinese from voting in Washington.

1852 
"THE CHINA BOYS" / CHINESE AND GOLD MINING
As the news of the discovery of gold reached Guangzhou, thousands of Chinese came to America and joined the Gold Rush, about 25,000 Chinese arrived at San Francisco, taking along their harvesting tools, dreaming of became millionaires by the mining of gold. The period, which the later historians called "The Gold Rush", started. San Francisco, at that time, were also called as "Gold Mountain" by some of the Chinese.

During the mid-19th Century, the Chinese Government had raised taxes, in which the farmers were unable to pay for them. And also, natural disaster such as flood happened. Crops were destroyed, the Chinese could not produce enough rice to feed themselves. So as they heard about the news of the Gold Rush in America, they came to the U.S. in swarm, hoped to mine the gold.

At first, the Chinese were cheerfully welcomed as ''The China Boys,'' invited to official functions and praised for the quality of their work. The next thing they knew, the governor was denouncing them as avaricious ''coolies,'' whites were chasing them out of the mines and legislators were targeting them with punitive taxes.

To lower the quantity of exported gold and balance the national trade, the Federal Government imposed the "Foreigner Miners' License Tax" in 1852, which, stated that you should register to become a licensed miner before you could actually started mining. The law aimed mostly at the Chinese miners to increase the State's revenue. It required every foreign miner who did not choose to become a U.S. citizen to pay $3 every month to the state.

In mining, the Chinese worked for companies for gold silver. The huge taxes discouraged their business, but the Chinese managed to pay the levies and gathered as much gold and other metal nuggets as they could. New ore veins were opened too, and the European miners grew angry at the Chinese for becoming rich while they grew poorer.

When employment in mining, railroad building and timbering was closed to Chinese, they turned to manufacturing. California had just begun to develop consumer industries and free from the economic control of the Eastern States. Before the turn of the century, one half of California's labour force engaged in manufacturing was of Chinese origain.

From 1869 there was a small community of Chinese miners living in Arrowtown. They were originally invited as workers when the West Coast gold rush depleted local labour and helped build such buildings as the St John's Presbyterian Church. The Chinese were largely segregated from the European miners and created their own settlement near Bush Creek. Many worked on a large sluicing in Arrow Flat. The population of Chinese was entirely men, and the proceeds from their labours was sent home to families in China. The Chinese were regarded as successful miners, which was mainly due to their hard work.

1852 
OLDEST CHINESE TAOIST SANCTUARY WAS BUILT
Bok Kai Temple is the oldest active Chinese Taoist temple in California. Bok Kai is the Chinese water god, the bringer of rain, the preventer of floods and the banisher of evil. Since the temple was built in 1854, and rebuilt in 1880), in Marysville has been stated that this is "where the saints can best watch over the town to see that nothing good flows away and that nothing bad flows in."

The Yuba River courses down the hills from Gold Country and pours into the Feather River, about 40 miles north of Sacramento. Marysville was founded at the confluence of the two rivers in 1851 and during the Gold Rush briefly swelled into one of the largest cities in the state. Many of those drawn to the gold fields were Chinese immigrants from the Canton province, who made up about a quarter of Marysville's population of about 5,000 people and built the second-largest Chinatown in California after San Francisco's.

In 1880 the Chinese community built the Bok Kai Temple, replacing a smaller temple from 1854. The new temple faced the Yuba River, along the bridge leading into town. The building itself was unremarkable, but the inside of the front porch was painted with a lyrical mural showing robed figures, flying birds and graceful calligraphy. The main altar featured the figurines of Bok Kai and six other deities, intricate carvings, ceremonial weapons and other artifacts imported from southern China. In 2001, the National Trust for Historic Preservation declared the temple one of the 11 most endangered sites in the nation.

1853 
PEOPLE VS. HALL
Another attempt to define the legal status of Chinese took racial, not nativist, form. In late 1853, a "free white citizen" named George Hall was convicted of murdering a Chinese man, but the next year the California Supreme Court reversed the conviction on the grounds that Hall had been "convicted upon the testimony of a Chinese person." California Supreme Court ruled that a white man charged with murder could not be convicted on the testimony of a Chinese witness.

The chief justice ruled that Indians had originated from Asia before crossing the Bering Strait and that therefore the laws barring testimony by Indians applied to the "whole of the Mongolian race," that Chinese were covered by the generic term "Black" and that the court should not turn "loose upon the community" the Chinese "whose mendacity is proverbial; a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development..." (People v. Hall). Here was convoluted American racial logic attempting to grapple with the "racing" of a set of people seen as entirely foreign. No concern whatsoever was evinced for the Chinese murder victim. Again, the Chinese were stripped of crucial constitutional rights, but the means for doing so were inadequate and inconsistent.

Lalu means either Islam or Long Life, and Nathoy is pronounced Nasoi indicates that she was a Daur (a minority in Mongolia that is related to the Mongols and Tungus-Manchu-speaking communities that settled in Han that gave up the Mongolian faith and Lamaism to become followers of Islam). Their nomadic and farming backgrounds provided the ability to survive, apparent alienation from most of Warrens' Chinese and her affectin for her home in the Salmon River canyon.

1853 
POLLY BEMIS IS BORN
Idaho's Polly Bemis was the Pacific Northwest's most famous Chinese American woman, overcoming the fact that "Orientals" (Asians/Chinese) were not well respected in mining camps. Her reputation were comparable to others in her hometown's (Warren) storied past that also revolved around other characters of the time and place named Judge Poe, Three-Fingered Jack and Cougar Dave.

Polly Bemis (Lalu Nathoy) was born on September 11,1853, in Northern China (apart from the many other Chinese that came from Southern China/Canton), near one of the upper rivers.

Lalu's impoverished farmer parents had her feet had been bound as if she were from a family of means, then unbound. When Lalu was eighteen, a prolonged drought forced her father was forced to sell her to bandits in exchange for enough seed to plant another crop to save his family. It is reported that when the bandits take her away from home, she was not obedient and stoop to them while trying many times to escape from the bandits as many times as she can. It is reported that she let (Chen), the leader of the bandits, keep her for himself as a wife instead of making her a common whore.

