164 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
The completion of the transcontinental railroad
in 1869 was regarded as a national triumph, and
commemorated with a ceremonial golden spike that
linked the Union Pacific with the Central Pacific at
Promontory Point in Utah. None of it would have
been possible without abundant low-wage labor: the
Union Pacific was largely built by Irish immigrants
and Union veterans, while Chinese immigrants
were chiefly responsible for the dangerous
construction of the Central Pacific through the
Sierra Nevada Mountains.
When the railroad work ended, many Chinese
immigrants settled throughout the West while others
moved to San Francisco. In the severe economic
depression of the 1870s, these immigrants became
easy scapegoats and targets. Chinese workers—so
desperately needed just a few years earlier—were
accused of undercutting wages just as the Irish
immigrants had been in the 1850s. The earliest anti-
Chinese group formed in 1867, and by the 1870s a new
political party was advocating immigration restriction
as a way to protect white labor. Anti-Chinese riots
throughout the west, alongside this political party,
led to the nation’s first attempt to prevent a particular
ethnic group from immigrating. The Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882 halted the immigration of
Chinese laborers and prohibited those already in the
country from seeking naturalized citizenship.
In response to this widespread antagonism,
more Chinese sought refuge in San Francisco. By the
mid-1880s, they constituted one-tenth of the city’s
population, largely concentrated in a neighborhood
of fifteen square blocks known as “Chinatown.”
There, too, they were greeted with harassment,
largely in the form of ordinances designed to control
everything from their business practices to their
physical appearance. The city supervisors also
launched an investigation into the living and working
conditions in Chinatown, and their ensuing report
captures the extraordinary racism that gripped San
Francisco in the 1880s.
Billed as a public health effort to uncover the
“unvarnished truth,” the report described the
Chinese “race” as “the rankest outgrowth of human
degradation that can be found upon this continent.”
The supervisors presented an extensive catalogue of
MAPPING VICE IN SAN FRANCISCO
Willard Farwell et al., “Official Map of
‘Chinatown’ in San Francisco,” in The
Chinese at Home and Abroad, 1885
sanitary code violations, most of which amounted
to inadequate plumbing and drainage. They
described residents of Chinatown “living scarcely
one degree” above waterfront rats, in unimaginably
crowded conditions. Instead of nuclear families, the
investigators found men sleeping in shifts in filthy
lodging houses while women were widely enslaved
as prostitutes. Such living conditions, the authors
speculated, surely bred leprosy and drug addiction.
To drive publicity for the report, the authors
commissioned an elaborate map that relentlessly
focused on vice. Originally folded into the report, the
map was then reissued in a much larger format that
measured five feet wide, a portion of which is shown
here. Chinese lodgings and businesses are marked
in tan, gambling houses in pink, and opium dens
in yellow. A special effort was made to distinguish
Chinese prostitution (green) from white prostitution
(blue), in order to highlight the growing demand
that drew white women into the sex trade. Red marks
Chinese “joss houses,” or places of worship. The
authors also noted that the map identified only the
street level activity in each establishment, while the
report went further in describing the sins committed
in the labyrinthine world below.
The map is presented as an authoritative urban
plan, quite similar to the contemporary Sanborn
insurance maps that undergirded the growth of
modern cities. Its elegance and precision hide its
racially charged and sensationalistic profile of the
Chinese population. By mapping vice—and the
absence of nuclear families—the authors argued
that there was something fundamentally alien about
the Chinese. The overall message was clear: if the
Chinese were unable to convert to Christianity,
and if they continued to sow “immorality, vice, and
disease,” they must be expelled from the city. The
map was just one example of the growing use of
cartography to address social problems in the Gilded
Age. In identifying the human geography of the
city, the map anticipated the next two examples on
pages 166 and 168, yet here the goal was segregation
rather than assimilation.
The story of the Chinese in California has echoes
throughout American history, where a market
economy alternately demands, then rejects, low-cost
immigrant labor. The limits on Chinese immigration
served as a precedent for the more comprehensive
1924 restrictions. Yet Chinatown continued to thrive,
especially after the liberalization of immigration
restrictions in 1965: the neighborhood once derided
as the vortex of filth in San Francisco remains one of
the largest Chinatowns outside of Asia.