The completion of
the transcontinental railroad in May 1869 is usually told as a story
of national triumph and a key moment for American Manifest Destiny.
The railroad made it possible to cross the country in a matter of
days instead of months, paved the way for new settlers to come out
West, and helped speed America's entry onto the world stage as a
modern nation that spanned a full continent. It also created vast
wealth for its four owners, including the fortune with which Leland
Stanford would found Stanford University some two decades later. But
while the transcontinental has often been celebrated in national
memory, little attention has been paid to the Chinese workers who
made up 90% of the workforce on the Western portion of the line. The
railroad could not have been built without Chinese labor, but the
lives of Chinese railroad workers themselves have been little
understood and largely invisible.
This landmark volume
shines new light on the Chinese railroad workers and their place in
cultural memory. The Chinese and the Iron Road illuminates more fully
than ever before the interconnected economies of China and the US,
how immigration across the Pacific changed both nations, the dynamics
of the racism the workers encountered, the conditions under which
they labored, and their role in shaping both the history of the
railroad and the development of the American West.