A History of California

A Spiral of Wealth Creations

Containing:

How the Chinese made California

ISBN: 9798342067522

Copyright © 2024 Piero Scaruffi

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These are really four books that ended up being one.

The first one was born out of my curiosity about early California: I was puzzled that neither the Spaniards nor the Russians nor later the Mexicans found anything interesting in California, and that the Chinese (on the other side of the ocean) never even ventured there.

The second book (originally titled “How the Chinese made California” on my website) was about the contribution of the Chinese laborers to the development of California after it was conquered by the USA. It seems to me that they more than anyone else deserve the credit. The reason they have been largely ignored is that we don’t know their names. Most of the Chinese who worked humble jobs in the gold mines, in the early towns and in the railroads have been omitted from the official records and sometimes even from the drawings and photographs. Coincidence or not, their waves of immigration into the Bay Area correspond with the booms of the Bay Area: the Gold Rush first and Silicon Valley now. During the “exclusion” period (when Chinese immigration was banned) the Bay Area declined in importance relative to southern California. When Chinese immigration resumed in earnest in the 1980s, the Bay Area regained its position of cultural and economic leadership. Go figure!

The third book was meant to probe California's spiral of wealth creations. There are few places in the world that experienced one "boom" after the other in a short period of time. Most places (whether medieval Venice, industrial-revolution Manchester or car-manufacturing Detroit) were defined by one boom that created their original wealth. California instead has been shaped by one boom after the other between 1849 and 2024: gold, agriculture, oil, real estate, aviation, Hollywood, and the multiple booms of Silicon Valley (semiconductors, Internet, social media, Artificial Intelligence). Each boom created immense fortunes. It has been a land of nonstop "gold rushes".

The fourth book was about the architecture of Los Angeles. Through the work of its architects, one can document the development of the city, a city which is another improbable miracle in a state of improbable miracles: from tiny village into sprawling metropolis in a relatively short time. Each building and house is associated with the story of an individual or a couple, and the story of all those stories is the story of the serial booms of Los Angeles.

I had previously written a thick “A History of Silicon Valley” which includes a cultural history of the Bay Area. I am too lazy to summarize that story in this book, which is already three books in one, so I hope the reader will forgive me if this book doesn’t spend much time on the arts and the society of the Bay Area. As always feedback is welcome. You can reach me via my website: www.scaruffi.com

Piero Scaruffi, California, 2024

America was "discovered" in 1492. For three centuries and a half, California was a huge, unexplored wilderness. Then, in little more than a century and a half, California has become the world's main center of technological innovation, the world's main producer of films, the fifth largest economy in the world, a land of billionaires, and even a focal point of the counterculture. A mysterious force almost effortlessly ignited the Gold Rush of 1849, the real estate boom of Los Angeles at the end of the 19th century, the oil boom of southern California in the early 20th century, Hollywood in the first half of the 20th century, and Silicon Valley at the end of the 20th century. These waves of wealth creation, each one more consequential than the previous one, rank among the most stunning stories of the modern world, especially if one considers that none of them was planned by the government. They did more than just create very rich people out of thin air: they changed the world.

Various ethnic groups can claim to have "built" the USA. The Italians claim to have "discovered" and named America. The Irish, the Poles, the Swedes and of course the British claim to have built this or that part of the country or the economy. Credit must go to all of those immigrant groups, and in many states an even bigger credit goes to the black people imported as slaves from Africa. But rarely is credit given to the Chinese, and to Asians in general. In my opinion, there are two main reasons. Traditionally, the USA was thought as the East Coast and, at best, the Midwest. Histories of the growth of the USA are centered around Boston, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, and so on. Those cities were indeed "built" mostly by European immigrants. However, in the 21st century the USA has steadily shifted westward and California has become the most populous state and the largest economy (the fifth largest in the world if it declared independence). And so explaining who "built" the East Coast leaves out some of the most important regions of the USA, from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley. If we focus instead on California, it is hard to claim that Europeans alone built it. The contribution of Chinese immigrants to establishing the mining, agricultural and railway operations was fundamental, and without these operations California would not have developed. The second reason why the contribution of Chinese immigrants is neglected is quite simple: few among the Chinese could write in fluent English. We don't know their stories and in most cases don't even know their names. However, a history of California cannot be complete without mentioning the contribution of Chinese immigrants, and that contribution turns out to be more important than anything contributed before their arrival. It was literally the Chinese that turned California into a place to live and work. Before the Chinese arrived, California was at best the "Wild West" and at worst just a useless arid land.

On the other hand, what is rather strange is that America was discovered by Europeans. The Chinese didn't discover America, despite the fact that the fourth expedition of Zheng He (1413-15) returned to China from the east coast of Africa, a pretty long voyage, and that the Spanish and Portuguese ships were smaller than the Chinese vessels, and that the Chinese possessed (long before the Europeans) key technologies, such as the mariner’s compass, multiple masting and the axial rudder. which made oceanic navigation by large ships easier. The voyage east across the Pacific Ocean is more difficult than going west towards China, but it took only 63 years for the Europeans to figure out how to do it. The Chinese had thousands of years to discover the same trick.

The very technological success of China may have kept Chinese sailors from thinking the way Columbus thought. Especially after the remodeling in 1411-15 of the Grand Canal by the "Yongle Emperor", aka Zhu Di, Chinese sailors had little motivation to test and innovate ship technology, as transport shifted from the coast to the canals. The imposing ship-building capacity of China was diverted from the coastal ports to the inland ports. And then after 1500 China became politically hostile altogether to maritime commerce and exploration. That xenophobic mindset cost China the opportunity to compete with the European empires during the time of colonization. By forbidding foreign trade, the Chinese emperors helped Europeans establish their colonial empires in Asia, besides encouraging the rise of piracy and the emigration of Chinese merchants to South China Sea ports.

China didn't develop scientific cartography until the arrival of the Jesuits (China's first accurate world map was made by the Italian priest Matteo Ricci in 1602). For two millennia China produced stylized but extremely schematic representations of the world which were largely useless to sailors (they were meant for philosophers). The belief that China was the center of the world may have dampened any enthusiasm for exploring beyond the national boundaries. Whatever the reason, the Europeans were sending expeditions to all the seas when China was not sending a single one.

Not only did the Chinese not discover America before the Europeans, bur also, after the Europeans discovered a whole new continent, the Chinese government showed no interest in exploring it and colonizing it. European countries (even tiny ones) sent explorers, merchants, scientists and (alas) conquerors: the emperor of China didn't send anyone.

The Chinese "colonizers" of California were instead humble merchants, laborers and fishermen who traveled on non-Chinese ships as passengers carrying with them the know-how necessary to create a viable society: agriculture, mining, transportation and commerce.

Look closely, and the Chinese were crucial for the early finance (ultimately due to the gold mines), transportation (the railroads), agriculture (enabled by irrigation) and urbanization (which was often centered around a Chinatown): the four pillars of California's economic development. Fast forward to the late 20th century, and an underveloped region of California transforms into the most technological region of the world: Silicon Valley. Is it a coincidence that this happens when Chinese immigration resumes and that most new Chinese immigrants settle precisely in the Bay Area? When you notice the coincidence, you start to wonder if the abundant supply of skilled (intellectual) Chinese labor fueled the growth of today's high-tech California just like the abundant supply of unskilled (manual) Chinese labor fueled the growth of yesterday's California.

Many books have paid attention to the black communities of California or to the painful history of the indigenous populations or to the Hispanic communities. This was for a very good reason: to identify, record and stigmatize racial discrimination. Studies on how ethnic groups were penalized by "progress" are important. However, it is also important to analyze ethnic communities in relation to how much they contribute to the development of a region, without assuming that all development is uniquely due to white people's leadership, planning and execution. The Chinese community belongs to the group of ethnic communities that suffered from discrimination and even persecution, but, perhaps more importantly, it contributed significantly to the early development of California, as well as to its recent high-tech boom.

Why focus on the Chinese immigrants? Because two centuries ago skilled Chinese laborers were crucial in building the economy of early California and today skilled Chinese engineers are crucial in building California's digital economy, and probably no other ethnic minority can boast of such a role at both times. The Indians, for example, can claim to have helped today's software industry, but this came after someone had created the hardware industry (the "silicon" of Silicon Valley), which was made possible by an existing infrastructure of railways, farms and trade. The two groups of Chinese immigrants, two centuries apart (one speaking Cantonese, the other, Mandarin), may appear to be totally unrelated, but maybe they are not.

The role of Taiwanese immigrants who returned to Taiwan has also traditionally been neglected, but one could argue that they were as important to the boom of Silicon Valley as DARPA (the military agency that funded much of the early Silicon Valley) and Stanford University (from which the early startups originated).

"California" is the name of a mythical island in Garci Rodriguez-de-Montalvo's chivalric novel "Las Sergas de Esplandian/ The Adventures of Esplandian" (first published in 1510). This imaginary island is located east of the Indies, i.e. west of the North American continent.

The novel was popular in Spain two decades after Columbus "discovered" America. It was popular because it revived the Greek myth of the Amazons, female warriors who lived with no men. Coincidence or not, Columbus, who always thought that his discovered islands were located just east of the Indies, had written after his very first voyage of 1492 that he had heard of an island populated exclusively by women. Montalvo may have been inspired by Amerindian legends heard by Columbus. Or not. Anyway, the novel ended up inspiring Spanish "conquistadores". Hernan Cortes in person, the conquistador of the Aztec empire, wrote in 1524 to the king of Spain that his men had learned from the natives of an island populated only by women. In 1532 he dispatched ships along the western coast of Nueva Espana (Mexico) to locate the island. In 1535 he personally led another expedition. They started calling it California, the name used in Montalvo's novel. In 1539 he dispatched Francisco de Ulloa, who finally determined that the region they had called "California" was not an island but a peninsula (today's Baja California). Ulloa referred to the Gulf of California as the "Sea of Cortes", but the account of his voyage, published in 1541, is also the first document that uses the name "California".

Spain had little interest in this piece of land and its exploration was left to individuals. In 1542 Juan Cabrillo, one of Cortes' original conquistadores who had become rich by mining gold in Guatemala, built two ships and then ventured north on the west coast of Nueva Espana (Mexico). He arrived at the Island of California and claimed it for Spain, except that he had just "discovered" San Diego Bay, which he named "San Miguel". He ventured further north where presumably no Europeans had ever been and "discovered" Monterey Bay, naming it "Bahia de Los Pinos". His adventure was ended by his untimely death in early 1543. Cabrillo's journey convinced the few who heard of it that there was nothing of value in California. There was nothing in the northwest of America comparable to the great civilizations (and wealth) of the Aztecs and the Incas. The story of Cabrillo's journey was written by another explorer, Andres de Urdaneta, after interviewing the returning sailors.

Sailing westward across the Pacific was easy because of the prevailing winds (the winds that Magellan had taken advantage of in 1521). Sailing eastward was still impossible. In 1564 New Spain's viceroy Luis de Velasco dispatched a fleet led by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi to conquer the archipelago to the west of Mexico, Islas del Poniente, the Philippines, hoping that they would find a way back. A previous mission in 1543 led by Ruy Lopez de Villalobos had reached the Philippines but failed to return. It had convinced Spain that the Pacific Ocean was smaller than it is due to no reliable account from the survivors. Legazpi's mission succeeded and in 1565 Spain began its colonization of the Philippines. The real brain of the voyage had been Andres de Urdaneta, who had now become a missionary friar, and he discovered and plotted the easterly route across the Pacific Ocean from the Philippines back to Acapulco (in about four months). Because of sea currents and winds, his route from Manila to Acapulco went up north, so that the ships first touched land in Cape Mendocino (north of San Francisco), and from there south to Acapulco. That route was important because for the first time gold and silver could be shipped from America to Asia and spices from Asia could be shipped to America. Europe wanted gold and silver from America, and wanted spices, cotton, silk and porcelain from the Far East. It was not possible to trade directly one for the other and avoid at the same time the routes of the Indian Ocean, which were controlled by Muslims and the Portuguese. That started Spain's monopoly of American-Asian trade that lasted two centuries. Basically, Spain had just invented Pacific trade.

Francisco Gali carried out the first trans-Pacific crossing from the Asian mainland to the Americas, sailing from the Portuguese colony of Macau to Acapulco in 1584. In 1587 Pedro de Unamuno carried out the second one, also from Macau to Acapulco. The latter stopped on the California coast,somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the crew included Filipino sailors, who were therefore the first Asian people to travel to America, and in particular to California. Ironically, all those Spanish ships that sailed along the coast of California didn't spot the San Francisco Bay.

For the Spaniards, colonization of the East Coast of North America was supposed to be a Portuguese affair. In 1493 the Pope had brokered the Treaty of Tordesillas that mandated a division of the new continent between Spain and Portugal along a specific line (hence the current border of Portuguese-speaking Brazil with its Spanish-speaking neighbors). Britain, of course, didn't recognize this treaty, but Spain did. For them the Atlantic Coast was named after Estevão Gomes, the Portuguese explorer who had deserted Ferdinand Magellan's expedition in 1521 but then in 1524 had explored the Atlantic Coast all the way north to Terra Nova e Labrador (the land first sighted by João Fernandes Lavrador in 1498), looking for a passage to Asia. The first accurate map of the Atlantic Coast of North America was made by cartographer Diogo Ribeiro for the king of Spain, based on Gomes' journey: the "Padron Real" of 1527. Newfoundland had already been claimed for England in 1497 by explorer John Cabot and in 1583 became England's first colony in North America. On the West Coast, Spain, using the same Papal bull, claimed the Territorio de Nutca (today's Oregon and Washington state) and controlled it from 1789 (when Jose' Martinez built the Fort of San Miguel in today's Vancouver Island) until 1795 (when it finally accepted English rule).

Interest in California was also boosted by Francis Drake's journeys: he reached California in 1579, and Spain was alarmed that the British were approaching Spanish territory. For both commercial and geopolitical reasons, Spain became interested in finally exploring the west coast of Nueva Espana, the largely unknown land which was increasingly known as California. In May 1602 Sebastian Vizcaino, a merchant involved in trade between China and Mexico via the Philippines, was dispatched to explore the coast of California up to Cape Mendocino. After ten months Vizcaino had renamed San Miguel as San Diego and named Monterrey Bay. His crew included the missionary friar Antonio de la Ascension, who kept a daily diary and drew a map in which California is still depicted as an island. For almost two hundred years many maps kept showing California as an island.

Almost a century went by before a European seriously tried to settle in California. In 1697 a Jesuit missionary, Juan Maria de Salvatierra, established the Mision de Nuestra Senora de Loreto Concho', around which the town of Loreto developed, the first permanent settlement of "California" (today's Baja California peninsula in northern Mexico). The Jesuits founded more "missions" in the peninsula. That it was a peninsula and not an island was demonstrated by the Jesuit missionary and cartographer Eusebio Francisco Kino who published his map in 1701. Again, many decades passed before the Spanish government showed any interest in what its subjects were doing in this vast but scarcely populated northwestern region of Nueva Espana. Meanwhile, the Spaniards continued to apply the name "California" for an ever expanding region as they ventured north. The first Chinese to describe the American continent was also the first one to describe Europe: Shouyi Fan aka Luigi Fan, who converted to Catholicism, became a Jesuit and traveled to Rome via Brazil in 1708-09 and wrote "Shen Jian Lu/ Record of Personal Observations" ( 身見錄 ) upon returning to China.

Three European events indirectly triggered the exploration of today's California. First, the Danish-born Russian cartographer and explorer Vitus Bering (Ivan Bering in Russia) led two "Kamchatka" expeditions, the second one in 1733 also known as the "Great Northern Expedition" to map the eastern shores of Siberia and the western shores of North America. In 1728 he "discovered" the strait that bears his name between Russia and Alaska just before dying. News of Russian traders venturing south along the coast alarmed Spain. In 1732 Mikhail Gvozdev became the first Russian to cross the strait from Asia to America. Second, at the end of the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), during which Spain momentarily lost both Cuba and the Philippines (which it regained by giving Britain its other colony of Florida), but gained the vast French colony of Louisiana extending all the way to the Mississippi River, the king of Spain launched reforms throughout the empire. His emissary Jose' de Galvez was dispatched to Nueva Espana in 1765 and set out to improve the government of the colony. Galvez did more. He dreamed of colonizing California and prepared to launch expeditions both overland and by sea. Third, in 1767 Spain decided to expel the Jesuits from its empire, following the example of Portugal (1759) and France (1764): the Jesuits had become too powerful, too rich, and too political, and in America they often protected the indigenous populations against the European colonizers. The king dispatched Gaspar de Portola to Nueva Espana to turn over the 15 missions created by the Jesuits in Baja California to the Franciscan friars, and Junipero Serra (a friar who refused to ride horses and insisted on walking, who in the 1750s had conceived some celebrated missions in the Sierra Gorda of Queretaro) was placed in charge of the missions. Galvez appointed Portola as "governor" of Las Californias (plural), dividing the region into Antigua and Nueva California, respectively the one that had been explored and the one in the north that was still unexplored. Antigua (essentially the peninsula) came to be known as Baja California, and Nueva came to be known as Alta California. The latter presented natural obstacles to exploration from the south: the overland route was rugged along the coast and tough inland (deserts and mountains), not to mention Indian resistance, and the sea route ran counter to the southerly currents of the Pacific coast. In 1769 Galvez was ready to launch two expeditions up the coast of Alta California, one overland, led by Portola, and one by ship, led by Vicente Vila. Galvez drafted Junipero Serra's Franciscan friars to accompany the expeditions. The two groups departed from Baja California and met in San Diego and then continued overland, preceded by soldiers led by Fernando Rivera y Moncada and Franciscan diarist Juan Crespi'. Junipero Serra founded the mission of San Diego in July 1769. Portola "discovered" on foot the San Francisco Bay in November (spotting it from today's Sweeney Ridge). In 1770 Junipero Serra sailed to Monterrey and established the mission of San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo (today's Carmel, near today's Monterey) while at the same time Portola marched back to Vizcaino's Monterrey Bay and established a port and a "presidio" (a fort and a village). Thus was Monterrey founded (now known as Monterey).

Meanwhile, Galvez had fallen sick and returned to Spain in 1771. Serra's friars founded other missions, notably San Gabriel Arcangel (near today's Los Angeles) in 1771 and San Luis Obispo de Tolosa in 1772. The old missions of Baja California were now run by the Dominicans. In 1773 a border was drawn between "Franciscan" California and "Dominican" California, de facto the border between Alta and Baja California. In 1774 Spain finally appointed a governor of Las Californias: Felipe de Neve y Padilla, who took residence in Baja California. In 1774 Fernando Rivera y Moncada, who had been second-in-command on the Portola expedition, traveled again to Monterrey because he had been appointed military commander, arriving in May 1774. In November 1774 the first baby of European immigrants (the first "white" baby) was born in Alta California: Juan Jose' Garcia, the son of a mission blacksmith. The next major explorer was Juan Bautista de Anza, who differed from his predecessors in one simple fact: he was born in Nueva Espana, not in Spain. He set out in 1774 and, after following an easier inland route instead of the rugged coastal route, in 1776 he established the Presidio of San Francisco near the strait that today is called "Golden Gate" (the narrow entrance to the bay) and founded the town of San Jose' de Guadalupe (today's San Jose). The DeAnza group consisted of almost 100 people, which almost doubled the Spanish population of Alta California: that's how small the Spanish footprint was in this province of Nueva Espana. Serra's friars founded the mission of San Francisco de Asis in 1776 and the mission of Santa Clara de Asis in 1777. Halfway between the presidio and the mission DeAnza created the settlement of Yerba Buena, the beginning of the city of San Francisco (Yerba Buena is today's Portsmouth Square in Chinatown).

The Franciscan missions were connected by an overland route which became known as the "Camino Real". In 1775 Juan de Ayala became the first explorer to sail into the San Francisco Bay, passing through the future Golden Gate. His cartographer Jose' de Canizares drew the first map of the Bay. Both Anza and Ayala had been sent by Spain for fear that Russians were colonizing the region. In 1776 Spain declared Monterrey the capital of both Baja and Alta California, and governor Felipe de Neve moved to Monterrey. El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciuncula (today's Los Angeles) was instead founded in 1781 by order of governor Felipe de Neve after the king of Spain in person requested that more secular villages be established in Alta California. Neve populated this place located near the San Gabriel mission with a group of 40 or 50 immigrants from distant parts of Mexico, recruited by Rivera, who travelled more than 1,500 kilometers to settle such a distant and dangerous place (Rivera didn't make it back because he was killed by Yuma Indians along the way). Within eight years the five main explorers were all dead: Rivera was killed in 1781, Serra died in 1784, Portola in 1786, Galvez in 1787, and Anza in 1788.

After San Jose and Los Angeles, the third secular pueblo founded by the Spanish colonial government of Alta California was Villa de Branciforte, near today's Santa Cruz, established in 1797. The two provinces of Las Californias (Alta and Baja) were officially created in 1804. The Mexican-born explorer Gabriel Moraga explored the Central Valley of California between 1806 and 1808, and named both the Sacramento Valley and the Sacramento River. Alta California also included Nevada, Utah and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, western Colorado and southwestern Wyoming.

An important event that the people of Nueva Espana largely ignored was the declaration of independence by the 13 British colonies of the East Coast in 1776. The USA was born, with its capital in Philadelphia, much smaller than Nueva Espana at the time. The two bordered because Nueva Espana had expanded westward in 1763 to the Mississippi river, which was the eastern border of Virginia, Georgia and North Carolina, three of the British colonies now part of the USA.

In 1803 the USA (Thomas Jefferson) purchased Louisiana from France (Napoleon), which had purchased it back from Spain in 1800. That "Louisiana" included 13 of today's states: Montana, North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wyoming, Nebraska, western Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. The border between the USA and Nueva Espana was now at the Rocky Mountains.

Meanwhile, the Russian colonization of Alaska began in earnest. In 1784 the merchant Grigory Shelikhov established Russia’s first permanent settlement in Alaska, and Russian "promyshlenniki" began trickling down the coast to north California looking for the pelts of sea otters and fur seals, and frequently indenturing native Aleut hunters to hunt furs for them. In 1799 the czar gave his blessing to the Russian-American Company, which was also Russia's first joint-stock company. Russian merchants spread as far south in California as Fort Ross in 1812, about 100 kilometers north of the San Francisco Bay. Nikolai Rumyantsev as Minister of Commerce funded Russia's first circumnavigation of the Earth in 1803–1806 (led by the Estonian officer Adam-Johann von Krusenstern and the Ukrainian officer Yuri Lisyansky) and as Minister of Foreign Affairs funded the "Rurik" circumnavigation (led by the Estonian officer Otto von Kotzebue) in 1815-18. The latter failed in its main mission (to discover the "Northwest Passage" between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans via the Arctic waters) but provided precious information about Alaska's and California's geography, flora, fauna and people. (Russia maintained possession of Alaska until 1867 when it sold it to the USA).

Another explorer looking for the Northwest Passage was a Briton, Alexander Mackenzie, who in 1792-93 managed to cross British Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific, possibly the first person ever to do so and certainly the first European ever.

The naval British expedition of the Pacific Coast, led in 1791-95 by George Vancouver (who had served under James Cook), which reached America via Africa, Australia and Hawaii, resulted in the first detailed maps of the coast from today's Marin County to today's British Columbia, published in 1798 after his death as "Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World".

