At Grant Avenue and Bush Street stands a ceremonial gate marking the entrance to San Francisco's Chinatown. Its four Chinese characters "Tien Hsia Wei Kung" remind those who enter that "the world is for all to share." The words were written by Dr. Sun Vat-sen, the Founding Father of the Republic of China.
The first Chinese to arrive in the United States were not always welcomed with a full share of the New World's bounty. What they gained in the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 was taken away in the subsequent Exclusion Acts. As of today, justice, reciprocity and equality are making progress. The spirit of "Tien Hsia Wei Kung" may not yet prevail but the San Francisco Chinatown reminder receives more than lip service.
One of the earliest records of Chinese arrivals in the United States goes back to August 9 of 1785. Three Chinese seamen were put ashore in Baltimore by the ship Pallas skippered by John O'Donnell. In April of 1796, five Chinese servants were recorded as lodged in the home of Andreas Everardus Van Braam Houckgeest, a Dutchman of Philadelphia. In these and other cases, follow-up information is not available. Chinese came to American shores and some of them stayed, but the records have been lost. Only the descendants remain.
Five Chinese are known to have been attending American schools between 1818 and 1825. Records of the U.S. Immigration Service note the entry of a Chinese in 1820. Up to 1849, only 43 immigrants were recorded - not counting the West Coast. The Chinese population of San Francisco was counted at 54 in February of 1849. Less than a year later - in January - the count was 787 men and 2 women.
Chinese began to organize as early as December 10, 1849. The Alta Californian of that date reported a meeting of some 300 Chinese at the Canton Restaurant on Jackson Street in San Francisco. They resolved that a committee of four be established to represent them in dealings with the "foreign devils" among whom they had come to live.
Shops of the Chinese began to cluster along what is now Sacramento Street between Kearny Street and Grant Avenue, which was formerly Du Pont Street. The street was known - and still is - as "tong jen gai" or the street of the Tong people. The Chinese restaurants of San Francisco go back at least to July of 1849.
Importation of Chinese contract labor began in the late 1940s and continued for some years. By 1850, about 500 of the 57,787 miners counted in California were Chinese. Immigration increased sharply in 1851. This led to feeling against the Chinese among American miners. Scattered incidents occurred in 1852. One of the first recorded moves to drive out the Chinese was a meeting at Foster and Atchinson's Bar in Yuba County in that year. A resolution demanded that Chinese be denied the right to hold claims after May 1, 1852, and that Chinese leave the mines. On May 8, a resolution passed in the Columbia Mining District sought the exclusion of "Asiatics and South Sea Islanders" from mining. The Foreign Miners' Tax of $3 a month was passed in 1852 and the amount was increased to $4 a month in 1853 and $6 in 1856. Discrimination eventually terminated the Chinese role in California mining.
But gold fever had infected South China and the overseas Chinese communities of Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. The Chinese kept on moving toward California - and not always the easy way. Pacific crossings probably were made in junks. As recently as the 1920s, these durable little vessels were putting into Newport-Balboa south of Los Angeles. In 1852, so the story goes, eight sampans set out for California. Six were lost in the hazardous crossing, one reached Monterey and the other put in at Caspar Beach, four miles north of Mendocino. The George and Charlie Hee brothers, last of the Chinese loggers in Medocino County, had a grandfather in the 20-foot sampan that reached Caspar.
In 1850, a statute prohibited Negroes and Indians from testifying for or against whites. No less an authority than the U.S. Supreme Court mad~ this law applicable to Chinese in 1854. There was worse discrimination ahead.
Having lost out in gold mining, the Chinese tried their hand at fishing. Chamber's Journal of January 21, 1854, reported the settlement of 150 Chinese on San Francisco's southside to engage in fishing. A Chinese fishing company was established in March of 1860. A decade later the Chinese were fishing the Pacific coast from the Oregon border southward to the Mexican territory of Baja California and along the Sacramento River delta. Fishing vessels of the Chinese put in at San Francisco, Monterey and San Diego.
Opportunities for manual labor took the Chinese eastward. In the mid-1850s, some 40 to 50 went to Nevada to work on a hydraulic mining project at the mouth of Gold Canyon. Soon nearly 200 had settled down in a Chinatown at the town of present-day Dayton. About 2,000 congregated around Virginia City to work as miners, woodcutters and servants.
Clan and district associations were mushrooming at about the same time. Some of these were subsequently involved in conflict. The Chinese Six Companies was established and in 1901 became the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. The Six Companies was born of five: the Kong Chow, Ning Yeung, Sam Yup, Yeong Wo and Van Wo Associations. With accession of the Hop Wo Association in 1860, the five became six. Today's membership is about 30. A second powerful organization, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, was born in 1910. It is the sponsor of the world famous Miss Chinatown Beauty Pageant. Winners travel the world to visit other overseas Chinese communities, the Republic of China and Hongkong.
The "Weaverville War" was fought in 1854 between Sze Yup people and a group from Hengshan. There were other battles over mining rights, including that between a group of Sam Yup and Hakka people at Chinese Camp in 1856.
Railroad building began to attract sturdy Chinese crews. On January 4, 1855, the newspaper Oriental said in an editorial Laborers for the Pacific Railroad: ”... the boundless plateaus of the western half of this continent ... will be scattered with busy lines of Chinese builders of iron roads that shall link the two oceans and add to the wealth and comforts of the dwellers on either shore.”
In 1858, the Sacramento Union said: "(The contractors of the California Central Railroad) resorted to hiring Chinamen to fill the places of those who left; the result is that they now have fifty Chinamen employed, and they find them very good working hands." Chinese laborers were employed for work on the San Jose Railroad in 1860.
