A History of California

and

How the Chinese made California

Piero Scaruffi (2024)

Back to History | Politics | Contact

---

A Preface: Why the Europeans and not the Chinese?

Various ethnic groups can claim to have "built" the USA. The Italians claim to have "discovered" and named America. The Irish, the Poles, the Swedes and of course the British claim to have built this or that part of the country or the economy. Credit must go to all of those immigrant groups, and in many states an even bigger credit goes to the black people imported as slaves from Africa. But rarely is credit given to the Chinese, and to Asians in general. There are two main reasons, in my opinion. Traditionally, the USA was thought as the East Coast and, at best, the Midwest. Histories of the growth of the USA are centered around Boston, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, and so on. Those cities were indeed "built" mostly by European immigrants. However, in the 21st century the USA has steadily shifted westward and California has become the most populous state and the largest economy (the fifth largest in the world if it declared independence). And so explaining who "built" the East Coast leaves out some of the most important regions of the USA, from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley. If we focus instead on California, it is hard to claim that Europeans alone built it. The contribution of Chinese immigrants to establishing the mining, agricultural and railway operations was fundamental, and without these operations California would not have developed. The second reason why the contribution of Chinese immigrants is neglected is quite simple: few could write in fluent English. We don't know their stories and in most cases don't even know their names. However, a history of California cannot be complete without mentioning the contribution of the Chinese immigrants, and that contribution turns out to be more important than anything contributed before their arrival. It was literally the Chinese that turned California into a place to live and work. Before the Chinese arrived, California was at best the "Wild West" and at worst just a useless arid land.

On the other hand, what is rather strange is that America was discovered by Europeans. The Chinese didn't discover America, despite the fact that the fourth expedition of Zheng He (1413-15) returned to China from the east coast of Africa, a pretty long voyage, and that the Spanish and Portuguese ships were smaller than the Chinese vessels, and that the Chinese possessed (long before the Europeans) the key technologies for oceanic navigation by large ships, notably the mariner’s compass, multiple masting, the axial rudder. The voyage east across the Pacific Ocean is more difficult than going west towards China, but it took only 63 years for the Europeans to figure out how to do it. The Chinese had thousands of years to discover the same trick.

The very technological success of China may have kept Chinese sailors from thinking the way Columbus thought. Especially after the remodeling in 1411-15 of the Grand Canal by the "Yongle Emperor", aka Zhu Di, Chinese sailors had little motivation to test and innovate ship technology, as transport shifted from the coast to the canals. The imposing ship-building capacity of China was diverted from the coastal ports to the inland ports. And then after 1500 China became politically hostile altogether to maritime commerce and exploration. That xenophobic mindset cost China the opportunity to compete with the European empires during the time of colonization. By forbidding foreign trade, the Chinese emperors helped Europeans establish their colonial empires in Asia, besides encouraging the rise of piracy and the emigration of Chinese merchants to South China Sea ports.

Not only the Chinese didn't discover America before the Europeans: after the Europeans discovered a whole new continent, the Chinese government showed no interest in exploring it and colonizing it. European countries (even tiny ones) sent explorers, merchants, scientists and (alas) conquerors: the emperor of China didn't send anyone.

The Chinese "colonizers" of California were instead humble merchants, laborers and fishermen who traveled on non-Chinese ships as passengers carrying with them the know-how necessary to create a viable society: agriculture, mining, transportation and commerce.

The novel was popular in Spain two decades after Columbus "discovered" America. It was popular because it revived the Greek myth of the Amazons, female warriors who lived with no men. Coincidence or not, Columbus, who always thought that his discovered islands were located just east of the Indies, had written after his very first voyage of 1492 that he had heard of an island populated exclusively by women. Montalvo may have been inspired by Amerindian legends heard by Columbus. Or not. Anyway, the novel ended up inspiring Spanish "conquistadores". Hernan Cortes in person, the conquistador of the Aztec empire, wrote in 1524 to the king of Spain that his men had learned from the natives of an island populated only by women. In 1532 he dispatched ships along the western coast of Nueva Espana (Mexico) to locate such island. In 1535 he personally led another expedition. They started calling it California, the name used in Montalvo's novel. In 1539 he dispatched Francisco de Ulloa, who finally determined that the region they had called "California" was not an island but a peninsula (today's Baja California). Ulloa referred to the Gulf of California as the "Sea of Cortes", but the account of his voyage, published in 1541, is also the first document that uses the name "California".

Spain had little interest for this piece of land and its exploration was left to individuals. In 1542 Juan Cabrillo, one of Cortes' original conquistadores who had become rich by mining gold in Guatemala, built two ships and then ventured north on the west coast of Nueva Espana (Mexico). He arrived at the Island of California and claimed it for Spain, except that he had just "discovered" San Diego Bay, which he named named "San Miguel". He ventured further north where presumably no Europeans had ever been and "discovered" Monterey Bay, naming it "Bahia de Los Pinos". His adventure was ended by his untimely death in early 1543. Cabrillo's journey convinced the few who heard of it that there was nothing of value in California. There was nothing in the northwest of America comparable to the great civilizations (and wealth) of the Aztecs and the Incas. The story of Cabrillo's journey was written by another explorer, Andres de Urdaneta, after interviewing the returning sailors.

Sailing westward across the Pacific was easy because of the prevailing winds (the winds that Magellan had taken advantage of in 1521). Sailing eastward was still impossible. In 1564 New Spain's viceroy Luis de Velasco dispatched a fleet led by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi to conquer the archipelago to the west of Mexico, Islas del Poniente, the Philippines, hoping that they would find a way back. A previous mission in 1543 led by Ruy Lopez de Villalobos had reached the Philippines but failed to return. It had convinced Spain that the Pacific Ocean was smaller than it is due to no reliable account from the survivors. Legazpi's mission succeeded and in 1565 Spain began its colonization of the Philippines. The real brain of the voyage had been Andres de Urdaneta, who had now become a missionary friar, and he discovered and plotted the easterly route across the Pacific Ocean from the Philippines back to Acapulco (in about four months). Because of sea currents and winds, his route from Manila to Acapulco went up north, so that the ships first touched land in Cape Mendocino (north of San Francisco), and from there south to Acapulco. That route was important because for the first time gold and silver could be shipped from America to Asia and spices from Asia could be shipped to America. Europe wanted gold and silver from America, and wanted spices, cotton, silk and porcelain from the Far East. Not it was possible to trade directly one for the other and to avoid the routes of the Indian Ocean, which were controlled by Muslims and Portuguese. That started Spain's monopoly of American-Asian trade that lasted two centuries. Basically, Spain had just invented Pacific trade.

Francisco Gali carried out the first trans-Pacific crossing from the Asian mainland to the Americas, sailing from the Portuguese colony of Macau to Acapulco in 1584. In 1587 Pedro de Unamuno carried out the second one, also from Macau to Acapulco. The latter stopped on the California coast,somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the crew included Filipino sailors, which were therefore the first Asian people to travel to America, and in particular to California. Ironically, all those Spanish ships that sailed along the coast of California didn't spot the San Francisco Bay.

For the Spaniards, colonization of the East Coast of North America was supposed to be a Portuguese affair. In 1493 the Pope had brokered the Treaty of Tordesillas that mandated a division of the new continent between Spain and Portugal along a specific line (hence the current border of Portuguese-speaking Brazil with its Spanish-speaking neighbors). Britain, of course, didn't recognize this treaty, but Spain did. For them the Atlantic Coast was named after Estevão Gomes, the Portuguese explorer who had deserted Ferdinand Magellan's expedition in 1521 but then in 1524 had explored the Pacific Coast all the way north to Terra Nova e Labrador (the land first sighted by João Fernandes Lavrador in 1498), looking for a passage to Asia. The first accurate map of the Atlantic Coast of North America was made by cartographer Diogo Ribeiro for the king of Spain, based on Gomes' journey: the "Padron Real" of 1527. Newfoundland had already been claimed for England in 1497 by explorer John Cabot and in 1583 became England's first colony in North America. On the West Coast, Spain, using the same Papal bull, claimed the Territorio de Nutca (today's Oregon and Washington state) and controlled it from 1789 (when Jose' Martinez built the Fort of San Miguel in today's Vancouver Island) until 1795 (when it finally accepted English rule).

Interest in California was also boosted by Francis Drake's journeys: he reached California in 1579, and Spain was alarmed that the British were approaching Spanish territory. For both commercial and geopolitical reasons, Spain became interest in finally exploring the west coast of Nueva Espana, the largely unknown land which was increasingly known as California. In May 1602 Sebastian Vizcaino, a merchant involved in trade between China and Mexico via the Philippines, was dispatched to explore the coast of California up to Cape Mendocino. After ten months Vizcaino had renamed San Miguel as San Diego and named Monterrey Bay. His crew included the missionary friar Antonio de la Ascension, who kept a daily diary and drew a map in which California is still depicted as an island. For almost two hundred years many maps kept showing California as an island.

Almost a century went by before a European seriously tried to settle in California. In 1697 a Jesuit missionary, Juan Maria de Salvatierra, established the Mision de Nuestra Senora de Loreto Concho', around which the town of Loreto developed, the first permanent settlement of "California" (today's Baja California peninsula in northern Mexico). The Jesuits founded more "missions" in the peninsula. That it was a peninsula and not an island was demonstrated by the Jesuit missionary and cartographer Eusebio Francisco Kino who published his map in 1701. Again, many decades passed before the Spanish government showed any interest in what its subjects were doing in this vast but scarcely populated northwestern region of Nueva Espana. Meanwhile, the Spaniards continued to apply the name "California" for an ever expanding region as they venture north.

Three European events indirectly triggered the exploration of today's California. First, the Danish-born Russian cartographer and explorer Vitus Bering (Ivan Bering in Russia) led two "Kamchatka" expeditions, the second one in 1733 also known as the "Great Northern Expedition" to map the eastern shores of Siberia and the western shores of North America. In 1728 he "discovered" the strait that bears his name between Russia and Alaska just before dying. News of Russian traders venturing south along the coast alarmed Spain. In 1732 Mikhail Gvozdev became the first Russian to cross the strait from Asia to America. Second, at the end of the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), during which Spain momentarily lost both Cuba and the Philippines (which it regained by giving Britain its other colony of Florida), but gained the vast French colony of Louisiana extending all the way to the Mississippi River, the king of Spain launched reforms throughout the empire. His emissary Jose' de Galvez was dispatched to Nueva Espana in 1765 and set out to improve the government of the colony. Galvez did more. He dreamed of colonizing California and prepared to launch expeditions both overland and by sea. Third, in 1767 Spain decided to expel the Jesuits from its empire, following the example of Portugal (1759) and France (1764): the Jesuits had become too powerful, too rich, and too political, and in America they often protected the indigenous populations against the European colonizers. The king dispatched Gaspar de Portola to Nueva Espana to turn over the 15 missions created by the Jesuits in Baja California to the Franciscan friars, and Junipero Serra (a friar who refused to ride horses and insisted on walking, who in the 1750s had conceived some celebrated missions in the Sierra Gorda of Queretaro) was placed in charge of the missions. Galvez appointed Portola as "governor" of Las Californias (plural), dividing the region into Antigua and Nueva California, respectively the one that had been explored and the one in the north that was still unexplored. Antigua (essentially the peninsula) came to be known as Baja California, and Nueva came to be known as Alta California. The latter presented natural obstacles to exploration from the south: the overland route was rugged along the coast and tough inland (deserts and mountains), not to mention Indian resistance, and the sea route ran counter to the southerly currents of the Pacific coast. In 1769 Galvez was ready to launch two expeditions up the coast of Alta California, one overland, led by Portola, and one by ship, led by Vicente Vila. Galvez drafted Junipero Serra's Franciscan friars to accompany the expeditions. The two groups departed from Baja California and met in San Diego and then continued overland, preceded by soldiers led by Fernando Rivera y Moncada and Franciscan diarist Juan Crespi'. Junipero Serra founded the mission of San Diego in July 1769. Portola "discovered" on foot the San Francisco Bay in November (spotting it from today's Sweeney Ridge). In 1770 Junipero Serra sailed to Monterrey and established the mission of San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo (today's Carmel, near today's Monterey) while at the same time Portola marched back to Vizcaino's Monterrey Bay and established a port and a "presidio" (a fort and a village). Thus was Monterrey founded (now known as Monterey).

Meanwhile, Galvez had fallen sick and returned to Spain in 1771. Serra's friars founded other missions, notably San Gabriel Arcangel (near today's Los Angeles) in 1771 and San Luis Obispo de Tolosa in 1772. The old missions of Baja California were now run by the Dominicans. In 1773 a border was drawn between "Franciscan" California and "Dominican" California, de facto the border between Alta and Baja California. In 1774 Spain finally appointed a governor of Las Californias: Felipe de Neve y Padilla, who took residence in Baja California. In 1774 Fernando Rivera y Moncada, who had been second-in-command on the Portola expedition, traveled again to Monterrey because he had been appointed military commander, arriving in May 1774. In November 1774 the first baby of European immigrants (the first "white" baby) was born in Alta California: Juan Jose' Garcia, the son of a mission blacksmith. The next major explorer was Juan Bautista de Anza, who differed from his predecessors in one simple fact: he was born in Nueva Espana, not in Spain. He set out in 1774 and, after following an easier inland route instead of the rugged coastal route, in 1776 he established the Presidio of San Francisco near the Golden Gate (the narrow entrance to the bay) and founded the town of San Jose' de Guadalupe (today's San Jose). The DeAnza group consisted of almost 100 people, which almost doubled the Spanish population of Alta California: that's how small the Spanish footprint was in this province of Nueva Espana. Serra's friars founded the mission of San Francisco de Asis in 1776 and the mission of Santa Clara de Asis in 1777. Halfway between the presidio and the mission DeAnza created the settlement of Yerba Buena, the beginning of the city of San Francisco (Yerba Buena is today's Portsmouth Square in Chinatown).

The Franciscan missions were connected by an overland route which became known as the "Camino Real". In 1775 Juan de Ayala became the first explorer to sail into the San Francisco Bay, passing through the future Golden Gate. His cartographer Jose' de Canizares drew the first map of the Bay. Both Anza and Ayala had been sent by Spain for fear that Russians were colonizing the region. In 1776 Spain declared Monterrey the capital of both Baja and Alta California, and governor Felipe de Neve moved to Monterrey. El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciuncula (today's Los Angeles) was instead founded in 1781 by order of governor Felipe de Neve after the king of Spain in person requested that more secular villages be established in Alta California. Neve populated this place located near the San Gabriel mission with a group of 40 or 50 immigrants from distant parts of Mexico, recruited by Rivera, who travelled more than 1,500 kilometers to settle such a distant and dangerous place (Rivera didn't make it back because he was killed by Yuma Indians along the way). Within eight years the five main explorers were all dead: Rivera was killed in 1781, Serra died in 1784, Portola in 1786, Galvez in 1787, and Anza in 1788.

After San Jose and Los Angeles, the third secular pueblo founded by the Spanish colonial government of Alta California was Villa de Branciforte, near today's Santa Cruz, established in 1797. The two provinces of Las Californias (Alta and Baja) were officially created in 1804. The Mexican-born explorer Gabriel Moraga explored the Central Valley of California between 1806 and 1808, and named both the Sacramento Valley and the Sacramento River. Alta California also included Nevada, Utah and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, western Colorado and southwestern Wyoming.

An important event that the people of Nueva Espana largely ignored was the declaration of independence by the 13 British colonies of the East Coast in 1776. The USA was born, with capital in Philadelphia, although initially much smaller than Nueva Espana. The two bordered because Nueva Espana had expanded westward in 1763 to the Mississippi river, which was the eastern border of Virginia, Georgia and North Carolina, three of the British colonies now part of the USA.

In 1803 the USA (Thomas Jefferson) purchased Louisiana from France (Napoleon), which had purchased it back from Spain in 1800. That "Louisiana" included 13 of today's states: Montana, North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wyoming, Nebraska, western Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. The border between the USA and Nueva Espana was now at the Rocky Mountains.