Both Spain and Russia had long claimed the Pacific coast north of Alta California, but Spain was too south and Russia too north, whereas Britain had Canada. The new country of the USA had its own interest: trading with China. The war of independence ended in 1783 with the USA doubling in size because it acquired the British region north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi and south of the Great Lakes (renamed Northwest Territory in 1789). Chinese tea was one of the commodities in high demand in Europe (after all, the whole war against Britain had started with the "Boston Tea Party"). Britain was buying tea from China by selling Indian-grown opium to China. The USA, however, had to pay for tea with silver coins. In February 1784 the ship Empress of China, commanded by captain John Green, left New York with a cargo of mainly ginseng, pelts, bullion and silver. It sailed east across the Atlantic to the Cape Verde islands, then rounded the Cape of Good Hope and crossed the Indian Ocean to reach Canton/ Guangzhou in China in August. Since 1757, Canton was the only city in China that the emperor allowed to trade with foreigners. In December the ship sailed back, reaching New York in May 1785, carrying lots of tea and "exotic" Chinese goods: that expedition had discovered that the Chinese also wanted ginseng, bullion and fur, and the investors soon discovered that their fellow Americans wanted Chinese lacquerware and porcelain. The Empress of China had inaugurated direct US-Chinese trade and had breached the British monopoly on the tea trade. It also transported Samuel Shaw, the first official representative of the US government, who in 1792 was formally appointed ambassador to China.

In October 1787 John Kendrick sailed from Boston on the ship Columbia Rediviva, the first US ship to round the Cape Horn, and in August 1788 reached the region that the Anglosaxons called Oregon (an English misspelling of the Algonquian name of a river flowing east to west). Robert Gray completed the voyage to Canton in 1789 (from July to December) with a cargo of Oregon furs, traded the furs for tea, and returned to Boston in August 1790 via the Cape of Good Hope, thus becoming the first US captain to achieve the circumnavigation of the Earth. Gray sailed again for another circumnavigation a few weeks later (October 1790), arriving in Oregon in June 1791, exploring the still unexplored Columbia River in May 1792 (hence the name of the river), sailing to Canton and then around the Cape of Good Hope across the Atlantic back to Boston in July 1793.

In 1800 the New York fur trader John Jacob Astor (born in Germany and raised in Britain) imitated the Empress of China with his own Canton-bound ship full of fur and opium. Astor made a fortune trading Canadian fur in New York, London and Canton and became the first multi-millionaire of the USA. Of course, it would have been easier and faster to ship fur to China from the Pacific coast.

John Meares, an illegal English fur trader based in India, led an expedition in January 1788 from Portuguese Macau (he couldn't sail as a British citizen because the East India Company held a monopoly on British trade in the Pacific) to Nootka Sound (near today's Vancouver), arriving in May 1788. His ships carried 50 Chinese sailors and laborers who built the first ship ever built by Europeans or Asians in the Pacific Northwest, using materials that they carried with them from China. It sailed in September 1788 towards the Sandwich Islands. Those 50 Chinese were probably the first Chinese to visit the Pacific Northwest.

The ability of the USA to sail to California was indirectly helped by the Barbary Wars. Four Muslim states of North Africa, known as the "Barbary States" (Morocco, which was already independent, and the Ottoman provinces of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli) had been practicing piracy for centuries. They not only stole cargoes but even sold sailors as slaves. They mostly demanded that European nations pay ransom, or, still better, annual tribute. In 1801 one of the Barbary States (that was already at war with Sweden) even declared war on the USA because the USA refused to pay the requested ransom. US president Thomas Jefferson launched an attack using Sicily (then part of the Spanish kingdom of Napoli) as a military base. The USA took four years but in 1805 the pasha capitulated. It was the first war fought by the USA outside America. It was also the first time that US soldiers fought together as USA rather than separately as New Yorkers, Texans, Virginians, etc. The victory excited the US public.

At the same time, Thomas Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to scout the route from Illinois to the Pacific Ocean in 1804-05, the first official exploration by the USA of the Oregon Country (today's states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho). The Anglosaxons ignored the southern route through California that still belonged to Spain.

Tired of the long route to China via Africa, Astor had the idea of establishing a fort/port in Oregon to trade fur directly across the Pacific to China. In 1810 he organized a double overland expedition, one by sea via Cape Horn which reached Oregon in March 1811 and founded Fort Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River (the first US settlement on the Pacific coast) and one overland, which arrived at Astoria in January 1812. Alas, his venture was doomed by the war of 1812 between the USA and Britain. More than sixty men had died in the exploration. The war was caused by British arrogance: between 1807 and 1812 Britain had seized some 400 merchant ships of the USA, and between 1803 and 1812 more than 6,000 US sailors had been kidnapped and forced to work on British ships (Britain didn't have enough sailors). In 1812, while Britain was consumed by the Napoleonic wars, the USA decided to take action. Since the USA only had 16 warships, it opted for waging war overland, invading British Canada. The war raged for two years from the Canadian border to New Orleans, and the British even raided Washington, setting the Capitol and the White House on fire, but the war ended with no winner. It did end with some losers: the "Indian" tribes who sided with the British, which were annihilated and lost their lands. Future president William Henry Harrison, governor of the Indiana Territory, defeated the confederation created by chief Tecumseh in the north (the war had started in 1810 but ended in 1813) future president Andrew Jackson defeated the Red Sticks in Alabama in 1813-14 (he then defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815). Those Indian wars helped open the route to the Far West. In 1818 the USA and Britain, having finally made peace, reached an agreement to jointly settle the Oregon Country all the way to the 49th parallel north (which became the border with British Canada). Oregon provided the USA with access to the Pacific Ocean.

In 1823 the Franciscan missionary Jose' Altimira established Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma north of San Francisco, the only new mission established after Mexico's independence, California's northernmost and its last one.

A crisis between the USA and Spain over Florida almost erupted into another war but this time the two countries reached an agreement in 1819: Florida became a state of the USA and a border was agreed upon between the USA and Spanish California. In particular, the 42nd parallel became the northern limit of Nueva Espana (i.e. the border between California and Oregon). Spain finally renounced any claims on Oregon Country, and Russia gave up its claims too.

Spain lost Nueva Espana two years later. In 1821 the creole Augustin de Iturbide and the mestizo Vicente Guerrero declared the independence of Nueva Espana, and declared a Mexican Empire (Mexico, California, Texas, Central America). Alta California was now part of the independent country of Mexico, and its capital was Monterrey.

In 1829-30 a Spanish merchant named Antonio Armijo led the first caravan from near Santa Fe in Nuevo Mexico to San Gabriel Mission in Alta California, opening what would be known as the "Old Spanish Trail" (about one thousand kilometers). The journey took about three months. Traders were selling blankets and clothes to Alta California, and were buying horses, mules and Paiute slaves.

The interest of the USA in exploring the Pacific Ocean was still minimal, but increasing. In 1821 US president James Monroe, the man who had negotiated the Louisiana Purchase when Jefferson was president, established the Pacific Squadron, tasked with protecting US commerce with Asia. The only lucrative trade with Asia was with China for tea. Ten years later, when Jackson was president, the Pacific Squadron carried out a military mission against pirates in Sumatra (one of the Indonesian islands) by sailing from New York via the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean to Sumatra (and then via the Pacific Ocean and Cape Horn back to New York six months later, another circumnavigation). In September 1826 the warship USS Vincennes sailed from New York for Cape Horn for the Pacific Ocean, which it patrolled for three years. It then reached China in 1830 and sailed for New York via the Indian Ocean and the Cape of Good Hope, becoming the first US warship to circumnavigate the Earth. At the time the Pacific Squadron was not interested in Alta California, which belonged to Mexico. It was interested only in protecting the trade between the East Coast of the USA and East Asia. Back then it took between four and seven months to to sail from the East Coast ports to Alta California, and there was little reason to do so.

If Spain, France, Russia, Britain and the USA were only hesitantly exploring California, there was one power that showed absolutely no interest in California despite being located across the ocean and being frequently visited by ships coming from California: China, ruled since 1644 by a Manchu dynasty called Qing. The Chinese emperor should have been at least curious to find out more about the continent that had provided new crops like potatoes, corn and peanuts which had indirectly enabled the rapid increase of China's population during the previous century. But the emperor, Yizhu Xianfeng (Emperor Wenzong), was dealing with multiple crises: the two Opium Wars against the British Empire (1839-60) and the "unequal treaties" (the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the Treaty of Tientsin in 1858) which humiliated China, and the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) and the Nian Rebellion (1851-68) which killed millions of Chinese.

Anglosaxon migrants were trickling into Alta California. First and foremost, there was the Canadian Hudson's Bay Company, which in 1824 had built its Pacific outpost, Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River. The Mexicans, like the Spaniards before them, had little interest in the north and in the interior of Alta California, which allowed the company's hunters and trappers to roam the rivers of southern Oregon and northern California. In 1826 Alexander McLeod started exploring and trapping in northern California and in 1829 he reached the Sacramento River Valley thereby linking the Columbia River (Fort Vancouver, in today's Washington State) with California's Central Valley (today's Sacramento) in what became known as the Siskiyou Trail (today's Interstate 5 largely follows the Siskiyou Trail).

While searching for a mythical river, St Louis fur trapper Jedediah Smith became the first US citizen (and possibly the first Caucasian man ever) to cross the Mojave desert into Mexico's Alta California, reaching San Gabriel Mission in November 1826, the first to cross the Sierra Nevada east into Nevada (1827), and the first to reach Oregon Country overland from California (1828).

The wealthy fur trader Ewing Young had pioneered the connection of California with the lucrative Santa Fe Trail, a route for horses between Louisiana (notably St Louis) and the Mexican border (Santa Fe, the northern terminus of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, which led to Ciudad de Mexico), a route created over the decades by Spanish and French traders and improved for wagon traffic in 1821 by William Becknell just weeks before Mexico's independence opened up commerce for US traders: in 1830 Young set out from Santa Fe and followed Jedediah Smith's route to move to California, where he fur-hunted for a while. In 1834 he started plying the Siskiyou Trail to sell horses, mules and cattle to Oregon Country, where he eventually settled down.

The first industry of California was therefore fur trading.

The first US citizens to build fortunes in Alta California were the sea merchants of the 1830s. Alpheus Thompson, who had started his career in Canton in 1821 and in Hawaii in 1825, settled in Santa Barbara in 1834 and got rich trading with China. Faxon Atherton started his business in 1836 with ships plying between Yerba Buena and San Diego, and then made a fortune in Chile. Atherton settled in 1858 in Valparaiso Park in San Mateo County (the town that grew out of that "park" was eventually named Atherton and became one of the richest towns in the USA). William Heath Davis, born in Hawaii, settled in Yerba Buena in 1838, erected the city's first brick building in 1849, and in 1850 he founded New Town San Diego. Thomas Larkin settled in 1832 in Monterey and quickly became the wealthiest person in town (and therefore one of the wealthiest in all of Alta California). His illegitimate son Oliver was possibly the first white Anglosaxon child born in California (not of mixed race). When gold was discovered, Larkin moved to San Francisco in the second brick building of the city. The second industry of California was therefore maritime trade.

John Marsh, who had made money but also created enemies with his trade with the "Indians", immigrated to California in 1836 via the Santa Fe Trail and became a Mexican citizen in order to buy in 1837 a ranch in Contra Costa (today's area north of Berkeley). From the beginning, Marsh plotted against Mexico: he conducted a campaign to convince US citizens to emigrate to California, hoping that a flood of Anglo-Saxons would lead to a Texas-style secession from Mexico.

In 1839 Johann "John" Sutter, a Swiss immigrant wanted for debts in his home country who had arrived five years earlier in New York, and who one year earlier had travelled with missionaries to Oregon Country spending time also in Russian Alaska, obtained land on the American River (in today's Sacramento) from the Mexican governor of Alta California, Juan Bautista Alvarado, and in 1841 erected a fort, meant as the first building of a utopian “New Helvetia” which quickly became a plantation-style colony modeled after the Caribbean ones, relying on imported Hawaiian ("Kanakas") workers and enslaved Indios. A Hawaiian-born employee was William Heath Davis, the son of a Boston trader and a Hawaiian princess, who had moved to Yerba Buena in 1838 and guided Sutter up the Sacramento River in 1839 to scout a location for his fort. They picked a location near the confluence of the Feather, American Fork, and Sacramento rivers. By 1846 it became the main trading post in California, a place where trappers, Indians, soldiers and immigrants (like Heinrich Lienhard, a fellow Swiss) left behind the wilderness and congregated.

The third industry of California was therefore agriculture. In 1841 the 21-year-old John Bidwell, a native of New York, led the first wagon train of pioneers out of Missouri across the mountains into eastern California (in six months). One of the "passengers" was the German immigrant Carl Weber. The route was later improved and simplified after the discovery of gold. A group of 12 men and their wives and children turned north to Oregon and de facto initiated the Oregon Trail.

Meanwhile, Oregon Country was experiencing a surge of settlers. In 1834 a group of priests (notably the missionary Jason Lee) and fur trappers (notably Nathaniel Wyeth, a wealthy Boston merchant who was trying to compete with the Hudson's Bay Company) traveled from Missouri to Oregon via the still unnamed Oregon Trail. Wyeth also founded Fort Hall, which would become the place where the Oregon and the California trails forked. That expedition set the trend: afterwards, immigrants of Oregon Country were mostly trappers like Joseph Meek, who reached Oregon in 1840 (the first wagons to reach the Columbia River overland) and who in 1841 served as the scout for the United States Exploring Expedition, but also missionaries like Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, who founded a mission in 1836 and returned in 1842 leading a wagon train along the Oregon Trail (they were famously killed by the Cayuse in 1847). William Gray, who had originally arrived with the Whitmans, later wrote the book "A History of Oregon, 1792-1849".

The United States Exploring Expedition, dispatched by US president Andrew Jackson, consisted of seven ships (notably the glorious USS Vincennes) commanded by Charles Wilkes. It explored the Pacific Ocean between 1838 and 1842 carrying a crew that included several scientists and cartographers.

Somehow the popularity of the Far West (Oregon Country and Alta California) increased rapidly, despite the fact that reaching it required several months of rough travel (whether by sea via Cape Horn or overland via the Oregon Trail) and that neither Oregon nor California belonged rightfully to the USA. Both politicians and journalists championed the idea of "manifest destiny", that God had meant the USA to extend from one coast to another. Oregon Country experienced a "great migration" in 1843 (actually involving only about a thousand immigrants), mainly to Willamette Valley (today's Salem) so that in 1843 there were enough Anglosaxon and Francophone settlers to create a provisional government.

An Oregon resident, Lansford Hastings, fell in love with Alta California in 1843 and started dreaming of an independent Republic of California. In 1845 he published a guide book titled "The Emigrants' Guide to Oregon and California" which encouraged migration along the vastly improved Oregon Trail, especially to California, and it managed to convince quite a few people. In 1846 a wagon train of pioneers, later known as the "Donner Party", followed Hastings' book but got lost in the Sierra Nevada where many died of starvation (the survivors, including the Prussian Louis Keseberg who later settled at Fort Sutter, had notoriously resorted to eating the bodies of those who had died). In July 1846 a group of 238 Mormons escaping religious persecution landed at Yerba Buena, led by Samuel Brannan, the highest-ranking Mormon in New York who had printed Mormon newspapers (and promoted Hastings' book in the Mormon community). When they had left New York in January, Alta California was still a province of Mexico, when they arrived via Cape Horn in July, it had been taken over by US-born rebels and Yerba Buena was now called San Francisco. This was the time when Brigham Young was leading 15,000 Mormons on an overland trail to the Great Salt Lake, the prehistory of Mormon Utah. Brannan's Mormons tripled the population of tiny San Francisco. Sam Brannan quickly left the Mormon Church and became a businessman. In January 1847 he launched San Francisco's first newspaper, the weekly California Star, and by the end of 1847, he was running a store at Sutter's Fort.

The first detailed maps of California and Oregon were produced by the army officeer John Fremont, who led a group of topographers and cartographers in three expeditions from 1842 to 1846 on behalf of the US army (his guide was Kit Carson). During the second expedition of 1844 he discovered the Old Spanish Trail used by Mexican traders and named it that way.

Meanwhile, the Mexican population was still mostly concentrated around the missions. While the population of Alta California was still tiny, there was constant turmoil. In 1831 wealthy landowners of Los Angeles and San Diego rebelled against the governor, the first of several rebellions. Until 1834 most of the useful land of Alta California was controlled by the missions, i.e. by the Catholic Church. In 1834 Mexico enacted the "secularization laws" that confiscated those lands and distributed them to lay Mexican-born settlers. For example, the Mission San Francisco Solano (in today's Sonoma) controlled about 4,000 square kilometers. The Mexican government sent the Monterrey native Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo to secularize this mission and he took advantage, becaming the richest man in California. He took Rancho Petaluma for himself and was ordered to found the Pueblo de Sonoma. Juan Bautista Alvarado y Vallejo, who too was born in Monterrey itself, the son of Vallejo's sister, received Rancho El Sur on the Big Sur coast. Another powerful family, the Castros, was based in Villa de Branciforte. The patriarch's daughter, Martina Castro, became the first woman in California to obtain a land grant (in present-day Capitola, near Santa Cruz).

The ranchos simply replaced the missions continuing with the same agriculture and keeping the same "Indians" as laborers.

In 1836 the Mexican government enacted laws that limited the power of provinces and instead centralized power. Inspired by Texas, Alvarado and Vallejo conspired with people from the USA to declare the independence of Alta California from Mexico. The secession didn't succeed but Alvarado successfully negotiated to become governor instead. He was from the San Francisco Bay area. In 1844 Alvarado again conspired against the Mexican government, which had replaced him with a new governor, and after a couple of battles near Los Angeles (between tiny armies which included immigrants from the USA), Pio Pico, born at Mission San Gabriel Arcangel near Los Angeles, was installed as governor. There was rivarly between the south of Alta California and the north: different prominent families competed for control of the government.

Immigration was still scarce. Not many people wanted to move into this distant and primitive place. In 1840 there were about 8,000 Mexicans in Alta California, the so-called "Californios". The Pueblo of Los Angeles had become the largest urban settlement (about 1,500 people) but most Californios were spread out across the 455 ranchos of Alta California. We don't know how many "Indians" lived in Alta California. There were hundreds of immigrants from the USA, like John Sutter and John Marsh, who now owned large ranches (both Johns were involved in political intrigues and military adventures).

In June 1846, about 30 illegal immigrants born outside Alta California started a revolt in Sonoma (north of San Francisco) against the Mexican government because they feared that the government was about to expel them. They declared a California Republic on the model of the Texas Republic which had successfully seceded from Mexico in 1836. That rebellion would not have succeeded without the help of a real army. John Fremont's group had become such an army. It was engaged in Fremont's third expedition in the north, mostly notable for massacring "Indians" (for example, the "Sacramento River massacre"). Informed of the Sonoma rebellion, Fremont, an army officer (the only officer of the US army in Alta California), organized the "California Battalion", which basically consisted of his cartographers, scouts (like Kit Carson) and hunters and, additionally, of other US immigrants recruited at Sutter's Fort (including Sutter's foreman James Marshall and the celebrated Lansford Hastings), for a total of about 160 people. Fremont quickly took over Sonoma.

The commander of the Pacific Squadron, John Drake Sloat, unsure whether the US government had declared war on Mexico, took Monterey (in July), which was still the capital of Alta California, and two days later Yerba Buena (which was renamed San Francisco by the Stockton-appointed new mayor Washington Bartlett), without encountering any resistance. The "Battle of Yerba Buena" was actually not a battle at all. Sloat proclaimed Alta California part of the USA, but, in poor health, Sloat surrendered command of Alta California to Robert Stockton, who was a politician besides being a commodore. Stockton counted on about a thousand sailors and soldiers (which made him a superpower in sparsely populated and poorly defended Alta California), and together with Fremont's battallion promptly marched on Los Angeles (in August) where, again, the Mexicans surrendered without firing a shot. Up to this point the president of the USA, James Polk, had been unaware of what was being done in Alta California in his name. Stockton used John Fremont's scout Kit Carson as a courier to Washington (the first of his three coast-to-coast journeys to deliver messages to Washington, after which he became a celebrity). The USA had formally declared war on Mexico in May but the news reached Alta California only in August. It was in fact the headline on the very first edition of California's first newspaper, The Californian, founded in 1846 by Monterrey's mayor Walter Colton (appointed by Stockton). And finally general Stephen Kearny, who had just completed a three-month-long exploration of the Rocky Mountains, took New Mexico and San Diego in December.

In January 1847 the USA (John Fremont) and Mexico (Mexican general Andres Pico) signed the Treaty of Cahuenga that terminated hostilities in Alta California (assuming that there ever was any "hostility" in California, as the Mexican soldiers had basically refused to fight). That's when the "Mormon Battalion" (about 500 Mormon volunteers recruited in Iowa in July 1846 by captain James Allen and who had been fleeing persecution in Illinois) finally arrived in San Diego after a 3,000 kilometer six-month march from Idaho (via Kansas, New Mexico and the Old Spanish Trail). Many Mormons (like Brannan) thought that an independent California would be the ideal refuge for their church, but their leader Brigham Young stopped in Utah.

The war between the USA and Mexico continued in Mexico proper and Mexico City fell in September 1847. In February 1848 the peace treaty (the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo) formally assigned the Mexican province of Alta California (the northern half of Mexico) to the USA as simply California. California, then, had a non-Indian population of 14,000. The acquired territory was split by the USA beteween California, Utah Territory and New Mexico Territory. For the record, Fremont dreamed of becoming a Napoleon of California and first he was arrested by Kearny for insubordination and then was treated like a crazy old man by the people who knew him. Texas (which originally extended north to south Wyoming and west to east New Mexico) had already been annexed in 1845, following a rebellion in 1836 of the slave-owning Anglo-American immigrants.

There was ambiguity over the precise location of the California-Utah border. It would have made sense to use the Sierra Nevada mountains, running vertically from Oregon to Mexico, but, instead, California claimed the 120th degree of longitude as the border, which would have included Nevada. The compromise was a slanted line from the intersection of longitude 120 degrees with latitude 39 degrees down to the Colorado River at latitude 35 degrees.

At the same time, in 1846 Britain and the USA split Oregon Country and, following the Whitman massacre, the USA also created the Oregon Territory in 1848. Now the USA controlled over 2,000 kilometers of the Pacific coast and in fact was the only power to front both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

And so the USA had already fought four wars: the Independence War of 1775–83, the first Barbary War in North Africa of 1801-05 the War of 1812-14 against Britain again, and the Mexican War of 1846-48; to which one must add all the various "Indian wars".

Meanwhile, several merchants of the East Coast were getting rich trading with China. Boston's John Cushing moved to China in 1803 (at the age of 16) and stayed in that country for 27 years, establishing Perkins and Co, which became one of the main trading companies. The vast majority of trade with China involved tea. In 1839 trade was disrupted by the "Opium War" between China and Britain. China lost the war. The Treaty of Nanking of 1842 forced China to open more ports to British trade: Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai. The USA dispatched the diplomat Caleb Cushing to negotiate its own treaty, the Treaty of Wanghsia in 1844. In 1800 the journey from the East Coast to Canton took six months. The first clipper ship was built in 1833 (by Isaac McKim). The boom of tea, opium and, later, gold, prompted a boom in clipper building, and in 1846 the clipper ship "Sea Witch" cut the trip Boston-Canton to ten weeks. Ironically, it took longer to travel from New York to California. In the 1840s it could be done by sea via the Cape of Good Hope (six months), by sea via the Isthmus of Panama (shorter but with a high risk of malaria) or overland (which also took six months). The route via Panama involved travel by canoe up the Chagres River for 48 kilometers and by mule for another 49 kilometers to reach the Pacific coast. Mail was delivered that way too.

