Mike and I love to visit Chinatown in each city that we visit and San Francisco’s Chinatown is the largest such district outside of Asia and the oldest Chinese community in North America. Most of the early Chinese immigration to the United States can be traced to the mid-1800s. These early immigrants, around 25,000, came seeking economic opportunity in America in 1850, at the height of the CaliforniaGold Rush.
Many in the Chinese community took jobs as farmhands or in the burgeoning garment industry in the “City by the Bay.” Still more became laborers with the Central Pacific and Transcontinental railroads, and were instrumental in building the transportation infrastructure that helped fuel the westward expansion of the United States before, during and after the Civil War.
I found this article from The History Channel about the history and what the Chinese community had to go through to become American citizens.
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