CHAPTER ONE
“A journey of a thousand miles begins where you are standing,” says an old Chinese proverb. And so the story of the first wave of Chinese emigration to the United States properly begins not in nineteenth-century America but rather in the world these immigrants left behind.
Perhaps no country exudes a greater air of mystery to Westerners than China. It is remote (from the West, at least), and it is vast. The territory of China today (almost 3.7 million square miles) comprises the third largest country in the world. Though it only just surpasses the size of the continental United States, its diversity is breathtaking. Its borders stretch from the mountains of Siberian Russia to the Himalayas of India, from the densely populated coastal lands that border the Yellow, East China, and South China Seas to the almost uninhabitable Gobi Desert of north-central China, then farther west to the isolated plateaus of Central Asia.
China’s true grandeur, however, is not vested in its size or distance, but in its age—five thousand years of continuous civilization and intact practices and traditions. The Chinese state is considered by many historians to be the oldest functioning organization on earth. It is also the world’s most populous country. China is home to more than one billion people—fully one-fifth of humanity.
In the mid-nineteenth century China was still an imperial state, ruled by the surviving members of the Qing dynasty. The Qing, originally from Manchuria, a region north of China, had held power for two hundred years, but that power was waning. Monumental changes were about to take place that would transform not only the lives of people inside China, but also their entire relationship to the world beyond China’s borders.
Westerners of the time, when they thought of China, imagined a genteel and exotic land filled with quaint pagodas, curved stone bridges, and lotus blossoms—images popularized by the paintings and poetry and observations of the handful of writers, missionaries, travelers, and merchants who had come there. But few outsiders who traveled in China could understand the language or the culture around them. While most noted—accurately—that it was a culture in whose bedrock was respect for social, economic, and family traditions—the culture that also invented paper and printing, rocketry and gunpowder, and introduced to the West exquisite foods, silks, and spices—the real China was far more complicated.
Few visitors were able to travel the length and breadth of the country, so they failed to grasp how dramatically the geography itself shifted, and along with it, cultural customs that were often in great conflict from region to region. Within the boundaries of this one nation were divisions as dramatic as you would find crossing border after border in Europe.
In western China, a remote area encompassing more than half of the nation’s territory, in a shifting landscape of deserts, rugged mountains, and grassy valleys, lived some of the many ethnic minorities of China, most notably the Mongols and the Tibetans. In the desert were scattered oasis cities on what was once called the Silk Road, along which Marco Polo traveled in the thirteenth century to find marvels so dazzling, so magnificent, that when he put together a record of his travels Europeans thought it all a creation of his imagination. Over the steppes, nomads roamed about on horseback, or tended sheep, a fiercely independent, rugged people, skilled at hunting and warfare.
In the southwest corner was Tibet itself, with its villages and towers of stone, desolate and hauntingly beautiful structures, built into the sides of cliffs. Tibetans crossed some of the local gorges by rope bridge—nothing more than a single plaited cable of bamboo. (Snapping a wood cylinder around the sagging rope, a Tibetan traveler would slide halfway across the abyss with his or her feet dangling, then shimmy hand over hand up to the other side.) Very few people or sights here would fit the silk-and-pagoda stereotypes that so many Westerners held (and hold). In fact, some inhabitants would have distinctly southern European or Arabic features and wear Middle Eastern garments and jewelry.
Moving west to east, a visitor could follow one of two rivers: the famous Yangtze River of south China, or the Yellow River of the north, both flowing from the highlands of Tibet to the sea. The significance to Chinese civilization of these two rivers rivals that of the Nile to Egypt; the area between them was the heart of China, a region of fertile farmland, fed with silt, webbed together by lakes, rivers, and canals. Millions of Chinese depended on the rivers for their survival, but one of them, the Yellow River, was known as China’s “sorrow” for its unpredictable floods of yellow, muddy water that all too frequently surged beyond the river’s course, swirling through or even drowning entire villages.
Dominating the north-central area of China was the Gobi Desert, and to the northeast Manchuria and the Great Khingan Range. Some of the vast, flat stretches of land were covered with wheat and millet; other areas were overcultivated into desert. In the winter, icy gusts buffeted the plains, and many farmers chose to live in earth-walled villages, or in caves deep within the steep cliffs of mountains.