Through Shanghai (China), San Francisco (United States) and Idaho City (United States) - she arrived at Warrens (a rip-roaring camp - northeast of McCall - during the Gold Rush days that started in 1861 in Idaho), where the bandit (Hong King) either died or deserted Polly while operating a restaurant/dance hall/saloon/gambling house for several years. Polly, however, stated "Old woman smuggle me into Portland. I cost $2,500. . . . Old Chineeman he took me to Warrens in a pack train."

According to reports, Polly gained her freedom long before she married Bemis, "Big Jim was sitting out in front of his place one afternoon, sunning himself, when he suddenly toppled over. He was dead when he was picked up. The doctor said it was his heart. As a result, Polly and the other girls no longer belonged to anyone. For four of the five, it was just a matter of changing hands, and they continued their whoring. Polly opened a little restaurant and did well until she fell in love with Charley Bemis."

For Chinese men, not only were there not Chinese women here, but they also had laws that forbid interracial marriage between Chinese and whites. It creates a situation where there are criminal Tongs, secret societies, set up where they could bring these girls to who had been sold by their parents to the United States and women were literary sold into prostitution. Some of the women tried to run away with the help of men who befriended them or who loved them. The only other way and some of the women did this, was to commit suicide rather than continue to work and endure these conditions as a sex slave.

There is also another story. Acknowledging that the Chinese women who labored as prostitutes, the majority worked as chattel for masters who'd bought them. Beginning in 1861, California passed a series of codes aimed at restricting the importation of Chinese women for prostitution that motivated the smuggling trade between "importers" (often Chinese) and recruiting agents. She could have followed the paths of other Chinese women where she stayed at San Francisco's Chinatown (in barracoons) where enslaved Chinese women were either held while awaiting distribution or auctioned off to the highest bidder. This would result in her traveling by boat up the Columbia River from Portland to Lewiston, Idaho, and then by pack train to Warrens.

Pioneers A. W. Talkington stated "Polly was a good woman and entitled to a good deal of consideration because of her upright conduct in rather difficult circumstances" and George Bancroft claimed "got money from women's time-honored methods." Other pioneers insisted Polly had never worked as a prostitute. "Polly Nathoy was brought from China to Warrens for the world's oldest profession. When taken to (Hong King's) saloon, she was terrified! Charlie Bemis was present and protected her from unwanted advances." (Bertha Long)

Polly's longing for freedom is seen as she determines to buy herself back from the whore house; saves money for her freedom when she is sold to the saloon; even tries to kill Hong King, her master, to make herself free. When Charlie wins her from Hong King in a card game, she doesn't feel happy or grateful but angry that Charlie "forces her to break her promise that when she leaves Hong King, she would become a free woman." She doesn't want to belong to Charlie though he loves her and will never make her a slave. She wants to be a self-sufficient woman with her own business, a boarding house. For the desire for independence, Polly has refused three times Charlie's proposal of marriage and still keeps her own place after eighteen years of living with him.

On July 8, 1872 - Charles Bemis (whose "fearless personality, coupled with his skill at shooting, enabled him to maintain order without getting into trouble owned the saloon and was the town's deputy sheriff) bought Lalu from the Chinese owner (Hong King) as payment resulting from a poker game (according to legend) - who was introduced as "Polly" and thereafter was called by this name as his "poker bride."

LIFE IN WARRENS In its heyday, the population of Warrens reached 3,000, roughly one third of which were Chinese who had relocated after the railroads were complete. There wasn't a single white woman in the camp which was rife with violence and bloodletting. Probably because of the rough passage, the women were all either Lapwai (Sheepeater) Native American girls, stolen or possibly purchased from their tribe, or Chinese slaves owned by "Big Jim," the boss of the Chinese colony. He worked his slaves as prostitutes. The most famous of these was China Polly, who Big Jim had bought, along with four other women, in San Francisco, taking them first to Idaho City and eventually downriver to Warrens.

Polly was just one of fifty Chinese in Warrens who pleaded not guilty to "the alleged violation of Section 6 of Act November 3rd, 1893 of the Statutes of the United States." All fifty blamed their failure to register on the government official's inability to come to Warrens as promised because "the roads were impassible owing to the snows and rains and they were represented by the same attorney, D. Worth."

All the descriptions of Polly in her youth remark on her beauty, and she was renowned even in her old age for her wit and charm. By the 1880s they were living together. Polly remained financially independent on Bemis (who died in October 29,1922) by taking in laundry from miners and ran a boardinghouse.

After living together for years, they were married in 1894 after Idaho modified its law against mixed-race unions. Some say as the result of Polly's medical care (with the assistance of Al Kan/Lee Dick - credited as "healers") resulting from an injury resulting from a poker game with John Cox, above-listed "poker bride" and/or the result of the 1895's Geary Act that required Chinese legally residing in the United States to carry a certificate of residence at all times.

The couple was renowned for their generous hospitality with Polly's bright-eyed warmth and humor - whether injured, ill and/or nursing them back to health. As pioneer John Carrey put it, "There was nobody in my day who carried the respect Polly earned through her kindness to everybody." The Bemis ranch became known as Polly Place, and a overnment survey party named the creek running through the property for Polly in 1911.

On May 13,1896, the case United States v Polly Bemiss [sic], (one of fifty Chinese who pleaded not guilty to the "alleged violation of Section 6 of Act November 3rd, 1893 of the Statutes of the United States") in the matter of the arrest and deportation of said defendant, was heard in Moscow, Idaho. As required by law, Polly had a white witness who testified that she had already been living in the United States when the Geary Act passed, that she was a "peaceable law abiding Chinaman, inoffensive, and has been continuously engaged in laundrying [sic] for ten years in Idaho County." Her witness was a resident of Grangeville, and his testimony was given on May 7,1896, before W. A. Hall, U.S. Circuit Court Commissioner for the District of Idaho. Polly also presented testimony before Hall that same day.

Although Polly is a woman with strength and courage, she was afraid of having children. What she's worrying about was not about herself but the children. She believed that her children, who would be Chinese-Americans, would live under racism and violence against the Asians.

Polly died at 3:00 A.M. on November 6,1933 and buried at Grangeville's Prairie View Cemetery.

