The construction of the Transcontinental Railway
2014 Use of this website constitutes acceptance of the User agreement that allows a personal web use visualization; no copy; arbitration; No guarantees.
Copyright 1979 by Stan Steiner All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations in articles and critical reviews.
Views on the line Pacific Rail Road No. 7148 John Chinaman on the Union Pacific Rail Road Railroad Posted by T H E Anthony Co.
Stan Steiner is a national treasure, it is one of our most eloquent defenders of the faith, faith in the humanity of all men and women everywhere, especially those who helped build the in America Fusang he does it again for the wonderful people, the Chinese it is, perhaps, his most moving book Montagu.
Fusang is a book of wonders that we Chinese Americans performed as we built this country in America, our country throughout We are part, heroic in its history, and Stan Steiner gives the facts, history, research to confirm what we should not have forgotten for the exclusion finally a book that recognizes and celebrates our discovery and building of America We will adopt this book as part of our arsenal of citizenship documents MAXINE HONG KINGSTON.
I'm sorry to tell you that I think you make a mistake in the list anything on your site by Stan Steiner's work is so ridiculous as to any knowledgeable historian shaking his head in disbelief Especially it said the Chinese were living in tents in winter while working in the Sierra there is not any evidence that I found in my very extensive building the first railroad through the Sierra studies to support what whether even close to what Steiner wrote historian is the worst it has been my misfortune to read that I regret most sincerely that you use the trash Steiner he takes the wonderful work you have done.
LYNN FARRAR, USE RETIRED ENGINEER, SOUTH PACIFIC RAILWAY.
RAIL CHINA MEN Chinese Men Chinese railroad foreman was qualified to work as the great work that their ancestors had built fortresses in the gorges of the Yangtze, carved and laid the stones of the Great Wall of China the Big Iron Route.
There was no train to Jerusalem, and the Lord of Life is mounted in the city under the humble form, on a donkey in the world on wheels, Chicago, 1874.
And then the day came when the final peak, the Golden Spike, had to be hammered down fat last runway length iron rails had spanned a continent to celebrate the occasion, the dignitaries came bankers and railroad tycoons, politicians and railway men to be photographed at the union of the nation hundreds of people in this memorable photograph taken at Promontory Point Utah, May 10, 1869, there was a large group that were totally invisible.
Nowhere to be seen were the thirteen miles of China railway men who had dug tunnels, built the PLATFORMS, and laid the track for half the transcontinental line of the central railway Pacific through the steepest mountains and deserts tortuous western Chinese laborers had become faceless They were gone.
An oil painting of the event later symbolically represented three men crouched beside railway tracks as they drove in the Golden Spike Two of the three were Chinese.
This famous painting was reprinted in hundreds of thousands of copies; proudly hung in saloons and brothels throughout the West for years and yet, in the reproduction of painting a curious thing happened Under the paint there was a drawing in which people who had gathered to junction tracks have been described, each numbered face, so that viewers could identify who was who, but there was no drawing of the three railway men.
Again, the Chinese railway men were rendered faceless They disappeared from history.
China's men not only built the western half of the first transcontinental railway, they built all or part of almost all railway lines in Western Despite this, or perhaps because of it, their work was belittled and denigrated for their heroism century; white workers on the Western Railway were irritated skill and strength of the little yellow men who they contemptuously compared with dwarves and monkeys.
From the beginning, the white railway workers had ridiculed China's young men as too effeminate for a real working man, like laying iron rails They were too delicate They had too little hands they were too small Historian railway reflects the popular prejudices of the time described arc Chinese marched in white camps as a bizarre procession of dwarves.
So convinced were the white railway men that these celestial monkeys could not do the work of white men when James Strobridge Irish boss working hard to mind the central Pacific, was ordered to hire Chinese he exploded in anger I will not the Chinese boss I will not be responsible for work on the road by the Chinese work from what I saw of them, they do not fit anyway workers I do not think they can build a railway.
His contempt was commonplace when Leland Stanford, one of the owners of the Central Pacific, was elected governor of California, he condemned the Chinese emigrants as degraded people who were the slums of Asia they were unfit to honest work.
