Starting around the 1850s, Chinese immigrants began to flee from the Guangdong Province in southern China in search of economic opportunity and a better life in the United States through the California gold rush and more employment opportunities. [1][2] The Chinese immigrants were accepted as cheap labor and worked in low wage jobs in agriculture, domestic work, and on the railroads. [3]

In the 1860s, approximately 15-20,000 Chinese workers laid the tracks to build the wester half of the Transcontinental Railroad. [4] Scholars today recognize the critical importance Chinese workers played in the building of the ambitious feat. [5] Their lives and efforts were treated as dispensable as they were paid less than white workers, and hundreds lost their lives as a result of the dangerous work which included hanging off steep mountain cliffs in woven reed baskets, handling explosives to tunnel through rock, and working through harsh Sierra Nevada winters. [6][7] It was through the exploitation and strenuous work of these Chinese workers that the Big Four Railroad Tycoons including Leland Stanford, built much of their wealth. [8] Stanford would use this money to fund the creation of Stanford University and help shape the city of Palo Alto. [9]

Chinese immigrants were also employed by Stanford on his property as cooks, maids, gardeners, and farm hands on the Stock Farm. [10] In 1884 after the tragic death of his only son, Leland and Jane Stanford decided to build a university in his memory thus beginning the creation of Stanford University. [11] Stanford also employed Chinese laborers in the construction of the University as well, with some living in temporary camps on the farm, and others living in the nearby towns of Menlo Park and Mayfield. [12] Mayfield especially housed a number of Chinese workers in the Mayfield Chinatown which was described as a shanty town–or slum–and were decried as an eyesore to other Mayfield residence and outsiders.[13]

The disgust with Chinatowns was not uncommon especially in the 1800s. In San Francisco, biased media coverage by public health investigators, journalists, and politicians wrote sensationalized pieces about the “unhygienic nature of the Chinese men and women”. [14] However, while articles wrote about overcrowdedness, dangerous diseases, “nauseating” air quality, and the overall unsanitary nature of Chinatown, cities were much less eager to help actually solve these issues. [15] Chinese merchants who ran places of room and board for Chinese workers complained about police extortion, fraud, and the absence of city services such as trash removal and sanitation services. [16] Furthermore, council members also refused any plans for a Chinese hospital, while also refusing care for Chinese patients in public hospitals. [17] In other cities such as Tacoma, Washington, a mob of several hundred men expelled the Chinese community and burnt down their Chinatown, ridding the city of their Chinese community. [18] The terrorism and forced removal of Chinese communities gained the name the “Tacoma Method”, by San Francisco newspapers which warmly received the idea. [19]

This trend of Chinese expulsion parallelled a rise in anti-Chinese sentiment across the United States. [20] While at first, Chinese immigrant workers were welcomed as cheap labor, when the US economy took a downturn in the late 1800s, the Chinese were an easy scapegoat to project the country’s issues on. [21] This culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to severely cut the number of immigrants from China from coming and staying in the United States. [22]

The massacre of the Chinese at Rock Springs, Wyoming / drawn by T. de Thulstrup from photographs by Lieutenant C.A. Booth, Seventh United States Infantry [36]

In 1903 after Mayfield was incorporated into Palo Alto, the Mayfield Chinatown–which faced El Camino Real and stood between College and Stanford avenues–was at the top of the town’s agenda to be destroyed. [23] Chinese residents of the Chinatown were moved to the area that became Foon Cannery, and then eventually (the recently closed) Fry’s Electronics. [24]

However, the removal of Chinatown was not the only illustration of anti-Chinese sentiment in and around Palo Alto. In 1893, an attempt to establish a Chinese washhouse prompted the Palo Alto Times to editorialize:

“ NO CHINATOWN WANTED, Palo Alto is not in the ordinary sense an anti-Chinese town. The class of people residing here are too intelligent and independent for that…. On one point, … we are positively unanimous. We are solidly determined that vile combination of bad odors, bad women and bad habits known as Chinatown shall not find a lodgement within our limits. There is a place for everything – even for a nuisance, and the place for a Chinatown is as far as possible from Palo Alto”[25]

The publication, the Palo Altan, also wrote:

“ No Saloons for Palo Alto! No Chinese for Palo Alto! Clean town, clean morals.”

“ The cry in other towns: ‘The Chinese must go!’ In Palo Alto the motto is: ‘The Chinese must not come!’”[26]

Although the Palo Alto Times wrote that Palo Alto was “not in the ordinary sense an anti-Chinese town”, it is pretty apparent that the town was indeed anti-Chinese. [27] Many houses across Palo Alto would also carry clauses in their deeds which would discriminate against Chinese people and other people of color, including the property owned by Jane Stanford which stated “no cattle, horses, hobs or poultry could be kept on the property and no persons of African, Japanese, Chinese or Mongolian descent were to use or occupy the houses” [28] (For more information about housing discrimination in Palo Alto click here)

Portion of grounds--residence of Honorable Leland Stanford "Palo Alto" near Mayfield, California [37]

There are also several documented cases of acts of violence against Chinese people in Palo Alto during the late 1800s, early 1900s. [29] In 1899, when a group of young men beat two Chinese men on the road south of Mayfield (without provocation), and in 1903, nine grammar school boys faced assault charges for throwing stones at a Chinese vegetable vendor, inflicting a severe head wound. [30]

The makeup of Palo Alto has largely changed since the destruction of Mayfield’s Chinatown. After World War II, Palo Alto received a new wave a Chinese immigrants. [31] However, unlike the prior Cantonese immigrants who worked in low wage jobs, this new wave of Mandarin-speaking immigrants from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan came as academics, doctors, and engineers. [32] Just as agriculture and employment opportunities lured Chinese immigrants to the Valley in the past, the high-tech sector and the region’s reputation as one of the world’s top centers of research and development continues to draw immigrants from China today. [33] According to a 2010-2015 survey, Palo Alto has about 10,500 residents of Chinese descent making up about 15.8 percent of the population. [34] Despite the change in residence, a renewed interest in early Cantonese immigrants has sparked Stanford University to come full circle and learn about the workers which helped produce the university. [35] From 2012 to 2020, in partnership with the Chinese Historical Society of America and 50 descendants of Chinese railroad workers, Stanford students and professors created the “Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project”. [36]

“There has been inattention to the role of Chinese workers in this part of American history and our goal has been to correct that. … The process of making sense of history is never over. This project shows how the gathering of new research, the creative use of a variety of historical materials, but also changing opinion, makes a big difference in how we can understand the past.” – Professor Gordon Chang of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Science [37]