When Chinese Laborers Helped Bring the Country Together

[Randy W]

The Donner Summit tunnels and 13 others in the Sierra Nevada built by Chinese railroad workers remain a testament to ingenuity and industry.

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The Quest to Protect California’s Transcontinental Railroad Tunnels
Built by Chinese immigrants in the 1860s, the caverns cutting through Donner Summit helped unite the country

 

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“Competent railroad engineers said it couldn’t be done but the Chinese weren’t railroad workers and didn’t know it couldn’t be done,” he says as I reach out to run my hand over the pattern of drill divets in the wall like an acolyte in a granite cathedral to the past. When an entire class of middle schoolers comes tramping in, graffiti hiding on the dark, pockmarked walls flash in brilliant yellows and reds beneath the beams of their headlamps. Overhead, a central shaft dug to allow more workers to tackle the rock simultaneously, reaches for the Earth’s surface. Outside, a hand-built retaining wall of stacked granite boulders, dubbed the “China Wall” by historians, remains perfectly intact, despite having been built without mortar or cement of any kind.

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The overwhelming majority of the workers at the Donner Summit tunnels came from five districts in the province of Guangdong, China. Some villages had so many young men that left to seek their fortune on the Transcontinental that they were known as “railroad villages.” Despite intense anti-Chinese racism, many went on to make a new life in California when the railroad was complete. Due to extreme poverty and armed conflict, “that whole area had for generations sent their men overseas,” explains Sue Lee, retired director of the Chinese Historical Society of America. “The handful of us who are third, fourth, fifth generation Americans come from those areas.”