The lack of male virility Kwangtung was evident not only in their small size, but the way they dressed and bathed in the rugged border camps, after work, they religiously washed in a hot bath made from empty whiskey barrels Every man soaped and rinsed himself as a woman in the flower water, and emerged the smell of perfume is surely the Puritan Yankees who were rough in the desert, and farmers in Europe to which the bath was an aristocratic vice, these habits were suspicious female.
Even stranger, and more suspect, were the strange ways they ate was said that the Celestial devoured mice and rats in their labor camps was their kitchen even more exotic They refused to eat the male diet of beans and beef white men consumed Instead, they imported their food from China dried oysters, dried fish, dried abalone, dried fruit, dried mushrooms, dried seaweed, crackers and sweets, and an endless variety of meats roasted, sweet and sour and dry, poultry and pork, rice and teas each group of twelve to twenty Chinese workers had their own cook, who prepared dishes to suit the local palate and every cook has a duty not only of the preparation of these festivals of non-Christian food, but brewing the tea barrels that were to be served all day in tiny cups like ladies fit to the use.
In these customs of Chinese Yankees imagined dark rituals, mysterious These men from China were not only pagans, they turned ordinary things in pagan practices and some women so that was deeply disturbing to the men of the border.
Yet the dreams of conquering the railroad owners were more powerful than the prejudices of their workers Although the central Pacific was founded in 1861 to build the western part of the dream of the transcontinental railroad in 1865, he managed to establish that thirty one miles of track Not only were the owners humiliated by the lack of progress, but the work was frustrated by the lack of workers responsible Strobridge needs five thousand men to be said, but his teams work rarely counted eight hundred Even these were unreliable and the Sacramento Union sarcastically referred to these white workers as enterprising cutthroats who either ran to the gold camps preferred to work Sacramentans to fly in the alley corners those who remain at work were worse than those who did not, because they tended to be drunk and capricious .
Chinese rental was the order of the general superintendent Charles Crocker railway.
Strobridge, a stubborn man Vermont, committed reluctantly fifty Chinese workers; it affected them in odd jobs like filling dump trucks, they were too weak to swing a jackhammer, he insisted.
The day these men were finally allowed to work in the ranking of the platform to the tracks, it was reported that the law coolies passage was longer and was smoother than all white crew s It was embarrassing, because the Chinese were so inexperienced that many had never been on a train or even seen one.
Furious, the white crews have vowed to avenge their shame in the days that followed, they have not only worked at full speed, but voluntarily halved their lunch break even at the end of a week, the Chinese workers PLATFORMS were the longest of any band on the white line railway that wouldn t work a hundred rods of them threatened to hit or leave, and many did.
One observer wrote that this was probably the cruelest blow of all the ego white.
China's young muscular men received the jobs that whites had abandoned wherever we put them, we found them good, said the happy Crocker and they worked in our favor to the point, we found if we were in a hurry for work of work, it was better to put Chinese soon even the stubborn Strobridge barked, Email highest coolies.
And they came as gold miners came before them, the same regions of the Kwangtung province in the canton of the delta, most marine sea districts swept Sunwui Toishan and, in the area known as the Sze Yup they came by the thousands and tens of thousands so many young people wanted to come that ships Pacific Mail Line, which most of them were often overburdened by their captains with a third too passenger's investigation inevitable Congress this lawlessness, the captains were redundant accused of greed, although no one asks young people Kwangtung to testify as to why they were so eager to come to America they pressed on obviously overloaded vessels.
Among these men, it is said that most were farmers son, but in the land of their fathers, near the coast, traditions seas were as alive as the winds of the sea s These are the countries where sailors and Chinese adventurers had come for centuries, and these young men were aggressive and pugnacious even more than the gold miners, they seemed to enjoy, relish, to seek the challenge of the unknown and exotic foreign lands and adventures and they offered to work on the railroad they found them.
On the rolling hills of the rocky ridges that form the spine of the Sierra Nevada, the coil iron rails climbed the winding arcs The ravines and valleys between were to be filled with untold tons of earth and be filled by large easels Some of these easels, like Deep Gulch, rose a hundred feet high and were five hundred feet long They were built of logs, felled and bound by hand, because there was no steam tools or electricity; even the tons of earth had to be moved entirely by band in awe of the strength and skill of Chinese men who have done this work, Albert Richardson of the New York Tribune, which was matching the most distinguished Horace Greeley during the civil war, tried to describe the epic scene.