In October 1848 the brand new steamship SS California, built on a government contract by New York's Pacific Mail Steamship Company, took four months and 22 days to travel from New York to San Francisco via the Strait of Magellan, delivering mail, passengers and cargo. When they left, they didn't know that gold had just been discovered in California: they thought they would be transporting California produce.

Hawaii (a mysterious land until the publication in 1784 of the journals and charts of the 1778 expedition of James Cook, who named them "Sandwich Islands") was not yet part of the USA. It was an independent kingdom, having survived a brief five-month British occupation in 1843. Trade between America and China via Hawaii had already started in the late 1780s, and the ships almost immediately started hiring Chinese sailors. In 1794, on his third trip to Hawaii, George Vancouver reported the existence of a Chinese resident. Hawaii had only one valuable commodity to export: sugar. At the time sugar was still a precious commodity. The first sugar plantation was probably established by a Chinese merchant, Tze-Chun Wong, in 1802. The first sugar mill in Maui was also brought by Chinese merchants (around 1835). In the next few years, Chinese laborers started settling in Hawaii as laborers for the sugar plantations established by US capitalists. The reason why Hawaii didn't have enough laborers of its own is that diseases imported by Westerners such as cholera and the plague decimated the native population. Early Chinese immigrants were from Fujian province and spoke Fujianese rather than Cantonese, but, later, the majority were Guangdong province. By 1848 there was a Chinatown in Honolulu, and in 1852 it was the Hawaiian government itself that commissioned the English captain John Cass to find and bring Chinese immigrants (he returned with 175 laborers and 20 domestic servants), and soon there were more Chinese than Whites in the island (especially after the free-trade treaty signed with the USA in 1876, which also granted the USA the naval base later known as "Pearl Harbor"). The "sugar rush" of Hawaii is not as famous as the "gold rush" of California but it brought about 20,000 Chinese immigrants to Hawaiian shores resulting in the same demographic aberration: there was only one Chinese woman for every 17 Chinese men. It also established a blueprint for what would happen in California: the Chinese laborers were the first to urbanize, the first to create ethnic associations that helped immigrants, and the first to be discriminated against.

The fourth industry of California was mining, and, specifically, mining for gold. When the soldiers of the "Mormon Battalion" were discharged In the second half of 1847, about 100 of them went to work for John Sutter who was building a water-powered sawmill to produce lumber, the first step in erecting a whole town for the settlers that Sutter expected to arrive from the east. The sawmill was located in Coloma on the American River, about 70 kilometers from Sutter's Fort, a location chosen by Sutter's foreman James Marshall, one of the many East Coast immigrants who had arrived in 1845 via Oregon's Willamette Valley and the Siskiyou Trail, and one of the Sutter people who had volunteered for Fremont's California Battalion and returned with the Mormons. In January 1848, when the sawmill was completed, Marshall discovered gold in the river. A few days later the war ended and California was officially part of the USA. The "Gold Rush" started in the sawmill itself: Marshall's men abandoned their duties to search for gold and an almost bankrupt Marshall left Coloma.

In March a San Francisco newspaper, The Californian, published a tiny article that stated: "Gold Mine Found. In the newly made raceway of the Saw Mill recently erected by Captain Sutter, on the American Fork, gold has been found in considerable quantities. One person brought thirty dollars worth to New Helvetia, gathered there in a short time". Few people noticed. Then in May everybody noticed when Sam Brannan, the shopowner at Sutter's Fort who was being paid in gold by the miners, a man until then mostly known in town for drinking, womanizing and fighting, showed up with the gold in San Francisco: sailors abandoned their ships, soldiers deserted the presidio, merchants left their shops, and most of the male population of San Francisco (which was about 1,000 people) rushed to Coloma. Both newspapers, The Californian (that had moved to San Francisco) and Brannan's own California Star, had to shut down because their entire staff left the city. Hundreds of ships were abandoned in the Bay because countless sailors, the moment they arrived, rushed to the gold fields. Some ships became hotels. One was even used as a prison. Brannan got rich overnight because his store was the only store near Sutter's mill.

In the next two months thousands of Californians flocked to the area, which quickly expanded to a larger area of the rugged Sierra Nevada foothills. In June the exodus began also in Hawaii and Hawaiian settlements popped up everywhere. In August, the news reached Oregon and, by the end of the year, two-thirds of the male population in Oregon had moved to California. Most of the gold miners had no experience in digging for gold or for anything else: they were farmers and trappers. Mexicans, Peruvians and Chileans sailed to San Francisco, and many of them had experience in mining. Some of the Mexicans had arrived in 1842, when Francisco Lopez had discovered gold at Rancho San Francisco in the mountains north of Los Angeles. Far from being chaotic, the 1848 gold rush was relatively peaceful and ordered. There was plenty of gold for everybody and many miners knew each other well enough to get along.

In 1848 there were only 325 Chinese in the whole of the USA. There were probably only about 50 Chinese in the whole of California before 1848 and only seven arrived in San Francisco in 1848. The first known Chinese woman to arrive in San Francisco was a maid, known as Marie Seise, who worked in Hong Kong for the family of US merchant Charles Van Megen Gillespie (possibly the first US merchant to reside in the British colony of Hong Kong) and moved to San Francisco with them in February 1848, just before the Gold Rush. A maid had also been the first Chinese woman to immigrate to New York: Afong Moy in 1834, raised in Guangzhou. But some Chinese learned of the California gold much earlier than US citizens east of the Sierra Nevada: the trip to China took only three months, therefore news reached China faster than it did New York or Boston. In late December a ship arrived in Hong Kong carrying some gold dust from California and a copy of a Honolulu newspaper writing about the gold in California. In January 1849, Hong Kong’s English-language weekly, Friend of China, reprinted the article. The news spread in Guangdong province. Men had been leaving the Pearl River Delta since the 1830s, often for South America and the Caribbeans, often as indentured laborers drafted against their will in the so-called "coolie trade”.

The first people to rush to California were actually US citizens living in Hong Kong (at the time a British colony), notably Yuan Sheng, a Chinese who had become a US citizen earlier in South Carolina and called himself Norman Assing. Assing landed in July. Already a prominent merchant, he opened both a restaurant and a brothel, and in December founded the Chew Yick Association, one of the earliest organizations to help Chinese immigrants. The Kong Chow association instead helped immigrants from the Sun Wui and Hawk Shan districts. Tong Achick, who arrived in 1851 already fluent in English, became a rich merchant and founded the Yeong Wo association for immigrants from his native district of Heung Shan. At the time many Chinese suffered from civil unrest and famine. The motivation to emigrate was great, and California was being depicted in Cantonese as "Gam San" (“Gold Mountain”). For most of China the rest of the world was a distant and mysterious land, but the people of the Pearl River Delta were instead used to Westerners because of Canton (Guangzhou) being the only official trading port for Westerners, a stop for many US merchants and missionaries, and because of Hong Kong, that had just become a British colony in 1842. The first Chinese immigrants came mostly from the district speaking Hoisanese, a dialect of Cantonese. Most of them didn't know any English, and would take any job, but there were plenty of humble jobs for those willing to take them. One of the fastest growing districts in San Francisco was the old Yerba Buena area, which was now the preferred location of Chinese businesses: it soon became better known as Chinatown.

In October 1849 a group of 50 or 60 Chinese arrived under contract with an English businessman of Shanghai and were sent to a camp in the gold region. That pioneered the system of "huiguans", merchant companies based in San Francisco that found jobs for groups of laborers. They hired the laborers in China, organized sea passages for them, and delivered them to the California contractors: the Kong Chow company was formed in 1850, the Sze Yup company and the Sam Yup company in 1851, and by 1854 there were four, known as the "Four Great Houses", each one representing a different district and dialect of the Pearl River Delta (later there were six, that merged in 1862 in what would become the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association).

Their leaders were the relatively wealthy and educated Chinese who had arrived earlier, for example Yee Ah Tye, who had arrived in San Francisco in 1847 and become Sze Yup's leader. Only 325 Chinese arrived in San Francisco in 1849, and only 450 in 1850, but in 1851 the number jumped to 2700 and in 1852 it skyrocketed to more than 20,000. The Chinese immigrants were almost all men. In 1850 there were more than four thousand Chinese men in San Francisco but only seven Chinese women. The vast majority of the female Chinese population was employed in the brothels that rapidly multiplied during the Gold Rush, like the famous ones (more than one) owned by the Cantonese madam Ah Toy (who claimed to have been the first prostitute of San Francisco). The girls had mostly been sold by their families back in China and their status in San Francisco was basically that of indentured slave girls. Both merchants and criminal gangs imported unmarried Chinese women for the needs of the vast male unmarried population. Lai Chu-chuen opened the first Chinese bazaar in 1850. The first troupe from China to perform Chinese opera arrived in 1852 and within 20 years at least four theaters were built, including the Donn Quai Yuen (Grand Chinese Theatre). The Chinese immigrants started building their own temples, such as, in 1851, the Tien Hou Temple, a Taoist shrine to the divine protector of seafarers. Most Chinese immigrants were Taoists.

While we tend to focus on the poverty that induced many Chinese to flee their country, it is also important to understand the opposite motivation: the Pearl River Delta, a relatively wealthy (not poor) region, was home to a vibrant market and export economy, its merchants were eager to find new markets, and their workers were eager to find virgin places where to emulate those merchants. One motivation was to escape chaos and poverty, but the other one was the belief that they could transplant their industrial and commercial skills in the virgin continent. Early Chinese immigrants came from the Pearl River Delta not because it was the poorest region but because it was the most familiar with Western ideas and manners, thanks to the missionaries who had established hospitals and schools, thanks to merchants like Wu Bingjian (aka Houqua) who had mastered the international trade, and thanks to popular books like Lin Zexu's "Sizhou Zhi/ Gazetteer of the Four Continents" (1839) and Xu Jiyu’s "Yinghuan Zhilue/ Brief Record of the Ocean Circuit" (1848). In 1850 a ship from Hong Kong delivered 50 Chinese immigrants but also more than one thousand pieces of furniture and more than one thousand blocks of granite. We tend to emphasize the number of Chinese who immigrated and to ignore the ones who left: it is true that between 1848 to 1876 more than 200,000 Chinese arrived in San Francisco, but it is also true that in the same period more than 93,000 left.

Not all Chinese headed for the gold mines. The Monterey peninsula boasted four Chinese fishing villages between Point Lobos and McAbee Beach. The first Chinese arrived in the 1850s from China, landing near today's Pt Lobos State Park. Others were, quite simply, shipwrecked on that coast. At one point Point Alones (in today's Pacific Grove) had more Chinese than San Francisco's Chinatown.

Chinese from a village called Lee Ook Bin of Guangdong province, led by John Sing Lee, tried to sail to Monterey but instead landed in 1852 at Casper Beach, near Mendocino, a center of logging. They found employment in the lumbermills and also built a Taoist temple that is still standing (known as both Mo-dai Miu and Temple of Kuan Tai). One can argue that the Chinese were not so much coming to America as escaping China. After losing the Opium War to England in 1842, China lost a second Opium War (the "Arrow War") to England and France in 1856. Meanwhile the Taiping Rebellion of 1851-64 resulted in the death of about ten million people. The Guangdong province was also devastated by an ethnic conflict between the majority Punti (Cantonese) people and the minority Hakka people from 1855 until 1867. By 1859 about 10% of California’s population was born in China.

The Chinese also have arrived in California via the Philippines. The Philippines lay between Nueva Espana and China. Chinese had settled in the archipelago even before Miguel Lopez de Legazpi conquered the Philippines for Spain in 1565 (thanks to Andres de Urdaneta's discovery of the eastern way to Asia) and founded Manila in 1571. After the Spanish conquest, the so-called "Manila galleons" started traveling between Acapulco in Nueva Espana and Manila in the Philippines one or two times per year, and were known as "Naos de China" because they came with silver and with American vegetables (corn, potato, tomato, tobacco, cocoa, etc) and sometimes imported European objects and returned home with Chinese luxury goods such as spices, porcelain, silk, lacquerware and jade as well as slaves.

Most of the Chinese merchants and sailors who settled in the Philippines came from the province of Fujian and spoke Hokkien. The Chinese in the Philippines were almost all men and most of them married local women. The second-generation "Chinese" in the Philippines were therefore mostly mixed-race. The Spaniards called them "Sangleyes".

Trouble started soon, when the Chinese pirate Lim Hong (Limahong for the Spaniards) attacked the newly established capital of Manila in 1574. He was not working for the Chinese government (which in fact wanted him dead or alive) but the Spanish rulers remained suspicions about the Chinese population's loyalty after Limahong was defeated and fled. In 1581 the Spanish authorities opened a market calle Parian that became a sort of ghetto for the Sangleyes who didn't convert to Catholicism: it was located outside the walled city of Intramuros, where the Spanish colonizers lived and worked. In 1594 the authorities also created Binondo for the Chinese who converted to Catholicism (it is Chinatown in today's Manila, the oldest Chinatown in the world). The Sangleyes vastly outnumbered the Spaniards (thousands to a few dozens). The Sangleyes revolted in 1603 and the Spaniards killed thousands and burned down the Parian. From generation to generation the Parian kept moving.

Despite the distrust, the Chinese colony in the Philippines grew rapidly, as trade with China was lucrative and the only other option was to sail west across the Atlantic Ocean around the Cape of Good Hope (in violation of the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1493) using Dutch and Portuguese ports in the Indian Ocean: clearly not an ideal route.

Spanish priest Joaquin Martinez de Zuniga, who wrote "Historia de las Islas Filipinas" (1803), counted tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese in the Philippines. It became possible for the Chinese to emigrate to North America because both the Philippines and Mexico were part of Nueva Espana. Trade run by Manila's Sangleyes indirectly connected Canton with Sevilla, often bypassing state control (both Qing and Spanish), thereby creating a globalized economy in which American silver was exchanged for Asian goods, or Asian goods fashionable in Europe for European luxury goods that became fashionable among China's elite (like clocks and mirrors). This globalized economy effectively extended to the whole globe because the western Mediterranean was connected with the Middle East via ports like Marseille and Canton was connected with India via British routes and nearby Macao via Portuguese routes. And Manila became a cosmopolitan city, as documented by Spanish missionary and cartographer Pedro Murillo Velarde, author of the first detailed map of the Philippines in 1734 (the "Carta hydrographica y chorographica de las Yslas Filipinas").

In about 1763 Filipino immigrants somehow traveled as far as the swamps of Louisiana and founded the fishing village of Saint Malo, possibly the first Asian settlement in North America, a "floating" village of raised stilt homes that was first described in 1883 by writer Lafcadio Hearn. Both Chinese sailors and Chinese merchants travelled on the Spanish galleons bound for Acapulco. These galleons always stopped in Monterrey, sometimes for several weeks. Chinese fishermen settled around Monterrey even before Portola and Junipero Serra built the first Spanish settlements of Alta California in 1769. After Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1821, the route from the Philippines to America declined for a while because Spain moved control of the Philippines to Madrid. The next wave of Chinese emigration to the American continent came after Britain emancipated the African slaves of its Caribbean colonies. Both Britain and the Netherlands looked at China for indentured servants and workers (cheap labor). The decline of the transatlantic slave trade created an opportunity for those Chinese who wanted to emigrate to America: Chinese contract laborers found work as far as Argentina and in the sugar plantations of Cuba (the first recorded arrival in Cuba dates from 1847 when 206 arrived from Guangdong province) and later worked on the Panama Canal in 1903–14. Cuba had the largest Chinatown in Latin America (today there are virtually no Chinese left in Havana's Chinatown because the Chinese, having become rich capitalists, left after communist dictator Fidel Castro seized power in 1959 and nationalized all private businesses). Today, one of the smallest Chinese communities of Latin America is in Mexico, despite the fact that many arrived in Acapulco: clearly many Chinese left Mexico and the simplest explanation is that they moved to California.

On the East Coast and in Europe the confused reports of California gold had been discounted as mere hearsay. That changed when US president James Polk announced the discovery of gold in December 1848 during his "State of the Union" address. The trip to California was long and dangerous but in 1849 the dream of getting rich overnight attracted about 90,000 people (the so-called "49ers" or "argonauts"), of which only about 55,000 were US citizens. They may have been motivated also by the terror created in towns and cities by the cholera epidemic that had started in Europe and was spreading to the USA in 1849: thousands of 49ers died on their way to California.

The trip from the East Coast to San Francisco still took 4-8 months. There were still the same three routes: by sea around the Cape Horn, by sea to Panama's Atlantic Coast and then by sea again from Panama's Pacific Coast, and overland to Oregon or southern California, from where steamships sailed for San Francisco. Disease and "Indians" made each route more or less dangerous. Diseases spread more easily in ships. Indians often attacked caravans. Europeans had to travel first across the Atlantic Ocean to New York. It is not surprising that among the first gold diggers there were many from the Sandwich Islands (as James Cook called Hawaii): they only had to cross the Pacific Ocean, and they had been doing so for a long time (Polynesians were the preferred sailors for Pacific Ocean routes). Most of the "49ers" arrived via ship, entering the Bay Area at the strait that used to be called "Boca del Puerto de San Francisco" and had been renamed "Golden Gate" by Fremont (not because of the gold but because of the "golden" trade with China). And thousands of Chinese went through the same gate.

The ones arriving overland by wagon followed rudimentary maps that still said "unexplored" for most of the territory east of the Sierra Nevada.

The total amount of gold found in this relatively small region was colossal: $10 million in 1849, $41 million in 1850, $75 million in 1851, and $81 million in 1852; but it was distributed among a rapidly increasing number of miners. While in 1848 the amount of gold dug by a miner was enough to make him rich, and in 1849 the amount of gold per miner was more than enough to pay for food and supplies, within two years the amount per miner was barely enough to survive, given also the inflated prices of all items. The real beneficiaries of the mass migration were the businessmen who sold food, supplies, machinery and services to the miners. Miners lived in camps that soon became boomtowns. They were mostly men (possibly a 10 to 1 ratio). San Francisco itself was mostly a tent city. The weather was harsh in the winter. There were no hospitals and few doctors: even trivial injuries could lead to death. Even money was not widely available: many goods were paid for with gold until 1854, when the newly established San Francisco Mint started minting gold coins (that the USA adopted for national circulation). Drinking, gambling and violence made those towns unsafe. As profits decreased, crime increased. When Marshall discovered gold, California was still in a limbo, not ruled by Mexican authorities anymore but also not ruled by US authorities yet. Technically speaking, there weren't even laws in California. The US armies and private militias maintained some kind of order. There was no parliament to enact laws and there were no judges to enforce them. And, technically speaking, most goldfields were on public land, land that belonged to the government. Since there was no police force and no army presence, vigilante groups were organized. Victims included the indigenous populations, who were helpless against the wave of armed intruders. Thousands may have been killed during the Gold Rush. The Chinese were also frequently victims of violent crime because in 1854 the California Supreme Court decided that the Chinese did not have the right to testify in a California court against white citizens, including those accused of murder. That decision de facto legalized white violence against Chinese immigrants. Joaquin Murrieta was a legendary outlaw of the era.

A letter written by an unnamed immigrant describes the human toll of 1849: “Of course there is a great deal of suffering; a large number die every day, whose deaths are not published; several bodies are found every morning on the beach, and under carts where they have crawled for shelter. The principal disease is Dysentery, although dissipation and exposure kills a great many. Indeed, I never have seen so much dissipation in my life as prevails here. Every one drinks, and gambling is going on in almost every house, from eight in the morning until two and three at night, Sundays not excepted, and thousands change hands every day.”

Ironically, one person who lost money due to the gold rush was Sutter himself, who had even run for governor. He lost many of his employees who joined the gold rush, he was swindled by investors, and a tidal wave of gold prospectors and miners settled illegally on the land of his ranch even stealing his crops and animals. In December 1848 his son John Sutter Jr and Sam Brannan designed a new city, Sacramento, near the original New Helvetia, at the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers. It proved a strategic location, the ideal jumping-off point for the gold region. One of the new immigrants, stagecoach driver James Birch, arrived in Sacramento in 1849 to start his own stagecoach business, the California Stage Company, providing both transportation and mail delivery. Sacramento grew rapidly, despite a cholera epidemic in 1850 and the great fire of 1852.

Sacramento, serving the gold-mining community, quickly became a center of commerce to rival San Francisco. While most of the miners wound up broke, the merchants got rich selling mining equipment and supplies. Among the early arrivals of 1849 were two young men from New York: Collis Huntington, who traveled overland with his wife, and Mark Hopkins who traveled alone by sea via Cape Horn. They opened stores and in 1855 they merged into the Huntington and Hopkins Hardware Store. Charles Crocker and his two brothers arrived from Indiana to El Dorado County (near Coloma) in 1850, quickly gave up mining for the easier business of store owners in Sacramento, and Charles became one of the city's most prominent businessmen and politicians. Leland Stanford, a lawyer from Wisconsin, and his wife Jane, having lost all their possessions to a fire, and Leland's five brothers moved to El Dorado County in 1852, opened a general store for miners and in 1856 moved to Sacramento. The lives of these four immigrants would soon intersect and then shape the future of California.

The ones who got rich in the 1850s were those who had business acumen and invested in mines rather than mining themselves. For example, George Hearst, a poor immigrant when he arrived in 1850, who started out prospecting, selling supplies, farming and raising livestock, and invested his savings into mines, until in 1859 he struck it rich in the legendary Comstock Lode. He became partner with San Francisco lawyers James Haggin and Lloyd Tevis (a former 49er), who had started their law office in Sacramento in 1850, invested in gold mines and moved to San Francisco in 1853. Their firm Hearst, Haggin, Tevis and Co went on to become the largest private mining firm in the USA, controlling dozens of gold, silver and copper mines scattered between Alaska and Chile, including the world’s largest silver mine, the Ontario (1872) in Nevada, the world’s largest gold mine, the Homestake (1877) in South Dakota, and the world’s largest copper mine, the Anaconda (1880) in Montana. Tevis got so rich that he acquired shares in the California Steam Navigation Company, the California State Telegraph Company, stagecoach lines, streetcar lines and ranches, and even gained control of Wells Fargo in 1870 and co-founded the Pacific Oil Company in 1879. What he didn't achieve as a miner in 1849 he achieved as an investor in other people's mines. With the profit from mining, Hearst purchased a huge piece of land in San Simeon, near San Luis Obispo, which his son would make famous.

Charles Lux (born in a German-speaking part of France) was one of the young men who traveled from New York to San Francisco in 1849 and did not become a miner but instead opened a butcher shop. Henry Miller (born Heinrich Kreiser in one of the German kingdoms) was another young New Yorker who had arrived in 1850 and had the same idea to open a butcher shop. Both purchased a lot of land: Lux south of San Francisco (today’s South San Francisco, Burlingame, Millbrae and San Bruno) and Miller in the Central Valley (much of the San Joaquin Valley, even owning water rights to the San Joaquin River). They got together in 1858 and created a classic case of integrated meatpacking business: they raised cattle in Miller's ranches, drove them to Lux's ranches, and turned cattle into meat at their San Francisco slaughterhouse. Miller survived Lux by 30 years, expanded to other states and eventually owned a million cows. Meanwhile, Miranda Lux, who had married Charles Lux in 1857, became one of the Bay Area's first philanthropists: she financed schools for children and personally ran an orphan asylum.