Meanwhile, the Russian colonization of Alaska began in earnest. In 1784 the merchant Grigory Shelikhov established Russia’s first permanent settlement in Alaska, and Russian "promyshlenniki" began trickling down the coast to north California looking for the pelts of sea otters and fur seals, and frequently indenturing native Aleut hunters to hunt furs for them. In 1799 the czar gave his blessing to the Russian-American Company, which was also Russia's first joint-stock company. Russian merchants spread as far south in California as Fort Ross in 1812, about 100 kilometers north of the San Francisco Bay. Nikolai Rumyantsev as Minister of Commerce funded Russia's first circumnavigation of the Earth in 1803–1806 (led by the Estonian officer Adam-Johann von Krusenstern and the Ukrainian officer Yuri Lisyansky) and as Minister of Foreign Affairs funded the "Rurik" circumnavigation (led by the Estonian officer Otto von Kotzebue) in 1815-18. The latter failed in its main mission (to discover the "Northwest Passage" between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans via the Arctic waters) but provided precious information about Alaska's and California's geography, flora, fauna and people. (Russia maintained possession of Alaska until 1867 when it sold it to the USA).

Another explorer looking for the Northwest Passage was a Briton, Alexander Mackenzie, who in 1792-93 managed to cross British Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific, possibly the first person ever to do so and certainly the first European ever.

The naval British expedition of the Pacific Coast, led in 1791-95 by George Vancouver (who had served under James Cook), which reached America via Africa, Australia and Hawaii, resulted in the first detailed maps of the coast from today's Marin County to today's British Columbia, published in 1798 after his death as "Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World".

Both Spain and Russia had long claimed the Pacific coast north of Alta California, but Spain was too south and Russia too north, whereas Britain had Canada. The new country of the USA had its own interest: trading with China. The war of independence ended in 1783 with the USA doubling in size because it acquired the British region north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes (renamed Northwest Territory in 1789). Chinese tea was one of the commodities in high demand in Europe (after all, the whole war against Britain had started with the "Boston Tea Party"). Britain was buying tea from China by selling Indian-grown opium to China. The USA, however, had to pay for tea with silver coins. In February 1784 the ship Empress of China, commanded by captain John Green, left New York with a cargo of mainly ginseng, pelts, bullion and silver. It sailed east across the Atlantic to the Cape Verde islands, then rounded the Cape of Good Hope and crossed the Indian Ocean to reach Canton/ Guangzhou in China in August. Since 1757, Canton was the only city in China that the emperor allowed to trade with foreigners. In December the ship sailed back, reaching New York in May 1785, carrying lots of tea and "exotic" Chinese goods: that expedition had discovered that the Chinese also wanted ginseng, bullion and fur, and the investors soon discovered that their fellow Americans wanted Chinese lacquerware and porcelains. The Empress of China had inaugurated direct US-Chinese trade and had breached the British monopoly on the tea trade. It also transported Samuel Shaw, the first official representative of the US government, who in 1792 was formally appointed ambassador to China.

In October 1787 John Kendrick sailed from Boston on the ship Columbia Rediviva, the first US ship to round the Cape Horn, and in August 1788 reached the region that the Anglosaxons called Oregon (an English misspelling of the Algonquian name of a river flowing east to west). Robert Gray completed the voyage to Canton in 1789 (from July to December) with a cargo of Oregon furs, traded the furs for tea, and returned to Boston in August 1790 via the Cape of Good Hope, thus becoming the first US captain to achieve the circumnavigation of the Earth. Gray sailed again for another circumnavigation a few weeks later (October 1790), arriving in Oregon in June 1791, exploring the still unexplored Columbia River in May 1792 (hence the name of the river), sailing to Canton and then around the Cape of Good Hope across the Atlantic back to Boston in July 1793.

In 1800 the New York fur trader John Jacob Astor (born in Germany and raised in Britain) imitated the Empress of China his own Canton-bound ship full of fur and opium. Astor made a fortune trading Canadian fur in New York, London and Canton and became the first multi-millionaire of the USA. Of course, it would have been easier and faster to ship fur to China from the Pacific coast.

John Meares, an illegal English fur trader based in India, led an expedition in January 1788 from Portuguese Macau (he couldn't sail as a British citizen because the East India Company held a monopoly on British trade in the Pacific) to Nootka Sound (near today's Vancouver), arriving in May 1788. His ships carried 50 Chinese sailors and laborers who built the first ship ever built by Europeans or Asians in the Pacific Northwest, using materials that they carried with them from China. It sailed in September 1788 towards the Sandwich Islands. Those 50 Chinese were probably the first Chinese to visit the Pacific Northwest.

The ability of the USA to sail to California was indirectly helped by the Barbary Wars. Four Muslim states of North Africa, known as the "Barbary States" (Morocco, which was already independent, and the Ottoman provinces of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli) had been practicing piracy for centuries. They not only stole cargoes but even sold sailors as slaves. They mostly demanded that European nations paid ransom, or, better, annual tribute. In 1801 one of the Barbary States (that was already at war with Sweden) even declared war on the USA because the USA refused to pay the requested ransom. US president Thomas Jefferson launched an attack using Sicily (then part of the Spanish kingdom of Napoli) as a military base. The USA took four years but in 1805 the pasha capitulated. It was the first war fought by the USA outside America. It was also the first time that US soldiers fought together as USA rather than separately as New Yorkers, Texans, Virginians, etc. The victory excited the US public.

At the same time, Thomas Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to scout the route from Illinois to the Pacific Ocean in 1804-05, the first official exploration by the USA of the Oregon Country (today's states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho). The Anglosaxons ignored the southern route through California that still belonged to Spain.

Tired of the long route to China via Africa, Astor had the idea of establishing a fort/port in Oregon to trade fur directly across the Pacific to China. In 1810 he organized a double overland expedition, one by sea via Cape Horn which reached Oregon in March 1811 and founded Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River (the first US settlement on the Pacific coast) and one overland, which arrived at Astoria in January 1812. Alas, his venture was doomed by the war of 1812 between the USA and Britain. More than sixty men had died in the exploration. The war was caused by British arrogance: between 1807 and 1812 Britain had seized some 400 merchant ships of the USA, and between 1803 and 1812 more than 6,000 US sailors had been kidnapped and forced to work on British ships (Britain didn't have enough sailors). In 1812, while Britain was consumed by the Napoleonic wars, the USA decided to take action. Since the USA only had 16 warships, it opted for waging war overland, invading British Canada. The war raged for two years from the Canadian border to New Orleans, and the British even raided Washington, setting the Capitol and the White House on fire, but the war ended with no winner. It did end with some losers: the "Indian" tribes who sided with the British, which were annihilated and lost their lands. Future president William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory, defeated the confederation created by chief Tecumseh in the north (the war had started in 1810 but ended in 1813) future president Andrew Jackson defeated the Red Sticks in Alabama in 1813-14 (he then defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815). Those Indian wars helped open the route to the Far West. In 1818 the USA and Britain, having finally made peace, reached an agreement to jointly settle the Oregon Country all the way to the 49th parallel north (which became the border with British Canada). Oregon provided the USA with access to the Pacific Ocean.

In 1823 the Franciscan missionary Jose' Altimira established Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma north of San Francisco, the only new mission established after Mexico's independence, California's northernmost and its last one.

A crisis between the USA and Spain over Florida almost erupted into another war but this time the two countries reached an agreement in 1819: Florida became a state of the USA and a border was agreed upon between the USA and Spanish California. In particular, the 42nd parallel became the northern limit of Nueva Espana (i.e. the border between California and Oregon). Spain finally renounced any claims on Oregon Country, and Russia gave up claims too.

Spain lost Nueva Espana two years later. In 1821 the creole Augustin de Iturbide and the mestizo Vicente Guerrero declared the independence of Nueva Espana, and declared a Mexican Empire (Mexico, California, Texas, Central America). Alta California was now part of the independent country of Mexico, and its capital was Monterrey.

In 1829-30 a Spanish merchant named Antonio Armijo led the first caravan from near Santa Fe in Nuevo Mexico to San Gabriel Mission in Alta California, opening what would be known as the "Old Spanish Trail" (about one thousand kilometers). The journey took about three months. Traders were selling blankets and clothes to Alta California, and were buying horses, mules and Paiute slaves.

Interest of the USA in exploring the Pacific Ocean was still minimal, but increasing. In 1821 US president James Monroe, the man who had negotiated the Louisiana Purchase when Jefferson was president, established the Pacific Squadron, tasked with protecting US commerce with Asia. The only lucrative trade with Asia was with China for tea. Ten years later, when Jackson was president, the Pacific Squadron carried out a military mission against pirates in Sumatra (one of the Indonesian islands) by sailing from New York via the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean to Sumatra (and then via the Pacific Ocean and Cape Horn back to New York six months later, another circumnavigation). In September 1826 the warship USS Vincennes sailed from New York for Cape Horn for the Pacific Ocean, which it patrolled for a 3 years. It then reached China in 1830 and sailed for New York via the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope, becoming the first US warship to circumnavigate the Earth. At the time the Pacific Squadron was not interested in Alta California, which belonged to Mexico. It was interested only in protecting the trade between the East Coast of the USA and East Asia. Back then it took between four and seven months to to sail from the East Coast ports to Alta California, and there was little reason to do so.

Anglosaxon migrants were trickling into Alta California. First and foremost, there was the Canadian Hudson's Bay Company, which in 1824 had built its Pacific outpost, Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River. The Mexicans, like the Spaniards before them, had little interest in the north and in the interior of Alta California, which allowed the company's hunters and trappers to roam the rivers of southern Oregon and northern California. In 1826 Alexander McLeod started exploring and trapping in northern California and in 1829 he reached the Sacramento River Valley thereby linking the Columbia River (Fort Vancouver, in today's Washington State) with California's Central Valley (today's Sacramento) in what became known as the Siskiyou Trail (today's Interstate 5 largely follows the Siskiyou Trail).

While searching for a mythical river, St Louis fur trapper Jedediah Smith became the first US citizen (and possibly the first Caucasian man ever) to cross the Mojave desert into Mexico's Alta California, reaching San Gabriel Mission in November 1826, the first to cross the Sierra Nevada east into Nevada (1827), the first to reach Oregon Country overland from California (1828).

The wealthy fur trader Ewing Young had pioneered the connection of California with the lucrative Santa Fe Trail, a route for horses between Louisiana (notably St Louis) and the Mexican border (Santa Fe, the northern terminus of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, which led to Ciudad de Mexico), a route created over the decades by Spanish and French traders and improved for wagon traffic in 1821 by William Becknell just weeks before Mexico's independence opened up commerce for US traders: in 1830 Young set out from Santa Fe and followed Jedediah Smith's route to move to California, where he fur-hunted for a while, and in 1834 he started plying the Siskiyou Trail to sell horses, mules and cattle to Oregon Country, where he settled down.

The first industry of California was therefore fur trading.

John Marsh, who had made money but also created enemies with his trade with the "Indians", immigrated to California in 1836 via the Santa Fe Trail and became a Mexican citizen in order to buy in 1837 a ranch in Contra Costa (today's area north of Berkeley). From the beginning, Marsh plotted against Mexico: he conducted a campaign to convince US citizens to emigrate to California, hoping that a flood of Anglosaxons would lead to a Texas-style secession from Mexico.

In 1839 Johann "John" Sutter, a Swiss immigrant wanted for debts in his home country who had arrived five years earlier in New York, and who one year earlier had travelled with missionaries to Oregon Country spending time also in Russian Alaska, obtained land on the American River (in today's Sacramento) by the Mexican governor of Alta California, Juan Bautista Alvarado, and in 1841 erected a fort, meant as the first building of a utopian “New Helvetia” which quickly became a plantation-style colony modeled after the Caribbean ones, relying on imported Hawaiian ("Kanakas") workers and enslaved Indios. A Hawaiian-born employee was William Heath Davis, the son of a Boston trader and a Hawaiian princess, who had moved to Yerba Buena in 1838 and guided Sutter up the Sacramento River in 1839 to scout a location for his fort. They picked a location near the confluence of the Feather, American Fork, and Sacramento rivers. By 1846 it became the main trading post in California, a place where trappers, Indians, soldiers and immigrants (like Heinrich Lienhard, a fellow Swiss) left behind the wilderness and congregated.

The second industry of California was therefore agriculture.

In 1841 the 21-year-old John Bidwell, a native of New York, led the first wagon train of pioneers out of Missouri across the mountains into eastern California (in six months). One of the "passengers" was the German immigrant Carl Weber. The route was later improved and simplified after the discovery of gold. A group of 12 men and their wives and children turned north to Oregon and de facto initiated the Oregon Trail.

Meanwhile, Oregon Country was experiencing a surge of settlers. In 1834 a group of priests (notably the missionary Jason Lee) and fur trappers (notably Nathaniel Wyeth, a wealthy Boston merchant who was trying to compete with the Hudson's Bay Company) traveled from Missouri to Oregon via the still unnamed Oregon Trail and also founding Fort Hall, which would become the place where the Oregon and the California trail forked. That expedition set the trend: afterwards, immigrants of Oregon Country were mostly trappers like like Joseph Meek, who reached Oregon in 1840 (the first wagons to reach the Columbia River overland) and who in 1841 served as the scout for the United States Exploring Expedition, but also missionaries like Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, who founded a mission in 1836 and returned in 1842 leading a wagon train along the Oregon Trail (they were famously killed by the Cayuse in 1847). William Gray, who had originally arrived with the Whitmans, later wrote the book "A History of Oregon, 1792-1849".

The United States Exploring Expedition, dispatched by US president Andrew Jackson, consisted of seven ships (notably the glorious USS Vincennes) commanded by Charles Wilkes. It explored the Pacific Ocean between 1838 and 1842 carrying a crew that included several scientists and cartographers.

Somehow the popularity of the Far West (Oregon Country and Alta California) increased rapidly, despite the fact that reaching it required several months of rough travel (whether by sea via Cape Horn or overland via the Oregon Trail) and that neither Oregon nor California belonged rightfully to the USA. Both politicians and journalists championed the idea of "manifest destiny", that God had meant the USA to extend from one coast to another. Oregon Country experienced a "great migration" in 1843 (actually only about one thousand immigrants), mainly to Willamette Valley (today's Salem) so that in 1843 there were enough Anglosaxon and Francophone settlers to create a provisional government.

An Oregon resident, Lansford Hastings, fell in love with Alta California in 1843 and started dreaming of an independent Republic of California. In 1845 he published a guide book titled "The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California" which encouraged migration along the vastly improved Oregon Trail, especially to California, and it managed to convince quite a few people. In 1846 a wagon train of pioneers, later known as the "Donner Party", followed Hastings' book but got lost in the Sierra Nevada where many died of starvation (the survivors, including the Prussian Louis Keseberg who later settled at Fort Sutter, notoriously resorted to eating the bodies of those who had died). In July 1846 a group of 238 Mormons escaping religious persecution landed at Yerba Buena, led by Samuel Brannan, the highest-ranking Mormon in New York who had printed Mormon newspapers (and promoted Hastings' book in the Mormon community). When they had left New York in January, Alta California was still a province of Mexico, when they arrived via Cape Horn in July, it was taken over by US-born rebels and Yerba Buena was now called San Francisco. This was the time when Brigham Young was leading 15,000 Mormons on an overland trail to the Great Salt Lake, the prehistory of Mormon Utah. Brannan's Mormons tripled the population of tiny San Francisco. Sam Brannan quickly left the Mormon Church and became a businessman. In January 1847 he launched San Francisco's first newspaper, the California Star, and by the end of 1847, he was running a store at Sutter's Fort.

The first detailed maps of California and Oregon were produced by the army officeer John Fremont, who led a group of topographers and cartographers in three expeditions from 1842 to 1846 on behalf of the US army (his guide was Kit Carson). During the second expedition of 1844 he discovered the Old Spanish Trail used by Mexican traders and named it that way.