They were a great Chinese army besieging nature in its strongest citadel The steep mountains resemble anthills prodigious They swarmed with Celestial, shoveling, wheeling, spoofing, drilling and blasting of rock and earth.
Soon the great army to cope with ever more mountains on a high cliff overlooking the gorge of the American River, the platform of the railway was to climb fourteen hundred feet on the sides of steep rock There had no ledges There was not even a goat track blasting crews trimmed to incline seventy-five degrees to the days inch by inch, they advanced to within one foot on some days.
The story is told how one day a foreman of Chinese labor came to Strobridge He politely waited, hat in hand, until either could speak Maybe we can be of assistance, be said so-called my people, you know, built the Great Wall of China stones.
Sculpture roads that clung to cliffsides as bird nests on inaccessible ledges, was a very ancient art of Chinese engineers has been portrayed a dramatic reminder of their expertise in the famous Emperor retirement paint Hsuan tsung of the capital of the Tang dynasty in 775 AD on a mountain in the painting there is a winding road that is supported by ball and dug into the side of a rock face; It is perched on the mountain as if suspended in the air.
road construction feats, as was common in China for thousands of years if the ability of men Kwangtung for hanging cliffs to dizzying heights and to blast a road sky seemed incredible to their bosses Yankee, who chuckled in disbelief at the thought, it was not new to the Chinese technology.
Skeptical than ever Strobridge gave approval reluctantly, he has nothing to lose.
The men wove large baskets, large enough to hold several workers, reeds and vines on the tall baskets, knotted four eyelets in the directions of the four winds, and registered with the appropriate prayers strings were attached to the eyelets and baskets, each holding two or three men were slow off the edge of the cliff down to the site hundreds of roadbed marked feet below the swaying wind, Chinese workers put dynamite explosions in rock and rotated for their lives with all their strength Many fell below Many died but in a few weeks had been blasted platform of rock They were more and more experts in drilling, blasting and other rock work, said the engineer of the railway, Sam Montague.
In the icy winds that whistled through the infamous Donner Pass, which rose to 7,042 feet in the Sierra Nevada, crews were overwhelmed during the winter of 1865, the engineers had expected a tunnel that was to be dug under the top, exactly 1,659 feet long and wide enough for two tracks, but the rock was so hard the ball gunpowder simply back over the holes and Chinese TBMs were forced to camp in thin canvas tents under ten piles snow twenty feet for month after month, they lived like seals huddled together in cotton padded clothes Many of their camps were swept away by avalanches in the Arctic oblivion of these mountains, and the dead were recovered up that the snow thawed.
Spring brought a renewal of the work on the tunnels There was not one but fifteen tunnel digging and hundreds of gullies to cross before the train could pass through And winter 1866 runways n has still not reached the top I do not want to wait for another spring, railroad owners ordered three locomotives being pulled over the mountains by the group It seemed an impossible task.
In the snow that was more than a man, hundreds of young people Kwangtung was bitched with mule teams were attempting this feat The men cleared a path two hundred feet wide through the forests on the mountains No trees Yankee is how an official described the giant trees and yet small timber merchants cut a road in the snow that was miles long on carts newspapers they greased with pork lard, they fired locomotives and whole wagon train of volatile nitroglycerine and provides the mountain.
Says a historian of the railway The yellow man had proved its superiority through hard work.
In their desperation to cover the mountains before their rivals railway builders did, Central Pacific owners forced the Chinese crew to work from morning to night, seven days a week, Irish crews of the Union Pacific had the advantage of easier terrain and richest owners meant better wages and entertainment.
On dry flats of the Utah desert, the Chinese crew of the central Pacific from the west, and the Irish crew of Pacific Union from the East, met head They literally blew themselves up each other in the race railways laid as follow the government subsidized every mile at 16 000 to 42 000, as well as hundreds of millions of acres of right of way, rival ordered their crews ask PLATFORMS parallel for hundreds of miles in the ranking of their platform, the Irishmen were accustomed to take their shots without giving a warning to China, reported an expert for the Union Pacific, Grenville Dodge, and the Chinese because several were injured severely Chinese crews assess the situation, responded in kind one day they set off dynamite charges just above the Irish crews, and several were enter Irishmen living Rees.
From that time, Irish workers have shown more respect for the Chinese, and there was no other penalty, said Dodge.