Not so farther south. Here the air turned humid and balmy, and the fields, flooded with water and webbed by stone pathways, sparkled in the sun like shards of mirror. Spread throughout these fields was the classic beauty of the Chinese countryside: the bamboo and willow groves, the silver lacework of canals between towns. Farmers tended lush mulberry groves used for the cultivation of silkworms, and in the nearby villages teams of women boiled cocoons in vats of water, spinning long, delicate threads to be woven into lustrous fabrics. There were graceful pavilions, monasteries, and curved dragon bridges, teahouses nestled in wooded, mist-shrouded hills, spas built over natural hot springs, with people soaking in the water—all the trappings of a sophisticated society.
Yet over all these diverse regions, each with its own ethnic tradition and history, ruled one all-controlling, coherent authority, maintained by one of the oldest bureaucracies on earth. One significant element of this formal cohesion was language. Out of a welter of dialects in China, only one written language had emerged. About the time that Hannibal crossed the Alps in Europe, the first emperor of China mandated an official script of three thousand characters, and these pictographs (which, unlike the letters of Western alphabets, are not phonetic) became the basis of the modern Chinese vocabulary. This universal set of characters made it possible for an official to travel from one end of China to the other, bearing official documents that could be read by all educated people in each region, even if they spoke different tongues. A centralized state using such a uniform written language could exercise effective control over a diverse population speaking very different dialects, despite the fact that most people seldom traveled far from their home villages and had little personal interaction with the rulers and their officials. Also aiding the institutionalization of the Chinese civil service was a system of imperial examinations exploited by the Qing dynasty in the seventeenth century. As China moved into modern times, this bureaucracy managed to exercise at least some control over three very different populations: the China of the inland, the China of the elite, and the China of the coast.
Inland China in the mid-nineteenth century was filled with dirt-poor families. At that time, most people in China, 80 to 90 percent of them, lived in the countryside as peasants, serving as the nation’s raw muscle. Their costumes rarely varied—in south and central China the men wore baggy cotton trousers, sandals of leather or grass, and broad-brimmed hats to protect their faces from the sun. Their lives followed an endless cycle dictated by the seasons: pushing plows behind water buffalo to break the soil and prepare the seed bed; planting rice seedlings by hand in ankle-deep water, stepping backward as they progressed from row to neat row; scything the rice stalks at harvest, then threshing them over a hard earth floor—in short, lives spent, generation after generation, in nonstop, backbreaking labor.
The work was mind-numbing, but ingenuity was often evident, as when peasant farmers devised a complex system of irrigation to flood or drain the fields. They built special equipment, water wheels and water mills, to harness the forces of nature. In the countryside you might see a peasant pedaling away on a treadmill field pump, as if putting in time on a modern stationary exercise bicycle. Foreigners who visited China in the mid-nineteenth century marveled at the ingenuity of these contraptions, and at the remarkable economies they helped produce.
No group in China worked harder for so little than the peasants. In the typical rural village, people slept on mats on dirt floors, their heads resting on bamboo pillows or wooden stools. They ate a spare but nutritious diet: rice and vegetables, supplemented by fish and fowl, which they cooked over a wok-shaped boiler. An armload of fuel warmed and fed a dozen people. Hardly anything was wasted; even their night soil would later be used to fertilize the fields. In times of famine, people had little more than a bit of rice to sustain them. To survive hard times, some ate tree bark or even clay. Rice was by no means the only crop the peasants grew, but it evolved into China’s main food staple because of its nutritional value and ability to sustain a huge population. Rice could be harvested more frequently than wheat, and its system of cultivation far predated historical Chinese civilization.
Most lived and died without gaining more than a dim comprehension of the world beyond their own village. If a peasant traveled, it was usually only over dirt roads to a nearby market town to purchase or sell goods. Along the way, he might encounter his countrymen bumping along on horseback, by wheelbarrow, or on foot. A common sight during his journey would be the baggage porter accompanying a wealthier traveler or merchant. With bamboo poles balanced over their shoulders, weighed down on both ends with other people’s luggage, these men served the public as beasts of burden. At night, they stayed in hostels that resembled stables in their crudeness, where they washed themselves with filthy communal rags and collapsed into sleep on an earthen floor.
Few peasants would ever see any member of the class who actually ruled their lives, as they often lived thousands of miles away. In mid-nineteenth-century China, the center of power could be found in the capital city of Beijing—the nerve center of the nation, in the far north of the country—where a handful of bureaucrats and their civil servants could alter the destinies of large parts of the population with the stroke of a pen.