Meanwhile, the Mexican population was still mostly concentrated around the missions. While the population of Alta California was still tiny, there was constant turmoil. In 1831 wealthy landowners of Los Angeles and San Diego rebelled against the governor, the first of several rebellions. Until 1834 most of the useful land of Alta California was controlled by the missions, i.e. by the Catholic Church. In 1834 Mexico enacted the "secularization laws" that confiscated those lands and distributed them to lay Mexican-born settlers. For example, the Mission San Francisco Solano (in today's Sonoma) controlled about 4,000 square kilometers. The Mexican government sent the Monterrey native Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo to secularize this mission and he took advantage, becaming the richest man in California. He took Rancho Petaluma for himself and was ordered to found the Pueblo de Sonoma. Juan Bautista Alvarado y Vallejo, who too was born in Monterrey itself, the son of Vallejo's sister, received Rancho El Sur on the Big Sur coast. Another powerful family, the Castros, was based in Villa de Branciforte. The patriarch's daughter, Martina Castro, became the first woman in California to obtain a land grant (in present-day Capitola, near Santa Cruz).

The ranchos simply replaced the missions continuing with the same agriculture and keeping the same "Indians" as laborers.

In 1836 the Mexican government enacted laws that limited the power of provinces and instead centralized power. Inspired by Texas, Alvarado and Vallejo conspired with people from the USA to declare the independence of Alta California from Mexico. The secession didn't succeed but Alvarado successfully negotiated to become governor instead. He was from the San Francisco Bay area. In 1844 Alvarado again conspired against the Mexican government, which had replaced him with a new governor, and after a couple of battles near Los Angeles (between tiny armies which included immigrants from the USA), Pio Pico, born at Mission San Gabriel Arcangel near Los Angeles, was installed as governor. There was rivarly between the south of Alta California and the north: different prominent families competed for control of the government.

Immigration was still scarce. Not many people wanted to move in this distant and primitive place. In 1840 there were about 8,000 Mexicans in Alta California, the so-called "Californios". The Pueblo of Los Angeles had become the largest urban settlement (about 1,500 people) but most Californios were spread out across the 455 ranchos of Alta California. We don't know how many "Indians" lived in Alta California. There were almost hundreds of immigrants from the USA, like John Sutter and John Marsh, who now owned large ranches (both Johns were involved in political intrigues and military adventures).

In June 1846, about 30 illegal immigrants born outside Alta California started a revolt in Sonoma (north of San Francisco) against the Mexican government because they feared that the government was about to expel them. They declared a California Republic on the model of the Texas Republic which had successfully seceded from Mexico in 1836. That rebellion would not have succeeded without the help of a real army. John Fremont's group had become such an army. It was engaged in Fremont's third expedition in the north, mostly notable for massacring "Indians" (for example, the "Sacramento River massacre"). Informed of the Sonoma rebellion, Fremont, an army officer (the only officer of the US army in Alta California), organized the "California Battalion", which basically consisted of his cartographers, scouts (like Kit Carson) and hunters and, additionally, of other US immigrants recruited at Sutter's Fort (including Sutter's foreman James Marshall and the celebrated Lansford Hastings), for a total of about 160 people. Fremont quickly took over Sonoma.

The commander of the Pacific Squadron, John Drake Sloat, unsure whether the US government had declared war to Mexico, took Monterey (in July), which was still the capital of Alta California, and two days later Yerba Buena (which was renamed San Francisco by the Stockton-appointed new mayor Washington Bartlett), without finding any resistance. The "Battle of Yerba Buena" was actually not a battle at all. Sloat proclaimed Alta California part of the USA, but, in poor health, Sloat surrendered command of Alta California to Robert Stockton, who was a politician besides being a commodore. Stockton counted on about a thousand sailors and soldiers (which made him a superpower in sparsely populated and poorly defended Alta California), plus Fremont's battallion, and promptly marched on Los Angeles (in August) where, again, the Mexicans surrendered without firing a shot. Up to this point the president of the USA, James Polk, had been unaware of what was being done in Alta California in his name. Stockton used John Fremont's scout Kit Carson as a courier to Washington (the first of his three coast-to-coast journeys to deliver messages to Washington, after which he became a celebrity). The USA had formally declared war on Mexico in May but the news reached Alta California only in August. It was in fact the headline on the very first edition of California's first newspaper, The Californian, founded by Monterrey's mayor Walter Colton (appointed by Stockton). And finally general Stephen Kearny, who had just completed a three-month-long exploration of the Rocky Mountains, took New Mexico and San Diego in December.

In January 1847 the USA (John Fremont) and Mexico (Mexican general Andres Pico) signed the Treaty of Cahuenga that terminated hostilities in Alta California (assuming that there ever was any "hostility" in California, as the Mexican soldiers had basically refused to fight). That's when the "Mormon Battalion" (about 500 Mormon volunteers that were escaping persecution in Illinois, recruited in Iowa in July 1946 by captain James Allen) finally arrived in San Diego after a 3,000 kilometer six-month march from Idaho (via Kansas, New Mexico and the Old Spanish Trail). Many Mormons (like Brannan) thought that an independent California would be the ideal refuge for their church, but their leader Brigham Young stopped in Utah.

The war between the USA and Mexico continued in Mexico proper and Mexico City fell in September 1947. In February 1848 the peace treaty (the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) formally assigned the Mexican province of Alta California (the northern half of Mexico) to the USA as simply California. California had non-Indian population of 14,000. The acquired territory was then split by the USA beteween California, Utah Territory and New Mexico Territory. For the record, Fremont dreamed of becoming a Napoleon of California and first he was arrested by Kearny for insubordination and then was treated like a crazy old men by the people who knew him. Texas (which originally extended north to south Wyoming and west to east New Mexico) had already been annexed in 1845, following a rebellion in 1836 of the slave-owning Anglo-American immigrants.

There was ambiguity over the precise location of the California-Utah border. It would have made sense to use the Sierra Nevada mountains, running vertically from Oregon to Mexico, but instead California claimed the 120th degree of longitude as the border, which would have included Nevada. The compromise was a slanted line from the intersection of longitude 120 degrees with latitude 39 degrees down to the Colorado River at latitude 35 degrees.

At the same time, in 1846 Britain and the USA split Oregon Country and, following the Whitman massacre, the USA also created the Oregon Territory in 1848. Now the USA controlled over 2,000 kilometers of Pacific coast and in fact was the only power to front both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

And so the USA had already fought four wars: the Independence War of 1775–83, the first Barbary War in North Africa of 1801-05 the War of 1812-14 against Britain again, and the Mexican War of 1846-48; to which one must add all the various "Indian wars".

Meanwhile, several merchants of the East Coast were getting rich trading with China. Boston's John Cushing move to China in 1803 (at the age of 16) and stayed for 27 years, establishing Perkins and Co, which became one of the main trading companies. The vast majority of trade with China involved tea. In 1839 trade was disrupted by the "Opium War" between China and Britain. China lost the war. The Treaty of Nanking of 1842 forced China to open more ports to British trade: Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai. The USA dispatched the diplomat Caleb Cushing to negotiate its own treaty, the Treaty of Wanghsia in 1844. In 1800 the journey from the East Coast to Canton took six months. The first clipper ship was built in 1833 (by Isaac McKim). The boom of tea, opium and later gold prompted a boom in clipper building, and in 1846 the clipper ship "Sea Witch" cut the trip Boston-Canton to ten weeks. Ironically, it took longer to travel from New York to California. In the 1840s it could be done by sea via the Cape of Good Hope (six months), by sea via the Isthmus of Panama (shorter but with a high risk of malaria) or overland (which also took six months). The route via Panama involved travel by canoe up the Chagres River for 48 kilometers and by mule for another 49 kilometers to reach the Pacific coast. Mail was delivered that way too.

In October 1848 the brand new steamship SS California, built on a government contract by New York's Pacific Mail Steamship Company, took four months and 22 days to travel from New York to San Francisco via the Strait of Magellan, delivering mail, passengers and cargo. When they left, they didn't know that gold had just been discovered in California: they thought they would be transporting California produce.

Hawaii (a mysterious land until the publication in 1784 of the journals and charts of the 1778 expedition of James Cook, who named them "Sandwich Islands") was not yet part of the USA. It was an independent kingdom, despite a brief five-month British occupation in 1843. Trade between America and China via Hawaii had started in the late 1780s, and the ships almost immediately started hiring Chinese sailors. In 1794, on his third trip to Hawaii, George Vancouver reported the existence of a Chinese resident. Hawaii had only one valuable commodity to export: sugar. At the time sugar was still a precious commodity. The first sugar plantation was probably established by a Chinese merchant, Tze-Chun Wong, in 1802. The first sugar mill in Maui was also brought by Chinese merchants (around 1835). In the next few years, Chinese laborers started settling in Hawaii as laborers for the sugar plantations established by US capitalists. The reason why Hawaii didn't have enough laborers of its own is that diseases imported by Westerners such as cholera and the plague decimated the native population. Early Chinese immigrants were from Fujian province and spoke Fujianese rather than Cantonese, but later the majority came from Guangdong province. By 1848 there was a Chinatown in Honolulu, and in 1852 it was the Hawaiian government itself that commissioned English captain John Cass to find and bring Chinese immigrants (he returned with 175 laborers and 20 domestic servants), and soon there were more Chinese than whites in the island (especially after the free-trade treaty signed with the USA in 1876, which also granted the USA the naval base later known as "Pearl Harbor"). The "sugar rush" of Hawaii is not as famous as the "gold rush" of California but it brought about 20,000 Chinese immigrants and the same demographic aberration: there was only one Chinese woman for every 17 Chinese men. It also established a blueprint for what would happen in California: the Chinese laborers were the first to urbanize, the first ones to create ethnic associations that helped immigrants, and the first ones to be discriminated against (in 1883 the Hawaiian government passed a resolution to restrict Chinese immigration).

The third industry of California was mining, and specifically gold mining. When the soldiers of the "Mormon Battalion" were discharged In the second half of 1847, about 100 of them went to work for John Sutter who was building a water-powered sawmill to produce lumber, the first step in erecting a whole town for the settlers that Sutter expected to arrive from the east. The sawmill was located in Coloma on the American River, about 70 kilometers from Sutter's Fort, a location chosen by Sutter's foreman James Marshall, one of the many East Coast immigrants who had arrived in 1845 via Oregon's Willamette Valley and the Siskiyou Trail, and one of the Sutter people who had volunteered for Fremont's California Battalion and returned with the Mormons. In January 1848, when the sawmill was completed, Marshall discovered gold in the river. A few days later the war ended and California was officially part of the USA. The "Gold Rush" started in the sawmill itself: Marshall's men abandoned their duties to search for gold and an almost bankrupt Marshall left Coloma.

In March a San Francisco newspaper, The Californian, published a tiny article that stated: "Gold Mine Found. In the newly made raceway of the Saw Mill recently erected by Captain Sutter, on the American Fork, gold has been found in considerable quantities. One person brought thirty dollars worth to New Helvetia, gathered there in a short time". Few people noticed. Then in May everybody noticed when Sam Brannan, the shopowner at Sutter's Fort who was being paid in gold by the miners, a man until then mostly known in town for drinking, womanizing and fighting, showed up with the gold in San Francisco: sailors abandoned their ships, soldiers deserted the presidio, merchants left their shops, and most of the male population of San Francisco (which was about 1,000 people) rushed to Coloma. Both newspapers, The Californian (that had moved to San Francisco) and Brannan's own California Star, had to shut down because their entire staff left the city. Hundreds of ships were abandoned in the Bay because countless sailors, the moment they arrived, rushed to the gold fields. Some ships became hotels. One was even used as a prison. Brannan got rich overnight because his store was the only store near Sutter's mill.

In the next two months thousands of Californians flocked to the area, which quickly expanded to a larger area of the rugged Sierra Nevada foothills. In June the exodus began also in Hawaii and Hawaiian settlements popped up everywhere. In August the news reached Oregon and, by the end of the year, two-thirds of the male population in Oregon had moved to California. Most of the gold miners had no experience in digging for gold or for anything else: they were farmers and trappers. Mexicans, Peruvians and Chileans sailed to San Francisco, and many of them had experience in mining. Some of the Mexicans had arrived in 1842, when Francisco Lopez had discovered gold at Rancho San Francisco in the mountains north of Los Angeles. Far from being chaotic, the 1948 gold rush was relatively peaceful and ordered. There was plenty of gold for everybody and many miners knew each other well enough to get along.

In 1848 there were only 325 Chinese in the whole of the USA. There probably only about 50 Chinese in the whole of California before 1848 and only seven arrived in San Francisco in 1848. The first known Chinese woman to arrive in San Francisco was a maid, known as Marie Seise, who worked in Hong Kong for the family of US merchant Charles Van Megen Gillespie (possibly the first US merchant to reside in the British colony of Hong Kong) and moved to San Francisco with them in February 1848, just before the Gold Rush. A maid had also been the first Chinese woman to immigrate to New York: Afong Moy in 1834, raised in Guangzhou. But some Chinese learned of the California gold much earlier than US citizens east of the Sierra Nevada: the trip to China took only three months, therefore news reached China faster than they reached New York or Boston. In late December a ship arrived in Hong Kong carrying some gold dust from California and a copy of a Honolulu newspaper writing about the gold of California. In January 1849 Hong Kong’s English-language weekly, Friend of China, reprinted the article. The news spread in Guangdong province. Men had been leaving the Pearl River Delta since the 1830s, often for South America and the Caribbeans, often as indentured laborers drafted against their will in the so-called "coolie trade”.

The first people to rush to California were actually US citizens living in Hong Kong (at the time a British colony), notably Yuan Sheng, a Chinese who had become a US citizen earlier in South Carolina and called himself Norman Assing. Assing landed in July, already a prominent merchant, opened both a restaurant and a brothel, and in December founded the Chew Yick Association, one of the earliest organizations to help Chinese immigrants. The Kong Chow association instead helped immigrants from the Sun Wui and Hawk Shan districts. Tong Achick, who arrived in 1851 already fluent in English, became a rich merchant and founded the Yeong Wo association for immigrants from his native district of Heung Shan. At the time many Chinese suffered from civil unrest and famine. The motivation to emigrate was great, and California was being depicted in Cantonese as "Gam San" (“Gold Mountain”). For most of China the rest of the world was a distant and mysterious land, but the people of the Pearl River Delta were instead used to Westerners because of Canton (Guangzhou), the only official trading port for Westerners, a stop for many US merchants and missionaries, and because of Hong Kong, that had just become a British colony in 1842. The first Chinese immigrants came mostly from the district speaking Hoisanese, a dialect of Cantonese. Most of them didn't know any English, and would take any job, but there were plenty of humble jobs for those willing to take them. One of the fastest growing districts in San Francisco was the old Yerba Buena area, which was now the preferred location of Chinese businesses: it soon became better known as Chinatown.

In October 1849 a group of 50 or 60 Chinese arrived under contract with an English businessman of Shanghai and were sent to a camp in the gold region. That pioneered the system of "huiguans", merchant companies based in San Francisco that found jobs for groups of laborers, hired the laborers in China, organized sea passages for them, and delivered them to the California contractors: the Kong Chow company was formed in 1850, the Sze Yup company and the Sam Yup company in 1851, and by 1854 there were four, known as the "Four Great Houses", each one representing a different district and dialect of Pearl River Delta. (later there were six, that merged in 1862 in what would become the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association). Their leaders were relatively wealthy and educated Chinese who had arrived earlier, for example Yee Ah Tye, who had arrived in San Francisco in 1847 and become Sze Yup's leader. Only 325 Chinese arrived in San Francisco in 1849, and only 450 in 1850, but in 1851 the number jumped to 2700 and in 1852 it skyrocketed to more than 20,000. The Chinese immigrants were almost all men. In 1850 there were more than four thousand Chinese men in San Francisco but only seven Chinese women. The vast majority of the female Chinese population was employed in the brothels that rapidly multiplied during the Gold Rush, like the famous ones (more than one) owned by the Cantonese madam Ah Toy (who claimed to have been the first prostitute of San Francisco). The girls had mostly been sold by their families back in China and their status in San Francisco was basically that of indentured slave girls. Both merchants and criminal gangs imported unmarried Chinese women for the needs of the vast male unmarried population. Lai Chu-chuen opened the first Chinese bazaar in 1850. The first troupe from China to perform Chinese opera arrived in 1852 and within 20 years at least four theaters were built, including the Donn Quai Yuen (Grand Chinese Theatre). The Chinese immigrants started building their own temples. In 1851 they built the Tien Hou Temple, a Taoist shrine to the divine protector of seafarers. Most Chinese immigrants were Taoists.