In the race railways to outdo each other, those Chinese crews had to distinguish more productively Crocker, bravado and some say on a bet, announced the same day, April 28, Chinese crews throw ten miles of track; Ten Mile day, he named eight Irish railway managers, they have done just that, laying new railways ten miles and fifty six feet Smasher 3520 rail lengths 25,800 wooden ties.
The feat was a final assembly at the completion of the great transcontinental route less than two weeks later Promontory Point, where the nation was reunited with nerves of iron iron rails and rhetoricians proclaimed that way in India the historic event that created a truly United States was symbolized a contemporary writer with the image of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic met as a friendly greeting with Asia Tawny a fantasy that was more real the fact.
Years later, in his testimony before the Special Joint Subcommittee of Congress in 1876-1877, which was to decide whether the Chinese had the right to remain in the West, they had invented and built, one of railway builders, West Evans said bluntly I do not see how we could do the work we have done here without them; at least I did the work on the railways which would not have been done if it was not for the work I do Chinese could have done without them.
In the Prairies and in the western mountains, there were few railroads that these young people did not build Kwangtung, in whole or in part, they helped build the South Pacific in the southwestern deserts and the North Pacific in forests they worked northwest by the thousands and the Canadian Pacific and they built the pLATFORMS and put the track almost every Texas railroads in Alaska and the Atlantic Pacific; Central California and Southern California; Nevada and Virginie Truckee; Eureka Palisades; Carson and Colorado; and Nevada; California and Oregon; Central Oregon; Seattle and Walla Walla; Texas Pacific, and the Houston and Central Texas; Alabama and Chattanooga; and many small lines.
And thousands of these young men gave their lives in the construction of railways The dead were never counted, nor have they been immortalized twenty thousand pounds of bones were collected from shallow graves along PLATFORMS and rights of way, according to a 1870 newspaper cited in the history of Chinese in America by Philip Choy H and Mark Lai These bones about twelve hundred Chinese who died in the construction of the transcontinental railroad finally comes home but many others are so far in unmarked graves in every Western state.
The ghosts of the Chinese railway men hovered over the mountains and lingered beside PLATFORMS and haunted the whistle stop deposits long after they were gone in the Prairies, where there was not a tree, no living thing in sight, an early transcontinental train travelers remembered coming on a bowl decorated with some original pattern for Chinese goods, like a specter of the past; and Omaha, one day he was surprised by the sight of a steam caravan arrived of what was forty years in the wilderness, directly from the golden door which, he said, was a tea train the Heavenly Kingdom Surely the Iron Horse was the Angel of abundance and the arms of Christianity, for his declamation mountain eagle would carry civilization into the wilderness and barbarism whistle of the East wind to 1874, the year it was written, travelers on the transcontinental railroads had already forgotten that these Chinese men who were buried alongside PLATFORMS had asked several of the tracks they were traveling on.
And he remained a stranger to Europe to perceive the blindness of those white men who could not see the Chinese as humans during his tour of America in 1879, the Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson traveled to California in a car third-class immigrants on the Union Pacific railroad He was troubled by the segregation of Chinese railway men in a separate car; but it even more disturbing is the attitude of the white passengers to those who had helped build the railroad, they moved into the ill feeling stupid, he called it.
These white Americans designs of Chinese railway men, Stevenson wrote, they never seemed to have watched them, listened to them, or thought, but hated a priori they do not see them at all.
Yet there were quiet nights along the rails when the ghosts appeared on those nights in the dark, the history of China's railway men reappeared like an apparition, a story, a fantastic legend .
One of these folk tales was reported in the daily New Mexican in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the twenty-seventh March in the year 1880.
A Galisteo Junction, the terminus of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, south of the territorial capital of New Mexico, the specter appeared shortly after the arrival of the train from Santa Fe evening, the operator the station and some friends took a stroll along the tracks from above in the sky, they beard strong voice and looked up, they were surprised to see a great ball from Western Whoever was in balloon basket was spoken in a strange Ianguage, quite incomprehensible to the people on earth.
The ball was wonderful monsterous size, the more wonderful newspaper that his gigantism, however, was its design, as it was in the form of a fish painted on its sides were very elegant and fanciful characters of an unknown language, but all Asian obviously adds to its mystery.
