Gold Mountain

The Yellow Peril

Ceded to the United States by Mexico in 1848, California was home to some 30 indigenous cultures before the Gold Rush, as well as a small minority of Californios (Mexican colonists of Spanish descent), Russians, Brits, and other Europeans. After gold fever hit, Native populations were decimated by disease and violence as people poured into the region. Those seeking their fortunes were mainly European Americans from the American east and south, but prospectors also included African and Native Americans, Mexicans, Central and South Americans, western Europeans, Russians, Australians, and Asians. At first welcomed, by the 1850s Chinese laborers were deemed the “yellow peril” invading America to offer cheap labor and take jobs from whites. Chinese were also legal outcasts, like blacks and Indians, unable to testify against whites, which led to ever-increasing anti-Chinese violence.

Almost all Chinese had left the mines by 1868. Some joined the new influx of Chinese immigrants who came to build the western portion of the transcontinental railroad over the Sierra Nevada. The Chinese also contributed to agricultural development in the region, building levees in the Sacramento Delta like those of their homeland, establishing orchards, and growing vegetables.

They were also fishermen, cigar makers, cooks, restaurateurs, merchants, laundry owners, domestic servants, and nannies.

Chinese culture arrived with the first sojourners. Theater groups and roving minstrels entertained fellow immigrants. Chinese operas were also presented for white audiences. In 1854, the Xinwenlu (Golden Hill News) became the first Chinese-language newspaper in North America. Gambling halls, temples, herbalists, fortune-tellers, laundries, restaurants, and boarding houses, along with Chinese churches and benevolent associations, created bustling Chinatowns.

Major cities in the west, including Sacramento, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Victoria (British Columbia), have been important community hubs, but none have held the significance of San Francisco, the port where émigrés were processed at the infamous Angel Island, and where the city's densely populated Chinatown offered immigrants critical resources. San Francisco itself has been known as Gold Mountain.

In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act halted Chinese immigration and prohibited Chinese from becoming U.S. citizens. Previously, only prostitutes and “morons” were excluded. Because white Americans assumed that all Chinese women entering the United States were prostitutes (most who arrived before the mid-1870s were in fact forced to become sex slaves), women were excluded early on and remained a small minority of the Chinese in America, though exempt classes—merchants, diplomats, students, clergymen, and travelers— could bring their families. Exclusion laws, violence against migrant workers, and the illegality of interracial marriage limited the possibility of Chinese men putting down permanent roots. Nonetheless, the 25,000 Chinese émigrés by 1852 grew to 4 million claiming full or partial Chinese heritage in the 2010 U.S. Census, making Chinese Americans the largest Asian group in the United States.

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