Many of the travellers who witnessed the Gold Rush wrote accounts of it: Edward Gould-Buffum's "Six Months in the Gold Mines" (1850), Walter Colton's diary "Three Years in California" (1850), Jacques Antoine Moerenhout's "The Inside Story of the Gold Rush" (published only in 1935), John Swan's manuscript “A Trip to the Gold Mines of California in 1848”, Heinrich Lienhard's manuscript only partially published as "Californien Unmittelbar vor und nach der Entdeckung des Goldes" (1898) and as "A Pioneer at Sutter's Fort 1846-1850" (1941), James Carson's "Recollections of the California Mines" (1852) and Chester Lyman's diary "Around the Horn to the Sandwich Islands and California, 1845–1850" (only published in 1925), the latter written by an astronomer of Yale University. Marshall's discovery was documented in the diary of the Mormon soldier and laborer Henry Bigler, never published in book format (Bigler soon left to join the Latter-day Saints Church that had settled in Utah, but in October 1849 the church sent him back to California to mine gold on behalf of their leader Brigham Young).

Soon, land speculation was also thriving and new towns were being created. A pioneering speculator was the lawyer Horace Carpentier, who arrived in 1849 not to search for gold but to buy land and founded the city of Oakland across the Bay from San Francisco.

The California constitution was written (in 1849 in Monterey) by notables like John Sutter, Thomas Larkin, army captain Henry Halleck, ranch owners like Abel Stearns, and some Californios. Halleck became rich after he joined the law firm of Frederick Billings and Archibald Peachy, which specialized in adjusting the old Mexican land grants to California land titles. In 1853 Halleck hired architect Gordon Cummings to build a four-story Italianate building known as Montgomery Block, possibly the largest west of the Mississippi, conceived for law firms and newspapers (although located near the "Barbary Coast" red-light district).

The German immigrant Carl Weber, who had arrived in California with Bidwell in 1841 and who in 1845 had acquired Rancho Campo de los Franceses on the San Joaquin River, quickly realized that it was more lucrative (and safer) to sell supplies to gold miners than to be a gold miner. Realizing the strategic location of his ranch, in 1849 he founded a new town, Stockton, a natural gateway to the rivers of the gold country (the Calaveras, Stanislaus, Tulomne, Merced and Mariposa Rivers). It was the first town in California to have an English name. In 1850 he built the home that is now known as Weber Point Home: it was built with redwood lumber transported by cart from the village of Woodside (today, one of the richest cities in the world) to the port of Redwood City and then by barge to the San Joaquin River and the Stockton Channel. Thousands of Chinese came to Stockton from Guangdong province, and remained after the Gold Rush, so that Stockton was home to the third-largest Chinese community in California.

Hundreds of Chinese men settled in Camp Washington (today's ghost town of Chinese Camp near Yosemite), further up into the hills, between Stockton and the gold mines.

Thanks to the mines and to the port (and later to the railways), San Francisco was also becoming an industrial city. The area around Potrero Point (today's Pier 70) witnessed a boom of industrial activity.

In September 1849 Domingo Marcucci, a 22-year-old Venezuelan-born 49er who arrived from Philadelphia in a steamship of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, started a shipyard in San Francisco to build or remodel ships for Pacific Mail, starting with the Captain Sutter, the first steamboat to run between San Francisco and Stockton.

In 1849 Irish immigrants Peter and James Donahue started Union Brass & Iron Works in San Francisco that quickly turned to making machinery for mining and agriculture (and later, when acquired in 1864 by Henry Booth, locomotives, and, finally, when reorganized in 1884 by Irving Scott, ships and even submarines as one of the USA's best shipyards).

Johan Nordtvedt arrived in California from Norway in 1850, changed his name to John North, and, having failed at gold mining, in 1852 opened the first major shipyard of Potrero Point, which went on to build river steamboats and ocean schooners.

In 1852 George Johnson, a sea captain who had journeyed to San Francisco with the 49ers, established George C. Johnson & Company with partner George Gibbs to sell steel, iron and hardware.

In 1852 Lewis Coffey and John Risdon founded Snow Boiler Works, which in the late 1850s, renamed Coffey & Risdon’s Boiler and Steamboat Blacksmith’s Works, became the largest foundry and equipment manufacturer in California, mainly for steamboats, while providing most of the iron pipes in the hydraulic mines.

The Pacific Rolling Mill Company, the first major iron and steel mill in the Far West, was founded in 1866, in San Francisco by investors such as bankers Darius Mills and William Ralston, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, mining tycoons James Fair, James Flood and Alvinza Hayward.

The chief building material (and the largest single industrial sector) was wood, transported by lumber schooners from the Pacific Northwest. When the Gold Rush started, lumber was imported from the East Coast but it was obviously a long and expensive journey. The first ones to realize that it made more sense to use the forests north of San Francisco were Andrew Jackson Pope and Frederic Talbot, both from families who owned sawmills in Maine, who founded Pope & Talbot the moment they arrived in 1849 with their load of lumber, purchased timberland in the north on Puget Sound and even their own ships.

In 1857 William Fuller and Seton Heather formed a company in Sacramento to import paint. In 1862 Fuller moved the company to San Francisco and in 1868 formed the company Whittier, Fuller & Co with former rival William Whittier, which rapidly became the the largest paint dealer of California.

The industrialization of San Francisco consisted mainly in the processing of wood and metal, but also of food. Italian-born Domenico Ghirardelli, owner of a coffee and chocolate store in Peru in the 1830s, arrived as a 49er but in 1852 opened a store in San Francisco that replicated his Peruvian success and in 1866 established a chocolate factory (on Jackson Street, designed by Mooser) that made him the largest producer on the West Coast. In 1867 the Prussian immigrant Claus Spreckels opened the California Sugar Refinery to process Hawaiian sugarcane (in 1878 he even founded in Maui the town of Spreckelsville, which became the largest sugarcane plantation in the world), and later started growing sugar beets in the Salinas Valley and processing them in Watsonville.

Even more important for the region were the canneries. Daniel Provost is credited as being the first one, in 1856, to pack California fruits and vegetables so that they could be sold far away. The need was particularly felt in the south bay, in the Santa Clara Valley, where orchards were spreading fast and producing more than California could use. Being able to export to distant markets the fruit bounty of the valley represented a big business opportunity. The solution was to dry and pack the fruits, using the canning method invented in 1810 in France by Nicolas Appert. In 1860 Francis Cutting, based in San Francisco, began exporting processed fruit to the East coast and Europe. In Santa Clara Valley the business was pioneered by physician James Madison Dawson, who in 1871 shipped his first canned fruit, and whose company evolved into the San Jose Fruit Packing Company. Within a decade, Santa Clara Valley boasted dozens of small family orchards and canneries. In 1891 the Del Monte Hotel of Monterey licensed the Oakland Preserving Company, a cannery founded by San Francisco grocer Frederick Tilmann, the right to use “Del Monte” on their products, as the name was becoming popular. In 1899 18 canneries, representing the majority of all California canning, including the San Jose Fruit Packing Company, the Cutting Fruit Packing Company and the Oakland Preserving Company, merged to form the California Fruit Canners Association, later renamed the California Packing Corporation or Calpak with its headquarters in San Francisco, and marketing its products under the Del Monte brand name.

California was recognized early on as an ideal land for raising sheep and by 1867 there were about two million sheep, but until 1859 all wool clipped in California was shipped abroad. In 1858 a H Heynemann and his partner Pick opened the first woolen mill on the West Coast, the Pioneer Woolen Mills, using mostly Chinese labor. When the original wooden building at Black Point (today's Ghirardelli Square) burned down, the Swiss-born William Mooser (the patriarch of the Mooser architectural firm) replaced it with a red brick building (later purchased by Ghirardelli in 1893). The Mission Woolen Mills opened in 1861, also using Chinese labor.

Wine was originally a southern California affair, but George Yount, a fellow traveler of Wolfskill who had received a land grant from the Mexican authorities of Sonoma (which makes him the first resident of Napa Valley), had already planted grapes in Napa Valley in 1839. Wine production picked up in earnest only in the 1860s. John Patchett started Napa’s first professional vineyard in 1854 and started selling wine in 1857. Sam Brannan of gold fame, already a rich man, opened a vineyard in 1859 in a place that he named Calistoga, and then built the Napa Valley Railroad in 1863. Charles Krug started his Napa winery in 1861, and his success inspired Jacob Schram (1862), John Lewelling (1864), Hamilton Crabb (1868) and many others to start wineries in Napa Valley.

In 1850 California became a state of the USA, with its capital in San Jose', the 31st state, while the Utah Territory was being hijacked by the Mormons and would take a while to be split into the states of Nevada (1864), Utah (1896) and Colorado (1876). The New Mexico Territory was later split into Arizona and New Mexico, both of which became states only in 1912. John Geary, a hero of the conquest of Mexico City in 1847, was appointed postmaster of San Francisco in January 1849 and was elected the first mayor of the city in January 1850. In 1850 the population of San Francisco was 25,000 (36,000 in 1852). San Francisco was the biggest city of the gold region, Sacramento the second biggest, and possibly third was Marysville, the main supply center for the northern mines (founded in 1850 at the junction of Yuba and Feathers rivers by land speculators led by lawyer Stephen Field).

In April 1850 one of the first laws enacted by the state of California, ironically titled the "Act for the Government and Protection of Indians", de facto granted US settlers the right to abuse indigenous people, which led to a cultural, economic and physical genocide. The law was proudly signed by California's first governor Peter Burnett, who held a messianic belief in the destiny of the white race to colonize California. In 1851 the state of California enacted another law: a tax on foreign miners, targeting mainly Latinos and the Chinese. The tax convinced many Chinese to move to San Francisco and open laundries and restaurants, and others to find employment in agriculture and fishing. Point San Pedro (now China Camp) in San Rafael, along the shores of San Pablo Bay, 30 kms north of San Francisco, became one of the centers of shrimp fishing in the 1860s (the village is still standing in China Camp State Park), and dried shrimp was also exported to China. Shrimping villages appeared from Hunter's Point (bay side of San Francisco) as far south as Rincon Point (on the coast north of Los Angeles, today famous for surfing).

Whether they got rich or poorer, the immigrants transformed San Francisco into one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world with a diversity of people and cultures that rivaled London and New York. Two Chinese-language newspapers were founded, both run by Christian missionaries: The Golden Hills' News (April 1854) and The Oriental (January 1955). In less than a decade, San Francisco became one of the world's main seaports, certainly the main one on the Pacific Coast.

The gold rush created business empires of all sorts: in 1852 Henry Wells and William Fargo started a service to ship gold, which became a bank, Wells Fargo; and in 1853 Levi Strauss, a German immigrant, started selling canvas pants called "jeans" to miners. Charles Gillespie, Marie Seise's employer, founded in 1848 the Western Title Insurance Company for residential real estate, the predecessor of Fidelity National Title Insurance Company. In 1852 Joseph Eastland, a foundry engineer of Union Iron Works, had the idea to install street lamps using "brilliant gas" (instead of oil lamps) and formed the San Francisco Gas Company with investment from his employers (the Donahue brothers), and in 1854 the streets of San Francisco were for the first time lighted by gas. His boss Donahue became an industrial and transportation baron. In 1860 he started the Omnibus Railroad that provided the first major horse-drawn streetcar lines in San Francisco, as well as the San Francisco and San Jose Railroad (today's Caltrain). As the price of everything skyrocketed, Brannan became California's first millionaire. He bought land in both San Francisco and Sacramento. In 1861 he also bought land in Napa Valley, hired Japanese gardeners, and built a hot springs resort, Calistoga, inaugurated in 1862. In 1868 he also inaugurated a railway, the Napa Valley Railroad, to bring tourists from the port of Vallejo (connected by ferry to San Francisco) to his resort.

The Gold Rush boom was so bizarre that San Francisco welcomed all sorts of eccentrics. Among the 49ers was Joshua Norton, raised in British South Africa, who left in late 1845 and reached San Francisco via Liverpool and Boston in November 1849, rose as a real-estate investor but went bankrupt as a commodity trader, and in 1859 declared himself "Emperor of these United States". Having nurtured a network of friends in the press, he was tolerated and even respected by the citizens until the end of his life. The official 1870 census listed his occupation as "emperor".

Sacramento was no less cosmopolitan. In 1852 there were 814 Chinese (804 men and 10 women), 1371 in 1870 and 1781 in 1880. They settled in the old Sutter Slough, which became known as the China Slough, a swamp that they turned into a waterfront district of shops (notably laundry services), restaurants and theaters. In fact, the first Chinese-run Chinese-language newspaper of the USA, The Chinese Daily News 沙架免度新录, appeared at the end of 1856 in Sacramento. Like the San Francisco ones, all the Chinese-language newspapers of Sacramento lasted only a few months.

In 1851 gold was discovered also in northern California (today's Siskiyou, Shasta and Trinity regions), generating the boomtown of Shasta. Chinese miners built the Taoist temple in Weaverville, a boomtown on the Trinity River.

The demographic problem was that most immigrants were men. A partial census in 1850 found only 5,500 women over the age of 15 (which at the time was old enough to get married) out of 200,000 people. Many of them were widows: men died during the journey (of accidents, diseases, Indian attacks), men died in the mines, and men died in the lawless boomtowns.

First and foremost, the booming population needed food, which resulted in a boom in agriculture in the old ranches. For example, Italians from the Liguria region jumpstarted agriculture in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

The infrastructure too was improved greatly. In 1851, the US Post Office contracted George Chorpenning to deliver mail from Salt Lake City (Utah) to Sacramento, initially via a route cursed with hostile Indians and severe winters. Later, another route, via the Mormon Trail was used.

In July 1851, the first university in the state of California was chartered: the California Wesleyan College, soon renamed University of the Pacific, in the tiny town of Santa Clara.

In 1852 there were more than 200,000 non-indigenous people in California. In 1852 John Bigler was elected governor of California and moved the capital to Sacramento in 1854.

The decline of California's gold economy started in 1853. Not only did the yield keep declining, other gold mining areas were discovered, such as in Australia's New South Wales in February 1851, which made California's gold mines less relevant.

The original technology of gold mining was "placer mining", which simply consisted in looking for nuggets, flakes or dust of gold in flowing creeks. Placer mining moved higher and higher into the mountains after the miners discovered that gold could be found also in the creekbeds of extinct creeks, creeks that had existed millions of years ago. However, this kind of placer mining was more complicated because typically the gold was buried under deposits of minerals that accumulated over the ages. This required hydraulic mining (perhaps California's first technological innovation) or drift mining. Even more sophisticated was quartz-lode mining. Within a few months it became difficult to find gold the easy way (in flowing creekbeds). But the miners knew that the surface gold came from deep quartz veins and started digging for subterranean veins of gold-bearing quartz. This required know-how, heavy equipment (like stamp mills to crush ore) and chemical processing, i.e. financial backing. The first stamp mill was possibly the one used by John Fremont and Kit Carson after they discovered the Mariposa Mine in 1849 on land owned by Fremont. In 1849 gold had been found northeast of San Francisco on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada at Deer Creek Diggings, which the following year was named Nevada City. In 1850 gold-bearing quartz was discovered underground (the Gold Tunnel vein). Charles Marsh built here a 15-km ditch in 1850 that became the first section of the vast network of ditches of the South Yuba Canal. In 1853 Edward Matteson pioneered hydraulic mining at American Hill Diggings, just north of Nevada City. When Marsh's original Rock Creek Water Company evolved, in 1870, into the South Yuba Canal Company, the "canal" consisted of 400 kilometers of ditches, 20 reservoirs and dozens of flumes that carried water to hundreds of hydraulic mines. But the first important gold-bearing quartz vein was discovered in 1854 near the trading post erected in 1848 by Rhode Islanders Henry and George Angel (today's Angels Camp). Technically speaking, this is the "Mother Lode", a system of linked gold-quartz veins that extends 200 kms north from Mariposa (although "Mother Lode" came to be used as a generic term for the gold country). It is not a coincidence that nearby in 1854 the blacksmiths J.M. Wooster and Andrew Gardiner built the Altaville Foundry and Machine Shop to produce the stamp mills and the mining machinery for the Mother Lode mines (the foundry was later acquired by David Durie Demarest).

In 1850 lumberman George Roberts discovered gold-bearing quartz on Ophir Hill in Grass Valley north of Sacramento and several competing miners arrived to dig, but their hard-rock mines were short-lived and in 1852 were consolidated by a John Rush in the Empire Quartz Hill. The mine was rich but mining it required a high-pressure steam engine to pump water out and then later provide electricity. (It was acquired in 1869 by William Bowers Bourn).

California's Gold Rush affected the whole country in other ways than just mass migration. The demand for mining machinery (like stamp mills to crush ore) and hydraulic equipment (like steam-powered pumps to drain water from mines) fueled progress in iron technology all over the country. Even picks, shovels and pans had to be imported, since California had minimal industry. The Gold Rush also led to increased production of lumber for houses, mines and stores, and more efficient methods were developed to produce lumber and transport it. All these immigrants needed to eat, and California had little agriculture. Therefore those who failed in mining found lucrative opportunities in agriculture and this required irrigation and transportation. Soon the region was producing massive amounts of fruits, vegetables and grains. Roads and bridges had to be constructed. Better wagons and better steamships had to be produced rapidly. Old international trade routes were revamped and new ones discovered. Merchants, bankers and investors created a new financial world. The USA enjoyed a prolonged economic expansion between 1841 and 1856, and the "Gold Rush" was one of the factors because it stimulated so many sectors of the economy.

California's gold was a major motivator for the construction of the Panama Railroad, inaugurated in 1855 after five years of work, so that those going to California didn't have to spend a week in canoes and on mules but simply spend a day in a train. But perhaps the real motivation was not the passengers but the cargo: California gold could now be transported safely and quickly through Panama. At the same time, steamships replaced sailing ships.

In 1856, California inaugurated its first railway line, a railroad from Sacramento to Folsom, the Sacramento Valley Railroad, the first railroad west of the Mississippi.

In 1857 the US Post Office contracted with James Birch a new route for mail delivery between Texas and San Diego: the first letters in July took 53 days to travel the 2,000 kilometers. A few days later, in September, Birch drowned in the famous shipwreck of the "Central America" en route from Panama to New York (400 passengers died and its cargo of gold was lost, resulting in a financial panic).

In September 1858 John Butterfield, also under contract with the US Post Office, began mail delivery from St Louis and Memphis via Texas and the New Mexico Territory (literally along the Mexican border) to San Francisco, a distance of 4,500 kilometers covered in 24 days, New York Herald's reporter Waterman Ormsby joined the inaugural trip and wrote a famous series of articles.

In April 1860 the Central Overland California & Pike’s Peak Express Company, better known as "Pony Express", founded by three Missouri businessmen (William Russell, Alexander Majors and William Waddell), delivered its first mail in ten days from Missouri to Sacramento. Missouri was where the telegraph line of the east terminated. Its innovative service employed mounted riders rather than stagecoaches, followed a shorter direct route (via the Oregon, California and Mormon trails and then over the Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe). They changed horses at each of the 186 stations along the way in order to ride at maximum speed.

The Pony Express was in operation for only 18 months because in October 1861 the first transcontinental telegraph line (which followed the Oregon-California Trail) was inaugurated by Western Union, connecting San Francisco and the East Coast. San Francisco had already been connected to San Jose in September 1853 and Los Angeles in 1860. Note that most electrical devices and even wires were not manufactured in California: they had to be imported from the East Coast via Cape Horn. The first transcontinental telegraph message from San Francisco to Washington reached US president Abraham Lincoln who was busy with the Civil War (started in April).

San Francisco was a city without trees, a city of sandy beaches and barren hills with no significant creeks. There wasn't enough water to sustain a boom town. In 1860 George Ensign founded the Spring Valley Water Company and in 1862 his Prussian-born engineer Alexis Waldemar von Schmidt built tunnels and flumes to deliver the water of the Pilarcitas Creek in San Mateo County to San Francisco. This company held a monopoly on water rights in San Francisco until 1930. (In 1865 Schmidt formed the Lake Tahoe and San Francisco Water Works dreaming of bringing Lake Tahoe water to San Francisco through a system of tunnels, dams and canals, but the politicians never approved the project).

San Francisco's Stock Exchange was formed in 1862, the second oldest exchange in the USA after the New York Stock Exchange, and it specialized in mining stocks.

A railway was built in October 1863 connecting San Francisco to San Jose in the south of the bay, which had become the capital of California in 1850. Along the way they built a depot called Santa Clara. In the following years, orchards began to cluster around the Santa Clara depot.

The Gold Rush didn't just change the economy and demographics of California: it also changed its natural environment. Besides polluting the rivers, the exponential increase of gold diggers in the mountains damaged fish and wild game populations.

So much was happening that the 380,000 people who lived in California (of which perhaps as many as 300,000 had immigrated during the Gold Rush) hardly noticed the Civil War of 1861-65 between the Union (northern states) and the Confederates (southern states). Henry Halleck and John Fremont (both already successful state politicians) were the most senior California officials in Lincoln's army during the Civil War. California was still largely isolated from the rest of the country, especially from the areas where battles were fought, and in 1861-62 a terrible storm caused widespread flooding in the Central Valley. California did participate on the side of Lincoln's Union. California sent a few volunteers to fight but mostly helped the Union with its gold. When Confederate general Robert Lee surrendered to Union's general Ulysses Grant in April 1865, San Francisco learned it right away thanks to the telegraph. A few days later the telegraph also brought the news of the assassination of president Abraham Lincoln.

To accelerate the settlement of California, the USA issued the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted public land for free to any citizen (and European immigrant) who committed to developing the land for five years. Married women did not qualify (their husbands did), but single women, widows and divorced women did qualify. While most of the land was swallowed by speculators, thousands of new immigrants moved from other states. In total 60,000 homesteaders took up 10% of of California's public land. The act excluded African Americans, Native Americans and Chinese Americans because they could not become citizens until, respectively, 1870, 1924 and 1943.

The Gold Rush stimulated the construction of more than local infrastructure: it made it urgent to shorten the trip from the East Coast to San Francisco. In 1849 Asa Whitney had already published the proposal for a transcontinental railroad from Chicago to California, and in 1856 Theodore Judah, the chief engineer for the Sacramento Valley Railroad, had traveled to Washington to present his project for a transcontinental railroad. A route was scouted in early 1861 by Theodore Judah, who was the chief engineer for the Sacramento Valley Railroad, Charles Marsh (a Canadian 49er), builder of several important ditches around the mining town of Nevada City, and Daniel Strong, owner of a drug store, in the Sierra Nevada gold town of Dutch Flat. The route followed the old California Trail to Dutch Flat then over Donner Pass and then down along the Truckee River. In 1863 Judah pitched the idea to investors. Four rich men agreed: Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford (future founder of Stanford University, who had become governor of California in 1862). Neither of the four was a miner, but they all made their fortunes during the Gold Rush selling supplies to miners. The groundbreaking ceremony for the Central Pacific Railroad was held in Sacramento in 1863.

Between 1863 and 1865 very little was achieved, just about 80 kms of tracks going east. In 1865, in Auburn, the man in charge, the eye-patched James Strobridge, started hiring Chinese workers, many of whom worked for the California Central Railroad. Many of the others had arrived in Auburn for the gold. For example, Charlie Yue was a licensed gold assayer, possibly the first one in California born in China. Thousands more were imported from the Pearl River Delta. Charles Crocker is credited as the one who saw the advantage of hiring Chinese workers from the mines (and later also directly from China). Bloomer’s Ranch (northeast of Sacramento, near Auburn) may have been the first place where Chinese workers were employed. By 1869 about 15,000-20,000 Chinese immigrants had worked on the railroad. Their presence is documented in the wood engraving of the special correspondent of Harper's Weekly Newspaper, the artist Joseph Becker.