In 1987 the Department of the Interior deemed the cabin significant in Idaho's heritage, and at the museum's dedication ceremonies Governor Cecil Andrus declared, "The history of Polly Bemis is a great part of the legacy of central Idaho. She is the foremost pioneer on the rugged Salmon River."

1854 
1ST CHINESE WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES
The first Chinese woman to arrive in the American West, in 1854, worked as a domestic servant to a missionary family. The second one arrived in 1855 is from Hong Kong. the famous Madame Ah Toy.

From 1880 to 1920, about 49,000 Chinese entered the United States and about 5 percent of them were women. According to the census data in 1860 to 1900, many women were categorized as prostitutes.

Mission Home claimed to save about 3000 Chinese women from the 1890 to 1900, which meant that one eighth of Chinese women in the US were rescued and reformed by Mission Home.

1854 
1ST CHINESE AMERICAN GRADUATE
In the summer of 1854, Yung received his B.A. degree and became the first Chinese student to be graduated from an American university. Yung Wing initially enrolled at the Monson Academy in Monson, Massachusetts. Upon his graduation in the summer of 1850, he entered Yale University. Yung Wing (also known as Rong Hong, 1828-1912) was born to a poor farming family, in the village of Nanping, in Xiangshan County, Guangdong Province, in southern China. became a naturalized American citizen on October 30, 1852, while a sophomore at Yale University. Later, in 1875, he married Mary Louise Kellogg from East Windsor, Connecticut. As the first Chinese graduate of an American university, Yung Wing received from Yale first his B.A. in 1854, and then was conferred an LL.D. in 1876. He played an important role to build Sino-American relations. Yung later returned to China and organized the Chinese Educational Mission, which brought over 100 Chinese boys to New England for schooling in the 1870s and 1880s.

1854  
CHINESE CAN'T GIVE COURT TESTIMONY
Chinese in Hawaii establish a funeral society, their first community association in the islands. People v. Hall rules that Chinese can't give testimony in court after the testimonies of Chinese witnesses resulted in the murder conviction of a white man. The judge reversed the verdict citing the Criminal Act of 1850, which had previously prohibited blacks, mulattos, and Indians from testifying for or against a white man.

This was the worst of the early laws because it addressed a state statute barring the testimony of blacks, mulattoes, and Indians against white defendants. Reasoning that the Chinese were descended from the same racial stock as Indians and that, as nonwhites, they were the legal equivalent of blacks. The court ruled that they were similarly excluded from giving evidence against whites. The decision, which became law in California by 1860, meant that whites could attack Chinese with impunity.

1855 
1ST CIVIL MARRIAGE OF CHINESE AMERICANS
On April 7, 1855, Charley Ah You, of Thung Shung Tung Co., and Miss Sag Sung were married by Justice O. Bailey; believed to be the first civil marriage of Chinese in California" and in America. (Courtesy of Gordon Kwock

1855 
CHINESE CONSOLIDATED BENEVOLENT ASSOCIATION / CHINESE PROTESTS
By 1855, Chinese merchants began organizing to protest these and other discriminatory acts. Eventually this organization became known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, or the Chinese Six Companies. The Chinese Six Companies settled arguments within their own community, negotiated between the Chinese people and the federal and state governments, and hired lawyers to challenge unfair practices in court.

The main sources of anti-Chinese sentiment during this time were workers' groups who described the influx of Asian workers to the United States as "yellow peril." In addition to widespread intolerance for people of color, many labor groups held that cheap immigrant labor would lower wages for American workers.

"SIX COMPANIES'" CONTROL OVER CHINESE AMERICAN COMMUNITIES
However, home-country elites also took advantage of the racist isolation of Asians in America to extend their influence and control over these communities. For example, excluded from participation in almost all American institutions, traditions, and organizations, the Chinese community was rife with district, family, and clan associations, as well as secret societies, schools, public festivals and rituals, and China-based political organizations.

At the apex of this pyramid, the Chinese Benevolent Association (in some places known as the Six Companies) ruled over the Chinese-American communities. The Six Companies, in turn, was an instrument of the Kuomintang (China's Nationalist Party) which, as an ally of the United States against the Chinese Communists, was given almost free reign over the overseas Chinese up to and including regular violations of the Constitutional rights of those who it perceived opposed them.

To one degree or another, all the Asian communities in the United States were faced with a "dual structure of domination" in which a homeland government or political party was allowed by the United States to be its junior partner and overseer with a great range of powers to develop and enforce the interests both of U.S. racism and overseas loyalty. These dual structures were especially strong during the exclusion/enclave period, and only in the current phase of Asian-American history are they being broken down. Dual domination, like exclusion, is a unique combination of racial and national oppression.

1857 
CHINESE IN SAN FRANCISCO
San Francisco opens a school for Chinese children (changed to an evening school two years later). Missionary Augustus Loomis arrives to serve the Chinese in San Francisco.

1858 
IMMIGRATION BAN
California passes a law to bar entry of Chinese and "Mongolians."

1858
FIRST JAPANESE CITIZEN IN THE US
Hamada Hikozo becomes the first Japanese to be naturalized as an American citizen.

1860
CHINESE DISCRIMINATION
In 1860, two discriminatory laws were passed in California. One forbade Chinese American children to attend public schools. The other re quired a special license to be purchased by Chinese American fishermen. It was called a license instead of a tax because unequal taxation was for bidden by law (in other words, it was illegal to tax Chinese fishermen and not Italian or Portuguese fishermen).

1860 
CHINESE ARRIVE IN JAMAICA
The Chinese started to arrive in Jamaica in 1860. By the year 1930, four thousand emigrated to Jamaica. In the next 6 years and additional 2,000 arrived. Compared with the African-Jamaican population and even with the number of Indians, the figure was relatively small but the Jamaican Government, facing economic pressures of the depression years with thousands of unemployed having no prospects of jobs in the immediate future, decided to close its doors to Chinese immigrants.

After January 1931, only children under 14 yrs old were allowed in on a student permit. Returning Chinese residents were required to produce a re-entry permit which had to be obtained prior to departure. Restrictions were tightened further in 1940 when only diplomats, tourists and students with permits were allowed entry. Sometimes later, limited quotas were granted for wives, children and parents. Jamaican-born Chinese had to show proof of birth.