As the fish ball sailed head, its mysterious occupants dropped two objects on the desert below was a beautiful flower made of fine paper, silky, and the other was a land cut, perhaps a glass of water, with a blue design.
Sounds of music and laughter drifted down the fishballoon In the cool evening air, he floated there, like a cloud for a moment and then, as silently as he had appeared on the mountains of the Sierra Colorado he disappeared he just sailed away on the evening of the day after a horse collector of curiosities happened to ride by filing isolated in the desert, he bought the silklike flower and cut for a large sum of money Being a curio connoisseur, asked where in his learned opinion, think fish ball could come, and he immediately replied, without hesitation, the ball should come from Asia.
Pp 244-248 REFERENCES Chinese who built America.
Not to my knowledge has written everything that comes in a shade to depict the epic feat of the Chinese in the West building maybe it is too soon after the event to expect anything other than superficial journalism and narrow erudition After all, so often the greatest literature of an era that is not written for years, decades and sometimes centuries later.
In any case, some of the books I recommend here justice to the nobility of their theme they are all just beginning.
The sweeping drama of China's efforts in America has been most enthusiastically and heroically portrayed in two books that are not really books at all is a written outline tersely and in fact, the history of Chinese in America HM Lai and PP Choy American Chinese studies planning Group, San Francisco, 1973, and the second is a history of the Chinese in California a syllabus edited by Thomas Chinn HM Lai and PP Choy Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969 Although the first covers a larger period of history, the second is written in more detail.
Some of the stories hinted by these contours are drawn in -Influence life and the role of the Chinese in the United States, 1776-1960 Chinese Historical Society of America, 1976 These tests are taken from the proceedings of the national conference of the Company held as part of the bicentennial celebration of the University of San Francisco.
The modern history of China in America begins with the Spanish conquest of merchants and Chinese traders began arriving in the Americas in great numbers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of Spanish ships that crossed the Pacific, These Chinese ships built the trips are described in Manila galleons by WL Schurz Dutton, 1939 and other documents is in Chinese in Mexico in 1635 by H Dubs and RS Smith Far Eastern Quarterly, Vol 1, 1941 and in notes on overseas Chinese in the late Ming and early periods Manchu CR Boxer Tien Hsia monthly, vol 9 August 1939-December Europe and China was mentioned by GF Hudson also addresses those first trips tradespeople.
Once crossed oceans became common, explorations in both directions have become common also These are noted in the history of California by HH Bancroft, Vol VII San Francisco, 1890 The opening of the North Pacific West by Chinese frontiersmen and settlers described in the trips made in the years 1788 and 1789, China in the north.
West coast of America by Captain John Meares London, 1790 The history of trade routes expanded in the old China trade by Foster Rhea Dulles New York, 1931, the Americans adventures China in the South Seas by James Kirker Oxford, 1970 the Rise of American civilization by Charles A Beard and Mary R Beard Macmillan, 1927 and Culture Contact US and China from 1784 to 1844 by George Danton Columbia University, 1931.
The spirit of the people who came later, China Calif described aptly by Mary Roberts Coolidge in Holt Chinese immigration, 1909; Arno 1969 After all these years, it's still me preeminent book on this subject, because it represents the Chinese as an integral part of American history.
Fittingly, the history of Chinese in America is to be found mostly not in books on the Chinese as a minority, but in books on vast western stories in American history HH Bancroft are good place to start looking, or we can start with the chapter on Asia and Africa to America in the great historian of retrospection Bancroft 1913 from here one can go to a study in mining camps frontier Government of America C Shinn Scribners, 1884; Harper Row, 1965 The Frontier Mining edited by Lewis M University of Oklahoma, 1967 Songs of the gold rush led by R Dwyer and Richard E Lingenfelter University of California, 1965 Quilts and Gold Dust by A McLeod Caxton, 1948 Three years in California by JD Borthwick Oakland, 1948 border mines Wild West by RW Rodman New York 1963 Hard rock miners by RE Lingenfelter University of California, 1974 and many others.
And then there are the travel stories and personal accounts trips to the West, which often contain overviews of Chinese pioneers A Tramp California by TS Kenderdine Globe Printing House, Philadelphia, no date, across the continent S Bowles Hurd and Houghton, 1866 through the Rocky mountains by Boyer-Wells Sackett, 1878 beyond the Mississippi AD Richardson Bliss, 1867, the California and west by LV Briggs Wright and Potter, no date, California by the MP Wilder Wright and Potter, 1871 list is long and this was my chance to discover many of these books, and many others, in the literature of Charles Dobie San Francisco Chinatown Appleton, 1936.