Everywhere in the city stood silent monuments to power. Surrounded by acres of marble, darkened by the shadow of three domes, the Temple of Heaven humbled the visitor who came into its presence. But far more intimidating was the Forbidden City, the ancient home to generations of emperors. Constructed in the fifteenth century, this city within a city has earned its place in the pantheon of the world’s great architectural masterpieces. Within the Forbidden City was a Chinese vision of paradise on earth. A breathtaking array of art—dragons of marble, lions of bronze, gilded gargoyles carved into balustrades—guarded a gigantic maze of palaces and pavilions, gardens and halls. A series of arches stretched from the edges of Beijing to this imperial labyrinth, and everything in the Forbidden City complex, right down to the last courtyard, converged upon the imperial throne, reflecting the belief that the entire world radiated out from the royal seat of China and its emperor: the son of heaven, the core of the universe.
North of Beijing was the Great Wall of China, the longest structure on earth. The Great Wall took many generations to build, and its purpose was simple: to protect the Han, who were the dominant ethnic population, from foreign incursion. For more than a thousand miles, it wound a serpentine path from east to west over mountains and the Mongolian plateau, a concrete expression of the Chinese resolve to repel all outsiders. Han rulers—the Ming dynasty—had controlled the empire for three centuries, during which time the wall had successfully kept out the barbarians from the north. But in 1644, nomads from Manchuria—the Manchus—fought their way past the barrier and conquered the Han people.
The new Manchu rulers might have been seen as barbarians by the Han, but they were swift, effective, and savvy conquerors, and they seized Beijing for their own. Moving into the Forbidden City, they established their own ruling line, the Qing dynasty, and declared their own capital in Beijing. They quickly adopted the habits of the previous Chinese ruling class and exploited its infrastructure, its vast system of laws and bureaucrats, though they added their own refinements to the system. To enforce the subjugation of the Han people, they mandated that all Han men wear long, braided queues as a badge of their humiliation (to shave one’s head was considered a sign of treason). Eager to guard their status as a privileged class, they outlawed intermarriage between Han and the Manchu. They also forbade Han migration to Manchuria, for as a minority population they wanted their own region within China to which they could safely retreat in case they were ever ousted from power.
But the most effective weapon in the Manchu arsenal was the imperial examination system, which used civil service tests as a mechanism of social order, forcing all aspiring officials to write essays on ancient Chinese literature and philosophy. Three tiers of examinations—local, provincial, and national—determined entrance into and promotion through the Chinese civil service bureaucracy. These tests created the illusion of meritocracy, of a system in which power and prestige were achieved not through lineage but through individual hard work and the rigors of learning. The examination process itself as well as its subject matter, converging with the Chinese respect for tradition and the Confucian emphasis on education, contributed to the development and maintenance of the culture’s reverence for education.
Children were told that “ministers and generals are not born in office”—they had to earn their way to the top. Like many motivational stories told to children, however, this one was not entirely true. Only certain groups were allowed to take the tests (women were entirely excluded from the process), and elite families had resources to hire the best tutors to prepare their sons for the examinations, giving wealthy test takers an enormous advantage over the sons of the poor. Most Chinese villages had special schools and tutors for the children of prosperous peasants and landlords.
In addition, as designed, defined, and dictated by the Manchus, the examination system had the nefarious result of creating a society in which the Han constantly competed against each other for favor with their rulers. More significantly, the system suppressed rebellion until the nineteenth century. The memorization and mastery of Chinese classics served as a safe outlet for the nation’s most ambitious, talented young men, encouraging them to direct their youthful energies into scholastic competition rather than openly questioning and challenging the system. The imperial exams soon became more potent than any military force, as the people themselves embraced this instrument of their own oppression.
Further, the system bred a sense of entitlement that turned the most talented sons of the Han Chinese, who should have been their leaders, into agents of the oppressor group. The very purpose of Qing hierarchy was to divorce the most talented from the masses from which they came. Passing the first test transformed a young man into a local magistrate, and even at the lowest level of government, he would enjoy the prerogatives of lifetime job security and exemption from torture, as he ascended to a world that severed him from his people. Once an official was in the system, it was impossible to get him out. The system gave him no incentive to serve the commonweal, because most of his tasks could be relegated to clerks who would interface with the suffering masses. The imperial exam system encouraged officials to think of their current position as merely one step on the ladder to the next, and to spend their days dreaming of passing the next exam.