While we tend to focus on the poverty that induced many Chinese to flee their country, it is also important to understand the opposite motivation: the Pearl River Delta, a relatively wealthy (not poor) region, was home to a vibrant market and export economy, its merchants were eager to find new markets, and their workers were eager to find virgin places where to emulate those merchants. One motivation was to escape chaos and poverty, but the other one was the belief that they could transplant their industrial and commercial skills in the virgin continent. Early Chinese immigrants came from the Pearl River Delta not because it was the poorest region but because it was the most familiar with Western ideas and manners, thanks to the missionaries who had established hospitals and schools, thanks to merchants like Wu Bingjian (aka Houqua) who had mastered the international trade, and thanks to popular books like Lin Zexu's "Sizhou Zhi/ Gazetteer of the Four Continents" (1839) and Xu Jiyu’s "Yinghuan Zhilue/ Brief Record of the Ocean Circuit" (1848). In 1850 a ship from Hong Kong delivered 50 Chinese immigrants but also more than one thousand pieces of furniture and more than one thousand blocks of granite. We tend to emphasize the number of Chinese who immigrate and to ignore the ones who left: it is true that between 1848 to 1876 more than 200,000 Chinese arrived in San Francisco, but it is also true that in the same period more than 93,000 left.

Not all Chinese headed for the gold mines. The Monterey peninsula boasted four Chinese fishing villages between Point Lobos and McAbee Beach. The first Chinese arrived in the 1850s from China, landing near today's Pt Lobos State Park. Others were, quite simply, shipwrecked on that coast. At one point Point Alones (in today's Pacific Grove) had more Chinese than San Francisco's Chinatown.

Chinese from a village called Lee Ook Bin of Guangdong province, led by John Sing Lee, tried to sail to Monterey but instead landed in 1852 at Casper Beach, near Mendocino, a center of logging. They found employment in the lumbermills and also built a Taoist temple that is still standing (known as both Mo-dai Miu and Temple of Kuan Tai). One can argue that the Chinese were not so much coming to America as escaping China. After losing the Opium War to England in 1842, China lost a second Opium War (the "Arrow War") to England and France in 1856. Meanwhile the Taiping Rebellion of 1851-64 resulted in the death of about ten million people. The Guangdong province was also devastated by an ethnic conflict between the majority Punti (Cantonese) people and the minority Hakka people from 1855 until 1867. By 1859 about 10% of California’s population was born in China. even worse and peasant rebellions broke out.

Other Chinese may have arrived in California via the Philippines. The Philippines lay between Nueva Espana and China. Chinese had settled in the archipelago even before Miguel Lopez de Legazpi conquered the Philippines for Spain in 1565 (thanks to Andres de Urdaneta's discovery of the eastern way to Asia) and founded Manila in 1571. After the Spanish conquest, the so-called "Manila galleons" started traveling between Acapulco in Nueva Espana and Manila in the Philippines one or two times per year, and were known as "Naos de China" because they came with silver and with American vegetables (corn, potato, tomato, tobacco, cocoa, etc) and sometimes imported European objects and returned home with Chinese luxury goods such as spices, porcelain, silk, lacquerware and jade as well as slaves. Most of the Chinese merchants and sailors who settled in the Philippines came from the province of Fujian and spoke Hokkien. The Chinese in the Philippines were almost all men and most of them married local women. The second-generation "Chinese" in the Philippines were therefore mostly mixed-race. The Spaniards called them "Sangleyes". Trouble started soon, when the Chinese pirate Lim Hong (Limahong for the Spaniards) attacked the newly established capital of Manila in 1574. He was not working for the Chinese government (which in fact wanted him dead or alive) but the Spanish rulers remained suspicions about the Chinese population's loyalty after Limahong was defeated and fled. In 1581 the Spanish authorities opened a market calle Parian that became a sort of ghetto for the Sangleyes who didn't convert to Catholicism: it was located outside the walled city of Intramuros, where the Spanish colonizers lived and worked. In 1594 the authorities also created Binondo for the Chinese who converted to Catholicism (it is Chinatown in today's Manila, the oldest Chinatown in the world). The Sangleyes vastly outnumbered the Spaniards (thousands to a few dozens). The Sangleyes revolted in 1603 and the Spaniards killed thousands and burned down the Parian. From generation to generation the Parian kept moving.

Despite the distrust, the Chinese colony in the Philippines grew rapidly, as trade with China was lucrative and the only other option was to sail west across the Atlantic Ocean around the Cape of Good Hope (in violation of the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1493) using Dutch and Portuguese ports in the Indian Ocean: clearly not an ideal route.

Spanish priest Joaquin Martinez de Zuniga, who wrote "Historia de las Islas Filipinas" (1803), counted tens of tousands of ethnic Chinese in the Philippines. It became possible for Chinese to emigrate to North America because both the Philippines and Mexico were part of Nueva Espana. Trade run by Manila's Sangleyes indirectly connected Canton with Sevilla, often bypassing state control (both Qing and Spanish), thereby creating a globalized economy in which American silver was exchanged for Asian goods, or Asian goods fashionable in Europe for European luxury goods that became fashionable among China's elite (like clocks and mirrors). This globalized economy effectively extended to the whole globe because the western Mediterranean was connected with the Middle East via ports like Marseille and Canton was connected with India via British routes and nearby Macao via Portuguese routes. And Manila became a cosmopolitan city, as documented by Spanish missionary and cartographer Pedro Murillo Velarde, author of the first detailed map of the Philippines in 1734 (the "Carta hydrographica y chorographica de las Yslas Filipinas").

In about 1763 Filipino immigrants somehow traveled as far as the swamps of Louisiana and founded the fishing village of Saint Malo, possibly the first Asian settlement in North America, a "floating" village of raised stilt homes that was first described in 1883 by writer Lafcadio Hearn. Both Chinese sailors and Chinese merchants travelled on the Spanish galleons bound for Acapulco. These galleons always stopped in Monterrey, sometimes for several weeks. Chinese fishermen settled around Monterrey even before Portola and Junipero Serra built the first Spanish settlements of Alta California in 1769. After Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1821, the route from the Philippines to America declined for a while because Spain moved control of the Philippines to Madrid. The next wave of Chinese emigration to the American continent came after Britain emancipated the African slaves of its Caribbean colonies. Both Britain and the Netherlands looked at China for indentured servants and workers (cheap labor). The decline of the transatlantic slave trade created an opportunity for Chinese who wanted to emigrate to America: Chinese contract laborers found work as far as Argentina and in the sugar plantations of Cuba (the first recorded arrival in Cuba dates from 1847 when 206 arrived from Guangdong province) and later worked on the Panama Canal in 1903–14. Cuba had the largest Chinatown in Latin America (today there are virtually no Chinese left in Havana's Chinatown because the Chinese, having become rich capitalists, left after communist dictator Fidel Castro seized power in 1959 and nationalized all private businesses). Today, one of the smallest Chinese communities of Latin America is in Mexico, despite the fact that many arrived in Acapulco: clearly many Chinese left Mexico and the simplest explanation is that they moved to California.

On the East Coast and in Europe the confused reports of California gold had been discounted as mere hearsay. That changed when US president James Polk announced the discovery of gold in December 1848 during his "State of the Union" address. The trip to California was long and dangerous but in 1849 the dream of getting rich overnight attracted about 90,000 people (the so-called "49ers"), of which only about 55,000 were US citizens. They may have motivated also by the terror created in towns and cities by the cholera epidemics that had started in Europe and was spreading to the USA in 1849: thousands of 49ers died on their way to California. The trip from the East Coast to San Francisco still took 4-8 months. There were still the same three routes: by sea around the Cape Horn, by sea to Panama's Atlantic Coast and then by sea again from Panama's Pacific Coast, and overland to Oregon or southern California, from where steamships sailed for San Francisco. Disease and "Indians" made each route more or less dangerous. Diseases spread more easily in ships. Indians often attacked caravans. Europeans had to travel first across the Atlantic Ocean to New York. It is not surprising that among the first gold diggers there were many from the Sandwich Islands (as James Cook called Hawaii): they only had to cross the Pacific Ocean, and they had been doing so for a long time (Polynesians were the preferred sailors for Pacific Ocean routes).

The total amount of gold found in this relatively small region was colossal: $10 million in 1849, $41 million in 1850, $75 million in 1851, and $81 million in 1852; but it was distributed among a rapidly increasing number of miners. While in 1848 the amount of gold dug by a miner was enough to make him rich, and in 1849 the amount of gold per miner was more than enough to pay for food and supplies, within two years the amount per miner was barely enough to survive, given also the inflated prices of all items. The real beneficiaries of the mass migration were the businessmen who sold food, supplies, machinery and services to the miners. Miners lived in camps that soon became boomtowns. They were mostly men (possibly a 10 to 1 ratio). San Francisco itself was mostly a tent city. The weather was harsh in the winter. There were no hospitals and few doctors: even trivial injuries could lead to death. Even money was not widely available: many goods were paid for with gold until 1854, when the newly established San Francisco Mint started minting gold coins (that the USA adopted for national circulation). Drinking, gambling and violence made those towns unsafe. As profits decreased, crime increased. When Marshall discovered gold, California was still in a limbo, not ruled by Mexican authorities anymore but also not ruled by US authorities yet. Technically speaking, there weren't even laws in California. The US armies and private militias maintained some kind of order. There was no parliament to enact laws and there were no judges to enforce them. And, technically speaking, most goldfields were on public land, land that belonged to the government. Since there was no police force and no army presence, vigilante groups were organized. Victims included the indigenous populations, who were helpless against the wave of armed intruders. Thousands may have been killed during the Gold Rush. The Chinese were also frequently victims of violent crime because in 1854 the California Supreme Court decided that the Chinese did not have the right to testify in a California court against white citizens, including those accused of murder: de facto, that decision legalized white violence against Chinese immigrants. Joaquin Murrieta was a legendary outlaw of the era.

A letter written by an unnamed immigrant describes the human toll of 1849: “Of course there is a great deal of suffering; a large number die every day, whose deaths are not published; several bodies are found every morning on the beach, and under carts where they have crawled for shelter. The principal disease is Dysentery, although dissipation and exposure kills a great many. Indeed, I never have seen so much dissipation in my life as prevails here. Every one drinks, and gambling is going on in almost every house, from eight in the morning until two and three at night, Sundays not excepted, and thousands change hands every day.”

Ironically, one person who lost money due to the gold rush was Sutter himself, who had even run for governor. He lost many of his employees who joined the gold rush, he swindled by investors, and a tidal wave of gold prospectors and miners settled illegally on the land of his ranch even stealing his crops and animals. In December 1848 his son John Sutter Jr and Sam Brannan designed a new city, Sacramento, near the original New Helvetia, at the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers. It proved a strategic location, the ideal jumping-off point for the gold region. One of the new immigrants, stagecoach driver James Birch, arrived in Sacramento in 1849 to start his own stagecoach business, the California Stage Company, providing both transportation and mail delivery. Sacramento grew rapidly, despite a cholera epidemic in 1850 and the great fire of 1852.

Many of the travellers who witnessed the Gold Rush wrote accounts of it: Edward Gould-Buffum's "Six Months in the Gold Mines" (1850), Walter Colton's diary "Three Years in California" (1850), Jacques Antoine Moerenhout's "The Inside Story of the Gold Rush" (published only in 1935), John Swan's manuscript “A Trip to the Gold Mines of California in 1848”, Heinrich Lienhard's manuscript only partially published as "Californien Unmittelbar vor und nach der Entdeckung des Goldes" (1898) and as "A Pioneer at Sutter's Fort 1846-1850" (1941), James Carson's "Recollections of the California Mines" (1852) and Chester Lyman's diary "Around the Horn to the Sandwich Islands and California, 1845–1850" (only published in 1925), the latter written by an astronomer of Yale University. Marshall's discovery was documented in the diary of the Mormon soldier and laborer Henry Bigler, never published in book format (Bigler soon left to join the Latter-day Saints Church that had settled in Utah, but in October 1849 the church sent him back to California to mine gold on behalf of their leader Brigham Young).

The German immigrant Carl Weber, who had arrived in California with Bidwell in 1841 and who in 1845 had acquired Rancho Campo de los Franceses on the San Joaquin River, quickly realized that it was more lucrative (and safer) to sell supplies to gold miners than to be a gold miner. Realizing the strategic location of his ranch, in 1849 he founded a new town, Stockton, a natural gateway to the rivers of the gold country (the Calaveras, Stanislaus, Tulomne, Merced and Mariposa Rivers). It was the first town in California to have an English name. In 1850 he built the home that is now known as Weber Point Home: it was built with redwood lumber transported by cart from the village of Woodside (today, one of the richest cities in the world) to the port of Redwood City and then by barge to the San Joaquin River and the Stockton Channel. Thousands of Chinese came to Stockton from Guangdong province, and remained after the Gold Rush, so that Stockton was home to the third-largest Chinese community in California.

Hundreds of Chinese men settled in Camp Washington (today's ghost town of Chinese Camp near Yosemite), further up into the hills, between Stockton and the gold mines.

In September 1849 Domingo Marcucci, a 22-year-old Venezuelan-born 49er who arrived from Philadelphia in a steamship of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, started a shipyard in San Francisco to build or remodel ships for Pacific Mail, starting with the Captain Sutter, the first steamboat to run between San Francisco and Stockton.

In 1850 California became a state of the USA, with capital in San Jose', while the Utah Territory was being hijacked by the Mormons and would take a while to be split into the states of Nevada (1864), Utah (1896) and Colorado (1876). The New Mexico Territory was later split into Arizona and New Mexico, both of which became states only in 1912. John Geary, a hero of the conquest of Mexico City in 1847, was appointed postmaster of San Francisco in January 1849 and was elected first mayor of the city in January 1850. In 1850 the population of San Francisco was 25,000 (36,000 in 1852). San Francisco was the biggest city of the gold region, Sacramento the second biggest, and possibly third was Marysville, the main supply center for the northern mines.

In April 1850 one of the first laws enacted by the state of California, ironically titled the "Act for the Government and Protection of Indians", de facto granted US settlers the right to abuse indigenous people, which led to a cultural, economic and physical genocide. The law was proudly signed by California's first governor Peter Burnett, who indulged in a messianic belief in the destiny of the white race to colonize California. In 1851 the state of California enacted another law: a tax on foreign miners, targeting mainly Latinos and Chinese. The tax convinced many Chinese to move to San Francisco and open laundries and restaurants, and others to find employments in farms and fishing. Point San Pedro (now China Camp) in San Rafael, along the shores of San Pablo Bay, 30 kms north of San Francisco, became one of the centers of shrimp fishing in the 1860s (the village is still standing in China Camp State Park), and dried shrimp was also exported to China. Shrimping villages appeared from Hunter's Point (bay side of San Francisco) as far south as Rincon Point (on the coast north of Los Angeles, today famous for surfing).

Whether they got rich or poorer, the immigrants transformed San Francisco into one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world with a diversity of people and cultures that rivaled London and New York. Two Chinese-language newspapers were founded, both run by Christian missionaries: The Golden Hills' News (April 1854) and The Oriental (January 1955). In less than a decade, San Francisco became one of the world's main seaports, certainly the main one on the Pacific Coast.

The gold rush created business empires of all sorts: in 1852 Henry Wells and William Fargo started a service to ship gold, which became a bank, Wells Fargo; and in 1853 Levi Strauss, a German immigrant, started selling canvas pants called "jeans" to miners. Charles Gillespie, Marie Seise's employer, founded in 1848 the Western Title Insurance Company for residential real estate, the predecessor of Fidelity National Title Insurance Company. As the price of everything skyrocketed, Brannan became California's first millionaire. He bought land in both San Francisco and Sacramento. In 1861 he also bought land in Napa Valley, hired Japanese gardeners, and built a hot springs resort, Calistoga, inaugurated in 1862. In 1868 he also inaugurated a railway, the Napa Valley Railroad, to bring tourists from the port of Vallejo (connected by ferry to San Francisco) to his resort.

