rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa with the Pacific coast at the Oakland Long Wharf on San Francisco Bay. North America's first transcontinental railroad (known originally as the " Pacific Railroad" and later as the " Overland Route") was a 1,911-mile (3,075 km) continuous railroad line constructed between 18 that connected the existing eastern U.S. For more information, check here.1863–1869: Union Pacific built west (blue line), Central Pacific built east (red line) and Western Pacific built the last leg (green line) to complete the railroad On March 12 at 11 a.m., the library will host a film screening of “Canton Army in the High Sierra” by filmmaker Loni Ding, followed by a panel discussion on Chinese workers and the railroad. 19 to May 22 at the Skylight Gallery on the 6th floor of the San Francisco Main Library. “Ideally, I’m just hoping we will have a big exhibition and bring different organizations together, besides the descendants,” she said. Yu Law, the curator, said that this exhibit is only the beginning. Even in our Chinese community, like new immigrants, they don’t know enough,” she said. “I feel like we’ve been here for a long time, but our history isn’t a part of the mainstream. “I feel it’s time to learn more about this now,” he said.įong, who arrived at the opening wearing a grey T-shirt featuring an old photo of the railway workers and brought along related books, DVDs and souvenirs, agreed. and now lives in Chinatown, felt an especially personal connection to the exhibition. Richard Ow, a 91-year-old immigrant who has spent 81 years in the U.S. So when we can see that the Chinese actually built this side of the mountain, we could connect.” ” At Weber River Canyon in Utah, the original photo contains train tracks, workers, and their ramshackle living quarters today, only the tracks remain.” Photo by Yujie Zhou. “All I know is I remember one time taking a date on our railroad ride to Sacramento. “When I first came to SF State, I had no idea about my own history,” said Steven Lee, a visitor of Chinese descent who was visiting the exhibit on Wednesday. More than 1,200 Chinese immigrant workers died in the construction of the railroad, and those who survived were not offered transportation back to California, leaving them homeless, jobless, and left to scatter in towns along the railway, according to Fong. At Weber River Canyon in Utah, the original photo contains train tracks, workers and their ramshackle living quarters today, only the tracks remain. “I feel like there aren’t enough books or documents about this, and that’s why it’s my calling to do something,” she said, acknowledging her own apathy on first hearing the stories in her early 20s.Īs Yu Law showed visitors around the exhibit, she pointed to photographs taken at former construction sites, which reproduce the precise location and angle of historic photographs. Nancy Yu Law, curator of the exhibition, agreed that the exhibit is the chance to remember those that have largely been left out of the railway’s history. ‘I feel it’s time to learn more about this now,’ he said.” Photo by Yujie Zhou. They became an “overwhelming majority” in the railroad workforce, according to Iris Chang, author of ‘The Chinese in America.’ She wrote that the experience left them “breathing granite dust, sweating and panting by the dim flickering glow of candlelight, until even the strongest of them fainted from exhaustion.” “Richard Ow, a 91 year old immigrant who has spent 81 years in the U.S. In vivid color photographs, Ju chronicles the struggles of over 12,000 contract laborers who crossed the pacific and docked in San Francisco. The exhibition, which opened for a four-month run on Wednesday, features the work of Li Ju, a Beijiing-based photographer who has visited the Transcontinental Railroad nine times since 2012, tracing the path of Chinese workers who labored there in the 1860s.
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