Meanwhile, such men often ruled their districts like totalitarian despots. Virtually no redress could be taken against any official who broke the law, because he was the law. A Chinese magistrate could, with no threat of retaliation, accuse a peasant of banditry, throw him in jail, take his property, and even execute him if he proved a troublesome prisoner. If he lusted after a girl in the village, he could coerce her father to surrender her to him as one of his concubines. So absolute was his power that a Chinese man once told a Western observer, “I would rather be mayor in China than President of the United States.”
Only a small percentage of Chinese officials lived in the capital. Local officials who passed the first test could be found dispersed in villages throughout the empire, and those who passed the second might ascend to a middle, provincial level, such as the mayoralty of a city. The coveted places in Beijing usually went to a select few who passed the third and final test. There, the Qing regime promptly organized them further into nine grades, easily identified by their garments. Each dignitary wore a flowing silk robe embroidered with the insignia of his office and a cap tipped with a button or globular stone, the color of which indicated his title. Commoners immediately recognized these officials not only by their costume, but also by the luxury of their vehicles and the size of their entourage. Considering themselves too lofty to walk, imperial bureaucrats traveled by carriage or sedan chair and felt compelled to descend to earth only when summoned to court in the Forbidden City, where the rarefied atmosphere made it clear that each individual, even a noble, was utterly insignificant and totally dispensable in the presence of the imperial family.
The coastal cities were the only places in China that looked out to the world beyond its borders, across the ocean. Shanghai, Canton, and Hong Kong, as ports, naturally were built not only near the sea but on or near major rivers that started deep within China’s interior. They served as hubs of international trade and commerce, where products from inland China, such as silks, teas, and porcelains, were shipped out internationally. With the constant arrival of overseas vessels and the interaction with foreign merchants and explorers, the port cities of China, as those elsewhere in the world, were more cosmopolitan, more progressive, and less locked in cultural traditions than the rest of the country. While Beijing emphasized respect for status above all, the Chinese along the coasts were usually more concerned with making money.
The influences of overseas merchants, the conduct of business, and the daily contact of their residents with foreign ideas and foreign people made these cities more difficult for the Chinese state to control than the rest of the country. One place in particular was notorious for its independence: Canton, the capital of Guangdong province and one of the oldest port cities in China. As early as the seventh century, merchants from across the globe—Arabic, Persian, Jewish, and Indonesian—had come there to trade. A millennium later, in the seventeenth century, Canton began a powerful legacy of anti-Manchu subversion: descendants of the founding Ming dynasty emperor, working from strongholds in Canton and other cities along the southern coast, waged furious resistance against their new rulers, a campaign that lasted for years before they were overwhelmed, captured, and executed. The local people, however, bitterly resented their new masters and established secret societies with the goal of one day overthrowing the Qing.
Yet they readily accepted another form of inequality. Money was king on the coast, and the rich lived almost like royalty. In the business districts of Shanghai during that era, the merchants in their prosperous shops with red signs engraved with gold calligraphy operated abacuses as fast as people today handle calculators. The wealthiest owned mansions with inner courtyards and manicured gardens. Stepping inside one of these upper-class homes was like entering a museum: a world of carved mahogany furniture and stained-glass lanterns, of private libraries and art collections, filled with lacquer, gold, and jade. The families of these merchants dined on porcelain dinnerware, with ivory and silver chopsticks. The women, too, served to dazzle—their bodies gleaming in brocade chipao gowns, their hair elaborately coiffed, their crippled feet (bound since childhood to fulfill the demands of fashion) snug in tiny, satin-embroidered shoes—as if to personify their roles as precious objects of art in their homes.
Just outside these mansions lay terrible poverty. Indeed, the social distance between merchant and coolie, or unskilled laborer, in these coastal cities was almost as great as that between official and peasant in inland China. During a famine in Shanghai in the late 1840s, the poor literally died in the streets at the doorsteps of the rich. Many begged piteously for soup-kitchen tickets that entitled them to the ladlefuls of rice gruel that were dispensed as acts of charity by wealthy merchants.