1860
OAKLAND'S CHINATOWN
Discrimination forced Oakland's earliest Chinese Americans to keep moving, first to 14th and Washington streets -- where Oakland's first Chinatown (once known as Tong Yan Fow and one of the oldest Chinese American neighborhoods in California) began in the early 1860s -- then to the east side of Telegraph Avenue at 17th Street.

1861 
CHINESE SOLDIERS IN THE LOUISIANA INFANTRY
Chinese soldiers served in the "Avegno Tiger Zouaves" Company I, 14th Louisiana Infantry, in 1861. Those Zouaves companies started as companies of the Governor's Guard. They were combined into a battalion and then put in a Regiment.

1861 
JAPANESE ARRIVES IN THE U.S.
Between 1861 and 1940, some 275,000 Japanese people moved to Hawaii and to the U.S. mainland. Many of the first Japanese immigrants were recruited to work in the sugar cane fields of Hawaii and fruit and vegetable farms of California. The Issei, or first generation immigrants from Japan, faced the difficulty of forging a new life that included elements of their traditional culture and the culture of their newly found homes.

1862
CHINESE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR SOLDIER - JOSEPH PIERCE
His war experiences made Pierce the most renown and highest ranked (corporal) Chinese soldier to have fought in the Civil War. Although Pierce was sold by his father at the age of ten to a sea captain, he did not spend his life at sea as a cabin boy or servant. Amos Peck for some reason took a liking to him and brought him to be raised by his mother in Berlin, Connecticut. Here he was treated as part of the Peck Family, attending the same country school with Peck's younger brothers and sisters.

Joseph Pierce in 1853 was most likely one of the few Chinese in New England and in Connecticut at the time. Although the first recorded Chinese began to come to America in 1848, the first significant immigration occurred in 1852, confining itself to the Pacific coast. The Pecks with whom he was raised was a prominent family, descendants of Deacon Paul Peck, one of the original proprietors, who along with Thomas Hooker, founded Hartford, Connecticut. Pierce was an accepted member of his community when he enlisted on July 26, 1862 for, undoubtedly, the same reasons the early volunteers had who answered President Lincoln's call for troops.

He was mustered into the Fourteenth Regiment, Company F of the Connecticut Volunteer Infantry that became part of the Second Brigade of the Third Division, Second Army Corps of the Army of the Potomac. From 1862 to 1865, Pierce unknowingly participated in what turned out to be many of the pivotal military events of the war, fighting in the major campaigns from Antietam to Gettysbury to Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House. He survived some of the bloodiest battles fought during the Civil War. The Fourteenth Connecticut participated in thirty-four battles and skirmishes, lost more men killed in battle in proportion to its size (only 215 (21%) of the original 1,040 men who left to fight returned home) and captured more prisoners, cannon and battle flags than any other Connecticut regiment.

1862
CHINESE "POLICE TAX" (Anti-Coolie Tax)
Six Chinese district associations in San Francisco form loose federation. California imposes a "police tax" of $2.50 a month on every Chinese.

1863 
CHINESE CAN'T TESTIFY
Territorial law banning Chinese from testifying in court cases involving whites in Washington.

1863 
ASIAN & CHINESE AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN THE CIVIL WAR
Chinese men served and many died in the armies and navies during Civil War (Union and the Confederate army), along with German, Irish, French and African American soldiers. Ironically enough, they even served under the "Color Troups" division of the armies! Although the number of Chinese (50+ were documented) who served was small in relationship to the total Chinese American population of the time, a higher percentage served than in any other ethnic group is a source of pride for the Asian/Asian Pacific American communities.

People from other Asian countries also served during the war. They came from China, India, Singapore, Malaya and other nations in the region. (source: muster rolls in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and also from many other sources - such as State rosters, regimental histories, other histories and other sources). Detailed information (name, resident, state, enlisted rank, state served, enlisted age, enlisted date, enlisted place and if they survived the war can be found here) of the soldiers that servived for both the Union and Confederate armies and navies can be found HERE.

The Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA), a national Asian Pacific American (civil rights advocacy and educational organization unveiled on April 26, 2003 the first historical marker in the United States dedicated to commemorating the American Civil War solders of Asian descent in Columbus, Ohio. During the last Congress, Congressman Mike Honda (the event's honorary guest) introduced a Joint Resolution posthumously proclaiming soldiers of Asian descent who fought in the Civil War to be honorary citizens of the United States (H. J. Res. 125).

1864 
CHINESE RACISM IN THE JIM CROW SOUTH
The Delta Chinese, who arrived in the years immediately after the Civil War to work on the cotton plantations and then opened groceries. Being neither black nor white in the Jim Crow South, they navigated a confusing, sometimes inconsistent set of racism, exclusion, segregated schools, laws and social mores. Plessy v. Ferguson is known by all, while Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927) (denying legal challenge by Chinese student to whites-only state school), is known by relatively few. "The Chinese in Mississippi were a third race in a system built for two," said James Loewen, a historian and the author of "The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White" (Harvard University Press, 1971). "Neither they nor the system knew what to do about that."

1864 
CHINESE POLL TAX
Territorial law enacting poll tax for Chinese in Washington.

1864 
FIRST KOREAN CITIZEN
Philip Jaisohn was born. He was the first Korean to become an American citizen and first Korean American to receive an American medical degree. Jaisohn was born Suh Jae-pil in the South Cholla Province of Korea, the son of parents who were members of the most privileged social class in Korea. He used an Anglicized version of his name upon his arrival in the United States in 1885, becoming Philip Jaisohn. He received his medical degree in 1892 and four years later returned to Korea to establish the first Korean newspaper. He became involved in the fight to keep Korea independent of China and, after 1910, to liberate it from Japan. Jaisohn devoted the majority of his life to the cause of Korean independence. His work in medical research and pathology (the study of diseases) and for Korean causes gained respect in both his homeland and his adopted country, the United States. Jaisohn died in 1951

	Chinese Railroad Workers

1865 
CENTRAL PACIFIC RAILROAD CO.'S RECRUITING
Central Pacific Railroad Co. recruits Chinese workers from Kwantung Province for the first transcontinental railroad. 10,000 workers were hired, of which 9,000 were Chinese. 1,000 workers dies on the job.