Construction of the transcontinental line was pushing across the West in 1863. In February of 1865, fifty Chinese were hired to fill dump carts. By the fall of that year, 3,000 Chinese laborers were at work on the rails that first bound America together. Chinese have been repeatedly memorialized for their contributions to the building of the Central Pacific, which had to penetrate the Sierra Nevada. Fifteen tunnels were bored in one stretch of sixty miles. The Union Pacific, pushing west from Omaha, hired Irish immigrants, many of whom had fought in the Civil War. The Central Pacific turned to the tough but tractible Chinese. Some 10,000 of them were employed at the height of construction. Historians attest that despite the Chinese liking for food, they were easier to please than the Irish. Hunting parties assured a plentiful supply of game. The golden spike was driven as locomotives of Union Pacific and Central Pacific met in 1869.
The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 between China and the United States is one of the most enlightened ever signed in terms of man's humanity to man. The treaty recognized the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his homeland and his allegiance, and specified the privileges of free emigration and immigration. The citizens of the two countries were to be free to leave the land of their birth and settle in the other. Equal treatment was to be accorded Americans and Chinese. The American West was not ready for such a concept, so reminiscent of the teachings of Abraham Lincoln, who had sent Burlingame to China, and of Dr. Sun Yat-sen in later times. The first of the Chinese "Exclusion Acts" forbade the naturalization of Chinese and suspended immigration of Chinese laborers for ten years. Further restrictions were laid down in 1892, 1902 and 1904. Still, the good neighborliness of the Burlingame Treaty was eventually to triumph. On December 13, 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the "Act to Repeal the Chinese Exclusion Acts, to Establish Quotas and for Other Purposes." Chinese were admitted to the United States on an equitable basis and made eligible for naturalization.
The Exclusion Acts led to the illegal immigration of Chinese into the United States by way of the "slot system." U.S. citizens of Chinese ancestry returned to China at the behest of and in the pay of those who supported the immigration of Chinese. These visitors would return to their native places, there to "find" a long-lost wife and several sons. The "slots" for sons were sold to those who wanted to emigrate to the United States. When the "son" followed his father to America, he left himself wide open to extortion. The persecuted sought the protection of the family associations or "tongs," which often engaged in feuds of their own.
Chinese have always carried their culture with them wherever they went. This led in the United States not only to the familiar Chinatowns - of which San Francisco and New York are the most famous but far from unique - but also to attempts to perpetuate Chinese education as distinct and separate from that of the country of residence. The first community-sponsored Chinese school in San Francisco was the Ta Ch'ing Shu Yuan, established in 1884. It began with about sixty students in two classes. Teachers were appointed or teaching duties taken up by the presidents of district associations, performing in turn.
Dr. Sun Yat-sen was the greatest organizer of overseas Chinese in history. In 1894, he established the Hawaii chapter of his revolutionary Hsing Chung Hui (Revival of China Society), which was dedicated to overthrow of the Ch'ing dynasty. Each member took an oath with left hand on an open Bible and right hand lifted to Heaven. Calling upon God to witness his solemn pledge, the member recited these words: "I swear to overthrow the Tartar slaves (Manchus), restore China to the Chinese and establish a democratic government. If I am of two minds, may God examine and judge me." The Hongkong chapter of Hsing Chung Hui was set up in January of 1895. The following November, the first of Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary endeavors failed when carelessness led to discovery of the conspirators' weapons in Canton. Lu Hao-tung, one of Dr. Sun's closest friends, was arrested and executed. Lu was the designer of the national flag of blue sky and white sun on crimson ground. The Founding Father described him as "the first man in the history of China to die for the Republican cause."
Dr. Sun escaped to Hongkong and then to Japan. In January of 1896 he went on to Hawaii. That June found him in San Francisco, where he stayed for a month to engage in propaganda work among members of the lodge of the Hung League. Chinese patriots had organized this society to oppose the Manchus and its slogan was "Overthrow Ch'ing and restore Ming." The original purpose had been largely forgotten, however, and the Hung League had become just another self-help society. Dr. Sun sought to stir up members but found it a difficult task. He summed up his experience as follows: "Members of the society in China were frequently in conflict with the government, which served only to strengthen their opposition to the Ch'ing dynasty. But members of the society who had gone abroad and were living under free governments had forgotten the political origins of their organization and regarded it as merely an association for mutual assistance. I was in America spreading the idea of revolution, but members of the society could not comprehend my ideas. I asked them the meaning of their slogan, 'Overthrow the Ch'ing dynasty and restore the Ming dynasty.' Most of them were unable to answer. Not until revolutionists had expounded the truth to them for several years did members of the Hung Men Society come to realize that their organization was the oldest revolutionary group extant. The seed of the Revolution was just beginning to be sown in America but there was at that time no great gain for the cause. Even so, what I did was sufficient to arouse against me the hatred and wrath of the Ch'ing dynasty."
After his efforts to firm up the Chinese of San Francisco, Sun Vat-sen entrained for a trip across the United States. He stopped off in many cities where the Chinese had settled, exposing the corruption and failure of Ch'ing and urging a republican system as the salvation of China. Dr. Sun didn't know that the Manchu Legation in Washington had set up a watch on him and his activities. His disguise of Japanese-style Western clothes and a moustache had been penetrated. This was to lead in London that October to his kidnaping and imprisonment at the Ch'ing Legation. He wrote of this experience and his close call with death in his Kidnaped in London.
Sun Yat-sen's Revolution was finally to succeed on October 10 of 1911. The world is not yet "for all to share" but that remains the hope and the ideal of those who have inherited the mantle of the Founding Father and continue to work - through Chinese societies all over the free world - for the defeat of Communism and the continuation of the National Revolution.