Evans wondered about the historical implications of what he had witnessed. In his estimation, the coming of the Chinese had incalculable consequences, not just for San Francisco or California but for the entire country. “The Chinese-labor question,” he predicted, in a few years would “break down, revolutionize, and reorganize parties, completely change the industrial system of many of our States and Territories, and modify the destiny of our country for generations to come.” He saw something historic that day in San Francisco. The “Occident and Orient stand face to face at last, and the meeting must signalize a notable era in the history of mankind.”
The arrival of Chinese in San Francisco in significant numbers after the 1848 discovery of gold attracted widespread attention, as their appearance, social ways, language, and distance from home set them dramatically apart from the Euro-American population. Though much has been made of the Chinese as forming a colorful part of the Gold Rush, their actual numbers were modest. In 1850, when California joined the Union, only about five hundred of the almost 58,000 gold seekers in California were Chinese. Their numbers rose, however, after the relatively easy method of individual prospecting was replaced by mining operations that required hired hands. Among those ready to work were many Chinese. From 1852 through the early 1860s, approximately six to seven thousand Chinese arrived each year. Perhaps half of those who came to America stayed for just a few years before returning home; the other half made America their new permanent residence.
The initial reception they experienced was generally welcoming. In May 1852, the state’s leading newspaper, Daily Alta California, for example, described Chinese as a “worthy integer of our population” and optimistically predicted that “the China boys will yet vote at the same polls, study at the same schools and bow at the same altar as our own countrymen.” In April 1854, a San Francisco newspaper reported on the recent arrival of nearly eight hundred Chinese from Hong Kong on board the Lord Warriston. More were expected to join the estimated twenty thousand already in the state. The newspaper then noted that the Chinese had already established a significant presence in the state: Chinese who had worked in mines and in San Francisco “were rising from extreme penury to comparative wealth.” Though the newspaper described the character of these workers as clearly inferior in every way to the intelligence, morality, and abilities of the “Caucasian race,” it observed nonetheless that the Chinese were becoming a vital element of the population. The “white men are naturally of the dominant race; they are all fitted to be masters,” but who would serve them? There were no “black slaves” in the state, Indians were “fast dying out,” and no white labor from the British dominions was to be had. Who would grow the food and staples and harvest them from the soil? “Roads have to be made, and railroads will soon follow,” but “will the white man, in this country, follow such employments?” “Never,” the paper declared, but Chinese would provide the muscle: they “are such a people.”
In the mid-nineteenth century, despite the great attention devoted to the Chinese presence in the country, there was no firm agreement on how many had arrived. Confusion over the count emerged immediately at the start of an 1876 federal investigation into Chinese immigration. A federal commission tasked with determining the extent of the Chinese presence in the country and its implications for the economic, social, and moral well-being of the nation began its work posing a simple but basic question: How many Chinese were there actually in the United States? A parade of government officials, citizens, and Chinese came forward to offer wildly differing numbers.
Charles Wolcott Brooks, a prominent San Franciscan, believed that only 67,000 Chinese lived in the country, while the Reverend Otis Gibson, one of the best-known church leaders associated with Chinese, calculated 150,000 were on the West Coast alone. The Six Companies reported that 148,600 Chinese were then in the country according to its carefully maintained membership rolls. One member of the federal committee claimed that he would prove there were over 200,000 in the country. Other witnesses said they knew there were 60,000, 90,000, 110,000, or over 210,000 Chinese. In San Francisco alone, the estimate appeared to range from a low of 30,000 in the summer and fall to over 65,000 in the winter. The issue was never resolved, which fueled continuing anxiety among whites about the true extent of the Chinese presence.
Closely associated with the issue of numbers in the minds of forces hostile to the Chinese was the ongoing conviction, despite the 1862 act outlawing American participation in the coolie trade, that many Chinese were not voluntary workers but coerced indentured servants. “Free soil” California was not a place for such beings.
Independent journalists, however, closely investigated the circumstances of Chinese entry into the country and largely confirmed that Chinese had come freely. A detailed news report in 1869 specifically addressed the speculation that Chinese who worked on the Central Pacific Railroad were here involuntarily. A reporter for the New York Evening Post, then one of the most respected newspapers in the country and known for its favorable attitude toward the rights of minorities, wrote that “nearly the whole force which built the Central Pacific railroad were brought over as free laborers.” They came under U.S. consul–approved contracts signed voluntarily and broke none of the U.S. laws prohibiting the coolie trade. An unidentified American businessman worked with Chinese merchants to recruit laborers, according to the newspaper, and many did enter into voluntary contracts. The basic terms were that the employers advanced the cost of passage and sent a deposit to a Chinese company in San Francisco to cover the return of remains in case of death. This was a form of insurance provided to the workers. In turn, the laborer agreed to work for a specified wage to pay off the advance; some executed a mortgage of real property as security for the loan. After working off the debt, the laborer was “free to make a new bargain or to go where he pleased.” Individual Chinese had entered into contracts for their labor as early as the 1840s in California.