Sacramento was no less cosmopolitan. In 1852 there were 814 Chinese (804 men and 10 women), 1371 in 1870 and 1781 in 1880. They settled in the old Sutter Slough, which became known as the China Slough, a swamp that they turned into a waterfront district of shops (notably laundry services), restaurants and theaters. In fact, the first Chinese-run Chinese-language newspaper of the USA, The Chinese Daily News 沙架免度新录, appeared at the end of 1856 in Sacramento. Like the San Francisco ones, all the Chinese-language newspapers of Sacramento lasted only a few months.

In 1851 gold was discovered also in northern California (today's Siskiyou, Shasta and Trinity regions), generating the boomtown of Shasta. Chinese miners built the Taoist temple in Weaverville, a boomtown on the Trinity River.

The demographic problem was that most immigrants were men. A partial census in 1850 found only 5,500 women over the age of 15 (which at the time was old enough to get married) out of 200,000 people. Many of them were widows: men died during the journey (of accidents, diseases, Indian attacks), men died in the mines, and men died in the lawless boomtowns.

First and foremosts, the booming population needed food, which resulted in a boom of agriculture in the old ranches. For example, Italians from the Liguria region jumpstarted agriculture in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

The infrastructure too was improved greatly as a result of the booming business. In 1851, the US Post Office contracted George Chorpenning to deliver mail from Salt Lake City (Utah) to Sacramento, initially via a route cursed with hostile Indians and severe winters, and later via the Mormon Trail.

In July 1851 the first university in the state of California was chartered: the California Wesleyan College, soon renamed University of the Pacific, in the tiny town of Santa Clara.

In 1852 there were more than 200,000 non-indigenous people in California. In 1852 John Bigler was elected governor of California and moved the capital to Sacramento in 1854.

The decline of California's gold economy already started in 1853. Not only the yield kept declining, but gold was also discovered in Australia's New South Wales (in February 1851), which made California's gold mines less relevant.

The original technology of gold mining was "placer mining", which simply consisted in looking for nuggets, flakes or dust of gold in flowing creeks. Placer mining moved higher and higher into the mountains after the miners discovered that gold could be found also in the creekbeds of extinct creeks, creeks that had existed millions of years ago. However, this kind of placer mining was more complicated because typically the gold was buried under deposits of minerals that accumulated over the ages. This required hydraulic mining (perhaps California's first technological innovation) or drift mining. Even more sophisticated was quartz-lode mining. Within a few months it became difficult to find gold the easy way (in flowing creekbeds). But the miners knew that the surface gold came from deep quartz veins and started digging for subterranean veins of gold-bearing quartz. This required know-how, heavy equipment (like stamp mills to crush ore) and chemical processing, i.e. financial backing. The first stamp mill was possibly the one used by John Fremont and Kit Carson after they discovered the Mariposa Mine in 1849 on land owned by Fremont. But the first important gold-bearing quartz vein was discovered in 1854 near the trading post erected in 1848 by Rhode Islanders Henry and George Angel (today's Angels Camp). Technically speaking, this is the "Mother Lode", a system of linked gold-quartz veins that extends from Mariposa 200 kms north (although "Mother Lode" came to be used as a generic term for the gold country). It is not a coincidence that nearby in 1854 the blacksmiths J.M. Wooster and Andrew Gardiner built the Altaville Foundry and Machine Shop to produce the stamp mills and the mining machinery for the Mother Lode mines (the foundry was later acquired by David Durie Demarest).

California's Gold Rush affected the whole country in other ways than just mass migration. The demand for mining machinery (like stamp mills to crush ore) and hydraulic equipment (like steam-powered pumps to drain water from mines) fueled progress in iron technology all over the country. Even picks, shovels and pans had to be imported, since California had a minimal industry. The Gold Rush also led to increased production of lumber for both houses, mines and stores, and more efficient methods were developed to produce lumber and transport it. All these immigrants needed to eat, and California had little agriculture. Therefore those who failed in mining found lucrative opportunities in agriculture and this required irrigation and transportation. Soon the region was producing massive amounts of fruits, vegetables and grains. Roads and bridges had to be constructed. Better wagons and better steamships had to be produced in rapid manners. Old international trade routes were revamped and new ones discovered. Merchants, bankers and investors created a new financial world. The USA enjoyed a prolonged economic expansion between 1841 and 1856, and the "Gold Rush" was one of the factors because it stimulated so many sectors of the economy.

California's gold was a major motivator for the construction of the Panama Railroad, inaugurated in 1855 after five years of work, so that those going to California that way didn't have to spend a week in canoes and on mules but simply spend a day in a train. But perhaps the real motivation was not the passengers but the cargo: California gold could now be transported safely and quickly through Panama. At the same time, steamships replaced sailing ships.

In 1856 California inaugurated its first railway line, a railroad from Sacramento to Folsom, the Sacramento Valley Railroad.

In 1857 the US Post Office contracted with James Birch a new route for mail delivery between Texas and San Diego: the first letters in July took 53 days to travel the 2,000 kilometers. A few days later, in September, Birch drowned in the famous shipwreck of the "Central America" en route from Panama to New York (400 passengers died and its cargo of gold was lost, which causes a financial panic).

In September 1858 John Butterfield, also under contract with the US Post Office, began mail delivery from St Louis and Memphis via Texas and the New Mexico Territory (literally along the Mexican border) to San Francisco, a distance of 4,500 kilometers covered in 24 days, New York Herald's reporter Waterman Ormsby joined the inaugural trip and wrote a famous series of articles.

In April 1860 the Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Company, better known as "Pony Express", founded by three Missouri businessmen (William Russell, Alexander Majors and William Waddell), delivered its first mail in ten days between from Missouri to Sacramento. Missouri was were the telegraph line of the east terminated. Its innovative service employed mounted riders rather than stagecoaches, followed a shorter direct route (via the Oregon, California and Mormon trails and then over the Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe). They changed horses at each of the 186 stations along the way in order to ride at maximum speed.

The Pony Express was in operation for only 18 months because in October 1861 the first transcontinental telegraph line (which followed the Oregon-California Trail) was inaugurated by Western Union connecting San Francisco and the East Coast. San Francisco had already been connected to San Jose in September 1853 and Los Angeles in 1860. Note that most electrical devices and even wires were not manufactured in California: they had to be imported from the East Coast via Cape Horn. The first transcontinental telegraph message from San Francisco to Washington reached US president Abraham Lincoln who was busy with the Civil War (started in April).

A railway was built in October 1863 connecting San Francisco to San Jose in the south of the bay, which had become the capital of California in 1850. Along the way they built a depot called Santa Clara. In the following years, orchards became to assemble around the Santa Clara depot.

By comparison, southern California was still a sleepy region. In 1850 there were at least two Chinese residents in Los Angeles, both house servants, and three Chinese decided to settle in Los Angeles in 1856. The Chinese population of L.A. multiplied rapidly as Chinese workers left the Gold Country. They mostly settled around Calle de los Negros. Chinese community associations were born just like in San Francisco. Los Angeles was still a village. Chinese farmers were however crucial in nearby San Gabriel Valley.

The Gold Rush didn't just change the economy and demographics of California: it also changed its natural environment. Besides polluting the rivers, the exponential increase of gold diggers in the mountains damaged fish and wild game populations.

So much was happening that the 380,000 people who lived in California (of which perhaps as many as 300,000 had immigrated during the Gold Rush) hardly noticed the Civil War of 1861-65. California was still largely isolated from the rest of the country, especially from the areas where battles were fought, and in 1861-62 a terrible storm caused widespread flooding in the Central Valley. California did participate on the side of Lincoln's Union. California sent a few volunteers to fight but mostly helped the Union with its gold. When Confederate general Robert Lee surrendered to Union's general Ulysses Grant in April 1865, San Francisco learned it right away thanks to the telegraph. A few days later the telegraph also brought the news of the assassination of president Abraham Lincoln.

To accelerate the settlement of California, the USA issued the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted public land for free to any citizen (and European immigrant) who committed to developing the land for five years. Married women did not qualify (their husbands did), but single women, widows and divorced women did qualify. While most of the land was swallowed by speculators, thousands of new immigrants moved from other states. In total 60,000 homesteaders took up 10% of of California's public land. The act excluded African Americans, Native Americans and Chinese Americans because they could not become citizens until, respectively, 1870, 1924 and 1943.

The Gold Rush stimulated the construction of more than local infrastructure: it made it urgent to shorten the trip from the East Coast to San Francisco. In 1863 Theodore Judah and D. W. Strong gathered investors in a town called Dutch Flat and pitched to them an ambitious project to build a transcontinental railroad. Four rich men agreed: Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford (who had become governor of California in 1862, the future founder of Stanford University). Neither of them was a miner, but they all made their fortunes during the Gold Rush selling supplies to miners. The groundbreaking ceremony for the Central Pacific Railroad was held in Sacramento in 1863.

Between 1863 and 1865 very little was achieved, just about 80 kms of tracks going east. In 1865, in Auburn, the man in charge, the eye-patched James Strobridge, started hiring Chinese workers, many of whom worked for the California Central Railroad. Many of the others had arrived in Auburn for the gold. For example, Charlie Yue was a licensed gold assayer, possibly the first one in California born in China. Thousands more were imported from the Pearl River Delta. Charles Crocker is credited as the one who saw the advantage of hiring Chinese workers from the mines (and later also directly from China). Bloomer’s Ranch (northeast of Sacramento, near Auburn) may have been the first place where Chinese workers were employed. By 1869 about 15,000-20,000 Chinese immigrants had worked on the railroad. Their presence is documented in the wood engraving of the special correspondent of Harper's Weekly Newspaper, the artist Joseph Becker.

The Chinese dramatically increased the pace of construction. The railroad climbed the foothills and then crossed the Sierra Nevada via tunnels dug with dynamite at Donner Summit (today used by graffiti artists). Dynamite, made of nitroglycerin, had just been invented in 1867 by a Swedish chemist named Alfred Nobel, and was extremely unsafe. The Chinese managed impossible acts of engineering, for example the ledge cut (and sometimes dynamited) into the rock of the steep slope of Cape Horn (near Colfax) 400 meters above the American River. Once they were done with the tunnels through the Sierra Nevada, they crossed into the Nevada Territory laying the foundations for the future town of Reno (where the first train from Sacramento arrived in June 1868) and then began laying tracks in the Nevada desert in full summer heat (up to 49 degrees Celsius). They were probably unaware that they were employed on one of the great engineering projects of the century, and that they stunned the white population with their amazing collective work. The Chinese worked on the railroad with no interruption, even in winter, which is very snowy at that elevation and was particularly harsh in 1866–1867. Working on those unexplored mountains was dangerous even with good weather. The Chinese were paid less than white workers, and in 1867 they tried in vain to obtain a raise via the rare strike: the strike failed but it is notable for being the first large strike in the USA. Nobody knows the number of Chinese who died building the railroad. They were known by the white workers for their unusually varied diet, for eating with chopsticks, for drinking tea or at least hot water (which, incidentally, may have made them less prone to diseases like dysentery and so even more valuable as workers). Alas, they also had a reputation for consuming opium and alcohol , and for visiting Chinese prostitutes. It was the Chinese who laid the last rail of the transcontinental, but Alfred Joseph Russell’s iconic photograph of the meeting of the two railroads at Promontory Summit doesn't show any Chinese. (Strobridge, however, did pay tribute to them and later Charles Crocker's brother gave a speech in Sacramento that includes praise for the Chinese)

In May 1869 the western railroad reached the eastern one at Promontory Summit in Utah (the Union Pacific Railroad, which started in Nebraska) and thus the East Coast was connected with a western terminus in Alameda, near Oakland, from where ferries took passengers to San Francisco. Travel that had taken months could now be done in a few days. The journey from Chicago to San Francisco now took six days. It helped that, after annihilating the Fox and Sauk in Illinois and Wisconsin (1832) and the Seminole in Florida (1835), the USA gained full control of the Great Plains in a series of "Indian wars" during the 1860s, namely against the Arapahos, the Cheyennes and the Sioux (aka the Dakotas).

The Transcontinental Railroad increased the agricultural trade with the East Coast and was therefore a boon to California ranches. As gold mining became less and less profitable, and foreigners were increasingly discriminated, in the 1860s many Chinese went to work for ranches, especially those who had been farmers back in China. Conveniently, the completion of the railroad had left thousands of Chinese unemployed. The state of California did not allow Chinese immigrants to own land, and the USA did not allow them to become US citizens through naturalization (the Naturalization Act of 1790 stipulated that only a “free, white person” was entitled to become a citizen). Until that time, California ranches had mostly been used for cattle. Agriculture had been pioneered by the missions but the sparse population didn't justify large-scale farming, but now the population was such that demand for food outpaced demand for gold-mining supplies. De facto, Chinese immigrants changed the diet of Californians, originally heavily meat-based, because they started growing grains, fruits and greens.

The Chinese enabled white landowner to turn California into an agricultural powerhouse. For example, John North, a politician originally from Minnesota, had founded the southern California town of Riverside in 1870, near the rail junction of San Bernardino, but his crops were not successful until Chinese workers brought the know-how of picking and packing oranges and lemons. The region soon became a major producer of citrus fruit.

Many of the Chinese had farmed in the Pearl River Delta of southern China (in Guangdong province) and they knew how to turn the swamps on a delta into fertile fields. In 1861 the state of California passed the Swamp and Overflow Act which allowed private companies to drain the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta for the purpose of fostering agriculture in the region. The Chinese applied their know-how to the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, building a vast network of earthen levees that multiplied the agricultural land. Most of the workers who drained swamps and built levees were Chinese. Despite the animosity that was growing towards the Chinese, in January 1852 the new governor of California, John McDougal, speaking to the state parliament, recognized that they were essential for draining swamplands to turn them into fertile land, and therefore encouraged more Chinese immigration at the same time that California's parliament and many town governments were imposing restrictions (e.g. the town of Columbia in 1852 explicitly barred Chinese from mining) and at the same time that in several places white miners were ganging up to expel Chinese miners and steal their mines. Unfortunately, a few months later the third governor, John Bigler, gave a racist speech in which he called the Chinese immigrants a "coolie race", which officially turn them into a lower class of immigrants than white European immigrants. By 1880 the Chinese had reclaimed enough delta marshlands that fruit orchards and farms multiplied and the first canneries appeared. Chinese levee-builders transformed the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta swampland into prime farming land. On top of that, many Chinese settled in the reclaimed land and became farmers themselves. In 1880 Chinese accounted for 38% of farming labor in the Sacramento region. They were also settling in the region around the Santa Clara mission (the future Silicon Valley): in 1880 Chinese accounted for 33% of farming labor in what is now Santa Clara County. They typically leased land from white landowners. In fact, agriculture became the first success story of the future Silicon Valley

In 1877 Chinese railroad workers were employed in building an extension of the Southern Pacific railroad through the San Joaquin Valley. When the project was completed and they were dismissed, the Chinese settled in the town of Hanford and took farming jobs. A vibrant local Chinatown of shops, restaurants, hotels, schools and a Taoist temple rose in Hanford.

The Chinese worked on reclamation and irrigation projects in San Joaquin County near Stockton and they began to farm the land that they had reclaimed. By 1880 there were 32 Chinese-owned farms in San Joaquin County, by the turn of the century there were 50 Chinese owned farms employing about 3,000 Chinese laborers.

Chinese workers were also employed to build infrastructure. In North California they built trails and roads to Oregon and to northeastern California. The Chinese built the Big Gap Flume in Mariposa County and the stone walls of the Quick Ranch also in Mariposa County. Chinese built the Bartlett Toll Road east of Clear Lake. Joel Parker Whitney, who owned a large piece of land in Placer County, hired about 1,000 Chinese laborers to buil roads and to grow fruit. Agostin Haraszthy's Buena Vista Vineyards in Sonoma County, considered the first modern commercial vineyard in California, employed mostly Chinese workers. Former Chinese gold miners also found employment in other kinds of mines. For example, borax in today's Lake County after it was discovered in 1856, and in Death Valley. For example, the New Almaden mercury mine in today's Santa Clara County. In 1873 only 30,000 miners were left in California, and about 60% were Chinese. Chinese workers were ubiquitous in the cigar industry (by 1866 half of the cigar factories were owned by Chinese and by 1870 more than 90% of the total labor force in the cigar industry was Chinese) and in shoe and clothing factories. By the late 1860s several factories were owned by Chinese immigrants and relocated in San Francisco's Chinatown.