Nonetheless, the areas closer to the sea also supported a working class of small entrepreneurs. In the province of Guangdong, boatmen, peasants, and small merchants mixed in a way that rarely happened inland, sparking an important part of the economy. Along Guangdong’s Pearl River drifted floating villages of junks, whose occupants handled cargo, or fished for a living, and these water-borne communities amassed the experience that comes with constant travel. Some natives of Guangdong worked the land, which was so poor that it bred a certain resourcefulness. Since the province was hilly and cursed with sandy soil, many rural families sought other ways to survive, such as producing handicrafts or working as middlemen merchants. And because Guangdong derived a certain energy from its port cities, such as Canton, many villages supported a thriving professional class, complete with doctors, artisans, real estate speculators, and teachers. It was this class of entrepreneurs who were the most eager to travel abroad.
The Chinese had once been adventurous and robust world travelers, and, at the peak of the Ming dynasty, long before the Manchu invasion, had launched from the coast several voyages of world exploration. Unfortunately, in the mid-fifteenth century, an emperor suspicious of the pressures for change introduced by these returning travelers abruptly shut down the naval expeditions, believing the Chinese people would do better to curb their wanderlust and tend to the graves of their ancestors. This marked the beginning of a long period of self-imposed isolation. During the early years of the Qing dynasty, the Manchu conquerors, fearing that Chinese overseas would ally themselves with rebel forces in the tropical Chinese island of Taiwan to plot the overthrow of the government, kept this anti-emigration policy in place. The penalty was death by beheading. Of course, once they had left the country, émigrés who flouted the law were obviously out of the reach of the government, so the law provided that any magistrates who assisted them were to be executed. Bureaucrats who captured people attempting to leave the country were rewarded with merit points that could lead to promotions.
But the law proved difficult to enforce. Despite the threat of execution, millions of Chinese, mostly from the coastal areas, left the country during the Qing dynasty to seek better lives elsewhere. In fact, the nineteenth century saw perhaps the greatest single exodus from China that the country had ever experienced in its history.
The nineteenth century also saw China’s decline as a world power. Centuries earlier, the Chinese had earned international admiration and respect as the most powerful civilization in the world, wealthier than all other countries, vastly more sophisticated than the societies of medieval Europe. China not only surpassed in area the greatest expanse of the Roman Empire, but lasted longer as well. But by the 1800s the nation had finally fallen prey to its own isolation. The Industrial Revolution vaulted many European countries far ahead of China in technological development. This almost fatal failure to keep pace would soon result in China’s humiliation by Western powers.
The West had received a bewildering array of contradictory reports of the decline. Some nineteenth-century travel writers from Europe or the United States saw the problems but preferred to dwell on the glories of the Chinese past, still extolling China as a land of imperial splendor, steeped in Confucian wisdom, a near-utopian society in which millions of people lived and worked together in peace and harmony. Yet other Western visitors in China began to reach very different conclusions, waking up at last to the filth, violence, and poverty in which so many lived. The truth, of course, reflected aspects of both versions, but the important new element was that the Qing dynasty was about to collapse under the weight of its own corruption. The government was bloated, increasingly inefficient and ineffective at controlling a growing and restless population.
Part of the problem lay with the personal extravagance of the Manchu ruling class. The Qing created an elite welfare state for their own people, for instance granting military stipends to each Manchu boy at birth. The original intent of the policy was to bind these boys to future service as soldiers, but later this stipend grew into an entitlement for all Manchu men, whether they served as soldiers or not. Corrupt rule allowed the Manchus to indulge in dissolute lives that contributed little to the public good, yet were impervious to challenge. In this setting, it was easy for the ruling class to accustom themselves to living beyond their means. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gross mismanagement of state funds almost emptied the coffers of the Qing treasury. In 1735, when Qian Long became emperor of the Qing dynasty, the imperial government owned some 60 million liang of silver; subsequent excessive spending sent China on such a downward spiral that by 1850, 115 years later, the reserves had dropped to only nine million liang.
Meanwhile, the Chinese population had more than doubled. In 1762, only about 200 million people lived in China, but a long period of internal peace caused the number to soar to 421 million by 1846. Inevitably, overcrowding caused shortages of arable land, which led to higher rents for tenant farmers, and greater concentrations of wealth among landowners. And what grew on the land wasn’t enough to feed everyone. Even during the best harvests, China had to import extra rice from abroad. In the province of Guangdong, the soil could yield only enough food to feed one-third of its people. Soon, people across China took matters into their own hands. Farmers chopped down entire forests on mountains near major rivers, denuding the land in hopes of growing more crops. The result was soil erosion, causing serious floods, which in turn brought famine and epidemics, killing tens of millions of people.