The Chinese dramatically increased the pace of construction. The railroad climbed the foothills and then crossed the Sierra Nevada via tunnels dug with dynamite at Donner Summit (today used by graffiti artists). Dynamite, made of nitroglycerin, had just been invented in 1867 by a Swedish chemist named Alfred Nobel, and was extremely unsafe. The Chinese managed impossible acts of engineering, for example the ledge cut (and sometimes dynamited) into the rock of the steep slope of Cape Horn (near Colfax) 400 meters above the American River. Once they were done with the tunnels through the Sierra Nevada, they crossed into the Nevada Territory laying the foundations for the future town of Reno (where the first train from Sacramento arrived in June 1868) and then began laying tracks in the Nevada desert in full summer heat (up to 49 degrees Celsius). They were probably unaware that they were employed on one of the great engineering projects of the century, and that they stunned the white population with their amazing collective work. The Chinese worked on the railroad with no interruption, even in winter, which is very snowy at that elevation and was particularly harsh in 1866–1867. Working on those unexplored mountains was dangerous even with good weather. The Chinese were paid less than white workers, and in 1867 they tried in vain to obtain a raise via the rare strike: the strike failed but it is notable for being the first large strike in the USA. Nobody knows the number of Chinese who died building the railroad. They were known by the white workers for their unusually varied diet, for eating with chopsticks, for drinking tea or at least hot water (which, incidentally, may have made them less prone to diseases like dysentery and so even more valuable as workers). Alas, they also had a reputation for consuming opium and alcohol , and for visiting Chinese prostitutes. It was the Chinese who laid the last rail of the transcontinental, but Alfred Joseph Russell’s iconic photograph of the meeting of the two railroads at Promontory Summit doesn't show any Chinese. (Strobridge, however, did pay tribute to them and later Charles Crocker's brother gave a speech in Sacramento that includes praise for the Chinese)

In May 1869 the western railroad reached the eastern one at Promontory Summit in Utah (the Union Pacific Railroad, which started in Nebraska) and thus the East Coast was connected with a western terminus in Alameda, near Oakland, from where ferries took passengers to San Francisco. Travel that had taken months could now be done in a few days. The transcontinental railroad shortened to six days the journey from Chicago to San Francisco and to ten days the journey from New York to San Francisco. It helped that, after annihilating the Fox and Sauk in Illinois and Wisconsin (1832) and the Seminole in Florida (1835), the USA gained full control of the Great Plains in a series of "Indian wars" during the 1860s, namely against the Arapahos, the Cheyennes and the Sioux (aka the Dakotas).

Railroads in Europe displaced the old economy of barge owners and horse-drawn vehicles but the transcontinental railroads simply settled a new world and created a new market. It also helped North-American railroad technology (steel rails, locomotives, comfortable rail cars) to become the best in the world. It also created new boomtowns that had nothing to do with gold: the village of Oakland mushroomed to 35,000 inhabitants in 1880, the second largest city in California after San Francisco.

The top beneficiaries, however, were the "Big Four": Crocker, Huntington, Stanford and Hopkins. Their Central Pacific Railroad had acquired control of the Sacramento Valley Railroad and the Western Pacific in 1865, and of the Southern Pacific (the western side of the southern transcontinental route to the Colorado River when it was still under construction) in 1868. In 1874 they even acquired the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company to control shipping traffic with Asia. In 1883 they extended the southern transcontinental railroad to New Orleans and in 1887 they connected San Francisco with Oregon, all consolidated in the Southern Pacific Company in 1885. All of them built with Chinese labor.

The Transcontinental Railroad increased the agricultural trade with the East Coast and was therefore a boon to California ranches. As gold mining became less and less profitable, and foreigners were increasingly discriminated against, in the 1860s many Chinese went to work for ranches, especially those who had been farmers back in China. Conveniently, the completion of the railroad had left thousands of Chinese unemployed. The state of California did not allow Chinese immigrants to own land, and the USA did not allow them to become US citizens through naturalization (the Naturalization Act of 1790 stipulated that only a “free, white person” was entitled to become a citizen). Until that time, California ranches had mostly been used for cattle. Agriculture had been pioneered by the missions but the sparse population didn't justify large-scale farming, but now the population was such that demand for food outpaced demand for gold-mining supplies. De facto, Chinese immigrants changed the diet of Californians, originally heavily meat-based, because they started growing grains, fruits and greens.

The Chinese enabled white landowners to turn California into an agricultural powerhouse. For example, John North, a politician originally from Minnesota, had founded the southern California town of Riverside in 1870, near the rail junction of San Bernardino, but his crops were not successful until Chinese workers brought the know-how of picking and packing oranges and lemons. The region soon became a major producer of citrus fruit.

Many of the Chinese had farmed in the Pearl River Delta of southern China (in Guangdong province) and they knew how to turn the swamps on a delta into fertile fields. In 1861 the state of California passed the Swamp and Overflow Act which allowed private companies to drain the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta for the purpose of fostering agriculture in the region. The Chinese applied their know-how to the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, building a vast network of earthen levees that multiplied the agricultural land. Most of the workers who drained swamps and built levees were Chinese. Despite the animosity that was growing towards the Chinese, in January 1852 the new governor of California, John McDougal, speaking to the state parliament, recognized that they were essential for draining swamplands to turn them into fertile land, and therefore encouraged more Chinese immigration at the same time that California's parliament and many town governments were imposing restrictions (e.g. the town of Columbia in 1852 explicitly barred Chinese from mining) and at the same time that in several places white miners were ganging up to expel Chinese miners and steal their mines. Unfortunately, a few months later the third governor, John Bigler, gave a racist speech in which he called the Chinese immigrants a "coolie race", which officially turned them into a lower class of immigrants than white European immigrants. By 1880 the Chinese had reclaimed enough delta marshlands such that fruit orchards and farms multiplied and the first canneries appeared. Chinese levee-builders transformed the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta swampland into prime farming land. On top of that, many Chinese settled in the reclaimed land and became farmers themselves. In 1880 the Chinese accounted for 38% of farming labor in the Sacramento region. They were also settling in the region around the Santa Clara mission (the future Silicon Valley); and by 1880 the Chinese accounted for 33% of farming labor in what is now Santa Clara County. They typically leased land from white landowners. In fact, agriculture became the first success story of the future Silicon Valley

The Chinese worked on reclamation and irrigation projects in San Joaquin County near Stockton and they began to farm the land that they had reclaimed. By 1880 there were 32 Chinese-owned farms in San Joaquin County, and by the turn of the century there were 50 Chinese owned farms employing about 3,000 Chinese laborers.

Chinese workers were also employed to build infrastructure. In North California they built trails and roads to Oregon and to northeastern California. The Chinese built both the Big Gap Flume and the stone walls of the Quick Ranch in Mariposa County. The Chinese built the Bartlett Toll Road east of Clear Lake. Joel Parker Whitney, who owned a large piece of land in Placer County, hired about 1,000 Chinese laborers to build roads and to grow fruit. Agostin Haraszthy's Buena Vista Vineyards in Sonoma County, considered the first modern commercial vineyard in California, employed mostly Chinese workers. Former Chinese gold miners also found employment in other kinds of mines such as borax mines in today's Lake County (after it was discovered in 1856) and in Death Valley, as well as the New Almaden mercury mine in today's Santa Clara County. In 1873 only 30,000 miners were left in California, and about 60% were Chinese. Chinese workers were ubiquitous in clothing and shoe factories as well as in the cigar industry: by 1866 half of the cigar factories were owned by Chinese and by 1870 more than 90% of the total labor force in the cigar industry was Chinese) By the late 1860s several factories were owned by Chinese immigrants and relocated in San Francisco's Chinatown.

The Chinese were also fishing, particularly off the coast of Monterey, in the San Francisco bay (like Hunter's Point), and north of the bay (like China Camp), and were often working in fish canneries.

Other veterans of the Transcontinental Railroad remained to work for the Central Pacific or joined other railway companies. A few months after completing the transcontinental railway, in November 1869 the Central Pacific connected Sacramento to San Francisco.

In September 1876 the Southern Pacific Railroad (owned by the same "Big Four" of the Central Pacific), using again Chinese labor, connected San Francisco and Los Angeles. Los Angeles had about six thousand people. The railway connected L.A. to the East Coast via San Francisco. That was the beginning of L.A.'s growth: by 1890 its population had increased to 50400 and it topped 100,000 in 1900. That railway included another engineering wonder: the Tehachapi Loop, created by about 3,000 Chinese workers. In 1881 Charles Crocker wrote to Collis Huntington that the railway was bringing in 8,000 Chinese from Guangdong province to work on the Tahachapi railway.

In 1877 Chinese railroad workers were employed in building an extension of the Southern Pacific Railroad through the San Joaquin Valley. When the project was completed and they were dismissed, the Chinese settled in the town of Hanford and took farming jobs. A vibrant local Chinatown of shops, restaurants, hotels, schools and a Taoist temple rose in Hanford.

A thousand Chinese worked on the railroad that crossed the mountains from San Jose to reach the sea in Santa Cruz, including a two-kilometer tunnel, which opened in 1880. Chinese railroad spread literally to every corner of the USA. Between May 1880 and September 1885 the Canadian Pacific Railway (busy building Canada's equivalent of the Transcontinental) employed about 20,000 Chinese, although most of them were new arrivals from the Pearl River Delta.

Some of the Chinese who had worked with nitroglycerine were hired in 1881 by the newly established Hercules plant in San Pablo Bay to produce dynamite. The underpaid Chinese workers lived in humble dormitories near the factory. Several workers died in explosions.

Many Chinese dismissed by the railroads and the mines ended up as woodcutters. After the railroad was completed in 1869, a town located near the Donner Summit tunnels in the forests near Lake Tahoe greatly benefited: Truckee became the gate to the lumber needed by the mines. Many Chinese of the railroad settled in Truckee, and in 1870 more than 25% of the population was ethnic Chinese.

Some Chinese tried to go back to mining, but the case of Bodie shows what happened to them. Gold had been found in 1859 north of Mono Lake, quite far from the original "gold country", on the other side of Yosemite. The town came to be known as Bodie from the name of the miner who had found gold, William Bodey. In 1878 one of the richest gold and silver ores of California was discovered, and for two years Bodie shipped significant amounts of gold and silver. Chinese miners, glad to leave the gold country where they were discriminated against and abused, were among the first to arrive in Bodie, but they were forbidden to mine and had to content themselves with opening shops. By 1880 there were several hundred Chinese (out of a population of 13,000) and they were shopkeepers, laundrymen, cooks, laborers, servants, dishwashers, a druggist, a restaurant owner, a hotel owner and some women.

California had run out of gold, but other minerals were discovered, unfortunately almost always in places where life was not easy, and Chinese workers were often employed. After borax was discovered in the desert of Death Valley, notorious for the scorching summer heat, a plant was built in 1883 near Greenland (today's Furnace Creek Ranch), the Harmony Borax Works. Most of the mine's workers were Chinese and the Chinese built most of the road from the plant to Mojave that was famously plied by mule-driven wagons.

Chinese immigration increased dramatically when the Gold Rush had already ended. The reason is simple. Those who had made money during the Gold Rush started restaurants and other businesses, and were in a position to invite the rest of their families to join them. At the same time the fortunes made in California by those who had left in 1849 and returned to China rich encouraged others to try their luck too in California.

The Chinese immigrants didn't write much about their experience, and so their voices are notably absent from historical accounts. The only Chinese who were fluent enough in the English language and powerful enough to get their opinions published were the rich merchants of San Francisco, like Norman Assing and Tong Achick; and they did speak up against the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants. But the thousands of Chinese laborers employed in mines and fields have been erased from history.

The Chinese soon became famous for another habit, besides working very hard: saving money. Despite their low salaries, several Chinese became rich enough to buy shops and even factories. California manufacturers grew rich by employing Chinese labor, but often their laborers became owners and then employed, in turn, other Chinese workers.

In 1850 the USA had a population of 23 million. Officially, there were only four thousand Chinese, mostly located in California. In 1860 the USA had increased to 31 million and the Chinese population had increased to 35,000. Chinese in California outnumbered immigrants from any other country. In 1870 the USA population was more than 38 million of which 64,000 were Chinese, 77% of whom in California.

Incidentally, in 1849 the Chinese also started moving to Cuba, a much longer trip. Thousands went to work in the Cuban sugar plantations.

The main inland town of the Central Valley between Los Angeles and Sacramento was Millerton, originally a military fort, Fort Miller, on the San Joaquin river. The town was devastated by floods in 1862 and 1867. In 1856 the citizens had expelled their Chinese population. Moses Church was a blacksmith who had arrived in California in 1852, traveling across the country by ox team with his wife and four children. In 1870 he was hired by a farmer, Anthony Easterby, to build a canal from the Kings River to wheat fields. At the time the region was almost a desert. In 1872 Leland Stanford was so impressed by the lush fields in the middle of the desert that he decided to build a station and then a city, Fresno, for his railway to Los Angeles. As usual, most of his workers were Chinese, and some settled in the area, founding Fresno's Chinatown. In 1874 the citizens of Millerton voted to move to Fresno. Moses Church went on to build hundreds of kilometers of irrigation canals which transformed the desert into fertile land. Stanford's Southern Pacific Railroad attracted immigrants. Fresno quickly became the agricultural and financial hub of the Central Valley, the main city between Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

The transcontinental railroads changed the demographics of California. For example, the railroads encouraged the production of wheat. The Central Pacific Railtoad promoted the Central Valley to the farmers of the Midwest, so much so that during the 1870s the Central Valley was probably the fastest growing region of California and by 1890 there were more Midwestern immigrants than North-eastern immigrants in California.

Louis Daguerre had invented the daguerreotype (an early photographic method) in 1839 in France. The invention spread quickly to the American continent and daguerreotypist shops popped up in all major cities.

Robert Vance, who had photographed the silver mines of Chile, arrived in California with the 49ers, opened art galleries in San Francisco and Sacramento, and in 1851 exhibited in New York some 300 daguerreotypes of the Gold Rush (all lost).

Carleton Watkins, who had arrived in 1851 with his childhood friend Collis Huntington, exhibited in New York in 1862 the daguerreotypes he had taken the year before in Yosemite, and that's how the East Coast got to see the wonders of Yosemite for the first time.

Alfred Hart was hired by the Central Pacific Railroad to document the progress of the railroad out of Sacramento and sold his 364 stereo photographs to Watkins. In 1870 he published "The Traveler's Own Book" describing how to travel by train from Chicago to San Francisco.

In 1852 Silas Selleck, originally a daguerreotypist from New York, opened in San Francisco the Cosmopolitan Photographic Art Gallery with his Sacramento partner George Howard Johnson (he also took daguerreotypes of corpses in their caskets at a cemetery).

The most bizarre and creative of the bunch was English immigrant Edward Muybridge, who had befriended Selleck since emigrating to New York in 1850 and in 1856 had opened a shop in San Francisco selling books, wood engravings, lithograph prints and Carleton Watkins' daguerreotypes before adopting in 1867 the pseudonym "Helios" and becoming a traveling photographer in a wagon called the Flying Studio, taking daguerreotypes that were sold by Selleck's gallery. He became famous in 1878 when he photographed a running horse for Leland Stanford at the race track of his Palo Alto Stock Farm (now part of Stanford University), which was the first example of chronophotography. In 1878 Muybridge also created a 360-degree five-meter long panorama of San Francisco from 13 photographs taken from the turret of Mark Hopkins' mansion. Muybridge's magnum opus was the 11-volume book "Animal Locomotion" (1887) containing 781 illustrations of people and animals in motion (walking, playing, dancing, galloping, flying, etc).

Los Angeles' photographers mostly captured views of prominent buildings and landscapes. William Godfrey, both photographer and miner, who had arrived in Placerville in 1850, took the first photo of downtown Los Angeles (of "The Plaza") in 1864. His business partner Henry Payne became one of the most prolific photographer of the city's buildings. Swedish-born Valentine Wolfenstein opened in 1871 in Temple Block a photography studio that catered to rich families.

Between 1850 and 1870 several important newspapers were born. In 1851 a John Emerson and his business partners started San Jose's newspaper San Jose Weekly Visitor (later renamed Mercury News, named for the nearby New Almaden mercury mines near San Jose). In 1855 James King (a former 49er) began publishing the Daily Evening Bulletin in San Francisco (King was assassinated by a politician who was then lynched by a mob). The Daily Morning Call was launched in December 1856 by five investors and edited by one of them, George Eustace Barnes (who in 1864 hired Mark Twain, as Samuel Clemens was now calling himself, as the only full-time reporter). James McClatchy launched the Sacramento Bee in 1857. The Democratic Press (later renamed San Francisco Examiner) was born in 1863 (and acquired in 1880 by mining tycoon George Hearst). The Daily Dramatic Chronicle (later renamed San Francisco Chronicle) was founded in 1865 by brothers Charles and Michael de Young. The literary journals edited by Bret Harte were devoted to the (scant) literary scene of San Francisco: the Golden Era, founded in 1852 by Rollin Daggett (a failed 49er) and John Macdonough Foard, the Californian, founded in 1864 by poet Charles Henry Webb, and the Overland Monthly, founded in 1868 by Bavarian-born bookseller Anton Roman.

In 1876 the Bohemian immigrant Francis Korbel founded San Francisco's legendary satirical magazine The Wasp, whose lead cartoonist was the Prussian-born George Frederick Keller.

The wealthy politician Frank Pixley, a former 49er who was now a political ally of Leland Stanford, co-founded in 1877 a weekly literary magazine, The Argonaut, that hired Ambrose Bierce as the editor. Bierce had arrived in San Francisco in 1867, a humble employee of the mint, and had married San Franciscan socialite Mollie Day (the daughter of a Virginia City mine superintendent), before becoming a journalist. Bierce joined the Wasp in 1881. In the 1880s the Argonaut was notable for hosting female writers such as: novelist Gertrude Atherton, the wife of George Atherton (who had inherited the fortune of his father Faxon Atherton as well as his mother Dominga's mansion, built in 1881 in San Francisco) and later Ambrose Bierce's lover; the reclusive supernatural-fiction writer Emma Dawson (who never married); the Los Angeles-based short-story writer Yda Addis, daughter of peripatetic photographer Alfred Addis (she never married but caused a scandal when she became the lover of former governor John Downey, thirty years her senior).

California began building its academia, which was obviously lagging by centuries behind the East Coast, where Harvard had been founded in 1636, Yale in 1701, the University of Pennsylvania in 1740 and Princeton in 1746. Evangelical organizations led the way. The Jesuits founded Santa Clara University in 1851 and Saint Ignatius Academy (later renamed University of San Francisco) in 1855. The Young Ladies’ Seminary was founded in Benicia in 1852 by Sylvester Woodbridge and other members of the First Presbyterian Church of Benicia. That church, founded in 1849, had been California's first Protestant church, and Benicia in 1850 had become one of the first California cities with a city council and a mayor. The seminary was meant to educate the young women from the Mother Lode region as well as from Gold Country towns like Sacramento and Stockton. Two missionaries, Cyrus Mills and his wife Susan, acquired it in 1865, relocated it to the Oakland foothills and renamed it Mills College, the first women's college west of the Rocky Mountains.

In 1857 John Swett and Henry Janes funded San Francisco's normal school to train teachers, directed by George Minns, a school that moved to San Jose in 1871 and was renamed California State Normal School and eventually became San Jose' State University, the oldest public university on the West Coast. A failed 49er, Hugh Toland, established a private medical school in San Francisco, Toland Medical College, which in 1873 was incorporated in the University of California and in 1898 moved to a their new building on Parnassus Hill, becoming the medical school of UC San Francisco. The University of California was established in 1868 on the ashes of the College of California created in 1853 in Oakland by Henry Durant (as Contra Costa Academy) and it opened its Berkeley campus in 1873.

Pomona College was founded in 1887 by pastor Charles Sumner and other members of Pomona's Pilgrim Congregational Church, 50 kms east of Los Angeles (originally a five-room cottage but soon relocated to the Claremont Hotel that was conveniently going out of business during the economic crisis of 1888). Occidental College was founded in 1887 in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles by pastor Samuel Weller and other members of the Presbyterian Church, with help from Lyman Stewart and Thomas Bard of the future Union Oil and from cattle rancher James Bell.

California was also beginning to appreciate its stunning natural beauty. The western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, both on the west and on the east sides, were littered with mining camps and boomtowns but the Sierra Nevada itself was largely unexplored. The California Geological Survey finally conducted a survey of the Sierra Nevada, led by Josiah Whitney along with William Brewer, Charles Hoffmann and Clarence King, starting with the future Yosemite Park in 1863, continuing in 1864 with the future Kings Canyon Park, where they discovered the highest mountain of the USA, named Mount Whitney (higher mountains would be added to the USA three years later with the purchase of Alaska). Mount Whitney was first summited in 1873 by three Lone Pine fishermen. The mountains were largely explored by the least documented of all explorers: the European shepherds, who probably created many of the trails used today by mountaineers. The High Sierra was an ideal terrain for sheep, thanks to its many meadows and relatively mild climate. One such shepherd was John Muir, originally from Scotland, a nomadic sawyer who had reached San Francisco in 1868, having traveled by steamship from Florida via Cuba and Panama, and settled in Yosemite for a few years becoming an amateur botanist and geologist besides a legendary mountain guide. In 1871 Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled in eleven days from his home in Massachusetts to California, where he spent seven weeks, visiting Yosemite and meeting John Muir. Muir eventually became influential enough to convince the USA to create Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks in 1890, but never actually hiked what is today North America's most famous trail, the John Muir Trail from Yosemite to Mt Whitney. The idea for that trail must be credited to Theodore Solomons, born and raised in San Francisco, who in 1892 set out to independently explore regions of the Sierra Nevada that no white man had seen before.

Chinatown's bad reputation for crime, drugs and prostitution was surpassed by a new district. The sailors and miners who stopped in San Francisco needed women and entertainment and could find it in a neighborhood nicknamed "Barbary Coast" (after the Barbary Coast of North Africa where pirates and slave traders thrived). Barbary Coast became the "red-light" district of saloons, dance halls, brothels, vaudeville theaters and drug stores selling just that (drugs), all establishments that catered exclusively to a male clientele Barbary Coast was lawless, with frequent murders and robberies. This was also the origin of San Francisco's reputation as a hub of homosexual "depravation" (as it was considered back then). Young men made up the vast majority of the population, especially the transient one. It became normal in the world of entertainment that men would play women roles. Cross-gender dressing was funny and transgressive. Same-sex dancing was inevitable. The result was that homosexuality became more common than in any other city, and same-sex prostitution joined the ranks of regular prostitution.

But perhaps San Francisco's real problem was neither crime nor "amorality": it was corruption, which escalated rapidly out of control. After losing an election in New York, politician David Broderick moved to California as a 49er but instead of searching for gold he searched for political power. He was elected state senator in 1850 and became vice-governor in 1851 under California's second governor, John McDougal. In San Francisco he engineered a system of bribes and embezzlement that made him a rich and powerful man. In 1856 James King of the Daily Evening Bulletin, the only journalist to openly protest against Broderick's graft, was assassinated by James Casey, a politician who worked for Broderick (who was then lynched by a mob). Nonetheless, in 1857 Broderick managed to be appointed senator in Washington. The only thing that stopped his career was a pistol duel that he fatally lost in 1859.