The Chinese were also fishing, particularly off the coast of Monterey, in the San Francisco bay (like Hunter's Point), and north of the bay (like China Camp), and were often working in fish canneries.

Other veterans of the Transcontinental Railroad remained to work for the Central Pacific or joined other railway companies, like the Chinese who built the railroad from San Francisco to Los Angeles. A few months after completing the transcontinental railway, in Novembner 1869 the Central Pacific connected Sacramento to San Francisco. In September 1876 the Southern Pacific Railroad (owned by the same investors of the Central Pacific), using again Chinese labor, connected San Francisco and Los Angeles. Los Angeles had about 6000 people. The railway connected L.A. to the East Coast via San Francisco. That was the beginning of L.A.'s growth: by 1890 its population had increased to 50,400 and topped 100 thousand in 1900., That railway included another engineering wonder: the Tehachapi Loop, created by about 3,000 Chinese workers. In 1881 Charles Crocker wrote to Collis Huntington that the railway was bringing in 8,000 Chinese from Guangdong province to work on the Tahachapi railway.

A thousand Chinese worked on the railroad that crossed the mountains from San Jose to reach the sea in Santa Cruz, including a two-kilometer tunnel, which opened in 1880. Chinese railroad spread literally to every corner of the USA. Between from May 1880 and September 1885 the Canadian Pacific Railway (busy building Canada's equivalent of the Transcontinental) employed about 20,000 Chinese, although most of them were new arrivals from the Pearl River Delta.

Some of the Chinese who had worked with nitroglycerine were hired in 1881 by the newly established Hercules plant in San Pablo Bay to produce dynamite. The underpaid Chinese workers lived in humble dormitories near the factory. Several workers died in explosions.

Some Chinese tried to go back to mining, but the case of Bodie shows what happened to them. Gold had been found in 1859 north of Mono Lake, quite far from the original "gold country", on the other side of Yosemite. The town came to be known as Bodie from the name of the miner who had found gold, William Bodey. In 1878 one of the richest gold and silver ores of California was discovered, and for two years Bodie shipped significant amounts of gold and silver. Chinese miners, glad to leave the gold country where they were discriminated and abused, were among the first to arrive in Bodie, but they were forbidden to mine and had to content themselves with opening shops. By 1880 there were several hundred Chinese (out of a population of 13,000) and they were shopkeepers, laundrymen, cooks, laborers, servants, dishwashers, a druggist, a restaurant owner, a hotel owner and some women.

California had run out of gold, but other minerals were discovered, unfortunately almost always in places where life was not easy, and Chinese workers were often employed. After borax was discovered in the desert of Death Valley, notorious for the scorching summer heat, a plant was built in 1883 near Greenland (today's Furnace Creek Ranch), the Harmony Borax Works. Most of the mine's workers were Chinese and the Chinese built most of the road from the plant to Mojave that was famously plied by mule-driven wagons.

Chinese immigration increased dramatically when the Gold Rush had already ended. The reason is simple. Those who had made money during the Gold Rush started restaurants and other businesses, and were in a position to invite the rest of their families to join them. At the same time the fortune made in California by those who had left in 1849 and returned to China rich encouraged others to try their luck too in California.

The Chinese immigrants didn't write much about their experience, and so their voices are notably absent from historical accounts. The only Chinese who were fluent enough in the English language and powerful enough to get their opinions published were the rich merchants of San Francisco, like Norman Assing and Tong Achick; and they did speak up against the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants. But the thousands of Chinese laborers employed in mines and fields have been erased from history.

The Chinese soon became famous for another habit, besides working very hard: saving money. Despite their low salaries, several Chinese became rich enough to buy shops and even factories. California manufacturers grew rich by employing Chinese labor, but often their laborers became owners and then employed, in turn, other Chinese workers.

In 1850 the USA had a population of 23 million. Officially, there were only 4000 Chinese, mostly located in California. In 1860 the USA had increased to 31 million and the Chinese population had increased to 35000. Chinese in California outnumbered immigrants from any other country. In 1870 the USA population was more than 38 million of which 64000 Chinese, 77% of whom were in California.

Incidentally, in 1849 the Chinese also started moving to Cuba, a much longer trip. Thousands went to work in the Cuban sugar plantations.

Ironically, the railroad, that was supposed to create an economic boom, caused an economic crisis: California got flooded with both cheap manufacturing goods from the East Coast and poor unemployed European immigrants. The Chinese became the favorite scapegoats of poor white workers. Chinese immigrants had always been willing to work for lower salaries (in fact, they had no other option) but now white workers saw that as unfair competition. During the Gold Rush, working in orchards and lumbermills were lower-paid jobs, but now they were more lucrative jobs than mining, so now white workers wanted the jobs that twenty years earlier only Chinese had been willing to take. Chinese workers were often harassed and abused. A consequence of the hostile atmosphere in the countryside was that many Chinese abandoned the old mining and agricultural camps and took shelter in the safer Chinatowns, notably the San Francisco one. Many of these rural "Chinamen" arrived in San Francisco with enough savings to purchase homes, and some even became landlords.

Even in the cities the discrimination was obvious. For example, in September 1859 San Francisco opened the "Chinese School" in Chinatown, a segregated public school for Chinese children. In 1866 California restricted public schools to white children, specifically excluding "Negroes, Mongolians, and Indians" ("Mongolians" being the Chinese and "Indians" meaning the indigenous population).

By 1870 the population of San Francisco had increased to 150,000 people, almost all of them arrived or born in 22 years.

The reputation of the Chinese kept deteriorating as more Chinese men got involved in crime and Chinese women in prostitution. While the vast majority were neither criminals nor prostitutions, the stereotype kept spreading. In 1866 the state of California passed laws to curb the Chinese brothels. A census of 1870 classified 61% of 3,536 Chinese women in California as prostitutes. Ethnic tensions further increased after in 1868 the USA and China signed the Burlingame Treaty, which de facto opened the gates to large-scale Chinese immigration to the USA. In 1874 the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company was founded, (by the two US railroads of the transcontinental railroad, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific), which replaced the Pacific Mail Steamship Company as the main transportation means for the Chinese coming to America.

In 1870 Los Angeles had a population of 5,728 people, of which 172 were Chinese. In 1870 in Los Angeles a highly publicized violent conflict exploded within the largest Chinese association, the See-Yup Company, and the notorious Chinese prostitute Sing-Ye was tortured by five gangsters. This was the worst form of publicity, confirming the racist feeling that the Chinese were not worthy of living among whites. In October 1871 hate against Chinese men turned violent and even deadly in the streets of Los Angeles, where 18 Chinese were lynched, and then the riots spread to other towns that had Chinese communities. In July 1877 an anti-Chinese riot in San Francisco by Irish fanatics left four people dead. That's when the old Chinese associations joined in the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (the "Six Companies"). Several white organizations, notably Denis Kearney's Workingmen's Party, started lobbying California politicians to stop Chinese immigration and even expel the Chinese already in California.

In 1880 the Chinese (numbering about 500) were the largest ethnic minority group in Los Angeles.

It became popular for California politicians to blame Chinese immigrants for unemployment among whites (for "stealing" white jobs). The Chinese entered the business of canneries because they were slowly kicked out of the fishing business through a sequence of taxes and regulations that explicitly targeted them. In 1876 white people even formed an Anti-Chinese and Workingmen's Protective Laundry Association in San Jose, which convinced several laundries to change occupation. Chinese laborers were arriving at rates much higher than during the Gold Rush: in 1876 there were 151,000 Chinese in the USA of which 116,000 were in California. However, Chinese women couldn't come anymore: in 1875 the "Page Act" of the USA de facto banned immigration of Chinese women, because they were viewed as likely prostitute. Meanwhile, a nationwide economic crisis engulfed the East Coast. The largest bank in the USA, Jay Cooke, went bankrupt, leading to the "panic of 1873". In 1879 California adopted a new constitution with an article that denied ethnic Chinese citizens the right to vote, forbade companies from hiring Chinese workers, and de facto encouraged cities to expel Chinese people. In 1880 the USA began to limit immigration from China and in 1882 the "Chinese Exclusion Act" suspended altogether immigration of Chinese laborers for a period of 10 years (the ban was renewed every ten years and repealed only in 1943, so it ended up lasting 61 years), besides depriving the Chinese already in the USA from becoming US citizens (and therefore depriving them of the right to vote). This was the first time in the history of the USA that a national group was discriminated by the government itself.

The Exclusion was often followed by "expulsion". In February 1885 the northern region of Eureka (today's Humboldt County) expelled to San Francisco all ethnic Chinese on a short notice. White terrorists set fire to Chinese property all over the state.

The Chinese population of 1880 in the whole of the USA was 105,465, out of 50 million people. No surprise that it remained roughly the same and sometimes even lower in the next six decades, despite the fact that the population of the USA grew to 76 million in 1900, 106 million in 1920 (when the Chinese population actually declined to 85,000) and 132 million in 1940.

The Chinese were de facto banned from the city’s fashionable elite, the elite that was enjoying Andrew Smith Hallidie's steam engine-powered cable cars, which debuted in 1873 (simply an evolution of mining conveyance systems), Frederick Layman's fancy "Telegraph Hill Observatory, Restaurant, and Concert Hall", which opened in July 1882, and the electric streetcar, which opened in April 1892, connecting the city with the Colma cemeteries.

Anti-Chinese riots continued and peaked in 1885 with the "Rock Springs massacre" in Wyoming territory, when white miners on strike killed 28 Chinese strikebreakers. The "exclusion" was particularly effective in the countryside: California's farm workers were mostly Chinese and were almost all expelled, replaced by Japanese workers. In 1880 there were only 145 Japanese in the USA, compared with more than 100 thousand Chinese: by 1924 the Chinese population had declined 20% while the Japanese population had multiplied thanks to 180,000 Japanese immigrants.

The Chinese miners, fishermen and farmers who were expelled from the rural areas moved to the various Chinatowns. Los Angeles' Chinatown slowly shifted east from its original locationm and the Garnier Building (built by French immigrant Philippe Garnier in 1890) became its unofficial city hall (today's Chinese American Museum of Los Angeles). The Los Angeles branch of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association was established in 1889.

It is interesting that the Chinese immigrants resisted the pressure to conform in terms of dress code and hair style. After all, those were the aspects of the Chinese race most often mocked by the white majority. While Muslims may resist the pressure to convert to Christianity because they believe that an omnipotent god is watching them and would condemn them to hell, nothing of the sort applies to the dress code and the hair style of the Chinese. The huiguan did act as guardians of Chinese traditions, but they were in no position to enforce the dress code of the thousands of Chinese spread all over California. Nor were the immigrants so overtly nationalist to employ the traditional Chinese dress and the pigtail as a political statement. By sticking to those traditions, they increased the risk of persecution, and, yet, they did stick to them.

At the same time, San Francisco's Chinatown did have a problem of crime. Many "tongs" formed as Chinatown grew. The Chinese community was relatively isolated in the city and only superficially protected by the police, creating the ideal conditions for crime gangs to form and prosper. The members of the tongs were generally poor and quasi-illiterate, whereas the members of the traditional Chinese associations (now six of them) were generally wealthy and educated. The tongs got into violent crime after entering the shady world of gambling and prostitution, both highly lucrative businesses that required "protection", and that were accompanied by consumption of opium.

Jackson Street was Chinatown's red-light district. Because the demand for prostitutes was so high (given the men-women imbalance), they started kidnapping girls from China. Soon the tongs started fighting each other for control of the territory. The Six Companies were the only meaningful obstacle to the tong. The "tong wars", peaking in the 1880s and 1890s. An article of March 1891 in the Daily Alta California read " The Traffic in Human Flesh Still Carried On" and accused "the Chinese slave-owners" of smuggling in girls from China: "every Chinese girl in San Francisco has a marketable value of from $1000 to $2000" (that included girls as young as eleven). And it wasn't only San Francisco: in March 1887 the city of San Jose declared its Chinatown a public nuisance and was planning to take action against the Chinese, but two months later Chinatown burned down and the Chinese moved to a new Chinatown far from downtown. In 1888 the very president of the USA, Grover Cleveland, stated that the Chinese immigrant was "an element ignorant of our constitution and laws, impossible of assimilation with our people and dangerous to our peace and welfare."

Chinatown is often depicted as a sort of "Chinese ghetto", but this misrepresents the Chinese immigrants: they actually wanted a town, and built a town wherever they could. That was a significant difference between the Caucasian immigrants and the Chinese immigrants. First of all, the Caucasians were more individualist, whereas the Chinese were more bound to collective life. Secondly, the Caucasians were more likely to be transient, or at least to think in "transient" terms. Trappers, loggers and miners had little interest in thinking long term: trappers moved after the animals they were hunting, loggers moved as forests were depleted, and miners moved as mines dried up. Last but not least, the Chinese were also more likely to know how to build (and how to farm) than the Caucasians. Therefore it is not surprising that the Chinese built Chinatowns wherever they could. It wasn't only an effect of anti-Chinese racism. The other side of the story was that the Chinese wanted to live in a Chinese town, with convenient Chinese services, the use of the lunar calendar and the staging of traditional festivals, and they often imported furniture and kitchenware from China for their homes. While their native customs, clearly different from European customs, fueled prejudice and stereotypes, the Chinese did little to amend or abandon them, clearly valuing them more than social integration and acceptance. Chinatowns were manifestations of a Chinese American subculture as much as the result of social persecution. While Chinatown's crime was legendary, in reality it paled compared with the lawlessness of the white mining areas. Between 1849 and 1854 over 4,000 murders were recorded in California, about 1200 in San Francisco alone, and Chinese were more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators. Chinatowns were, first and foremost, towns.

The Chinese that had already started businesses in California simply continued to expand. In 1890 Sai Yin Chew founded the Precita Canning Company in San Francisco, and the entire management was ethnic Chinese. Produce traveled by horse from the Santa Clara Valley and by train or boat from the San Joaquin County and the Sacramento Delta to the San Francisco cannery.

Therefore by the year 1900 the Chinese had been responsible for mining the gold of California that funded the development of California's infrastructure (including Stanford University), for building the network of railroads that connected Californian cities and then to the East Coast, for the irrigation and farming that fed the growing population of California, and for creating the first complex and stable urban environment in California (Chinatown). Finance, transportation, agriculture and urbanization are the four dimensions of economic development in any modernizing society. Chinese hard work had been the engine that had turned California into a wealthy state, that had turned the California swampland into fertile farmland, that had turned a state of sparse rural villages into a state of cities, and that had turned the once isolated state into a cog of the early globalized economy. They even laid the foundations for the civil-rights movement of the future. Like it or not, their opium dens also pioneered the culture of drugs that would remain a staple of the San Francisco Bay.

Chinese workers even helped create the USA's first national park and one of the most famous parks in the world: Yosemite. The famous valley of very tall waterfalls had been discovered accidentally in 1851 by US soldiers who were chasing "Indian" rebels (and popularized by the physician riding with the soldiers, Lafayette Bunnell). The original trail into Yosemite Valley was a mule trail from Mariposa with a lodging house along the way in a location that came to be known as Wawona. This became the Wawona Hotel. Chinese workers were hired in 1874 by Wawona Hotel's owner Henry Washburn to build the 37-km Wawona Road into Yosemite Valley, another engineering feat. In 1883 another group of Chinese laborers (with some white workers) built the first road through Yosemite's high country (through today's Tuolumne Meadows), the Great Sierra Wagon Road, mostly following the ancient Mono Trail used by the "Indians". Chinese chefs and workers kept working at the Wawona Hotel even after it was rebuilt after a fire.