The Central Pacific group started from Sacramento and eastward to the Missouri River, but they had problems of money and labor.

At first Charles Crocker had no problem in hiring workmen because shipload of Irishmen were arriving in San Francisco. Crocker hired first 50 Chinese men in response to white workers' threatening a strike; within two years, 90 percent of the work force on the Central Pacific Railroad was Chinese. However, railroad work was very dangerous. Hiring Chinese labor was the only choice for them. Governor Leland Stanford decided to hire Chinese workers, and so fifty Chinese labors worked on the railroad. They were trained to do all kinds of work such as blasting, using horses, handing rock, laying tiles, etc. About 15,000 Chinese had been hired.

Many Chinese were killed during the railroad building. After the first easy 23 miles of traveling, the Central Pacific Railroad had to cross the mountain of Sierra. It had a rise 7,000 feet in 100 miles. Thousands of Chinese were killed by accident, intense heat and cold, diseases or being overworked.

The Chinese worked from sunrise to sunset, six days a week. They worked much harder than anyone. The Chinese worked in gangs of 12 to 20 men and their wages were $30 to $35 a month per man. They brought their own food and supplies from San Francisco. They were healthy because they drank tea instead of unboiled water. When cliffs end the road, they had to climb down with basket to blow the cliff off.

The Chinese workers were usually small and skinny so they could easily go down on a basket to put dynamite to blow it. After they put the dynamite, they had to get back up in a hurry of they might be blown into pieces.

The Chinese railroad workers used techniques like making metal on the road they had used in China. For those dangerious work, many laborers were killed by snow slides and avalanches. The company lost count of the number dead and there was no record of how many died when building the railroad.

The Chinese worked from sunrise to sunset and get only $26 a month while the white men were getting $36 a month. At the start, their wages were $26-28 per month. Many Chinese men had saved $13-20 a month and returned as soon as possible to China.

The railroad between the west and East coasts were finally finished in 1869. There was a huge celebration from coasts to coasts. The Chinese cheered when the engine from the West and the one from the East rolled toward one another and touched. The transcontinental railroad was finally finished. The Chinese, however, were excluded from participating and they were not even mentioned during the ceremonies.

1865 
CHINESE IN THE MISSISSIPI DELTA
The Chinese first came to the Delta during Reconstruction (1865 - 1877), when plantation owners, looking for cheap labor and worried that black workers were acting like free people rather than slaves, lured the immigrants with promises of jobs. They could never make money and send any home competing against America's lowest-paid work force, blacks in the Mississippi Delta, so they opened grocery stores. Ninety-five percent of the Chinese operated grocery stores, mostly for black clientele."

The first Chinese grocery store in Mississippi was opened sometime in the early 1870s. Tax records show several Chinese landowners in Rosedale, in Boliver County.

In 1880, the U.S. Census reported that there were 51 Chinese in Washington County, Miss. Many of the Chinese immigrants were from the southern provinces of China. There are two stories concerning the naming of Canton Mississipi (in the Mississipi Delta), and both attribute the name to Chinese origin. One states that Canton, Mississippi, is the exact opposite side of the world as Canton, China, and was thus named. The other story states the daughter of a Chinese family died in the area and the sympathetic community named the town for the family. There is really no more proof for one over the other; it's just which one you wish to believe. (The town enjoyed notoriety for having as visitors the celebrated original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, who ordered two custom suits from Perlinsky's Tailor Shop.)

1867 
WORKERS' STRIKE
On June 25, railroad strike: the Chinese laborers, without support of other workers, won concession over wages. Workingmen's Party of California founded in San Francisco. Denis Kearney acted as its president. Four hundred men (associated with Workingmen's Party) attacked Chinese in San Francisco. As the result, two thousand Chinese railroad workers strike for a week.

BACKGROUND INFO: By 1865, the Central Pacific Railroad Company had hired over 3,000 Chinese workers to build the western portion of the transcontinental railroad. Many were former miners, and were actively recruited because of their low cost. At its peak, the project hired over 10,000 Chinese workers. They provided the bulk of the labor for dangerous tasks such as chiseling and dynamiting tunnels through solid granite.

Chinese workers who dug tunnels in the high Sierra worked six days a week for $30 a month. Paid less than their Euro-American counterparts, subjected to whippings, and forbidden from quitting their jobs, 2,000 of them went on strike. They demanded $40 a month, an 8-hour workday for those working inside the tunnels, a 10-hour work day for those working outdoors, an end to corporal punishment, and the right to quit the job whenever they wanted. The Central Pacific Railroad responded by cutting off their rations. The strike lasted one week until their food ran out, and they were forced back to work.

"Although few in America were aware of it at the time, [the Chinese working on the Central Pacific section of the Transcontinental railway] staged, in June 1867, one of the largest-scale strikes of the century. "As Montgomery goes on to observe, demanding a wage comparable to that being paid to white workers, insisting on a ten-hour day, and calling for abolition of whipping for those who quit, the Chinese refused to leave their makeshift tents for a week, won their wage demands, and returned to work.

1868 
BURLINGAME - SEWARD TREATY
During the 1860s, when California needed Chinese labor, the United States wanted to maintain good relations with China. American diplomats negotiated this treaty with China in 1868. This treaty agreed to Chinese immigration to American and American immigration to China.

U.S. and China (Ta-Tsing Empire) sign Burlingame - Seward Treaty recognizing rights of their citizens to immigrate. Burlingame's treaty sought to protect the rights of Chinese in America who were victims of popular animosity and discrimination. Article VII of the Burlingame Treaty in 1868 declared that "Chinese subjects shall enjoy all the privileges of the public educational institutions under the control of the Government of the United States." This was an effort to meet the urgent need for Chinese labor for the transcontinental railroad. This bill granted the right of free immigration with reciprocal privileges of residence, school and travel.

1869 
PASTOR S.P. AHEONG STARTS PREACHING
Chinese Christian evangelist S.P. Aheong starts preaching in Hawaii.

	Photo courtesy of the Utah Organization of Chinese Americans Members of the Organization of Chinese Americans gather at Golden Spike National Historic Site in 2001. Chinese workers were excluded from a photo taken at the site in 1869.