European imperialist appetite worsened the misery. For years, the West had tried unsuccessfully to break into the enormous Chinese market. Merchants scoured the world for goods such as fur pelts to sell to China, but the Qing scorned most of their products, and treated the foreign merchants with contempt, dictating where they could live and do business. By the early nineteenth century, however, British smugglers had opened the market wide, though not with legitimate trade goods like food or cloth, but by introducing a dangerous and highly addictive drug. Opium, harvested from the British colony of India, cut a wide swath through every class: from socialites seeking release from boredom to coolies who wished to ease the pain of heavy loads. Whether they smoked opium through a pipe or sucked it in tablet form, heavy addicts fell into a near-comatose stupor, gradually decaying into living skeletons. Demand spiraled, and imports of the drug soared from 33,000 chests in 1842 to 46,000 chests in 1848 to 52,929 in 1850, draining the Qing dynasty of its silver. (A chest contained 130 to 160 pounds of opium.) Millions of Chinese were wasting away, slowly dying from the poison.
The Chinese government tried desperately but unsuccessfully to stop the trade. In 1839, the Qing emperor appointed a special commissioner, an official named Lin Zexu, to end the drug traffic. In Canton, Lin confiscated 20,000 chests of opium—a British stockpile weighing more than three million pounds—and ordered the narcotic to be dissolved in fresh lime and water and flushed out to sea. In response, the British government launched a series of attacks against China to exert what they believed to be their right to foist a dangerous drug onto another country. Using this as a long-awaited excuse to break through China’s closed barriers, British forces invaded one port city after another—Canton, Amoy, Ningpo, Shanghai, Nanjing (Nanking)—until the Chinese finally capitulated. In 1842, the Qing government signed the Treaty of Nanking, which forced the country to open its ports to international trade, pay massive indemnities, and continue to allow the open importation of opium. The British established concessions at Amoy and Shanghai, and turned a rocky island into the colony of Hong Kong. They also joined France and other European nations in creating a system of extraterritorial privilege, whereby certain European powers were given their own jurisdictions within the port cities. Within these “concession” areas, Europeans were above Chinese law, and native Chinese were relegated to second-class citizenship in their own country.
Reports later emerged of white foreigners swaggering through Chinese port cities like petty dictators. A young American bank teller boasted that if a Chinese man failed to make room for him on the street, he would strike him down with his cane: “Should I break his nose or kill him, the worst that can happen would be that he or his people would make complaint to the Consul, who might impose the fine of a dollar for the misdemeanor, but I could always prove that I had just cause to beat him.”
Unfair treaties with the West also wreaked havoc in the countryside, when the Qing government shifted the burden of indemnities to the peasants, forcing them to pay increased taxes. The peasants were already slaves to the land, living a hand-to-mouth existence, owing heavy rents and the cost of supplies to their landlords. They already suffered horrid consequences for every disaster beyond their control (if they endured crop failure from unexpected weather or floods, they were always held personally accountable, while relief money sent by the central government lined the pockets of the local elite). Now, with the burdens of these new treaties put on the already sagging shoulders of the poor, large numbers of peasants found themselves thrown even deeper in debt. Many had no choice but to sell all their possessions—their plows, their oxen, even their own children—to pay down the debt. If they could not pay, rent collectors and local officials had the power to arrest them, beat them, or throw them into jail.
A Chinese prison was the last place anyone wanted to go. Conditions for the incarcerated in China exposed the depths of cruelty of the Qing dynasty. People were caged like animals, left in filth, dying from disease. Men were often left chained to decaying corpses, forgotten by the wardens. A mobile version of jail was the cangue, a cage in which the victim would be paraded before jeering crowds in the streets. A small opening cut into the bars at the top permitted the prisoner’s head to be drawn up for display to the crowds; each rough jostle would throw his neck against the jagged edges.
A desperate citizenry finally turned to violence. Nineteenth-century China roiled with rebellions, unprecedented in scale, and tens of millions of people died in the upheavals. The most serious one, known as the Taiping Rebellion, erupted in 1850 under the leadership of Hong Xiuquan, an ambitious young man from Guangdong province. A rural schoolteacher, Hong had tried repeatedly to pass the district-level imperial examination as his route to gentility. After failing the test several times, he suffered a mental breakdown and came to believe he was the son of God and the younger brother of Jesus Christ. An impassioned speaker, he started proselytizing, recruiting tens of thousands of followers, most from the bottom tier of Chinese society: homeless peasants, unemployed fishermen, charcoal burners off the streets. Some, however, were people with formidable military or technical skills, such as bandits, pirates, and former soldiers, as well as miners who knew how to handle explosives. Drifting north from Guangdong, the group moved from one city to another, seizing weapons and recruiting more people for their army.