Washoe County, located on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, in the northwestern corner of the Utah Territory bordering Oregon to the north and California to the west, had been explored by John Bidwell in 1841 and by John Fremont in 1843, who had named the valley river Carson River in honor of his scout Kit Carson. In 1851 a Mormon community had been established by John Reese around a trading post, Mormon Station, which in 1854 had been renamed Genoa in honor of Columbus' supposed birthplace (today Genoa is Nevada's oldest city). Nearby, ranchers had started the trading post of Eagle Station, which Abraham Curry had purchased in 1858 and renamed Carson City. At the time there were about 1,000 persons in Western Utah, all living under Mormon rule, mostly farmers, cattle ranchers and traders, but also 200 gold placers.

A gold nugget had been found already in 1849 by a Abner Blackburn (who had enrolled in the Mormon Battalion in 1846) in a place that came to be known as Gold Canyon and placers had been attracted to the moderately productive area. In 1855 John Reese hired a group of San Francisco Chinese to dig the Rose Ditch (aka Reese Ditch), a canal to bring water from the Carson River to Gold Canyon placers. Some of the Chinese laborers stayed to work on abandoned placer deposits. In January 1859 miner James Finney and others found gold on a hill that came to be known as Gold Hill, just north of Gold Canyon. In June two Irishmen, Patrick McLaughlin and Peter O'Reily, discovered gold nearby, under the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, and an aspiring miner, Henry Comstock (in reality a Canadian-born sheepherder and trapper from Oregon), convinced them that it was on his land. The Ophir Mine was born, with investment from three other people including George Hearst (it is unknown who named it "Ophir" after the Biblical place of gold). In August, it became apparent that the silver mixed with the gold was even more valuable than the gold. These miners had just stumbled onto the largest deposit of silver ore in the USA (still to this day), which came to be known as the Comstock Lode. (Comstock, who was never a protagonist, sold his share and moved out, and committed suicide in 1870 at the age of 49, McLaughlin became a cook and died in poverty, O'Riley lost everything and ended up in a mental asylum). The discovery sparked a "silver rush", the most sensational since the Gold Rush of 1849. Finney, the real discoverer of the Comstock Lode, named the mining camp under Mt Davidson that swelled into an overnight booming town as Virginia City, in honor of his birthplace. (Finney too sold his share and died in June 1861 in a horse accident at the age of 44). The center of mass moved from Genoa to Virginia City.

Virginia City quickly became a melting pot of various ethnic groups: Chinese, Irish, English, and of course the native Paiutes. From the beginning the Chinese were discriminated against: a Virginia City document of 1859 stated: “No Chinaman shall hold a claim in this district.” C Street became a border between the town of the merchants, investors and mining corporations, and the town of the Chinese, the Paiute Indians and the poor miners, including the "red light" district. Some Chinese remained near Gold Canyon, in a place that was known as simply Chinatown, 20 kms south of Virginia City. In 1861 this Chinatown was renamed Dayton after a John Day who planned a new town, and Dayton grew as a major milling and commerce center (until 1869 when the Virginia & Truckee Railroad was completed, bypassing Dayton and connecting the mines on the Comstock Lode to the transcontinental railroad in Reno).

The Comstock Lode posed new mining problems that required technological innovations. To start with, the silver was mostly underground. The miners had to dig tunnels. In 1860 the Orphir Mine hired as superintendent a Philip Deidesheimer, a German-speaking engineer from Hesse (Germany did not exist at the time), who had moved to San Francisco in 1852. He invented a method to supporting the unstable rocks of the tunnels ("square-set timbering", resembling a wooden honeycomb). This system required a lot of lumber, and not enough timber was available in Virginia City.

There were forests around Lake Tahoe, not far from Virginia City, and initially the logs cut there were transported by wagon. Loggers were familiar with the concept of the gravitation flume, a man-made channel that can float logs downhill. James Haines, a lumberman, had already built a log flume in 1859 as a faster way to transport lumber to Virginia City, and in 1867 he pioneered the V-shaped log flume on a 52-km route from the Sierra Nevada on the Carson River until Empire City, a newly formed town near Carson City and Dayton. Haines' invention was capable of transporting more than 100 kilometers of lumber daily from the Sierra Nevada to Empire City, that was soon nicknamed "the seaport of Nevada". The forests around Lake Tahoe were cleared within a few years. The vast majority of the woodcutters in Washoe County were French-Canadian and Chinese immigrants. In 1867 there was even a "Woodchopper's War" between the two groups. The Chinese labor force of Washoe County grew rapidly, becoming about 82% in 1880, including the three thousand above Lake Tahoe. The Chinese were also employed in flume building, road building and cooking, and some even started their own independent timber business.

In 1860 Almarin Paul invented a method to speed up the extraction of silver and gold from quartz ore using mercury, something that could be done in hours instead of days (the "Washoe Pan Process"). It was Duane Bliss' first job to help Paul run the first quartz mill.

Another important element of the "silver rush" was water. These mines were not located up in the foothills and took water from springs and wells. In 1860 the Gold Hill Water Tunnel Company was formed at Gold Hill to bore a tunnel into the mountain and collect and distribute more water. The Virginia City Water Company was formed by the Hungarian immigrant Arnold Theller in Virginia City to pump water from Cedar Hill Spring. These companies took water from seven tunnels and ran it down flumes and ditches into large cisterns above Virginia City and Gold Hill. The two companies merged in 1862 into the Virginia and Gold Hill Water Company, which the following year also absorbed the Cedar Hill Water Company. While many companies supplied timber to the Comstock, this water company enjoyed pretty much a monopoly on water for the mines. John Skae, the local telegraph operator of the California Telegraph Company, got rich thanks to an early form of "insider trading": he read the messages exchanged by mining magnates and speculated accordingly in the San Francisco stock market. He then took control of the Virginia and Gold Hill Water Works, hiring as superintendent John Gashwiler (later a partner of George Hearst in Idaho and South Dakota).

San Francisco's Union Iron Works provided much of the mining equipment in the Comstock Lode mines. Coffey & Risdon sold steam engines and boilers to the silver mines of the Comstock Lode and the company was renamed Risdon Iron and Locomotive Works in 1868.

The ore excavated from the mines needed to be milled: by 1880 more than 200 mills operated along the Comstock Lode. At the beginning these mills (employing large and heavy machinery like stamps) had to transport the equipment from San Francisco or from eastern cities via wagons over very poor mountain wagon roads. In 1866 the Gould & Curry Company south of Virginia City boasted 80 stamps.

Compared with the Gold Country of 1848, the Comstock Lode had one big problem: food. Apart from a few pockets of farming land, most of western Utah Territory didn't lend itself to farming and grazing. Food had to come from Sacramento, San Francisco or Owens Valley.

The Comstock Lode was known as "Yin Shan" ("Silver Mountain") to the Chinese. Chinese of all occupations flocked to the region: railroad workers (especially after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869), shop owners, placer miners, mill laborers, laundrymen, farmers, servants, and of course cooks. They were about 7% of the population of Virginia City in 1870, one of the largest Chinese communities in the West (between 1500 and 2000 people). The New York Times wrote in 1868 that Virginia City’s Chinese quarter was “filled with long streets of Chinese laundries, barber shops, tea stores, peanut stands, and nondescript booths.”

Meanwhile, in 1861 western Utah territory broke away as the Nevada Territory, and, in 1864, thanks to the efforts of a Virginia City lawyer, William Steward, Nevada became the 36th state of the USA: Lincoln needed its gold and silver for financing the Civil War.

That's when the Comstock Lode went corporate. The ore deposits, buried deep underground, required professional engineers and significant capital that favored big investors, and ideally vertical integration of financing, land purchase, woodcutting, transportation, engineering and mining. The first Gold Rush in California was not capital-intensive at all: anyone with a pan could search for gold; but the Comstock Lode demanded more capital and management and so it lent itself to a more "corporate" style of mining.

William Ralston had arrived in San Francisco in 1854, originally to work in the steamship business, and had already started a banking firm in 1856 with partners that included Cornelius Garrison (formerly a card hustler on Mississippi steamboats and a casino owner in Panama). In 1864 Ralston and fellow banker Darius Mills (a 49er who had built a bank in Sacramento in 1852 but had never invested in gold mining but rather in railways) opened in San Francisco the Bank of California, the first commercial bank on the West Coast with a branch in Gold Hill run by William Sharon. Sharon employed usurer tactics to reposses mines until Bank of California de facto achieved a monopoly over the Comstock Lode, whose manifestation was the Union Mill and Mining Company.

The underground nature of the mining and the rapid corporate takeover of the mines explains why the Comstock Lode was an "urbanized" affair rather than a scattered phenomenon like the Gold Rush of 1849.

In 1864 Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins and Crocker (aka the Central Pacific Railroad) linked Sacramento to the Comstock mining district when they built the Dutch Flat-Donner Pass Wagon Road. The road was an instant hit and proceeds from its traffic probably paid for the construction of the transcontinental railroad.

Life in the boomtowns was documented by the reporters of the Territorial Enterprise, a newspaper originally founded in 1858 in Genoa and based in Virginia City since 1860, notably by two immigrant roommates: William Wright, who wrote under the pen name "Dan DeQuille", and Samuel Clemens, a failed miner who wrote under the pen name "Mark Twain" (soon to become one of the most famous writers in the world).

The town of Reno was invented by a Bill Fuller. In 1859, when silver was discovered at the Comstock Lode, he bought land strategically located in a place where crossing the Truckee River was relatively easy, and the following year he started a river ferry, a trading post, an inn and finally a toll bridge. It became known as Lake's Crossing after a friend, Myron Lake who in 1861 traded a distant ranch for Fuller's operations. In 1868 Lake made a deal with Charles Crocker to situate a depot of the transcontinental railroad at his Crossing, and Crocker renamed it after a Civil War martyr, Jesse Reno. Crocker accepted the deal because Virginia City was not in the route of the transcontinental railroad devised by Judah, Marsh and Strong, but Reno was only 40 kilometers north of Virginia City. Many Chinese workers of the Central Pacific Railroad settled in Reno.

In 1869 a railroad was built to link Virginia City with Carson City on the river, mostly by Chinese labor, who also at the same time completed the first transcontinental railway. The following year the Virginia and Truckee Railroad, connecting Carson City and Virginia City with Lake Tahoe, started operating. It was funded by the Bank of California and managed by their employee Henry Yerington. In 1872 the line was extended to Reno and the transcontinental railroad. The early locomotives were made by Henry Booth, an Englishman who had moved to San Francisco in 1851, had acquired in 1864 Peter Donahue's Union Iron Works and had built the first locomotive made in California in 1865.

If the Chinese suffered discrimination and the Paiutes were dispossessed of their lands, the workers of the underground mines didn't fare much better: they had to work in temperatures of up to 57 degrees while managing explosives and operating heavy equipment. Furthermore, the deeper the shaft the worse the air quality. There were no ventilation tunnels. The deeper the shaft the more water had to be drained. There were no drainage tunnels. In 1869 an underground fire at a Gold Hill mine (the Yellow Jacket mine) spread smoke to the neighboring Crown Point and Kentuck mines, killing at least 35 miners who were stuck 260-300 meters underground, the worst mining disaster in the USA up to that time. The San Francisco stock market crashed, but Crown Point Mine's superintendent John Jones (a 49er) discovered a silver bonanza in 1871 that revitalized the Comstock Lode. (The following year Jones was elected senator, defeating William Sharon).

The deeper mines needed even more water. Sharon had acquired control of the old Virginia City and Gold Hill Water Company. In 1869 the four "Bonanza Kings" and John Skae bought Sharon's interest in the Virginia and Gold Hill Water Company, hired Prussian engineer Hermann Schussler, the famed chief engineer of San Francisco's Spring Valley Water Works (for which he had built the dam of the San Andreas Reservoir in 1870 and the dam of the Crystal Springs Reservoir in 1888, possibly at the time the largest concrete structure in the world), and set out to bring water from the Sierra Nevada, about 50 kms to the west. This project, whose superintendent was John Overton, was an engineering challenge: it implied building a dam on the Sierra Nevada, channeling the water into a wooden flume and then to an iron pipe that dropped the water into Washoe Valley from where it was lifted to Lakeview Hill above Virginia City as an inverted siphon (which pushed water uphill without pumps), down to a reservoir (named Five Mile Reservoir) via another wooden flume and down via other wooden flumes to cisterns above Gold Hill and Virginia City. High-pressure pipes were required for the water which first rushed down and then shot up. The 13-km wrought-iron high-pressure pipe was made by San Francisco's Risdon Iron Works, and San Francisco's George C. Johnson provided one million rivets. The material was delivered to Reno on the Central Pacific Railroad and then to the station of Lakeview by the newly completed Virginia & Truckee Railroad. Most of the lumber, dropped via a 4-km V-flume to the Virginia & Truckee Railroad, came from a sawmill (in 1878 renamed Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company) located in Little Valley between Lake Tahoe and Washoe Valley, whose superintendent was the same John Overton, working for owners Walter Hobart and Seneca Marlette. In 1873 Virginia City started receiving water from the Sierra Nevada.

Four Irishmen, namely mining superintendents John Mackay and James Fair and San Francisco saloon owners and stock traders James Flood and William O'Brien, formed a partnership and in 1869 purchased the Hale & Norcross mine from Sharon's Bank of California and as well as the Sparrow & Trench mill (one of the largest operations). In 1871 they acquired control of the flailing Consolidated Virginia Silver Mine and went on a buying spree, buying up the historic Ophir and the Gould and Curry mines. MacKay, raised in poverty in New York, had arrived in California's gold camps in 1851, had moved to Virginia City in 1859, and in 1865 had become rich investing in the Kentuck mine. Fair was an experienced miner. Raised on a farm in Illinois, he had moved to California in 1850 during the Gold Rush, moved to Virginia City in 1860, and had risen to superintendent of two of the most successful Comstock mines, the Ophir and the Hale and Norcross. In the Fall of 1873 Fair discovered almost 400 meters underground the richest silver and gold ore bodies in the Comstock Lode, soon known as the "Big Bonanza", which turned them overnight into tycoons, the "Silver Kings”, among the wealthiest men of their time.

MacKay became one of the richest men in the world (and possibly to this day the richest Irishman of all time). James Flood (another 49er) used his share to buy San Francisco real estate until he owned much of the city. He founded the Bank of Nevada in 1875 and drove the Bank of California out of business. He built a home on top of San Francisco's exclusive Nob Hill and in 1880 an even bigger three-story 40-room country home in Menlo Park ("Linden Towers).

William Sharon and William Ralston (the Bank of California) were encouraged to dig in the neighboring Belcher mine and sure enough they succeeded. William Sharon became another tycoon.

Therefore, the boom of the Comstock Lode was in reality several booms: the first one in 1859 with the discovery of the Ophir and Gold Hill bodies (the surface ledges of the Lode); the second one after 1864 with the transformation into "corporate" mining; and the third one in 1873 with the "Big Bonanza".

In the mid-1870s, Virginia City shipped about ten tons of bullion to San Francisco per week, the bulk of which came from the Consolidated Virginia mine. The San Francisco Stock Exchange went on overdrive. The value of mining shares skyrocketed. The volume of sales passed that of the New York Stock Exchange. The speculation frenzy of the 1860s and 1870s radically changed San Francisco from a port city to a financial center, in fact "the" financial center of the Western USA, with the California-Montgomery Street area rivaling New York's Wall Street. In turn, the Stock Exchange fueled growth in the San Francisco Bay Area. Almost seven million tons of ore were extracted between 1860 and 1880.

The fortune of the Bank of California and of the Stock Exchange created some of the richest men in the world, who often invested in non-mining businesses and in public works, besides extravagant private mansions. Ralston, for example, built in 1867 an 80-room country home in Belmont (now in the campus of Notre Dame de Namur University), in 1869 San Francisco's California Theatre, and in 1875 San Francisco's Palace Hotel, the largest hotel in the USA (completed after his death), while all the time investing in fur, furniture, sugar and in the city's water supply. In 1871 Ralston hired William Hammond Hall to design Golden Gate Park in the sandy Outside Lands: by 1879 the park counted 155,000 trees.

The engineering feats were not over.

Sharon and Ralston (i.e. Bank of California) weren't satisfied with owning the mines, the railroad and the water. They also wanted the wood. Therefore they engineered the acquisition of the sawmills that had been operating since 1861 at Glenbrook (originally Glen Brook) on the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe (as Lake Bigler had been renamed in 1862), and of land around Lake Tahoe's southern end. Timber was floated to Glenbrook's mill and then lumber was transported uphill via a wagon road (the Lake Bigler Toll Road aka King's Canyon Road, completed in 1863) to Spooner’s Summit (280 meters higher) where 20 kilometers of V-flumes took it to Carson City and the Virginia & Truckee Railroad. The takeover was assigned to Yerington and to Duane Bliss. The latter had arrived in California in 1849 when he was only 15, and had moved to Gold Hill in 1860 working in Almarin Paul's pioneering quartz mill. He had been hired by the Bank of California in 1863 and had helped Henry Yerington build the Virginia and Truckee Railroad for their masters. In 1870 the duo formed Yerington, Bliss & Co, which evolved in 1873 into Carson & Tahoe Lumber & Fluming Company (C&TL&F). Once they consolidated the land, mills and flumes of the Glenbrook area, they also built, in 1875, a narrow-gauge railroad to carry the lumber to Spooner's Summit, thus eliminating the need for wagons. Duane Bliss assumed control of the company, which became the largest Comstock timber and lumber operation.

The drainage of water from the deep shafts of the mines had haunted the Comstock companies from the beginning. The problem had simply become more serious as the mines went deeper. A proposal for a drainage tunnel had been advanced by Adolph Sutro, a Prussian Jew who had arrived in San Francisco in 1850 and had opened a mill in Dayton in 1862. However, he got approval and funding only after the Yellow Jacket Mine disaster of 1869. He hired Schussler as the chief engineer to build the six-kilometer horizontal tunnel under Mt Davidson at the altitude of the mines from near Dayton on the Carson River to the mines. and in 1872 he laid out the plan for the model town of Sutro near the mouth of the tunnel, with a broad main street lined up with the tunnel and cross streets named for women, and a large Gothic-style house for himself. The tunnel was completed in 1878. Sutro made money selling water to miners who were not making money anymore, and then invested the proceeds into San Francisco real estate. In 1896 he opened the Sutro Baths and built his seven-story Cliff House in Victorian style (it burned down in 1907, ironically after surviving the 1906 earthquake) and was elected mayor of San Francisco in 1895.

Thanks also to Sutro's tunnel, Virginia City's mines kept going deeper, and in 1880 it was normal for miners to be digging 700 meters below ground level. The deepest depth reached, in 1884, was in the Ophir-Mexican winze at more than 1,000 meters below the surface, the deepest mine in the world.

Several protagonists of the Comstock boom became Nevada senators: John Jones, William Stewart, and William Sharon.

In 1870 San Francisco had a population of 150,000, plus 24,000 in Alameda County (around Oakland) and 26,000 in Santa Clara County (the south bay) at a time when Los Angeles only had 15,000 and Sacramento 27,000. Thousands of Chinese were scattered in the mining counties: Nevada, Placer, Yuba and Butte all had more than two thousand Chinese, and these were counties with less than 20,000 people (there were only 234 Chinese in Los Angeles).

The 1870s were a decade marked by railroad and land monopolies, and by government corruption, while the manufacturing and agricultural sectors were making the transition from sweatshop and family business to factory for mass production.

In the 1870s San Francisco (that 30 years earlier was still a tiny village) boasted a rich and powerful caste of international merchants, banking titans, mining magnates and railroad moguls, which together represented a veritable financial empire.

In 1870 the Bank of California started the City Gas Company to compete with Donahue's gas monopoly and in 1873 it evolved into the San Francisco Gas Light Company, which in 1896 would venture into electricity and yield the San Francisco Gas and Electric Company.

James Lick, who had made a little fortute in South America as a piano maker, invested in the village of San Francisco before the Gold Rush (he arrived just before the discovery of gold), got rich selling city land that had been thought worthless and bought more land in the south bay, where he established orchards, and many other places. In the 1870s he was possibly the richest man in California (and one of the most reclusive tycoons) and he donated money for the construction of the world's first mountain-top observatory with the world's largest refracting telescope, completed 12 years after his death in 1888 on Mt Hamilton, east of San Jose, and known as Lick Observatory. In 1862 Lick opened the most opulent hotel west of the Mississippi River, nicknamed the Lick House, one of the four luxury hotels that turned Montgomery Street into one of the most fashionable streets of the city (the others being the Russ House of 1862, the Occidental Hotel of 1861, and the Cosmopolitan Hotel of 1865).

In 1878 the Big Four of the transcontinental railroad formed the Pacific Improvement Company, a holding company that went on a buying spree and would eventually become one of the largest corporations of California with dozens of subsidiaries in fields ranging from mining to electric streetcars, water systems, shipping, real estate and hotels. To start with, in 1880 they built in Monterey a luxury hotel called Hotel Del Monte, and extended the Southern Pacific Railroad to Monterey (later known as the Del Monte Express), and in 1881 their Pacific Improvement Company opened a scenic "17-Mile Drive" along the coast between Monterey and Carmel.

As it expanded, San Francisco became a city of steep hills. The famous San Francisco cable-car, the first in the world, was conceived by Andrew Hallidie, an English gold miner of the 1850s who had become a bridge builder. He had the cable car built in 1873 by his German engineer Wilhelm Eppelsheimer (the Clay Street Hill Railroad). In 1882 Leland Stanford and other investors formed the Market Street Cable Railway to convert the old horse-powered lines into cable-car lines. The vogue of the cable car was short-lived because the electric streetcar was popularized in 1887 by Frank Sprague in Virginia, and in 1893 the Market Street Railway Company becan replacing the cable cars with electric streetcars powered by overhead power lines.

In July 1876, to celebrate the centennial of the USA, a blind Italian-born Jesuit priest and scientist, Joseph Neri, who had been experimenting on a lighthouse placed on the roof of the St Ignatius Church of St Ignatius College (today's University of San Francisco) using a generator imported from France (a "magneto-electric machine"), turned on the first electric streetlights of San Francisco (on downtown Market Street).

In 1879 Canadian-born broker George Roe formed the California Electric Light Company, hiring as first president James Richmond Hardenbergh (a 49er who had been mayor of Sacramento, postmaster of Sacramento and US surveyor general of California). It was the first company in the country to operate a central power station (boiler, steam engine and dynamos), located near St Ignatius church and using dynamos purchased from Charles Brush (the Ohio inventor who had improved the dynamo in 1876), and the company sold electricity to 21 privately-owned arc lamps, the first example of utility-scale distribution of electric power, three years before Edison lit up Manhattan. Unlike the East Coast, where electricity mainly served the industry, in the Bay Area and in Los Angeles electricity first came to the cities for public and domestic use. Later, electric consumer goods (such as the washing machine) would spread more rapidly in California than in the rest of the USA, creating the image of high-tech living.