1869 
CENTRAL PACIFIC RAILROAD IS COMPLETED
Completion of first trancontinental railroad.

One of the "Big Four," Charles Crocker, realized the advantages of Chinese labor -- it came cheap and the workers were extremely dependable. Again and again, as Crocker's Central Pacific raced toward the linkup in Utah, his Chinese crews performed prodigies of labor. "Crocker's Pets," as they were derisively called, advanced the "head of steel" as much as 10 miles a day in flat country, handily outperforming white crews working west.

  In the 1850's, it took six months to travel by wagon from the Missouri River to San Francisco. The US was in dire need of a transcontinental railroad, so construction began on the East and West Coasts with plans to meet somewhere in between. Chinese immigrants were hired to take on the task of building tracks from the West - they constructed 1,800 miles of track through the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies to link with the eastern line being built by the Irish.

		The two lines were officially joined in Utah in 1869. The "Golden Spike" was driven at Promontory Point on May 10, 1869. The job of building was finished, and the crews were no longer needed. This was the greatest race of the 19th century. The stakes were high. Each mile of track laid down meant land grants and hefty federal subsidies - more capitol for road construction. Blasting up from California came the Central Pacific Railroad, led by four eminent Sacramento businessmen with 10,000 Chinese laborers. Eastern money and rough immigrant track gangs pushed the Union Pacific Railroad out from Omaha, barreling across the plains and through the Rockies. Both competitors had one last obstacle - ascent of the Promontory Mountains, the steepest grade east of the Sierra Nevada. This heroic work by Chinese Americans has been noted as the "greatest engineering feat of the 19th Century." Almost all of the work was done with picks, shovels, hammers and crowbars in intense heat and bone-numbing cold. It has been reported that a few thousand Chinese immigrants gave their lives during the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad.
The "Official Picture" that excluded the many Chinese workers who made this historical and greatest race of the 19th century a great reality.

The two lines were officially joined in Utah in 1869. The "Golden Spike" was driven at Promontory Point on May 10, 1869. The job of building was finished, and the crews were no longer needed.

This heroic work by Chinese Americans has been noted as the "greatest engineering feat of the 19th Century." Almost all of the work was done with picks, shovels, hammers and crowbars in intense heat and bone-numbing cold. It has been reported that a few thousand Chinese immigrants gave their lives during the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad.

This limestone formation, known as Chinaman's Arch, has become a memorial to the thousands of Chinese who helped build the transcontinental railroad. Because of labor shortages in California Chinese we employed experimentally by the Central Pacific Railroad in 1865. The proved to be excellent workers, and by 1868 over 10,000 were working on the railroad. Many of the Chinese remained with the Central Pacific after the completion of the railroad at Promontory. Travelers often noticed their tents along the route. Apparently one such camp was here during the 1880 s when this arch was given its special name. The Utah Organization of Chinese Americans has submitted an application to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names seeking to change the arch's name to Chinese Arch. "Our understanding was the arch was named in honor of the Chinese railroad workers. This is a term that does not honor them." Just how the 6-foot-by-20-foot rock arch came by its name is not recorded, says Melissa Cobern, chief ranger at the Golden Spike National Historic Site, 25 miles northwest of Brigham City. It may have been named for the 11,000-plus Chinese workers who drove the teams, drilled through rock and hammered the spikes for 700 miles of Central Pacific rail from Sacramento, Calif., to Promontory. They outnumbered the CP's Irish laborers by 9 to 1.
		Chinaman's Arch Soon to be Renamed Chinese Arch

1869 
CHINESE IN UTAH
The construction of the Central Pacific from Sacramento to Promontory brought the first Chinese into what is now the stale of Utah. At one point there were more than twelve thousand Chinese employed in the building of the Central Pacific.9 E. B. Crocker, brother of Charles Crocker, Central Pacific general superintendent, was among the first to suggest using Chinese laborers.10 Charles Crocker tried to persuade his Irish construction superintendent, J.H. Strobridge, to employ Chinese, but be resisted until labor became scarce and then consented to experiment with fifty Chinese. These fifty did so well that no limit was placed on Chinese employment.

1869 
FIRST JAPANESE IMMIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES
First group of Japanese immigrants arrive in U.S. and establish the Wakamarsu Colony at Gold Hill in California.

1869 
WAKAMATSU TEA & SILK CO.
Smuggled out of Japan by a German merchant named John Henry Schnell, one of the first Japanese settlers arrived at Gold Hill in El Dorado County, California, and started the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm Colony. Although their initial agricultural efforts failed, they brought to the region mulberry trees, silk cocoons, tea plants, bamboo roots, and other products. According to the U.S. Census of 1870, 55 Japanese were living in the United States, and 22 of them lived at Gold Hill.

1869 
CHINESE LABOR
Plantation owners hold a conference in Memphis, TN and propose substituting Chinese labor for black slaves.

1870 
SOUTHERNERS REPLACED SLAVES WITH "CHINESE COOLIES"
After the Civil War, defeated Southern plantation owners, knowing that the Chinese had a reputation for hard work and that in America they had no legal rights, decided they would make perfect substitutes for their late-departed slaves.

"Let the coolies come," the Southerners wrote, and by 1870, about 2,000 did. It didn't last long. The Southern whites discovered that they couldn't beat the Chinese as they had their slaves, for the Chinese knew how to sue for their rights in the courts, and by 1915 there were no Chinese farm workers in the South.

1870s 
ANTI-COOLIES ASS. / SUPREME ORDER OF THE CAUCASIANS
In the 1870s, the Anti-Coolies Association and the Supreme Order of the Caucasians ran boycotts of Chinese businesses and laborers and caused riots in Chinatowns across the West. Many immigrants returned to China, while others fled to San Francisco, home to the largest Chinese community and Chinatown in the United States.

Fueling the anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States was the widespread economic depression of the 1870s. It was believed that overcapitalizing of railroads contributed to the Panic of 1873, and as a result the railroads, big businesses, and the Chinese laborers became targets. The public, upset with big business excesses and rampant unemployment, supported early labor organizations such as the Workingman's Party led by Denis Kearney, himself an Irish immigrant. Their particular scapegoat was the Chinese immigrant. In 1877, the Workingman's Party led several violent demonstrations in San Francisco alone.

