Jottings from the Granite Studio

A Qing historian reads the newspaper…

Jottings from the Granite Studio header image 2
← Korea-China history wars, Part XIIVIWHOCARESXI Eastern Qing tombs under threat from illegal mining →

Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese-Americans

June 5th, 2007 · 4 Comments

Tony Platt of Sac State reviews a new book by historian Jean Pfaelzer on the persecution of Chinese-Americans in 19th-century California.


Between 1840 and 1900, more than 2 million Chinese laborers left their homeland to work in plantations and mines around the world. Twenty-five thousand of them joined California’s Gold Rush. By the 1860s, Chinese immigrants were a vibrant part of the state’s economy, accounting in some rural counties for one of every five residents. But by the turn of the century, more than half of a Chinese American population that once reached 80,000 was gone - deported, exiled or dead — and the survivors herded into urban ghettoes.

One particularly disturbing snippet from a review full of disturbing snippets:


In 1885, after a night of “exuberant violence,” a gallows was built in Eureka as a warning to any Chinese who stayed in town. “It took barely a century to virtually clear the coast of the redwood forest,” observes Pfaelzer. “It took barely a weekend to clear Eureka of the Chinese.”

Haven’t read it yet, but it’s definitely on my list.

Tags: Chinese History

4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 chriswaugh_bj // Jun 5, 2007 at 8:45 pm

    “Exuberant violence”? Sounds like a rugby game.

    More seriously: I was well aware of the various legal measures like Chinese Exclusion Acts and poll taxes taken to limit the number of Chinese emigrating to places like America and New Zealand, and I can’t say I’m surprised to hear about less legal measures, but this pogrom-like exuberant violence? Wow.

    Not sure about this bit, though:
    “The small number of upper class women married to Chinese merchants experienced their own kind of imprisonment: their feet bound to enforce immobility and chastity, they were “locked,” writes Pfaelzer, into an “invalid’s seclusion.”"
    I’m not an historian, but I don’t see how this fits with the rest of the story.

  • 2 花崗齋之愚公 // Jun 6, 2007 at 7:01 pm

    Chris,

    Without having read the book, I might suggest that gender always plays a role in discussions of race/immigration/assimilation. Part of the “concern” over the Chinese community was the lack of women leading to immorality. (Though at the same time, the immigration of women was feared because it might mean ’settlement.’)

    I too find it an odd digression, but I’d have to read the book (rather than just the review) to see how it fits into Pfaelzer’s overall argument.

  • 3 chriswaugh_bj // Jun 6, 2007 at 9:52 pm

    No, I meant the sudden inclusion of footbinding in a narrative about anti-Chinese pogroms. Seems to me that Chinese-Chinese violence is quite different from what sounds like an attempt at ethnic cleansing.

    But yes, we’d have to read the book first.

  • 4 無名 - wu ming // Jun 7, 2007 at 1:18 am

    it sounds like it intersects with the thesis of sundown towns a fair amount. the japanese internment in the 40s was just one incident in a century of mob violence and forced resettlements towards asian immigrants.

    i only discovered a couple of years ago that the reason why tacoma didn’t have a chinatown was that the leading citizens rounded them up and forceably put them on a train to california in the 1880s, which was so popular in the northwest that it became known as “the tacoma method”. my undergrad chinese language prof is involved with building a chinese-style garden to commemorate it.

Leave a Comment

From the archives