The upper class of San Francisco moved to a hill called California Hill after the steep California Street. The first people to pick that hill for their homes were lawyers: Richard Tobin in 1870, James Haggin in 1871, and David Colton, chief laywer of the Central Pacific Railroad, in 1873. The Tobin and Colton houses were designed by the architectural firm of Samuel Bugbee and Son, founded by the Canadian-born Samuel Bugbee who had opened a successful practice in Boston in 1846 before moving to San Francisco in 1861. Bugbee designed the California Theater in 1869 for William Ralston, Mills Hall at Mills College in 1871, the Wade Opera House in 1876 (today's Grand Opera House), and Golden Gate Park's Conservatory of Flowers, completed in 1879 after his death. The hill became famous after the Big Four railroad tycoons moved there: Leland Stanford in 1876 (905 California Street), Mark Hopkins in 1878 (999 California, a Gothic-style mansion designed by Canadian architects George Sanders and John Wright, whose tower was the highest point in San Francisco), Charles Crocker in 1880 (1100 California Street, a mansion in the style of France's Second Empire), and Collis Huntington in 1892 (1020 California Street, the Colton mansion, built in the Palladian style). Three of the four mansions were designed by Bugbee's firm. Central Pacific Railroad's superintendent Arthur Brown supervised work on the Crocker and Stanford mansions, at the same time that he was designing the Solano ferryboat to ferry transcontinental trains to and from San Francisco, which, inaugurated in 1879, was the largest ferry in the world. California Hill became known as Nob Hill after these four "nabobs" of the Central Pacific Railroad. Some went even further west, like Faxon Atherton's widow Dominga who built her city mansion in 1881. All of the Nob Hill mansions designed by Bugbee were destroyed by the earthquake and fire of 1906.

Ironically, the abundance of silver caused the crisis of the silver economy. Most German states before unification had minted silver currencies, but in 1871 Bismark's newly created Germany had decided to stop minting silver coins and to adopt instead the gold standard. The USA had backed its currency with both gold and silver and minted both types of coins, but in April 1873 the USA abandoned silver and moved de facto to a gold standard. France, the country that had been setting the exchange value between gold and silver currencies, stopped silver coinage in September. Several other European countries moved swiftly to gold. Silver prices declined. As a result, silver currencies depreciated sharply. Wall Street's financial "Panic of 1873" was not caused by the silver but it impacted California too. The "panic" started when a Philadelphia bank, Jay Cooke & Company, heavily invested in railroad bonds, failed in September. The railroad industry was the largest employer outside agriculture in the USA. Within one year, more than 100 railroads declared bankruptcy. In 1875 the double whammy of the "Panic" and of the gold standard, combined with the fact that the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had reduced commerce with Asia (it was faster for the East Coast to reach the Far East via Suez), caused the crash of the San Francisco stock market and the collapse of the Bank of California. Ralston was ruined and probably killed himself (he was found drowned).

Then Virginia City experienced its biggest fire in 1875, and in 1878 a rich lode was discovered in Bodie, attracting thousands of disaffected Comstock residents. In 1877 the lumber market crashed too, because two of lumber's main customers were railways and mines. Many sawmills of Truckee had to close. In 1882 the San Francisco Stock and Bond Exchange was established, which, unlike the old Stock Exchange (later renamed Mining Exchange), dealt in a variety of non-mining stocks. Inevitably, the Chinese became scapegoats: when in 1878 the Truckee and Steamboat Springs Canal Company hired the San Francisco-based Chinese firm Quong Yee Wo/ Lung Chung & Company to dig a 50-kilometer irrigation canal from Truckee to Reno and this firm brought in 115 Chinese laborers, the Workingmen protested and a few days later a fire destroyed Virginia City's Chinese quarter. The Chinese were cleansed from Truckee and Virginia City by 1886.

Nonetheless, the market value of the Comstock Lode had peaked in 1876, and record production of gold and silver had been achieved in 1877.

The Sierra Nevada splits California vertically in two. To the west is the coastal region of San Francisco and Los Angeles as well as the Central Valley, and to the east of the Sierra Nevada is a sparsely populated region. Eastern California had never been explored by the Mexicans. US emigrants crossed it, like Jedediah Smith who explored it in 1826, and Joseph Walker in 1834 was the first one to pay attention to the region. He discovered Walker River that marks the border with Nevada and Walker Pass in the Sierra. John Fremont led the 1845 expedition, guided by scout Kit Carson, that was sent by the US government to map the region. A lake, Owens Lake, was named after a member of his party, Richard Owens, and a region, today's Kern County, was named after another member, Ed Kern. Owens Valley became the name of the whole region between the Sierra Nevada to the west and the White Mountains to the east, south of Mono Lake.

The settlement of the region by white people started in earnest after gold was discovered in 1860 and a boomtown, Aurora, was founded. As gold diggers rushed to Aurora, convoys started carrying supplies to the town. It turned out that Owens Valley was ideal for raising livestock, and in 1861 a rancher named Samuel Addison Bishop moved his cattle and horse operation from the Tehachapi Mountains to a creek (later known as Bishop Creek) flowing into the Owens River. In 1860 an expedition led by a Darwin French discovered silver south at Coso, and gold was discovered in 1862 near Fort Independence, a fort created south of Bishop to "pacify" and then forcibly relocate the native Paiute population. The location was ideal because it was near the Owens River and near forests: plenty of water and wood. The boomtown of San Carlos was founded in 1862 and others followed. The boom of Aurora lasted only four years (the town was quickly abandoned), but more minerals were found on the mountains. After 1863 many ores were processed in a mining camp named Owensville (today's Laws), near Bishop Creek (near where the future town of Bishop was rising). Starting in 1861 gold, silver, copper and lead were discovered at the southern end of the White Mountains (east of Owens Valley), the area where Chinese miners were prospecting. In 1864 silver and gold were discovered high on the Sierra Nevada west of Fort Independence in a location later named Kearsarge after a Union warship. In 1865 some Mexican miners discovered silver at nearby the Los Angeles area which in the 1870s became the largest producer of silver in California. French-Canadian ex-49er Victor Beaudry opened a store in 1866 at Fort Independence and got rich selling supplies to miners and buying mines from those who failed. In 1868 Mortimer Belshaw, who had mined silver in Mexico, acquired rights on the mines, built a wagon road to the valley, established a furnace to smelt the ore into silver-lead bars, deployed a steamship across Owens Lake and developed the trade with Los Angeles, which at the time had little else to show. Cerro Gordo became the typical lawless boomtown and created a little wealth in tiny Los Angeles. French-Canadian immigrant Remi Nadeau, who had settled in Los Angeles in 1861, got rich delivering food and supplies to Cerro Gordo and transporting the silver to the city with his mule teams that took three weeks for the journey. To improve the transport of the silver to Los Angeles, in January 1875 California's former governor John Downey and Los Angeles ranch owner Francisco Temple established the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad with funding from two main investors, Comstock Lode millionaire John Jones and ranch owner Robert Baker, a duo who at the same time started planning the new seaside town of Santa Monica as its terminal. Their chief engineer Joseph Crawford hired 100 Chinese laborers from northern California to beat the Southern Pacific's crew over the crucial Cajon Pass (including a 1.2 kilometer tunnel). Unfortunately the crash of 1875 ruined Jones and Temple, and their railway was only completed between Santa Monica and Los Angeles. In 1876 the Southern Pacific connected Los Angeles to its transcontinental route and in 1877 it acquired the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad.

In 1870 more gold and silver were discovered in the Coso Range. In 1873 a new boomtown, Panamint City, sprung up from the desert of Death Valley after some outlaws stumbled upon silver. Towns like Lone Pine were born in Owens Valley to import supplies from Los Angeles (440 kms away) and sell them to the mining communities. Lone Pine was the theater of the first major recorded earthquake of California, which in 1872 killed 27 people (quite a few given how small those towns were back then). The problem is that the long journey to Los Angeles (or to Sacramento via Sonora Pass) was justified only insofar as the mining was truly lucrative. As mines became less productive, most of these boomtowns were abandoned. In 1876 new gold was discovered in Bodie, a town just north of Mono Lake originally founded by the WS Bodey who in 1859 discovered a minor vein of gold there. Miners started flocking to Bodie from nearby locations so that its population grew from less than 100 in 1876 to several thousands in 1880, making it briefly California's 7th largest city. It was in this remote town that the USA's first long-distance transmission of electricity took place in 1892 carrying electricity to Bodie from a hydroelectric power plant built 20 kms away in Green Creek and equipped with a Westinghouse generator. It was the project of engineer Thomas Leggett, a graduate from the Columbia School of Mines who had worked for a decade in Mexico and Central America (and would continue his career in South Africa).

Amos Catlin, a 49er who had settled in a place (near today's Folsom) that he named Natoma, formed the Natoma Water and Mining Company in 1853 to divert water from the South Fork of the American River. The company built a 32-kilometer ditch and started selling water to the gold mines. The operation expanded to a network of dams, ditches and reservoirs. In 1864 Horatio Gates Livermore acquired the Natoma Water and Mining Company and in 1866 he began using convict labor provided by the state of California (in return for land to build a new prison). The company even planted a vineyard that in 1883 was the largest in the world and spawned a winery. In 1892 his son Horatio Putnam had the idea of using water from the newly built Folsom Dam to generate electricity and started building a powerhouse equipped with four giant dynamos (manufactured by General Electric), powered by three turbines. In 1895 Livermore was able to transmit electricity 35 kilometers away to Sacramento, the first time that high-voltage alternating current was transmitted over a long distance. Sacramento celebrated the event with a "Grand Electric Carnival" in September.

The importance of water and later of electricity is evident in the history of the Utica Mine. In 1851 the Murphy brothers (Daniel Murphy and John Murphy) discovered rich gold deposits in what is now the town of Murphys. Soon there were gold miners all around the region. In 1852 some of them organized the Union Water company to tap the waters of Angels Creek for the mines. In 1853 the ditch was extended to what is now the town of Angels Camp. In 1854 John Selkirk found quartz-bearing gold near Angels Camp, but the mine was hard to develop and he abandoned it, as did later James Fair (before he became famous). It was finally named the Utica Quartz Mine, and eventually acquired by Robert Leeper, who in 1882 built the Utica Mansion of Angels Camp. Meanwhile, John Kimball and Ephraim Cutting gained control of the water company in the 1870s and expanded the system of reservoirs, flumes and ditches. Charles Lane, who had found gold in Idaho, acquired the Utica Mine in 1884 from Leeper and then the Union Water Company in 1887. He was funded by Alvinza Hayward, who in 1859 had acquired another disappointing mine, the Old Eureka Mine gold mine (today's town of Sutter Creek), and turned it into a success by digging deeper. Using the same method of deep mining, in 1885 Lane and Hayward struck a rich ore body. Alas, deep mining was dangerous and in 1889 twelve miners died in the mine, one of the most famous disasters of the era, and in 1891 a hoist cable snapped killing nine miners. As the mining went deeper, Lane needed more advanced technology, i.e. electric power, and he exploited the expanded canals and reservoirs of the Union Water Company to open a three-storey powerhouse on Angels Creek east of Murphys in order to supply electricity to his mine (completed in 1899), the fourth powerhouse of California. In 1901 the Utica Mine found the single richest gold deposit in California. (Lane had already left for the Alaska gold rush in 1898, leaving his son in charge of Utica).

In 1895 John Martin and Eugene de Sabla, two former gold miners in the Yuba River region north of Sacramento, built a hydroelectric plant in Nevada City (the Rome Powerhouse) and in 1901 their company built the world’s longest transmission line (about 200 kilometers) to Oakland's new electric railway. They were helped by William Stanley, who in 1886 had invented an alternating-current transformer for George Westinghouse in Pennsylvania and demonstrated high-voltage alternating-current transmission. By 1903 their local Yuba Power Company of the gold country had evolved into the California Gas & Electric Company of San Francisco which in 1905 merged with the San Francisco Gas & Electric Company (presided by William Bowers Bourn II) and changed its name to Pacific Gas and Electric Company, soon to create the largest network of electric power lines in the world.

Ironically, the railroad, that was supposed to create an economic boom, caused an economic crisis: California got flooded with both cheap manufacturing goods from the East Coast and poor unemployed European immigrants. The Chinese became the favorite scapegoats of poor white workers. Chinese immigrants had always been willing to work for lower salaries (in fact, they had no other option) but now white workers saw that as unfair competition. During the Gold Rush, employment in orchards and lumbermills consisted of lower-paid jobs, but now they were more lucrative jobs than mining, so now white workers wanted the jobs that twenty years earlier only the Chinese had been willing to take. Chinese workers were often harassed and abused. A consequence of the hostile atmosphere in the countryside was that many Chinese abandoned the old mining and agricultural camps and took shelter in the safer Chinatowns, notably the San Francisco one. Many of these rural "Chinamen" arrived in San Francisco with enough savings to purchase homes, and some even became landlords.

Even in the cities the discrimination was obvious. For example, in September 1859 San Francisco opened the "Chinese School" in Chinatown, a segregated public school for Chinese children. In 1866 California restricted public schools to white children, specifically excluding "Negroes, Mongolians, and Indians" ("Mongolians" being the Chinese and "Indians" meaning the indigenous population).

By 1870 the population of San Francisco had increased to 150,000 people, almost all of them arriving or born in the previous 22 years.

The reputation of the Chinese kept deteriorating as more Chinese men got involved in crime and Chinese women in prostitution. While the vast majority were neither criminals nor prostitutes, the stereotype kept spreading. In 1866 the state of California passed laws to curb the Chinese brothels. A census of 1870 classified 61% of 3,536 Chinese women in California as prostitutes. Ethnic tensions further increased after 1868 when the USA and China signed the Burlingame Treaty, which de facto opened the gates to large-scale Chinese immigration to the USA. In 1874 the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company was founded (by the two US railroads of the transcontinental railroad, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific), which replaced the Pacific Mail Steamship Company as the main transportation means for the Chinese coming to America.

In 1870 Los Angeles had a population of 5,728 people, of which 172 were Chinese. In 1870 in Los Angeles a highly publicized violent conflict exploded within the largest Chinese association, the See-Yup Company, and the notorious Chinese prostitute Sing-Ye was tortured by five gangsters. This was the worst form of publicity, confirming the racist feeling that the Chinese were not worthy of living among Whites. In October 1871 hate against Chinese men turned violent and even deadly in the streets of Los Angeles, where 18 Chinese were lynched, and then the riots spread to other towns that had Chinese communities. In July 1877 an anti-Chinese riot in San Francisco by Irish fanatics left four people dead. That's when the old Chinese associations joined in the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (the "Six Companies"). Several white organizations, notably Denis Kearney's Workingmen's Party, started lobbying California politicians to stop Chinese immigration and even expel the Chinese already in California.

In 1880 the Chinese (numbering about 500) were the largest ethnic minority group in Los Angeles.

It became popular for California politicians to blame Chinese immigrants for unemployment among Whites (for "stealing" white jobs). The Chinese entered the business of canneries because they were slowly kicked out of the fishing business through a sequence of taxes and regulations that explicitly targeted them. In 1876 white people even formed an Anti-Chinese and Workingmen's Protective Laundry Association in San Jose, which convinced several laundries to change occupation. Chinese laborers were arriving at rates much higher than during the Gold Rush: in 1876 there were 151,000 Chinese in the USA of which 116,000 were in California. However, Chinese women couldn't come anymore: in 1875 the "Page Act" of the USA de facto banned immigration of Chinese women, because they were viewed as likely prostitutes. California's politician Horace Page justified it to "end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women". In December 1875 US president Ulysses Grant himself said that "Chinese women... few of whom are brought to our shores to pursue honorable or useful occupations." In 1882 of the 40,000 Chinese who immigrated into the USA only 136 were women. The Page Act created a gender imbalance that would last until World War II. The men of Chinatown learned to live without families.

Meanwhile, a nationwide economic crisis engulfed the East Coast. The largest bank in the USA, Jay Cooke, went bankrupt, leading to the "panic of 1873". In 1879 California adopted a new constitution with an article that denied ethnic Chinese citizens the right to vote, forbade companies from hiring Chinese workers, and de facto encouraged cities to expel Chinese people. In 1880 the USA began to limit immigration from China and in 1882 the "Chinese Exclusion Act" suspended altogether immigration of Chinese laborers for a period of 10 years (the ban was renewed every ten years and repealed only in 1943, so it ended up lasting 61 years), besides depriving the Chinese already in the USA of citizenship (and therefore depriving them of the right to vote). This was the first time in the history of the USA that a national group was discriminated against by the government itself.

The Exclusion was often followed by "expulsion". In February 1885 the northern region of Eureka (today's Humboldt County) expelled to San Francisco all ethnic Chinese on a short notice. White terrorists set fire to Chinese property all over the state.

The Chinese population of 1880 in the whole of the USA was 105,465, out of 50 million people. No surprise that it remained roughly the same and sometimes even lower in the next six decades, despite the fact that the population of the USA grew to 76 million in 1900, 106 million in 1920 (when the Chinese population actually declined to 85,000) and 132 million in 1940.

The Chinese were de facto banned from the city’s fashionable elite, the elite that was enjoying Andrew Smith Hallidie's steam engine-powered cable cars, which debuted in 1873 (simply an evolution of mining conveyance systems), Frederick Layman's fancy "Telegraph Hill Observatory, Restaurant, and Concert Hall", which opened in July 1882, and the electric streetcar, which opened in April 1892, connecting the city with the Colma cemeteries.

Anti-Chinese riots continued and peaked in 1885 with the "Rock Springs massacre" in Wyoming territory, when white miners on strike killed 28 Chinese strikebreakers. The "exclusion" was particularly effective in the countryside: California's farm workers were mostly Chinese and were almost all expelled, replaced by Japanese workers. The first Japanese colony in North America had been established near Coloma in July 1869 by Japanese immigrants from the town of Aizuwakamatsu (some of them were samurai). In 1880 there were only 145 Japanese in the USA, compared with more than 100,000 Chinese. By 1924 the Chinese population had declined 20% while the Japanese population had multiplied thanks to 180,000 Japanese immigrants.

The Chinese miners, fishermen and farmers who were expelled from the rural areas moved to the various Chinatowns. Los Angeles' Chinatown slowly shifted east from its original locationm and the Garnier Building (built by French immigrant Philippe Garnier in 1890) became its unofficial city hall (today's Chinese American Museum of Los Angeles). The Los Angeles branch of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association was established in 1889.

It is interesting that the Chinese immigrants resisted the pressure to conform in terms of dress code and hair style. After all, those were the aspects of the Chinese race most often mocked by the white majority. While Muslims may resist the pressure to convert to Christianity because they believe that an omnipotent god is watching them and would condemn them to hell, nothing of the sort applies to the dress code and the hair style of the Chinese. The "huiguans" did act as guardians of Chinese traditions, but they were in no position to enforce the dress code of the thousands of Chinese spread all over California. Nor were the immigrants so overtly nationalist to employ the traditional Chinese dress and the "pigtail" (the racist name for their hair style) as a political statement. By sticking to those traditions, they increased the risk of persecution, and, yet, they did stick to them.

At the same time, San Francisco's Chinatown did have a problem of crime. Many "tongs" formed as Chinatown grew. The Chinese community was relatively isolated in the city and only superficially protected by the police, creating the ideal conditions for crime gangs to form and prosper. The members of the tongs were generally poor and quasi-illiterate, whereas the members of the traditional Chinese associations (now six of them) were generally wealthy and educated. The tongs got into violent crime after entering the shady world of gambling and prostitution, both highly lucrative businesses that required "protection", and that were accompanied by consumption of opium.

Jackson Street was Chinatown's red-light district. Because the demand for prostitutes was so high (given the men-women imbalance), they started kidnapping girls from China. Soon the tongs started fighting each other for control of the territory. The Six Companies were the only meaningful obstacle to the tong. The "tong wars" peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. An article of March 1891 in the Daily Alta California read " The Traffic in Human Flesh Still Carried On" and accused "the Chinese slave-owners" of smuggling in girls from China: "every Chinese girl in San Francisco has a marketable value of from $1000 to $2000" (that included girls as young as eleven). And it wasn't only San Francisco: in March 1887 the city of San Jose declared its Chinatown a public nuisance and was planning to take action against the Chinese, but two months later Chinatown burned down and the Chinese moved to a new Chinatown far from downtown. In 1888 the very president of the USA, Grover Cleveland, stated that the Chinese immigrant was "an element ignorant of our constitution and laws, impossible of assimilation with our people and dangerous to our peace and welfare."

Chinatown is often depicted as a sort of "Chinese ghetto", but this misrepresents the Chinese immigrants: they actually wanted a town, and built a town wherever they could. That was a significant difference between the Caucasian immigrants and the Chinese immigrants. First of all, the Caucasians were more individualist, whereas the Chinese were more bound to collective life. Secondly, the Caucasians were more likely to be transient, or at least to think in "transient" terms. Trappers, loggers and miners had little interest in thinking long term: trappers moved after the animals they were hunting, loggers moved as forests were depleted, and miners moved as mines dried up. Last but not least, the Chinese were also more likely to know how to build (and how to farm) than the Caucasians. Therefore it is not surprising that the Chinese built Chinatowns wherever they could. It wasn't only an effect of anti-Chinese racism. The other side of the story was that the Chinese wanted to live in a Chinese town, with convenient Chinese services, the use of the lunar calendar and the staging of traditional festivals, and they often imported furniture and kitchenware from China for their homes. While their native customs, clearly different from European customs, fueled prejudice and stereotypes, the Chinese did little to amend or abandon them, clearly valuing them more than social integration and acceptance. Chinatowns were manifestations of a Chinese-American subculture as much a result of social persecution as of anything else. While Chinatown's crime was legendary, in reality it paled compared with the lawlessness of the white mining areas. Between 1849 and 1854 over 4,000 murders were recorded in California, about 1200 in San Francisco alone, and the Chinese were more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators. Chinatowns were, first and foremost, towns.

The Chinese that had already started businesses in California simply continued to expand. In 1890 Sai Yin Chew founded the Precita Canning Company in San Francisco, and the entire management was ethnic Chinese. Produce traveled by horse from the Santa Clara Valley and by train or boat from the San Joaquin County and the Sacramento Delta to the San Francisco cannery.

Therefore by the year 1900 the Chinese had been responsible for mining the gold of California that funded the development of California's infrastructure (including Stanford University), for building the network of railroads that connected Californian cities to each other, and, then, to the East Coast, for the irrigation and farming that fed the growing population of California, and for creating the first complex and stable urban environment in California (Chinatown). Finance, transportation, agriculture and urbanization are the four dimensions of economic development in any modernizing society. Chinese hard work had been the engine that had turned California into a wealthy state, that had turned the California swampland into fertile farmland, that had turned a state of sparse rural villages into a state of cities, and that had turned the once isolated state into a cog of the early globalized economy. Note that railways were not just railways: they were paths of information transmission. Once built, they served multiple purposes to broadcast information over long distances. Notably, it was natural for electric telegraphy to run its cables along the already built pathways of railroad lines. The railways started global information transmission. The Chinese even laid the foundations for the civil-rights movement of the future. Like it or not, their opium dens also pioneered the culture of drugs that would remain a staple of the San Francisco Bay.

Chinese workers even helped create California's first national park and one of the most famous parks in the world: Yosemite. The famous valley of very tall waterfalls had been discovered accidentally in 1851 by US soldiers who were chasing "Indian" rebels (and popularized by the physician riding with the soldiers, Lafayette Bunnell). The original trail into Yosemite Valley was a mule trail from Mariposa with a lodging house along the way in a location that came to be known as Wawona. This became the Wawona Hotel. Chinese workers were hired in 1874 by Wawona Hotel's owner Henry Washburn to build the 37-km Wawona Road into Yosemite Valley, another engineering feat. In 1883 another group of Chinese laborers (with some white workers) built the first road through Yosemite's high country (through today's Tuolumne Meadows), the Great Sierra Wagon Road, mostly following the ancient Mono Trail used by the "Indians". Chinese chefs and workers kept working at the Wawona Hotel even after it was rebuilt after a fire.