Some courts did oppose attempts to harass and discriminate against the Chinese. In one San Francisco case, a judge denounced a ruling by the Board of Supervisors that required male prisoners' hair to be cut within one inch, unofficially referred to as the "Queue Ordinance." The judge described it as spiteful legislation intended to discourage immigration. He ruled that such a hair-cutting law purposely aimed at the Chinese, which was not enforced against any other prisoners, violated the Civil Rights Act of 1870, the 14th Amendment, and the Burlingame Treaty.

1870 
CHINESE 1% OF WASHINGTON
234 Chinese in Washington state according to the US Census, comprising 1.0% of the population.

1870 
AMERICAN LABOR UNION'S OPPOSITION TO THE CHINESE
"Sensing that its opposition to black enfranchisement was . . . costing more votes than it was winning, especially among German workers . . . the Tweed Ring switched its target to the Chinese. In 1870 it joined the unions in a huge rally against the immigration of 'coolie labor' to the United States." No less a figure than Selig Perlman had pointed out that "The National Labor Union came out against Chinese immigration in 1869, when the issue was brought home to the Eastern wage earners following the importation by a shoe manufacturer in North Adams, Massachusetts, of Chinese strike breakers" and that, writing to the same point, John R. Commons and his colleagues observed, "The general agitation which this action [i.e., the bringing of the Chinese shoemakers to Massachusetts] provoked among all classes of labour served to bring the national labour movement into closer sympathy with the California point of view." Commons et al., went on to note, "At the next convention of the National Labour Union in 1870 the general labour movement was ready to take the step from merely advocating the prohibition of Chinese importation to demanding total exclusion." Gyory's Eastern workers had not been then, and are not now, above reproach.

1870 
DEBATE OVER CHINESE RIGHTS
First Congressional debate over the rights of Chinese in the US.

1870 
PROSTITUTION LAWS AND WORK WAGES STRUGGLES
California passes a law against the importation of Chinese, Japanese, and "Mongolian" women for prostitution. 3,536 Chinese women had emigrated to California, 61 percent (2,157) listed as prostitutes.

Chinese railroad workers in Texas sue company for failing to pay wages. While people born in Africa and/or of African descent became eligble for citizenship through the "Naturalization Act," Chinese are not eligible for citizenship and the Act also forbids the entry of the wives of laborers. Due to the economic recession that leads to labor shortages and protests against cheap labor, only 18% of the Chinese remain working as field labor. 72% establish self owned businesses in the laundry trade.

Chinese laborers reclaim tule swamps in the Sacramento delta, construct roads, rock wall, and reservoirs in Northern and Central portions of the state. Targeting Chinese, San Francisco's Cubic Air Ordinance requires 500 sq. feet for every adult in a dwelling.

1870'S 
FIFTEEM PASSENGER BILL
In the 1870s, America no longer needed Chinese labor, but there was still a large number of Chinese immigrations came to San Francisco every year. The United States Congress wanted to stop Chinese immigration, so they passed this law to limit Chinese immigration.

1870 
IDAHO: HIGHEST PERCENTAGE OF CHINESE IN WESTERN STATES
In 1870, Idaho's population had the highest percentage of Chinese of all the Western states. . . . . Asian immigration into Idaho continued from this initial foray in the 1810s, through the Chinese miners in the 1870s, and the first Japanese immigrants in the 1880s, to more recent immigration from the Phillipines, Korea, and Vietnam.

1870 
CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1870
The revolutionary Reconstruction Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1870. The act expressly gave Chinese the right to testify in court and forbade the imposition upon them of discriminatory "penalties, taxes, licenses and exactions of every kind." In addition, the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 between the United States and China guaranteed the right of emigration between the two countries. Together, these hindered white California's ability to institutionalize racially the social position of the Chinese.

The original U.S. Constitution defined naturalization as available only to "free, white persons," but the Civil Rights Act of 1870 finally extended the right of naturalization to "persons of African nativity or descent." Congress debated Chinese naturalization in the course of the Reconstruction era civil rights debates, but that august body of white men declined to extend citizenship rights to Asians. Asians were defined as "aliens ineligible to citizenship," which became the new racial-national legal category to exclude Asians from entering the United States, owning land, etc.

1870 
172 CHINESE AMERICANS IN CALIFORNIA
According to the Census of 5,728 citizens, 172 are Chinese. Chinese cemetery is established on Fort Moore Hill.

In 1870, there were 3,536 Chinese women in California, and 2,157 or 61% of them were listed as "prostitutes" in the census. 2. Gold Rush - - Around 1849, many immigrants from all over the world came to California for the Gold Rush. Among those immigrants, many were Chinese who suffered from poverty when they were in China. They wanted to come to the California and get rich by finding gold. At the beginning, a few people did find some gold and became rich. They went back to China and showed what they found to their relatives and friends in China. Because people in China were poor at that time, they were so amazed by what those lucky miners had found. More and more people wanted to come to California because of what they saw.

The manual census data of 1870 revealed later that 71% of Chinese immigrant women were prostitutes, though it is speculated that the misconception and miscommunication of the census takers might have contributed to such a high percentage.

1870 
"TRADE CARDS" - POPULAR FORM OF ADVERTISING INCLUDE RACIST STEREOTYPES

One recurring theme frequently found in trade cards is "pigtail pulling." The Chinese men wore queues that were often pulled or cut for white amusement. This mean-spiritedness shows up in a number of trade cards and hints at the violent tendencies many white people harbored toward Chinese immigrants. Violence was not just targeted against Chinese adults, but against Chinese children as well (i.e. Chinese boys with their pigtails being pulled by white boys, French trade card shows a Chinese boy's queue being pulled so hard that he is decapitated over a sharp rail (Courtesy of CHSC's Ching Project).

At the height of “trade cards” or “advertising cards’” popularity during the latter half of the nineteenth century, trade cards mirrored the social, cultural, and political attitudes of the era. During this period, white America was hostile toward Chinese Americans, and the portrayals of Chinese Americans in trade cards mirrored the racism of the times.

