The Chinese workers who built an American railway and their history detailed in new book
- Author Gordon Chang gives a comprehensive account of the 20,000 Chinese who worked on the Central Pacific transcontinental line in the late 1860s
- Most workers were from Taishan in Guangdong. Very few spoke English, and some died carrying out the gruelling work
Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, by Gordon H Chang. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Ghosts of Gold Mountain is the most comprehensive account you are likely to find of the building of the western section of America’s transcontinental railway.
Author Gordon Chang set himself the difficult task of documenting the daily lives of the roughly 20,000 Chinese who helped build the Central Pacific section of American’s first transcontinental line in the late 1860s.
Chang begins his tale in the Taishan region of China’s Guangdong province, the source of the overwhelming majority of the workers, describing the everyday life of those tempted to seek their fortunes in America.
They were, almost to a man, peasant farmers who migrated or were recruited to California specifically to build the railway. How they were assigned to work gangs and the resulting inter-clan relations would be very interesting to understand, but this was apparently the province of the Chinese gang bosses and no source material has yet been found.