Sadly, the biggest losers of this rebellion were the peasants. Marauding Taiping troops swept through the countryside, stripping fields of all food. And when the Manchu government eventually crushed the movement, they took vengeance on millions of innocent country people, many whom had had nothing more to do with the rebellion than the fact that they had watched it happen.
This and several subsequent rebellions over the next decade left the population devastated and the land ravaged. People who had farmed in one place for decades, or even centuries, found they could no longer support their families. They roamed the country in search of farmland and better jobs, to escape civil warfare and the tax collector. With starvation or soldiers at their heels, many Chinese were willing to defy authority, because they risked death even if they stayed put and did nothing. Some chose to leave the country entirely. During the nineteenth century, millions of Chinese moved abroad to southeast Asia, the West Indies, the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, Africa, and the Americas. Even the Qing ban on migration to Manchuria could not prevent northern Chinese peasants, attracted by the region’s sparse population and open spaces, from slipping in illegally.
Nowhere was the urgency to leave greater than in the province of Guangdong. In 1847, the region experienced a credit crisis when British banks cut off funding to warehouses along the Pearl River. For more than a year, trade within the province halted almost completely, and a hundred thousand laborers found themselves unemployed. It was just about this time that some began to hear stories of the incredible wealth of a land across the sea—a land called Gum Shan, or “Gold Mountain.”
“Gold Mountain” was California. When gold was discovered there in 1848, a Chinese resident in California wrote a letter to share the news with one of his friends in the Canton region. Soon the region was buzzing with excitement, and people could talk of nothing else. If only they could get to Gold Mountain, perhaps all their problems would be solved.
Most people in Guangdong had only a dim concept of American life; almost no one had actually met anyone from America, or any Westerner. They heard rumors that white missionaries kidnapped and ate Chinese children, and reports of strange-looking foreigners, blue-eyed barbarians with red hair. There were hazards abroad—but stronger than the fear of the unknown was the opportunity to make money and salvage a living. Along with tales of barbarous deeds, the Chinese heard stories of a land glittering with wealth—all you had to do was walk around and pick the nuggets of gold up from the ground. Of course, these stories were no different from those that had enticed other adventure seekers to the mines in California, and later to Alaska, from all over the world. Greed is a powerful antidote to fear and an ancient inducement to adventure. Christopher Columbus, after all, found America while looking for El Dorado—a paradise of gold—in the Indies.
The promise of gold electrified the imaginations of the impoverished Chinese. It ignited hopes among poor people that they could go away for a brief period of time, then return wealthy enough to enjoy a new status among fellow townsmen. Perhaps a handful of gold was all they would need to break from the grind of daily life: to establish a small business, to purchase the land that would free them from the tyranny of rents, to build a house that would engender respect, to hire tutors for their children so they could pass the tests and become mandarins—in short, to achieve the wealth, power, and status that had been denied them solely by dint of their low birth.
Frenetically, men in the Canton region prepared to leave. They borrowed money from friends and relatives, sold off their water buffalo or jewelry, or signed up with a labor agency that would front them the money for passage in exchange for a share of their future earnings in America. All of this, of course, was illegal, but officials could easily be bribed to look the other way.
While the community willingly accepted the idea that the young men who left for Gold Mountain might be gone for many months, if not years, perhaps they knew it was important to cement each man’s ties to his home village. To remind him that the purpose of his trip was to earn money to bring back home, they usually married him off to a local woman and even encouraged him to father a child in the months or even weeks before he left. This step—the creation of a new family—carried a dual purpose: it would obligate him to send back remittances, and would also ensure the preservation of the ancestral bloodline.
A Cantonese nursery rhyme of the era, a simple ditty, expressed the collective longings of entire families:
Swallows and magpies, flying in glee:
Greetings for New Year.
Daddy has gone to Gold Mountain
To earn money.
He will earn gold and silver,
Ten thousand taels.
When he returns,
We will build a house and buy farmland.
That, at least, was the plan.