Between the 1870’s to the end of the 1890’s, "trade cards" or "advertising cards" were a popular form of promotion. On a post card with images on one side and slogans on the other advertising, they were directly or indirectly promote a commercial product, service, or event commonly distributed to the public at store counters, expositions, and through the mail."

Stereotypes were used within “trade cards” to elicit such emotions and ideas, whether or not the stereotypes have any logical connection to the product or service being advertised because it sought to persuade consumers to buy by eliciting particular emotions and ideas from within the consumer to influence him or her to buy.

One way to define the term "stereotype" is as a "loaded image," an image that is associated with a set of meanings and generalities. Thus, a racial stereotype is an image imposed on a racial group that defines that racial group according to a generality or a set of generalities become associated with an image and become stereotype? It occurs through repetition.

Within CHSC's Ching project - this a a trade card for a pest control product called ROUGH ON RATS. It shows a Chinese male about to eat a rodent. The advertising premise for this product is based on the stereotype that Chinese eat rats and mice and are therefore good rodent exterminators. The Chinese become part of the commercial image of the commodity, in other words, the Chinese have become COMMERCIAL MASCOTS.

Show an image of a Chinese person eating a dog to enough people enough times, and that image will become a stereotype. Eventually, the portrayal of a Chinese person eating a dog will no longer be needed to elicit the stereotype of the Chinese as dog-eaters. Simply show a Chinese person, and the stereotype of dog-eating will be invoked within the viewer's mind.

Trade cards manufacturers/advertisers played (exploited) on consumer fear that products and services are scarce and that another consumer Chinese or other) could have an advantage in procuring those scarce resources. The fact that a Chinese person has very little connection to the subject of furniture does not matter. What matters is the manipulation of consumer emotions to establish associations between the service and the emotions being played upon – hence exploisted racists stereotypes of the Chinese.

Trade cards depictions paralleled White labor’s efforts in the late nineteenth century to stop the flow of Chinese immigration into the United States and chanted "The Chinese Must Go!"

This rallying cry shows up in trade cards and demonstrates the political stance that trade cards often took. The above-mentioned Rough on Rats trade card uses the slogan "They Must Go" to refer not only to the rats, but also to the Chinese. Some cards advertised that their product was the solution to the "Chinese Question." Advertising cards for laundry products and laundry-related products tended to use this approach.

Trade cards with depictions of juvenile violence directed at Chinese and Chinese Americans indicate an overt and deeply rooted form of racist hate existing within white society at the time. The fact that white children would commit acts of hate against the Chinese demonstrates that overt racism was very much a part of American culture.

Trade card depictions of Chinese children as the recipients of hate violence demonstrate even more profoundly the high level of Sinophobia and racism that permeated American culture in the late nineteenth century.

1871 
MUSICAL RACISM

	Sheet Music Cover of 1871

Starting with a Bret Harte poem of 1871 titled 'The Heathen Chinee' (which was set to music) was indicative of a river of racism embedded in sheet music bought primarily by "well-to-do whites." Just the title and lyrics tell a lot about how Chinese Americans were perceived. Even the cover illustrations had caricatures of Chinese Americans that perpetuated ethnic stereotypes.

This is documented in a Darren Brown thesis that gathered a collection of sheet music that offered a sad social commentary on what was happening at the time - stereotypes at best, ugly racism at worst. These sheet music were purchased as the result of seeing them performed in vaudeville theater - which was how ideas were shared since it was before television and movies.

An example is the song "Since Ma is Playing Mah Jong." On the surface, it's a decorative cover that features a picture of Eddie Cantor, one of the most popular entertainers of the time. "It's about a non-Chinese family that's corrupted by mah jong," Brown explains, " and it turns the wife into a Chinese, and she wears a kimono, which is not Chinese, plays mah jong, starts cooking Chinese food and it drives the husband so crazy that he wants to kill chinks.

In these pieces of music, Chinese are seldom referred to with respect. In addition to the title piece, there is 'The Artful Chinee' which appears to show a man stealing a pig.. There is 'Chinky Chinee Bogie Man', in which a peaceful hamlet is threatened by the caricature of a Chinese man. There is 'Ching, Ching Chinaman' with Lon Chaney made up to look Chinese.

It is a recurring American theme, that those who were already here claimed the right to discriminate against those who came later. So people wrote the songs in this collection on Tin Pan Alley with names like Billy Rose and Con Conrad, Eve Unsell and Louis Gottschalk, all playing the same tune.

 1871 
CHINESE RAILROAD WORKERS
Beginning of construction of the Northern Pacific Railroad from Kalama to Tacoma, Washington, using nearly 2000 Chinese laborers. Chinese miners in eastern Washington outnumbered white miners nearly two to one. After the railroads were constructed, the Chinese settled in the towns of Puget Sound and Portland. They worked in the fields, logging camps and fish canneries. They ran laundries and did manual labor that many whites were unwilling to do. Some Chinese began businesses and retail shops of their own. In Idaho, half the miners in 1870 were Chinese.

1871 
CHINESE WERE KILLED IN LOS ANGELES
Nineteen Chinese were massacred by 500 Mexican and White Angelinos in Los Angeles' "Nigger Alley" in 1871, despite the efforts of future L.A. Mayor Henry Hazard. October 24 marked the worst incident of Anti-Chinese violence in America up to that time. This incident was called the Chinese Massacre of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles massacre occurred before the emergence of anti-Chinese agitation in the city and at a time when the county's Chinese numbered no more than 300 - less than 2 percent of the total population and the total Chinese population in 1870 exceeded 12,000, forty times that of Los Angeles.

While 37 rioters were later indicted, only eight were convicted. All were released within a year when the state Supreme Court threw out the case for lack of proof that any person was actually murdered. Chinese witnesses were statutorily barred from testifying.

The Area: Pointing north past the Federal Courthouse toward Chinatown, people have described the mid-19th century lawlessness of the little settlement, whose crime rate earned it the nickname "Los Diablos," the Devils. In 25 years, Los Angeles recorded 35 vigilante hangings. (Note: The Chinese population of Los Angeles County in 1860 numbered only 11, approximately 0.01 percent of the population.)

1872 
CHINESE CAN TESTIFY IN CALIFORNIA COURTS
California's Civil Procedure Code drops law barring Chinese court testimony.

 

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