And books on Chinese railroadmen ago the great railway iron RW Howard Putnam, 1962 a work of giants of the building of the first transcontinental railroad by WG Griswold McGraw-Hill, 1962 The Chinese role in building Pacific South Pacific Central, 1966 The Big Four by Oscar Lewis New York, 1938 A World on Wheels BH Taylor SC Griggs, 1874.
And for the agricultural effort of the Chinese in California there is a book for travelers and Settlers C Nordhoff New York, 187 and 3 factories in the area of Carey McWilliams Boston, 1959.
Although it deals only with California, by far the widest range book about these western pioneers is Chinese labor in California by Chin Ping University of Wisconsin, 1967 There is no singular book, is equal except perhaps the historical collection reprints and comments in this thin Bulletin of the Chinese historical Society of America, under the direction of Thomas and editor Chinn, the dean of all Chinese American historians.
A valuable and interesting addition to the sparse literature is the quarterly California Historical Society in the spring of 1978, they have compiled a special edition of the Chinese in California, with a preview of Thomas Chinn and some interesting items, including Chinese seafarers Robert Schwendinger and diplomacy of discrimination by David Anderson.
But for most, as I said, the history of Chinese and Western pioneers builders is still bidden in a casual phrase and obscure paragraph in dusty books and old forgotten the last century These bits of the past can be found by an endless search through the books lost After searching through hundreds or thousands, I know.
Sometimes I dream that the whole story is told in the books hidden in an archive in China, there is a comforting and recurring dream.
More recently, there has been a renewed flow, small but regular books on the problems the Chinese pioneers in the West faces once they arrived and the attempt to eliminate American history, for reasons that would make an interesting book itself many of these books not depict the realization of the Chinese, but the persecution they suffered, and many of them are not written from the perspective of the Chinese, but that their persecutors.
Among these books, within the limits of their approach, I was deeply impressed by the work and the enemy Essential Anti-Chinese Movement in California by Alexander Saxton University of California, 1971 a sympathetic study of human ironies involved in a fight if The inhuman.
The American immigrants unwelcome image of China, 1785-1882 by Stuart Creighton Miller University of California, 1969 was an excellent study, not Chinese pioneers, but their opponents less satisfying, for me, was the anti-Chinese movement in California Elmer C. Sandmeyer University of Illinois, 1973, its most striking feature is a magnificent bibliography the Chinese Americans Stanford Lyman M Random House, 1974 seems to be written by hand, a social science shortcut for most troubling I was fighting Bitter Gunther Barth Harvard University, 1964, a work which I find wanting in the two attitudes of the author and research, with a too easy acceptance historical stereotypes.
And speaking of stereotypes, it is a wonderful conglomeration of these in volume nineteenth century Chinese characteristics Rev. Arthur Smith reissued by Kennikat Press, 1970 may be the naive racism of the right reverend fun or anger, but in any case it is instructive Maybe an antidote can read a summary of prejudice and discrimination against the Chinese Chink published by World Cheng Tsu 1972.
Of course, the best stories are those told by people themselves but they just started to tell them these beginnings has long CALIFORN by Victor G and Betty Barry Nee Houghton Mifflin, 1974, a beautiful collection of memories in the first person and comments Then there are local and regional collections, such as the Chinese Argonauts Anthology of Chinese contributions to the historical development of Santa Clara County under the direction of Gloria Sun Hom Foothill Community College, 1971 Chinese American workers spent and now by the Getting Together Group I Wor Kuen San Francisco, no date and these old photographs and prints in the work of the Committee Wei Min the Chinese workers right next to the American uni Press, San Francisco, no date give a dramatic, so stubborn, panorama of Chinese manufacturers of the West.
Yet, I feel these books are just the beginning of more naked.
For me, the history of the Chinese in the West is the right topic for great novels, heroic dramas, epics and grandiose operas far as I know, they have not yet been written.
Copyright 1999-2006, all rights reserved Last updated January 8, 2006 Use of this website constitutes acceptance of the User Agreement; Click on an image or link to accept.
CHINESE railway, Chinese railway, Chinese Historical Society.