Because the Chinese were penalized by the language and because they were naturally reluctant to seek attention, their contribution has been relegated to a footnote in the history of California. Because they are largely a nameless group, with no hero standing out, no equivalent of Columbus and not even a Kit Carson, there is no mythological narrative about them., In reality, California was nothing before the Chinese arrived. Before the arrival of the Chinese, California was casually roamed by illiterate and unskilled Spanish and Russian explorers who built little more than huts. Even the 49ers who arrived from all over the (white) world did very little to create California: they mostly lived in camps, camps that were more famous for gambling and crime than for developing the land. In fact, most of those camps were abandoned the moment the gold ended, leaving behind only polluted rivers. Once the Chinese arrived, California developed roads, agriculture and transportation. It became a real living place. It doesn't matter that the Chinese themselves lived in the least appealing of urban environments: the work that they did created the most appealing aspects of California.

What is also underestimated is that every Chinatown remained a trans-Pacific community (at least with the Pearl River Delta Region), laying the foundations for California's future economy. While the stereotype is that the Chinese immigrants never went back to China, in reality thousands traveled back and forth, mostly merchants. The "huiguan", who charged the tickets, may have made more money from the departing Chinese than from the arriving ones.

A problem in the history of early Chinese immigration is the lack of individual voices, but this is also due to a difference in the concept of "making". Caucasian protagonists of the Gold Rush had a name. The Chinese who built towns, roads, railways and factories were often just a group of people. This may say more about the different perception of who really "makes" something than about the relative importance. Way before Marx invented communism, the Chinese were proud of collective achievements.

The Chinese merchants, who (unlike the Chinese laborers) were literate and wealthy, were not easily intimidated by the racist hordes. In 1885 Chinese immigrants Joseph and Mary Tape (a successful businessman and an orphan raised by the Ladies Protection and Relief Society) sued the city of San Francisco because their daughter Mamie was denied admission to a public school (Spring Valley School, which had been inaugurated in 1852 as California’s first public school): they won in front of the California Supreme Court but the California parliament immediately passed a law authorizing the creation of segregated schools. When in 1886 San Francisco passed regulations that were clearly targeting Chinese laundries a Chinese laundry owner, Yick Wo, appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court of the USA ruled in his favor, enforcing once and forever the principle of equal protection under the law (that would later benefit all races and ethnic groups). Another important precedent was set in 1898 when Wong Kim Ark, a "Chinaman" born in San Francisco, was recognized as a US citizen based of the 14th amendment of the US constitution (he had been denied reentry after traveling outside the USA). The Chinese American Citizens Alliance was formed in San Francisco in 1895.

San Francisco's Chinese intellectual elite, advocating for democracy in China, had its own newspaper, Chinese World, originally established in 1892 as the Mon Hing Yat Bo, and renamed Sai Gai Yat Po in 1908, written in both Chinese and English.

Founded in 1900 by Chinese Americans, the Chinese-Western Daily (Chung Sai Yat Po) remained the largest Chinese newspaper in the USA for several decades. Its editor, Ng Poon Chew, became the unofficial spokesman of the Chinese-American community.

Chinese rights activists Wong Chin Foo, "the Chinese Martin Luther King", born in Shandong province, raised by a missionary couple and brought to the USA in 1867, one of the first Chinese immigrants to be naturalized in 1874, founded a weekly magazine in New York in 1883, the Chinese American, the first Chinese-language newspaper of the East Coast, and in 1892 started the Chinese Equal Rights League of America, which soon had members also on the West Coast. He also fought against opium, gambling and prostitution in Chinese communities, and was a frequent target of Chinese criminal organizations.

The fight against sex trafficking was led in San Francisco by Presbyterian missionary Donaldina Cameron, who in 1897 became the head of the Mission House and set out to rescue as many Chinese girls as possible, helped by Tien Fuh Wu, a former abused girl. One of them, Bessie Jeong, later became the first Chinese-American woman graduate when she graduated from Stanford in 1927.

In 1905 something new happened: the Chinese in China protested against anti-Chinese racism in the USA. Chinese intellectuals had already been irked in 1904 when the Chinese delegation to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis had been humiliated. Then in July 1905 an emigrant, Feng Xiawei, killed himself in front of the US consulate of Shanghai, an event that moved the entire city. A boycott of US products started in Shanghai and spread in multiple Chinese cities, eventually joined by the Chinatowns of California. During this time the Chinese cities were flooded with stories of abuses suffered by the Chinese immigrants in the USA. Until then the ties between the immigrants the motherland had been tenuous at best. This grass-roots protest strengthened the ties between China and its California emigrants, but also encouraged the Chinese in California to stand up for their rights and injected a sense of national pride in their communities.

Stanford was founded in 1885. At the time it was not a prestigious university at all. Leland Stanford struggled to find scholars willing to move to California and become professors at Stanford. Walter Ngon Fong, who had originally arrived through a religious organization, became the first Chinese student to graduate from Stanford in 1896. Chinese students were admitted at Stanford, but were not allowed to share the dormitories with white students, so in 1919 Frank Chuck and other Chinese students founded the Chinese Club House.

Meanwhile, the USA was achieving some kind of stability. After so many wars, the last decades of the century were relatively peaceful for the USA. Of course, that's true only if one doesn't include the continuing massacres of "Indians": the Apache wars in the 1880s in the Southwest and the Sioux massacre in South Dakota in 1890 that de facto ended the Indian wars. The next major war was against Spain, which resulted in the US conquest of Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

During the 1840s there was another "gold rush" in the planet, although not as famous as the California one: it was a rush to mine minerals in the Chinese province of Yunnan, which drew millions of Chinese immigrants to the sparsely populated region. The flow of people between Yunnan and the Pearl River delta (Canton and Hong Kong) spread more than minerals and opium: a plague that had started in Yunnan reached Canton and Hong Kong in 1894, killing 100,000 people in a few weeks. Millions died in India between 1896 and 1898 and in Manchuria in 1899. It reached Hawaii in December 1899 (where Chinatown was burned down accidentally in an attempt to burn infected houses) and then ships started arriving in San Francisco with dead sailors. All ships from China, Japan, Australia and Hawaii were ordered to fly yellow flags and were quarantined, but the plague found its way into Chinatown anyway in February 1900. California's governor Henry Gage, fearful of the economic consequences if panic spread throughout the state, hesitated to lock down Chinatown even after the scientists confirmed the plague beyond any reasonable doubt, even criminalizing epidemiologist Joseph Kinyoun, censoring newspaper reports of plague infections, spreading disinformation and refusing to administer Waldemar Haffkine's experimental vaccine (note the similarities with 2020 when US president Donald Trump hesitated to recognize the covid pandemic and epidemiologist Anthony Fauci was even criminalized by right-wing media that also conducted anti-vaccine campaigns). The result was that the plague kept spreading and killed more than 100 people. The worst consequence, however, was that it further increased anti-Chinese sentiments among whites. In 1901 San Francisco's own mayor James Phelan wrote an article titled "Why the Chinese Should Be Excluded".

That was just the tip of the iceberg. The bad reputation of Chinatown as a den of sin, crime and prostitution, and now also of disease, was unique in California just when it was trying to promote itself as a modern city, worthy of the most fashionable European cities.

In April 1906 San Francisco was destroyed by an earthquake and a fire. Chinatown suffered perhaps more than any other neighborhood. The disaster made news all over the world and in particular in China. Chinese minister Liang Cheng arrived in Oakland to lead a relief effort, another gesture of solidarity from the homeland.

California's politicians, instead, saw a chance to get rid of Chinatown. A special "Subcommittee on Relocating the Chinese" was convened, with the intention of kicking the Chinese out of the city and giving their land to real-estate speculators. China's empress Cixi had to sent her ambassador to San Francisco to defend the ethnic Chinese. The Six Companies pointed out the economic damage that would be caused by losing the lucrative Asian trade and the cheap laborers. But ultimately the project of deporting the Chinese failed for a simpler reason: at the peak of anti-Chinese sentiment, just about any other city wasn't willing to accept new Chinese residents. In October 1906, amidst anti-Japanese sentiment, San Francisco renamed the Chinese School the "Oriental Public School" (with all Caucasian teachers), and the 93 ethnic Japanese schoolchildren of the city's public schools were moved to it.

And so the Chinese started rebuilding Chinatown, and by 1908 their work was done while the rest of the city was still under reconstruction. The new Chinatown was very different from the old one. The old one was basically an unappealing slum of filthy wooden tenements. The new one was designed by architects (hired by Chinese merchants) with the deliberate intention of creating a Chinese-themed tourist attraction. Hence the iconic pagoda-topped buildings of the Sing Chong and Sing Fat bazaars. That's when Look Poong-shan (born in Mendocino of a wealthy Chinese merchant man and an "Indian" woman), originally employed at the San Francisco branch of the Russo-Asiatic Bank, founded in Chinatown the first Chinese bank in the USA, the Canton Bank. The best thing about the new Chinatown is that the earthquake and fire crippled the tongs.

The Exclusion Act all but killed Chinese immigration into California. Indirectly, it redirected Chinese immigration to the East Coast: in 1892 the US government opened the immigration station at Ellis Island in New York through which millions of Europeans arrived. Despite the Exclusion Act, thousands of Chinese were admitted and jumpstarted the Chinatowns of the eastern cities (New York, Boston, etc). This was an important moment in the history of US immigration because previously immigration was delegated to each state. The millions of new (mainly European) immigrants convinced the US government of the need for a national immigration policy.

There was another loophole that allowed Chinese to immigrate specifically to California. The partial good news out of the 1906 earthquake was that the city's records were also destroyed so that any immigrant could claim to be a citizen. Many Chinese who were not citizens did so and became US citizens overnight. That allowed them to bring their immediate family members from China.

Discrimination against Chinese continued unabated, but now the Japanese, who had replaced the Chinese in the countryside, were perhaps targeted even more viciously. The 1907 riots in San Francisco affected the Chinese but were actually started by by anti-Japanese activists.

California didn't have the equivalent of Ellis Island until 1910 when the old military reserve of Angel Island, in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, was turned into an immigration station. That became the arrival point of Chinese immigrants. Because of the Exclusion Act, they were often detained there for weeks while the bureaucrats decided if they were arriving legally (as family members of US citizens) or not. The Chinese immigrants spent days and nights in the public dormitories of the island (which are still covered with graffitis, including 200 poems).

In 1913 California passed another discriminating law: the Alien Land Law, which limited the right to own land to "foreigners eligible to become citizens". Asians were not eligible under the Naturalization Law of 1870. The law (not repealed until 1952) was mainly directed against the Japanese, who controlled most of the agriculture, but de facto kept the Chinese was buying land outside their own Chinatowns.

Two events offered wealthy Chinese a chance to clean up San Francisco's Chinatown. In 1909 San Francisco decided to celebrate the 140th anniversary of Portola's discovery of the Bay with a six-day Portola Festival; in reality an event to celebrate the reconstruction of San Francisco after the earthquake and fire. Chinatown made the best of it, presenting itself as a tourist attraction for the first time. Then in December 1915 a world's fair was held in San Francisco to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal: the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. A telephone line was installed with New York. Philadelphia sent the "Liberty Bell". Spectacular architecture dotted the shore, including the Palace of Fine Arts (rebuilt in the 1960s, it is the only surviving structure) and the largest wooden-frame huilding in the world, the Machinery Palace, plus replicas of the Panama Canal, of thre Grand Canyon and of Yellowstone Park. Nearly 19 million people from all over the world attended. There was also a "Joy Zone", one of the largest amusement parks ever built, which included a "Chinese Village", whose main attraction was "Underground Chinatown", a grotesque, exaggerated depiction of the underworld of Chinatown, in particular its opium dens. While racist and insulting, this "thrilling" representation of Chinese life meant that Chinatown was becoming a tourist attraction. More importantly, it was "the" deviant aspect of San Francisco, which was otherwise trying too hard to present itself as an ordinary city. What stood out from this exhibition was that the "melting pot" of the USA was mostly a "white" melting pot but in San Francisco it was actually a confluence of white and "yellow".

In August 1915 the Pacific Mail S. S. Company announced that it would cease operations between China and California. Its ships had been the main mode of transportation for the Chinese community. Fearing that Japan (an emerging power after winning the war against Russia in 1905) would now control all the trans-Pacific traffic, Chinese merchants got together and formed the China Mail S. S. Company.

A second Chinatown was growing in Los Angeles. Chinese and Japanese merchants funded the establishment of a new farmers' market in 1909, the City Market. Chinese merchants and workers quickly took over the neighborhood, which became known as Market Chinatown. It was a cosmopolitan Chinatown because Japanese, Italians and other ethnic groups involved in wholesale produce moved there. All sorts of food industries popped up, including David Jung's Hong Kong Noodle Company which in 1918 invented the "fortune cookie". Clearly this was not the Chinatown of opium dens and tong wars.

Despite these attempts by the "Oriental" groups to gain legitimacy and respect, in 1917 the USA expanded "exclusion" to the whole of Asia (the "Asiatic Barred Zone Act"): Middle East, Central Asia, British India, Indochina, etc. The only exception was the Philippines, which the USA had conquered in the Spanish–American War of 1898: Filipinos were US nationals until 1934, when they were granted independence (actual independence only came in 1945). Chinese and Japanese were still able to immigrate into Hawaii because Hawaii was not a state of the USA (just a protectorate) until 1959. Several Chinese and Japanese tried to challenge these laws in courts, but in 1922 the Supreme Court ruled in that Japanese-born people were not "white", which meant that, according to the Naturalization Act of 1790, they could not become US citizens, and in 1923 the Supreme Court ruled that Indians too did not qualify as "white". Wong Kim Ark's lawsuit of 1898 had clarified that everybody born in the USA was a citizen but foreign-born Asians were still excluded from citizenship.

In 1911 China’s last emperor abdicated and the Republic of China was established by Sun Yat-Sen, just after Sun had visited San Francisco during his exile. The USA immediately recognized the new government. In 1912 San Francisco's Chinatown elected their own representative (Kuang Yaojie, president of the Ningyang huiguan) to the national congress in China. A few years later the excitement turned into anxiety when Japan, allied with Britain and France, first conquered the Chinese port of Qingdao from Germany (November 1914, during World War I), and then (January 1915) issued the "Twenty-one Demands" which basically amounted to China becoming a Japanese protectorate (Japan had already conquered Taiwan from China during the Jiawu Zhanzheng of 1894-95). The immigrants were increasingly touched by events in the motherland. At this time a number of schools for Chinese children were established, mainly in San Francisco and Hawaii, and mostly sponsored by the benevolent associations. The biggest was the Zhonghua School. These schools typically taught both Cantonese language and Chinese classics. The Chinese communities also doubled efforts to reshape their image by fighting vices like gambling and prostitution and the tongs.

The Chinese were not allowed to own land but could lease it from white landowners. When in October 1915 a fire destroyed the 100-people Chinatown of Walnut Grove, south of Sacramento, a group of Chinese led by businessman Lee "Charlie" Bing (who had owned a gambling house, a hardware store, a grocery store, a barber shop, a pool hall and a herbal medicine store) leased land from a man called George Locke and built their own town, Locke. It was the first town in California built by Chinese for Chinese. More Chinese workers came, employed in the farms and canneries of the Delta region. It became famous among white people because of its (illegal) casinos (like the building that today hosts the Dai Loy Museum).

In 1919 Chen Chunrong, a lawyer who had worked for the Italian American Bank (today's Bank of America), launched the joint-stock Chinese American Agricultural Company to purchase a large farm near Stockton. Hundreds of Chinese invested in it.

There were still tong wars in the first twenty years of the century, and they often spread to many cities. One started in 1917 in Portland and one in 1921 in Butte, north of Sacramento. But those were the last ones.

In 1919 the USA ratified the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" and then passed the "National Prohibition Act". Nightclubs serving alcohol illegally popped up in Chinatown.

The Chinese population of San Francisco was confined to a few blocks of the city. The Chinese dared not cross California Street or Broadway, because on the other side it was "white" territory, and Chinese who entered it risked being attacked.

