Paid a third what whites earned, housed in tents – the Chinese railroad workers who opened up America, then were airbrushed out of history

Museum of Chinese in America charts the lives of some of the 50,000 Chinese who built part of the first transcontinental railroad in the 1860s

Employed as engineers, masons, blacksmiths, explosives experts, and tunnelers, not just as labourers, they were excluded from famous photos of line’s completion

Reading Time:4 minutes

An image from an exhibition at the Museum of Chinese in America in New York which charts the lives of some of the 50,000 Chinese who built the transcontinental railway from the west coast of the United States in the 1860s. Photo: Stanford University

Published: 9:00pm, 10 Nov 2019Updated: 8:15pm, 11 Nov 2019

The Chinese workers who toiled to build the first transcontinental railroad across the United States in the 19th century have become legends among overseas Chinese – but few people know about the range of tasks those workers performed.

It is generally thought that Chinese were employed almost exclusively as unskilled labourers, but that is not so. According to a new exhibition, they were employed by the railroad at all levels: as engineers, masons, blacksmiths, explosives experts, loggers, and tunnellers, as well as manual labourers.

Although they were paid less than their white counterparts, and racism was rife, their work was valued while the railroad was under construction. But the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment in the US that occurred around the time the grand project was completed in 1869 meant their efforts were quickly erased from history.

The exhibition, “The Chinese Helped Build the Railroad – The Railroad Helped Build America”, at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in New York aims to change that.

An image from ‘The Chinese Helped Build the Railroad – The Railroad Helped Build America’ exhibition at the Museum of Chinese in America in New York. Photo: Museum of Chinese in America

The show, which is part of Stanford University’s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, takes an innovative approach by exhibiting then-and-now photos of locations taken along the route of the railroad. The modern photos were taken by Li Ju, a Beijing-based photographer.