The news report described the Chinese who were coming to America as not from the “lowest class” of workers, like those sent to Cuba and Peru. Nearly all who came had “been educated to read and write,” and because their many letters sent back to China provided “a vast amount of information” about America, those who followed them “know where they are going and what to expect when they arrive.” The Chinese came to America to “improve their condition—to earn and accumulate money,” and “if they decide to remain here, they will seek to have land and business of their own.” The journalist’s evidence was compelling and consistent with all other credible evidence at the time.
Nonetheless, the controversy persisted. At the center of it was the accusation that the Six Companies maintained a system that closely controlled and exploited Chinese workers. Its roots were in the 1850s, when Chinese leaders began to organize groups to attend to the needs of Chinese immigrants, provide assistance to newcomers, resolve disputes among themselves, and represent their interests to the wider society. The organizations were not commercial, though merchants dominated them, but mutual aid associations, known as huiguan, that represented the interests of migrants with same-place origins (diyuan), generally corresponding to counties in Guangdong. Merchant Cantonese often had formed these associations when they moved within China in aid of their businesses, but their form and function changed in America, a foreign and unfamiliar place. The Six Companies was a confederation of these separate huiguan. Most Chinese migrants and Americans who interacted with them and the Six Companies had a high regard for them and their purposes.
Still, Americans who were unfamiliar with the Chinese and their different ways could be uncomfortable and suspicious. For some, the huiguan and Six Companies were not just mysterious but possibly sinister. Sinophobes in America frequently accused the Six Companies of being “slaveholders,” a most incendiary charge. The Six Companies, it was said, were a “government unto themselves,” despotic, and anathema to American values.
The organization repeatedly defended itself ag
ainst the accusations over the years. Knowledgeable white Americans who had extensive contact with the Chinese, including white Christian ministers who were long associated with them in China and America, defended the huiguan against these scurrilous accusations. Respected ministers such as the Reverend William Speer and the Reverend Otis Gibson, who had served in Fuzhou, China, for more than ten years before returning in 1865 to work among the Chinese in California, righteously condemned immoral and cruel practices such as the forced prostitution of young Chinese women, but also defended the Six Companies against slander. “Why do the hundreds of intelligent Chinese Christians in America,” wrote Gibson, citing evidence to support his point of view, “constantly assert that there is no such thing known among their people in this country as slavery, or bondage, except in the case of women.” He posed his question rhetorically to emphasize his point. The Chinese who come here, Gibson declared, “in every case come voluntarily.”
Leung Cook, a proprietor of the Tung-ching-lung store on Commercial Street in San Francisco’s Chinatown, who hailed from Taishan, testified before a California state commission in 1876, providing a basic description of the Six Companies in his own words. He served as the president of the Ning Yeung association, the largest of the huiguan in the Six Companies. He reported that the organization was founded about 1853, after the Chinese first began to arrive, as they knew little of the English language and of American customs and needed help in “getting employment and in going from place to place.” The sole purpose of the Six Companies, he said, was “to look after Chinamen here.” He estimated that this association had a total of 75,000 members on its rolls, though the number was by then actually thirty to forty thousand because many had returned to China. He testified at length about the purpose of the huiguan. In his words, spoken through an interpreter:
When my countrymen come to California, my company takes care of them, pays their boarding and lodging expenses. For this they collect, afterwards, from each man, five dollars. That is considered to pay back the amount due the company for its advances, for expense, and its trouble. When they pay it they get a paper or permit, and can then buy tickets [to return to China]. Where men are sick, poor and unfortunate, they remit the five dollars and give the permit anyhow. Where men are in debt to anybody, and the company finds it out, it will not give the permit. If the debtors are too poor to pay, they are allowed to go [back to China].
Leung Cook served as head of the association for just one year, as the presidency changed annually. Among his duties was to help his compatriots with their mail from home. The other important function provided by the association was to assist in returning the remains of the deceased to China. The Chinese, he informed the commission, “think a good deal of the remains of deceased persons, and when a person finishes his life, they take his remains back to China to show to some of his relations in order to have them remember and do honor to them,” explaining, “It is a custom to do so.” More than just habit, the practice provided essential existential comfort to those far from home, especially for the Railroad Chinese in their dangerous endeavor. Through the years, the associations dutifully repatriated the remains of thousands of Chinese who died in America for eternal rest in their home soil and with family.
The Six Companies helped Huie Kin, and thousands of other Chinese who arrived in the United States in the nineteenth century, make the transition to life in a new country, which they were themselves helping to shape with their presence, labor, and business acumen. In San Francisco, early on, Chinese established a complex community of businesses, residences, shops, association halls, theaters, gambling dens, brothels, and temples right in the center of the city. San Francisco’s Chinatown, the “capital” of Chinese in America, still stands in the same original location. And while earthquakes and fires have reshaped the urban landscape of the port city, images of its early Chinese community survive, offering a precious link to the bygone world of the Railroad Chinese.