The proximity of Chinatown to the Hollywood studios opened opportunities in the nascent business of cinema. Some movies were shot in Chinatown itself. Some Chinese found employment as actors, like Willie Fung. However, Hollywood routinely depicted the Chinese as sinister characters. Chinese Americans started making their own movies. When she directed "The Curse of Quon Gwon" in 1917, Marion Wong became the first Chinese-American filmmaker and one of the earliest female filmmakers in the world. In 1922 Anna May Wong, an ethnic Chinese born in Los Angeles, starring in Chester Franklin's film “The Toll of the Sea", became the first Chinese movie star of Hollywood. She starred alongside Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's "Shanghai Express" (1932). The second Chinese-American star was Keye Luke, popular in the 1930s. Eventually, a Chinese-American production company was established in San Francisco, Grandview Films.

The Chinese communities were wealthy enough to be considered worth the trip across the ocean by stars of the Cantonese opera (like Li Xuefang who visited San Francisco in 1927) and of thre Beijing opera (like Mei Lanfang who spent almost the whole of 1930 in San Francisco).

In 1929 the New York stock market crashed, ushering in the Great Depression.

Hostility towards the Chinese community led to the demolition of Los Angeles' Chinatown in 1931 to make room for the city's new train station. Chinese-American farmers were devastated by the Great Depression and by the competition of Japanese-American farmers. The latter often took over the farms of the former. Thanks to activist and investor Peter Soo Hoo, in 1938 Los Angeles' New Chinatown opened (north of the original one) and also absorbed much of Market Chinatown. Hoo's association found a way to purchase the land and hired architects Erle Webster and Adrian Wilson to create attractive buildings with Chinese motifs, including two gates and a five-tiered pagoda. The intention was to make it a tourist attraction, just like its San Francisco counterpart. This was a fancier Chinatown, with restaurants that drew Hollywood stars. One of the first movies produced in New Chinatown was Josef von Sternberg's masterpiece "The Shanghai Gesture" (1941). This is where You Chung Hong lived: the first Chinese-American lawyer of California. Like its San Francisco counterpart, New Chinatown was funded and constructed by Chinese Americans. Many buildings were designed by the first Chinese-American architects to graduate from the University of Southern California: Gilbert Lester Leong and Eugene Choy (the first affluent Chinese American to build a home in the Silver Lake neighborhood, soon followed by others). Fung Chow Chan, owner of a famous New Chinatown bakery, founded the first Chinese-American commercial bank in California: Cathay Bank.

In 1935 two second-generation Chinese, Chingwah Lee (an art historian and the son of a merchant who had emigrated to San Francisco in 1877 and had become a herbalist of traditional Chinese medicine and an art collector) and Thomas Chinn (born in Oregon, whose maternal grandfather had arrived in California in 1849), founded the Chinese Digest, the first English-language magazine written by and for second-generation Chinese Americans.

In September 1931 Japan attacked Manchuria and in July 1937 Japan launched a large-scale invasion of China. The Chinese intellectuals of the USA were now fighting on two fronts: fighting Japanese imperialism in Asia while fighting racism in America. Starting in 1938 and until 1941, the Chinese associations were successful in mobilizing public opinion with their annual "Bowl of Rice" parties that were basically fund-raising events to benefit Chinese civilians. They were held simultaneously in the major Chinatowns of the USA and in many other participating towns. More than 200,000 people attended the one in San Francisco in 1940. This was an important moment: for the first time a large number of white people joined Chinese in Chinatown (and to celebrate a national Chinese issue). Clearly those white people didn't think of Chinatown as a nest of opium dens and brothels.

In 1941 Japan attacked the USA at Pearl Harbor causing the USA to enter World War II on the side of China. China was now allied with the USA, Britain and the Soviet Union in fighting international fascism. For the first time ever, China had a very positive image among the US public. The Chinese were hailed as heroes fighting against the common enemy, Japan's fascism and imperialism. More than anyone else, it was China's first lady who charmed the public opinion of the USA. China was ruled by Chiang Kai-shek (known as Jiang Jieshi in Mandarin China) and in February 1943 he sent his US-educated wife, known simply as Madame Chiang, on a "goodwill" tour of the USA. She became the second woman and the first Chinese to ever address the US Congress (a nationally-broadcast speech). She was received enthusiastically in San Francisco in March. Following her visit, and the dramatic change in the perception of Chinese people that she generated, in December 1943 the Exclusion Act was finally repealed.

However, the "Magnuson Act" that ended 62 years of Chinese "exclusion" established a yearly quota of only 105 visas for Chinese immigrants: it didn't exactly open the gates to Chinese immigration. Chinese students had already started trickling in, for example Tsou Tang, who arrived in 1941 and would graduate from the University of Chicago in 1951, later becoming an influential political scientist. The story was different for Japanese Americans (many of third generation), who were internet in concentration camps like Manzanar by the tens of thousands. Ironically, this reversed the situation of the previous 40 years, when Japanese had been able to acquire farmland from expelled or disillusioned Chinese farmers: in 1942 many farms run by ethnic Japanese were taken over by Chinese farmers.

Until the 1940s China was de facto a "western" country. Chinese scientists such as Ta-You Wu (who graduated from the University of Michigan in 1933) shared research with US and European scientists. Chinese universities were world-class universities. The scions of wealthy families often studied at western universities, like female physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, who graduated from the University of Michigan in 1936, went to work with Emilio Segre' at UC Berkeley and later worked on the atomic-bomb project for the USA (the "Manhattan Project"). Others moved to the USA thanks to US scholarships, like the winners of the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics: Chen-Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, two Chinese who had studied with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago in the 1940s.

Another important event for the many Chinatowns was a ruling in 1948 by the Supreme Court that de facto banned limitations on what a Chinese could own. The Chinese population of the USA had been deprived for three decades of the right to buy a home outside their Chinatown by the various Alien Land Laws. Now they were finally able to move into other neighborhoods of their city. Within a few decades, the Chinese that moved out of Chinatown changed the demographics of San Francisco's Richmond and Sunset districts, and wealthy Chinese families began moving to the suburbs, like Millbrae, Cupertino and Fremont in the Bay Area. Finally, in 1952 the "white person" restriction of the Naturalization Act of 1790 was abolished (with the "McCarran–Walter Act") so that now non-white immigrants could become citizens just like white (i.e. European) immigrants.

A number of Chinese students and scientists took advantage of those 105 visas available to China, but soon the Chinese had a bigger problem at home: Mao Zedong's communists won the civil war and seized power in mainland China, establishing one of the most isolated regimes in the world, while Chiang Kai-shek's government fled to Taiwan, which became de facto an independent country. For mainland Chinese, it wasn't just difficult to enter the USA: it was even more difficult to leave China. Right after the 1949 revolution the USA received thousands of political refugees who were escaping Mao's regime. The few Chinese students who visited the USA in the 1950s were strongly encouraged to become US citizens and stay because the USA was now afraid of leaking know-how to the communists. Ethnic Chinese in the USA increased to 150,000 in 1950 and 237,000 in 1960. But soon immigration from mainland China became virtually non-existent for three decades. The Chinese of America knew little of what was happening in China during the dramatic years of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao in 1966. It was literally another world: the USA was experiencing an economic boom while people in China were starving. All sorts of Chinese businessmen in San Francisco and Los Angeles were becoming rich, while their relatives in mainland China lived in utter destitution.

Respectability came also because of the success of ethnic Chinese politicians: in 1950 Gary Locke, a third-generation Chinese American, became governor of Washington State, the first Chinese-American governor of the USA; and in 1959 Hiram Fong (the son of a Cantonese who had immigrated to Hawaii in 1872) became the first Chinese-American senator.

It is telling that in 1952 the television series "The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong" became the first television program with a Chinese-American lead (the already famous Anna May Wong).

In 1960 there were 237,293 Chinese Americans (combining immigrants and citizens) of which 40% lived in California and 16% in New York (and also 16% in Hawaii). Los Angeles's Chinese community had ballooned from 2,111 in 1900 to 8,000 in 1950 to 20,000 in 1960.

Somehow the Chinese community started feeling proud of itself, even though the "white" elite still ignored their contributions. In 1963 five second-generation Chinese founded the Chinese Historical Society of America (Meiguo Huaren Lishi Xuehui): Thomas Chinn, Chingwah Lee, Chan Hoon Kwock (born in Hawaii from a merchant couple of Zhongshan), Henry Kwock Wong (owner of several shops and a journalist for the Chinese Digest, Chinese World, etc) and Thomas Wai Sun Wu (a dentist).

The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which repealed quotas, finally eased immigration into the USA from Asian countries. However, due to the closure of Mao's China, most Chinese immigrants of the 1960s and 1970s came from Hong Kong (still a British colony) and Taiwan (de facto independent and strongly allied with the USA, which still recognized its government as the legitimate government of all China). These were immigrants who often didn't identify with the old Chinatowns of California and were more likely to scatter in the suburbs, Chinese-American demographics changed. San Francisco's Chinatown became predominantly Sam Yup Wah (standard Cantonese).

At the time few Chinese families would think of moving to California. It was mostly single men who did so. The young ones from wealthy families came to study. The others came with little money, worked multiple jobs, saved money, over time bought their own business, and then worked even harder to make their business succeed. They often found a wife in China and brought her to California. Over the years, thousands of "mom and pop" businesses were created by such immigrants.

Wealthy immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan demanded better housing conditions than Chinatown. Realtors understood that they were ideal buyers, and started pitching prime properties to Hong Kong and Taiwanese families, not only to white families. For example, in 1972 a realtor named Frederic Hsieh (a Hong Kong immigrant himself) started pitching homes of a white Los Angeles suburb called Monterey Park, that already had the largest Chinese population outside of Los Angeles' Chinatown, to wealthy Taiwanese, and soon that suburb was known as "Little Taipei" with a population that became mostly Chinese. Within San Francisco, new Chinese districts popped up in the Sunset and Richmond districts. And new Taiwanese immigrants soon discovered warmer and safer areas in suburbs like Cupertino and Fremont. The old urban Chinatowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento were not appealing for the new immigrants. The Chinatowns represented an older generation that hung on to old traditions whereas the new immigrants were often "westernized" and were eager to integrate in the multi-ethnic US society.

What is today "Silicon Valley" was started in the 1950s with the early semiconductor startups. At the time there were virtually no Chinese engineers: mainland China was ruled by Mao, whose Great Leap Forward destroyed Chinese classic education without creating a modern one, and Taiwan was just beginning to embrace electronic technology. China was no longer graduating world-class scientists, and Taiwan's science and technology was still in its infancy. General Instrument Corporation of New Jersey opened the Taiwan Electronics Corporation in 1964, the real beginning of Taiwan's electronic industry. The National Taipei University of Technology and the National Taiwan University had been established by the Japanese (respectively, in 1912 and 1928, under a different name), and, unlike in the mainland, were not crippled by the politicians. The Taiwanese learned quickly from US and Japanese companies and in the mid-1960s started producing television sets, transistor radios and electrical appliances. Taiwan also started producing world-class engineers. After 1965 the majority of Chinese immigrants were college-educated, and they were coming from Taiwan or Hong Kong, like Winston Chen (of Solectron fame). For example, the Chinese-born David Lee (of Qume fame) was raised after 1949 in Taiwan. David Lam (of Lam Research fame) was raised in South Vietnam, which was first a French colony and then a de-facto US protectorate.

In 1955 the city of Cupertino was born, counting about 500 families. There were Chinese because the Chinese ruled the main industries of Cupertino: flowers and orchards. In 1968 the biggest crop in Santa Clara county was chrysanthemum.

In 1970 the population of the USA passed 203 million and the number of ethnic Chinese reached 436,000. There were actually more Japanese Americans (about 600,000) than Chinese Americans due to the fact that immigration from mainland China had died out after 1949. At the same time, millions of immigrants arrived from Indochina, following the "Vietnam War", especially after South Vietnam was conquered by communist North Vietnam. Many of the Vietnamese immigrants were ethnic Chinese. Within a decade from the end of the Vietnam War, half of all New Chinatown businesses in Los Angeles were owned by Vietnamese Chinese.

Between 1971 and 1973, Bruce Lee's movies launched Chinese martial arts (kung-fu) in the West. New Chinatown became popular for rock music: Madame Wong’s and the Hong Kong Cafe' became two of the main venues for the new wave of the late 1970s.

### STILL IN PROGRESS ###

Mao died in 1976, having caused the death of millions of people. In 1977 communist China removed restrictions on emigration, and emigration of college students and professionals resumed from mainland China, although at the beginning it was just a trickle. In 1979 the USA decided to recognize the communist regime of mainland China as the legitimate government of mainland China. In 1979 the Chinese benefited from a change in US immigration policy: the USA decided to treat Taiwan like an independent country, and therefore its immigrants did not affect the quota for mainland China. Ditto for Hong Kong that was technically part of Britain. Separate quotas for mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong meant more total number of Chinese immigrants.

In 1980 the population of the USA was 226 million and the Chinese population had doubled to 812,178.

The Chinese population started increasing rapidly with the opening of Deng Xiaoping's China: 1,645,472 in 1990, then 2,432,585 in 2000, then 3,794,673 in 2010 (when the US population had passed 300 million), and 5,400,000 in 2020 (out of 331 million people).

The 1990s witnessed the Internet revolution, which started in 1991 with the inauguration of the World-wide Web and the first "browsers" and "search engines". The first wave of Chinese founders in Silicon Valley was almost entirely of Taiwanese-born founders, like Jerry Yang of Yahoo, Steve Chen of YouTube and Jen-hsun Huang of Nvidia. Many of the Chinese executives in major Silicon Valley companies were also from Taiwan, like Kai-fu Lee, an executive first of Apple and then of Google. And finally a founder of a major company who was born and raised in mainland China: Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom in 2011.

In 1997 Hong Kong returned to be part of mainland China, a fact that induced many Hong Kongers to move to California, but for the most part Chinese immigration was now mainly from mainland China, and soon Mandarin-speaking mainlanders greatly outnumbered Taiwanese.

In 1997 Michael Chang, who had immigrated from Hong Kong as a student, was elected mayor of Cupertino, the first Chinese American to become mayor in the Bay Area. There wasn't a San Francisco mayor of Chinese descent until 2011, when Ed Lee got elected. In the same year, Jean Quan was elected mayor of Oakland.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Asian Americans became the fastest-growing ethnic group of the USA, thanks mainly to Indians and Chinese, which replaced the Japanese as the leading Asian-American group. The new crop of Chinese American immigrants were either students or engineers.

Silicon Valley (the south bay in general) is home to one of the largest foreign-born populations in the USA. Asian Americans (mainly Chinese and Indians) make up about 39% of San Jose’s population (whites only 24%) and 42% of Santa Clara County (whites are only 29%). Therefore they are under-represented among founders and executives. The relatively low number of ethnic Chinese founders in Silicon Valley is usually explained as a consequence of a value system that prioritizes education and hard work but also low risk. Therefore they tend to be highly paid engineers but not the founders of the companies for which they work. Asian-American families enjoy the highest median income. Asian-American students are so successful that Affirmative Action, a program invented to help minorities like them, became an obstacle for them. The founders in Silicon Valley are overwhelmingly white, often foreign but European, and sometimes Indian, rarely Chinese.

Just like in the 1850s, the "Chinese" (many of whom were born in the USA) are not the owners of the "gold mine" but instead the workers who make it work. Chinese provide the "labor" of the digital age, especially in the hardware sector (the machines that make Silicon Valley software move). It is incorrect and unfair to claim that Silicon Valley is the manifestation of the founders when it is the hard work of tens of thousands of engineers that make their startups succeed.

• Gordon Chang: The Chinese and the Iron Road/ Ghosts of Gold Mountain
• Jean Pfaelzer: "Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans"
• Henry Norton: The Story of California
• William Speer: The Oldest and The Newest Empire
• City of Los Angeles: Chinese Americans in Los Angeles, 1850-1980
• Michael Polk: Chinese Workers at Central Pacific
• Yong Chen: Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943
• Heinrich Lienhard: A pioneer at Sutter's fort 1846-1850
• Chester Lyman: Around the Horn
• Evelyn Hildebrand: The Chinese in California: Archaeology and Railroads at the Turn of the Century
• Philip Choy: A History of the Chinese in California
• Jiangmen city: Wuyi Overseas Chinese Museum