A Retelling of Gold Rush History: The Lives of Chinese Miners

by Nina Wu

In the 19th-century daguerrotype taken by Isaac Wallace Baker , a Chinese man dressed in a light-colored mandarin shirt holds his long braid in one hand, lookingdirectly at the camera. The man in the photo has no name, but his unsmiling face looks weather-worn, strong and dignified.

Portrait of a Chinese Man, c. 1851

Photo Image Courtesy of Oakland Museum

The photo is just one of the items included in the Oakland Museum of California's three-part, historical exhibit, entitled GOLD Rush! California's Untold Stories.. Taking an innovative step, the museum is the first in the Bay Area to present the state's history from a new perspective — one which tells the stories of the Chilean, Hawaiian, African, Native American and Chinese populations during that era.

“When people talk about the Gold Rush, they have a certain image in mind of white forty-niners,” Asian Cultural Program Coordinator Ming-Yeung Lu said. “But in fact, the Gold Rush was a major, international event that drew people from all over the world.”

Like many others from throughout the world, the Chinese had dreams of finding gold in a land they called Gum Shan — the Gold Mountain. Those who sought gold and adventure sailed more than 5,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean's rough waters, only to discover upon their arrival that they were still 150 miles from the gold mine sites.

“A lot of them thought you could come and pick up gold anywhere,” Lu said. “But the reality was different. The prices of gold had dropped tremendously and the price of food and lodging here was very expensive.”

The US census recorded a total of three Chinese residents in California as early as 1848, when the Gold Rush broke out in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The count increased to 300 just one year later and by 1852, grew to 30,000. “One thing we try to emphasize,” Lu said, “is that the reason the Bay Area is such a diverse, multicultural area really started from the Gold Rush era.”

In the Gold Fever portion of the exhibit, visitors to the gallery will see the recreated arheological site of the earliest Chinese store in California, excavated from beneath the corner of Sacramento and Kearny Streets in San Francisco.

The riches of the Gold Rush were, in fact, what transformed San Francisco from a small town to a bustling, industrial city. “The cosmopolitan aspect of San Francisco developed very early,” Lu said. “Those who settled there were mostly well-educated doctors and lawyers. They brought with them a high level of culture. If you read all the accounts, you'll find that people were fascinated by all these different cultures around them.”

That appreciation for culture included an appetite for Chinese cuisines, Lu said. He cited some written accounts by settlers who wrote of “exceedingly palatable” dishes served up by “celestials” (the Chinese).

Visitors to the audio-guided exhibit will get a glimpse of a Chinese mining camp next to a display of Native American tools, baskets and arrowpoints. They will also learn about the Californios, the members of great land-holding families and of the Spanish, missionary explorers who came to California looking “for glory, God and gold.”

History is retold with new voices and a new awareness of the destruction the Gold Rush caused in its wake, both of the Native American population and the environment.

The audiotape includes the dramatized voice of early immigrants telling their own stories — in English, Cantonese or Spanish — as one strolls pass life-sized figurines hard at work. “In the Cantonese audio-tour, there's a segment where they dramatically re-enacted the letter of a miner to his family,” Lu said. “It was written by a white miner, but in Cantonese, it`s still very vivid. To me this signifies that although there were cultural differences, a lot of the feelings these Chinese miners had were very similar to feelings the other miners had.”

Along with James Marshall's first piece of gold in a display case, visitors will seea large, spinning globe that pinpoints where all the gold-seekers came from — whether by land or by sea.

During the Gold Rush, the Chinese were the largest group of miners other than the white miners, according to Lu. Most came from the southern coast of China. Since the Chinese proved to be effective miners, resentment grew and they became “an easy mark” for foreign mining taxes in 1851.

“I think all the ethnic groups had tensions with one another,“ Lu said. “But the foreign miner`s tax was mainly aimed at the Chinese miners because at that point, they constituted the largest group of non-white miners.”

“A lot of the white miners at first willingly sold the Chinese these abandoned claims, thinking the Chinese were just simple-minded people, stupid enough to take over these mines they considered worthless,” he added. “But the Chinese worked these mines very thoroughly and it turned out they were hardly worthless, that they could still, in fact, mine a lot of gold from them, at which point the white miners became envious and antagonistic.”

Not all of the Chinese were miners. Some became storeowners, merchants and laundrymen who settled in the San Francisco and Sacramento areas. Lu points out that the origin of Chinese laundry businesses may have begun during the Gold Rush period. “A lot of the miners were men not used to doing women's work,” he said. “So they would send their shirts all the way back to Hong Kong to be laundered. That`s when a Chinese enterpreneur thought of the idea of starting a laundry.”

Wah Lee, the first Chinese laundry business in San Francisco, opened on the corner of Washington and Grant Streets in 1851. It cost $5 to launder a dozen shirts, a bargain compared to the $12 price charged in Hong Kong. By 1870, there were 2,000 Chinese laundries in the city.

Stockton resident Lani Ah-Tye said her great-grandfather, Yi Lo Ty, ran a general merchandise store in Plumas County. He was also a mining contractor. “His great advantage was that he spoke English,” Ah Tye said. “He was like a liaison between the Chinese miners and the others.” Ah Tye has spent several years researching and piecing together the history of her family in the United States for a book to be published this Spring.

Unlike most of the other Chinese miners during that century, Ah-Tye said her great-grandfather requested to have his bones buried in the United States rather than sent back to China. His bones, in fact, are at the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.

“With the publication of this book, I feel like I've come full circle,” she said. “It's been 26 years, so it's been a long journey. I did not realize our roots went so far back. In working on this, I discovered that I'm really more American than I am Chinese.”

Ah Tye will speak about her personal journey at a Museum-sponsored panel in June, along with documentary film-maker Loni Ding and Bill Ong Hing, director of the immigrant legal resource center in San Francisco. They will address the relevance of the Gold Rush legacy to Americans in California today.