One of the most prominent photographers working in California at the time of the Transcontinental was Carleton Watkins, who established a studio on Montgomery Street in San Francisco in 1871, shortly after the railroad’s completion. Located just a few blocks from Chinatown, Watkins’ studio employed several Chinese to help produce his stereographs and other images, and the products of their labors often featured Chinese as well. More than thirty extant Watkins images have Chinese as the main or partial subject.
His photographs of Chinese in San Francisco show them in Chinatown stores, temples, restaurants, and smoking establishments. Two of his most arresting images are from the 1870s. “Chinese Women, San Francisco” (below) shows two fantastically silk-gowned women in a bright sunlit room full of Chinese tropical hardwood furniture, traditional string instruments, and art calligraphy. The partially visible elegant inscriptions declare that the owner of the artwork is a cultivated person. The setting is unlike anything most Euro-Americans at the time could ever have imagined existing on American soil. The women, who may be mother and daughter, seem relatively at ease; they do not appear to have bound feet (which suggests they are either Hakka or Manchu neither of whom engaged in the practice), and are clearly well-to-do. They hold painted fans, wear jade bracelets and rings, and are elegantly coifed and groomed. An opium pipe sits on the table between them. A few moments later, to judge from the shifting shadows, Watkins took a second photo, “Chinese Actor, San Francisco” (below), showing a young man in a spectacular Chinese opera costume. It must have shimmered and glowed with brilliantly colored silks and embroidery in red, blue, and gold thread. He may very well have performed for Railroad Chinese in the Sierra or when they came to San Francisco for a visit. The altar behind him features a fine ceramic rendition of budai, the “laughing Buddha,” the spirit of goodwill and happiness. The flowering narcissus and citrus fruit, possibly pomelo, indicate it is the time of the Spring Festival or Chinese New Year, in late January or early February.
As early as the 1850s, Chinese photographers in San Francisco earned praise for the fine quality of their work. In 1854 a San Francisco newspaper reported on the photography of Ka Chau, who operated a “Daguerrian Establishment” and took pictures of Chinese men and women, though it seems none of his work has survived. By the late 1860s, at least sixteen Chinese professional artists and photographers were practicing their arts in San Francisco. The best known among them is Lai Yong, who worked from at least 1867 through the late 1880s as a photographer and portrait painter.
Though his life is still largely a mystery, Lai Yong’s existing photographs show that the clientele for his portraiture and photography ranged beyond the Chinese community and included some of the most important figures in San Francisco. A handful of his cartes de visite and cabinet cards, popular forms of presenting photography at the time, provide remarkable views of Chinese in the years when Chinese worked on railroads. Unlike the images produced by many non-Chinese photographers of that era, Lai Yong’s work does not have the feel of being “ethnographic,” that is, a look at what was deemed foreign and exotic for the study or enjoyment of others, not for those in the frame. A common mark of ethnographic photography is a visibly uncomfortable subject, who often avoids looking into the camera’s all-seeing eye. In contrast, Lai Yong’s images, apparently taken in his studio in the heart of Chinatown, are of fellow Chinese, who appear relaxed and even pleased with the attention they are receiving. They had the means and desire to have their pictures taken by a person from their own community.
One striking image Lai Yong captured is of a Chinese male sitting with Chinese furniture, next to a flowering narcissus on a Chinese table (below, top left). He looks directly into the camera; his facial expression and body language are confident, strong, and even a bit intimidating. He wears a dark silk tunic and rimmed black hat popular with city Chinese men at the time. Lai Yong uses the same furniture for a portrait of a woman (top right), elegantly attired and coiffed and also comfortable as she gazes straight into the camera. She is composed a
nd worldly. In another image, a confident young man holds a flower and a book. Other material that appear to be Chinese publications sit on the table shelf. His manner, clothes, and headwear express cultivation and refinement. Lai Yong’s Chinese are distinct individuals with humanity and personality.
Photography was not the only medium that Lai Yong used for expression. As a polemicist, he became well known for his co-authorship of one of the most articulate statements decrying anti-Chinese sentiment in America. In 1873, while he was engaged in his photographic work, Lai Yong served as the lead author with four other Chinese to produce “The Chinese Question from a Chinese Standpoint.” Directed to “the people of the United States” and translated and read before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors by the Reverend Otis Gibson, Lai Yong’s eloquent statement angrily demanded fair treatment of Chinese in the country as mandated by international treaty and human decency. He defended his compatriots as “peaceable and industrious” folk who had “toiled patiently to build your railroads” and substantively contributed to the economy of the West. He and his fellow authors protested the “severe and discriminating” actions against “our people while living in this country” and argued that if the mistreatment of Chinese did not end, the treaties between China and the United States should be abrogated. All Americans should then remove themselves from China and the Chinese from America. “Stay at home and mind their own business,” he emphasized, using an old admonition, “and let all other people do the same.” A few years later, Lai Yong, perhaps heeding his own declaration, himself disappeared from the San Francisco scene and returned to China.
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