Because the Chinese were penalized by the language and because they were naturally reluctant to seek attention, their contribution has been relegated to a footnote in the history of California. Because they are largely a nameless group, with no hero standing out, no equivalent of Columbus and not even a Kit Carson, there is no mythological narrative about them., In reality, California was nothing before the Chinese arrived. Before the arrival of the Chinese, California was casually roamed by illiterate and unskilled Spanish and Russian explorers who built little more than huts. Even the 49ers who arrived from all over the (white) world did very little to create California: they mostly lived in camps, camps that were more famous for gambling and crime than for developing the land. In fact, most of those camps were abandoned the moment the gold ended, leaving behind only polluted rivers. Once the Chinese arrived, California developed roads, agriculture and transportation. It became a real living place. It doesn't matter that the Chinese themselves lived in the least appealing of urban environments: the work that they did created the most appealing aspects of California.

Thanks to the Chinese, San Francisco was the first city to be born racially and ethnically diverse (not just different kinds of white people), and California was born the most cosmopolitan state in the Union. Because of the way it was settled, California was the first state to be first urbanized and then farmed, and the first cohesive, non-transient urban centers were the various Chinatowns, and in 1880 up to one third of the agricultural labor force in California was Chinese.

What is also underestimated is that every Chinatown remained a trans-Pacific community (at least with the Pearl River Delta Region), laying the foundations for California's future economy. While the stereotype is that the Chinese immigrants never went back to China, in reality thousands traveled back and forth, mostly merchants. The "huiguan", who charged the tickets, may have made more money from the departing Chinese than from the arriving ones.

A problem in the history of early Chinese immigration is the lack of individual voices, but this is also due to a difference in the concept of "making". Caucasian protagonists of the Gold Rush had a name. The Chinese who built towns, roads, railways and factories were often just a group of people. This may say more about the different perception of who really "makes" something than about the relative importance of what was made. Way before Marx invented communism, the Chinese were proud of their collective achievements.

Incidentally, one could argue that, similarly, China's staggering record-setting economic boom of the 1978-2012 period owes much to the nameless laborers from the countryside who were often discriminated (e.g. denied the right to own a city apartment) by the middle class that their underpaid work helped create.

All the action was in the north. Los Angeles was still a village and Southern California was still only a footnote in the history of the state. In 1870 the four counties of the south, namely Los Angeles, Santa Barbara (northwest of Los Angeles), San Bernardino (to the east) and San Diego (the very south), had a combined population of maybe 35,000 people. Spanish speakers were probably still the majority. Half of the "indios" had been killed by smallpox in 1863. The severe drought of 1862-65 had wrecked the fragile economy of the ranches and their cattle industry, causing many ranch owners to sell land and created a landscape of smaller farms.

Luckily, in 1857 a group of Germans from San Francisco had purchased a land southeast of Los Angeles and founded an agricultural colony called Anaheim. That can be considered the moment when the agricultural revolution of southern California began.

In 1870 a group of Midwesterners led by John Wesley North, an anti-slavery and anti-alcohol politician who had already founded the community of Saint Anthony in the Minnesota Territory, purchased land southeast of Los Angeles to start a model community. A few years later it became the birthplace of southern California's citrus industry.

Another epicenter of the "orange boom" was San Bernardino (east of Los Angeles), originally founded in 1851 by a few hundred Mormons dispatched from Utah to California by Mormon leader Brigham Young. They were led the former captain of the Mormon Battalion of 1847, Jefferson Hunt, now a politician who successfully carved San Bernardino County out of Los Angeles County in 1853. But the Mormons were recalled by Young back to Utah in 1857 and San Bernardino was developed by Jews, Chinese and Midwesterners.

Another colony of immigrants was created near the Arroyo Seco north of Los Angeles by the physician Tom Elliot and his brother-in-law Daniel Berry, representing a group of Indiana farmers fleeing the harsh winter of 1872–73. They too were encouraged by the prospect of growing citrus.

In 1850 there were at least two Chinese residents in Los Angeles, both house servants, and three Chinese decided to settle in Los Angeles in 1856. The Chinese population of L.A. multiplied rapidly as Chinese workers left the Gold Country. They mostly settled around Calle de los Negros. Chinese community associations were born just like in San Francisco. Chinese farmers proved crucial in nearby San Gabriel Valley to the northeast of Los Angeles, south and east of Pasadena.

The first fortunes were being created in rural southern California, among the old Mexican ranches. Abel Stearns, an orphan from Massachusetts who had worked on ships trading with Mexico, had became a Mexican citizen in 1828 at the age of 30 and the following year settled near the tiny Pueblo de Los Angeles, where he made a little fortune trading with the ranches of the interior and the ships that anchored at the harbor of San Pedro, and he kept buying ranch land. In 1841 he married the 14-year-old Arcadia Bandini, who belonged to the Mexican aristocracy: her grandfather on her mother’s side had been the commander of the Presidio of San Diego and the other grandfather had been a naval captain, and she was related to past mayors of San Diego and of San Francisco. When Stearns died in 1871, Arcadia owned more land than anyone else in California and was probably the richest woman of California.

Jonathan "Juan" Temple, who had arrived in 1827 from Hawaii to Alta California and acquired Mexican citizenship, possibly the second Anglosaxon resident of Los Angeles, opened Los Angeles' first general store and became Los Angeles' first major merchant and possibly the richest man in the region after Abel Stearns. He owned so much land in Mexico (more than 600 kms of coast) that he was probably also one of Mexico's richest men, and, from his headquarters in Los Cerritos (in today's Long Beach), continued to meddle into Mexican politics even after California became part of the USA, even owning a lease on the Mexican national mint until his death.

Many of these early ranchers became rich when the Gold Rush in the north of California exponentially increased the demand for beef and produce. Among them were also William Workman, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1841 overland from Santa Fe via the Old Spanish Trail, and Pliny "Francisco" Temple, who arrived in the same year but traveling from Massachusetts to Alta California via Cape Horn to join his older half-brother Juan. In 1845 Temple married Workman's daughter Antonia (possibly the first marriage in Los Angeles between two people with Anglosaxon last names) and got involved in Cerro Gordo's silver mines. In 1871 Temple built a new three-story Temple Block on the side of his brother's old two-story adobe. (Temple and Workman lost everything when their bank failed in 1875).

Robert Baker, one of the many 49ers who failed to find gold but got rich selling supplies and clothes to miners, invested his money in ranch land and in 1872-73 he purchased the land that is now Santa Monica. In 1875, he married the widowed Arcadia Bandini de Stearns, the single largest landowner in California. Their partner was a Nevada senator, John Jones, who had made a fortune mining silver near Lone Pine and who owned the land that is now Pacific Palisades. They co-founded Santa Monica in 1875. In 1878 they built in downtown Los Angeles a giant office and residential building, Baker Block, the city’s first steel-framed building. After baker died, in 1897 the twice widowed Arcadia and senator Jones established the Santa Monica Land and Water Company.

The economic boom of the ranches didn't last long: the end of the Gold Rush, the national depression of 1857, the saturation of the cattle market, the Civil War, the floods of the 1861-62 winter, and the drought of 1863-64 devastated the cattle-based economy of the Los Angeles area.

Abel Stearns' ranches south of downtown were sold in the 1870s and became new towns. Lemuel Webber, a pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Anaheim, purchased one of the ranches in 1870 and founded a Presbyterian colony called Westminster. Alonzo Cook in 1874 purchased the section to the east of it and started the community of Garden Grove. Artesia emerged in 1875 from a similar speculation on old Stearns land.

The first Los Angeles banks were born, created by people who would fuel the growth of the city: Isaias Hellman (who had arrived in 1859 from Germany) started an informal bank in 1867 from his shop, and one year later John Downey, an Irishman who had been governor of California (the first one from southern California) joined with mining magnate James Hayward to open the city’s first official bank, James Hayward & Company. In 1871 Hellman and Downey founded another bank, the Farmers and Merchants Bank.

However, the lawless "Far West" was even more lawless in Los Angeles. Los Angeles was infested with bandits, gamblers and brothels even more than the boomtowns of Gold County. The race riots of 1871, in which 19 Chinese were killed, was the last straw. The five thousand citizens of Los Angeles got together and offered a subsidy to the Southern Pacific Railroad to link Los Angeles to San Francisco and Sacramento. In September 1876 the Southern Pacific Railroad completed the San Joaquin Valley line and inaugurated the first train ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Tourists came, if nothing else, to visit in person the land romanticized by Helen Hunt Jackson's best-selling novel "Ramona" (1884).

It is telling who the first professional architect to practice in Southern California worked for. Ezra Kysor designed the Pico House hotel (1870) for Pio Pico (the last Mexican governor of Alta California who had become a Los Angeles businessman); the Perry Mansion (1876) for lumber tycoon William Perry, considered the first proper “mansion” in Los Angeles, in the newly created neighborhood of Boyle Heights (named after the Andrew Boyle who purchased the area to start a vineyard and turned into a residential subdivision by his son-in-law in 1875); and the Cathedral of Saint Vibiana (1876), the first cathedral of Los Angeles.

The Chinese merchants, who (unlike the Chinese laborers) were literate and wealthy, were not easily intimidated by the racist hordes. In 1885 Chinese immigrants Joseph and Mary Tape (a successful businessman and an orphan raised by the Ladies Protection and Relief Society) sued the city of San Francisco because their daughter Mamie was denied admission to a public school (Spring Valley School, which had been inaugurated in 1852 as California’s first public school): they won in front of the California Supreme Court but the California parliament immediately passed a law authorizing the creation of segregated schools. When, in 1886, San Francisco passed regulations that were clearly targeting Chinese laundries a Chinese laundry owner, Yick Wo, appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court of the USA ruled in his favor, enforcing once and forever the principle of equal protection under the law (that would later benefit all races and ethnic groups). Another important precedent was set in 1898 when Wong Kim Ark, a "Chinaman" born in San Francisco, was recognized as a US citizen based on the 14th amendment of the US constitution (he had been denied reentry after traveling outside the USA). The Chinese American Citizens Alliance was formed in San Francisco in 1895.

San Francisco's Chinese intellectual elite, advocating for democracy in China, had its own newspaper, Chinese World, originally established in 1892 as the Mon Hing Yat Bo, and renamed Sai Gai Yat Po in 1908, written in both Chinese and English.

Founded in 1900 by Chinese Americans, the Chinese-Western Daily (Chung Sai Yat Po) remained the largest Chinese newspaper in the USA for several decades. Its editor, Ng Poon Chew, became the unofficial spokesman of the Chinese-American community.

Chinese rights activists Wong Chin Foo, "the Chinese Martin Luther King", born in Shandong province, raised by a missionary couple and brought to the USA in 1867, one of the first Chinese immigrants to be naturalized in 1874, founded a weekly magazine in New York in 1883, the Chinese American, the first Chinese-language newspaper of the East Coast, and in 1892 started the Chinese Equal Rights League of America, which soon had members also on the West Coast. He also fought against opium, gambling and prostitution in Chinese communities, and was a frequent target of Chinese criminal organizations.

The fight against sex trafficking was led in San Francisco by Presbyterian missionary Donaldina Cameron, who in 1897 became the head of the Mission House and set out to rescue as many Chinese girls as possible, helped by Tien Fuh Wu, a former abused girl. One of them, Bessie Jeong, later became the first Chinese-American woman graduate when she graduated from Stanford in 1927.

In 1905 something new happened: the Chinese in China protested against anti-Chinese racism in the USA. Chinese intellectuals had already been irked in 1904 when the Chinese delegation to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis had been humiliated. Then in July 1905 an emigrant, Feng Xiawei, killed himself in front of the US consulate of Shanghai, an event that moved the entire city. A boycott of US products started in Shanghai and spread in multiple Chinese cities, eventually joined by the Chinatowns of California. During this time the Chinese cities were flooded with stories of abuses suffered by the Chinese immigrants in the USA. Until then the ties between the immigrants the motherland had been tenuous at best. This grass-roots protest strengthened the ties between China and its California emigrants, but also encouraged the Chinese in California to stand up for their rights and injected a sense of national pride in their communities.

San Francisco was so wealthy that trade unions of the 1880s were largely focused on anti-Chinese agitation, notably the Trades Assembly when it was run by Frank Roney after 1881. In 1882 the first serious socialist organization was born, the International Workingman’s Association, whose leader Burnette Haskell was inspired by Marx’s First International and by the anarchist Bakunin, but in 1886 Haskell abandoned the city to launch a utopian socialist experiment in the western Sierra Nevada (along the upper North Fork of the Kaweah River, near today's Three Rivers): the Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth. Inspired by Edward Bellamy's best-selling utopian novel "Looking Backward" (1888), several socialist clubs were born, almost half of them in California, to implement Bellamy's ideas. Lomaland was another utopian socialist community, this one created in 1897 at Point Loma near San Diego and affiliated to the Theosophical Society that was headed since 1896 by Katherine Tingley. Los Angeles was the base of the most prominent socialist politician, Gaylord Wilshire, a land speculator who ran for several offices in the 1890s, even in Britain and Canada (and always lost). Ideals of communal property and social justice were taking over the old amoral and violent individualistic spirit. The "wild" West was no more, replaced by an "idealistic" West.

In 1890, the superintendent of the Census Bureau announced that the "Frontier" was closed: the USA had truly reached the Pacific Ocean, and the "Far West" was no longer "far", and it was settled.

In fact, the "Frontier" was now the land of the tycoons. For example, those were the years of the tourist resort. In 1880 Charles Crocker of the Central Pacific Railroad built the Del Monte Hotel near Monterey (in today's Pebble Beach), designed by Arthur Brown, the hotel that launched a vogue for luxury Victorian-style resort hotels. In 1892 the Southern Pacific Railroad added the "17-Mile Drive" along the coast between Monterey and Carmel, a road which became a major tourist attraction. The idea spread throughout the state: in 1888 the Canadian brothers James and Merritt Reid designed Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, the world's largest resort hotel, which was soon acquired by John Spreckels, son of sugar magnate Claus Spreckels; and in 1890 Robert Thompson and John Ainsworth built the Hotel Redondo in Redondo Beach to promote tourism in Redondo Beach, one of the beaches of Los Angeles.

In 1891 Jane and Leland Stanford established Stanford University in memory of their only child, Leland Jr, who had died of typhoid fever, and hired Frederick Law Olmsted as the chief architect. The location was chosen near the farm that Stanford owned on the southern bank of the San Francisquito Creek, where he raised and trained racehorses. Wealthy San Franciscan had rushed to buy land along the railroad from San Francisco to Mayfield (today's south Palo Alto) after it had started operations in 1863 (funded by San Francisco industrialist Peter Donahue and others and acquired in 1868 by Stanford's own Southern Pacific Railroad). Initially, the university was not a prestigious university at all. Leland Stanford struggled to find scholars willing to move to California and become professors at Stanford. Walter Ngon Fong, who had originally arrived through a religious organization, became the first Chinese student to graduate from Stanford in 1896. Chinese students were admitted at Stanford, but were not allowed to share the dormitories with white students, so in 1919 Frank Chuck and other Chinese students founded the Chinese Club House.

Nearby, in 1887 the adopted sun of railroad magnate Mark Hopkins (Leland Stanford's partner and neighbor), Timothy Hopkins, who, at the age of 19, had inherited control over the family’s fortune, designed a new town, originally called University Park but renamed Palo Alto in 1892.

San Francisco's mayor between 1896 and 1902, James Phelan, son of a 49er turned businessman, represented the new generation of college-educated sons of Gold Rush pioneers who had inherited a fortune from their parents and had graduated from the new local universities (in his case UC Berkeley). Phelan wanted San Francisco to rival Paris and Berlin in beauty, grandeur and modernity. And also in racial purity: when he ran for senator in 1920 he used the xenophobic campaign slogan "Keep California White" (he lost). The new City Hall, designed by Canadian architects Augustus Laver and Thomas Stent (who had worked on the Parliament building in Ottawa), was finished in 1899 (after 28 years of construction).

Phelan commissioned deaf artist Douglas Tilden to build three bronze sculptures on Market Street: the Admission Day Monument (1897), the Mechanics Monument (1901) and the California Volunteers Monument (1906). In 1905 Phelan commissioned Daniel Burnham to lay out a plan to remake San Francisco. Burnham had designed Chicago's early skyscrapers (the Montauk Building in 1881 and the Masonic Temple Building in 1892), Chicago's Columbian Exposition in 1893, New York's Fuller Building in 1902 (today's Flatiron Building), and the layout of Washington in 1902 (the plan was never executed because of the 1906 earthquake).

In 1890 Michael de Young built San Francisco's first skyscraper, a ten-story building for his San Francisco Chronicle, the first steel-framed building in the city, also designed by Daniel Burnham. Sugar magnate Claus Spreckels and his son John Spreckels purchased the Morning Call and in 1897 built (across from the Chronicle) the tallest building west of Chicago, designed by the Reid brothers. (After the 1906 earthquake and after his father's death in 1908, John Spreckels went on a buying spree in San Diego).

Charles Crocker's grandchildren financed the 12-story St Francis Hotel in Union Square (1904), designed in the style of Chicago's architect Louis Sullivan by Walter Bliss and William Faville, who were designing many of the city's buildings.

Agriculture was the main industry of the south bay, the future Silicon Valley. In the 1890s Charles Baldwin's large estate in Cupertino (today's De Anza College campus) produced and exported the wine Beaulieu.

A national economic depression began in 1893 and lasted until 1897. Following The Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, the largest world fair yet, where electricity had been the big novelty, Michael de Young of the Daily Dramatic Chronicle conceived a six-month Midwinter Fair in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park to stimulate California's economy: it was California's first international event, and, in fact, the first international event held on the West Coast. Opening in January 1894, the fair indulged in Orientalist architecture that included an "Administration Building" designed by Arthur Page Brown (who was at work on the Ferry Building completed in 1898, the largest project yet in the history of the city), a Japanese Village, designed by George Turner Marsh, an Australian trader who had lived in Japan (the following year the village became the Japanese Tea Garden, managed by Japanese-born landscaper Makoto Hagiwara), a lavish Chinese exhibition, an "electric tower", an elaborate "Allegorical Fountain", and a Fine Arts Building which later became the DeYoung Museum.

In the 1890s many industrial complexes moved to South San Francisco, which became a working-class town, sandwiched between the increasingly wealthy downtown and the rich estates of the "Peninsula" (San Mateo county). Before and after the earthquake, high wages and labor organization scared businesses away. The shrinking Chinese labor force was an element in both driving wages up and making labor more unionized. In 1904 there were 180 local unions in San Francisco, most notably the Building Trades Council, presided by Irish-born labor leader Patrick McCarthy from 1898 until 1921, one of the most powerful labor organizations in the whole of the USA. The beneficiaries were the East Bay counties (Alameda and Contra Costa) which soon passed San Francisco in manufacturing output. Industry declined in San Francisco but increased in the Bay Area as a whole. When new technologies emerged, San Francisco had lost the ability to become a manufacturing leader, and so San Francisco was unable to participate in the new booms of oil, steel, chemicals, automobiles, airplanes and even cinema. San Francisco's unions, under political boss Abe Ruef, created the Union Labor Party that in 1902 elected a new mayor, Eugene Schmitz, inaugurating an age of widespread abuses and corruption.

San Francisco's embryonic cultural life was largely detached from its (embryonic) academic life. In the 1890s the novelist Jack London (born John Chaney) assembled a bohemian crowd at his Piedmont house, on the hills above Oakland. The "Crowd" included poet George Sterling, English story writer Herman "Jim" Whitaker, reporter Ambrose Bierce, journalist Blanche Partington, Japanese poet Yonejiro Noguchi, playwright Joseph Noel, poet Joaquin Miller, German photographer Arnold Genthe, newspaper editor Adeline Knapp, poet Gelett Burgess, and photographer Anne Brigman. At the same time, in nearby Berkeley, architecture theorist Charles Keeler cemented an artistic community of architects and environmentalists, inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, which included his friend Bernard Maybeck, and linked up with the Hillside Club, originally started by a group of women. London, Bierce and Keeler were also members of the the Bohemian Club, originally formed in 1872 in San Francisco by journalists from the San Francisco Chronicle who invited musicians, writers and artists. This club had been organizing, since 1878, summer excursions north of San Francisco called "Midsummer High Jinks" during which poets, actors and musicians were invited to perform, and since 1881 these events included a druidic ceremony called "Cremation of Care". Meanwhile, poet Ina Coolbrith, a renegade niece of Mormom Church's founder Joseph Smith, was holding literary salons at her home in San Francisco, and later became California's first poet laureate. She was a member of the "Golden Gate Trinity" with Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard.

The 1893 depression was soon forgotten in San Francisco because the Klondike gold rush of 1897 in Alaska (a fellow Pacific state) brought business to the city, and the 1898 annexation by the USA of Hawaii and the Philippines (both situated in the Pacific Ocean) created an atmosphere of optimism about the future.

In 1895 the state of California inaugurated its first highway (or better "wagon road" as there were no cars yet), which was mostly a tract of the old California Trail near Lake Tahoe, followed by a second state highway from Sacramento to Folsom in 1897.

At the turn of the century, San Francisco had 350,000 residents, which was about 20% of the entire West Coast population, and was now the tenth largest city in the USA after New York (3.5 million), Chicago (1.7 million), Philadelphia (1.3 million), St Louis, Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland and Buffalo. California's population had reached 1.5 million.

There were 14,000 Chinese in San Francisco, about 3200 each in Sacramento and Los Angeles, 2200 in Alameda County (essentially Oakland), 3600 in San Joaquin County and Fresno County combined, 1738 in Santa Clara County (the South Bay of orchards) and only 306 in San Mateo County (the Peninsula of the rich country homes). The Chinese populations of the old gold and silver counties (Amador, Butte, Calaveras, El Dorago, Mariposa, Nevada, Placer, Tuolumne) had been decimated.

In 1890 the share of the foreign-born population peaked at 14.8%. After so many wars, the last decades of the century were relatively peaceful for the USA. Of course, that's true only if one doesn't include the continuing massacres of "Indians": the Apache wars in the 1880s in the Southwest and the Sioux massacre in South Dakota in 1890 that de facto ended the Indian wars. The next major war was against Spain, which resulted in the US conquest of Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

During the 1840s the planet experienced another "gold rush", although not as famous as the California one: it was a rush to mine minerals in the Chinese province of Yunnan, which drew millions of Chinese immigrants to the sparsely populated region. The flow of people between Yunnan and the Pearl River delta (Canton and Hong Kong) spread more than minerals and opium: a plague that had started in Yunnan reached Canton and Hong Kong in 1894, killing 100,000 people in a few weeks. Millions died in India between 1896 and 1898 and in Manchuria in 1899. It reached Hawaii in December 1899 (where Chinatown was burned down accidentally in an attempt to burn infected houses) and then ships started arriving in San Francisco with dead sailors. All ships from China, Japan, Australia and Hawaii were ordered to fly yellow flags and were quarantined, but the plague found its way into Chinatown anyway in February 1900. California's governor Henry Gage, fearful of the economic consequences if panic spread throughout the state, hesitated to lock down Chinatown even after the scientists confirmed the plague beyond any reasonable doubt, even criminalizing epidemiologist Joseph Kinyoun, censoring newspaper reports of plague infections, spreading disinformation and refusing to administer Waldemar Haffkine's experimental vaccine (note the similarities with 2020 when US president Donald Trump hesitated to recognize the covid pandemic and epidemiologist Anthony Fauci was even criminalized by right-wing media that also conducted anti-vaccine campaigns). The result was that the plague kept spreading and killed more than 100 people in the city. The worst consequence, however, was that it further increased anti-Chinese sentiments among Whites. In 1901 San Francisco's own mayor James Phelan wrote an article titled "Why the Chinese Should Be Excluded".

Jack London himself, one of the most progressive writers of the time, depicted the ethnic Chinese population as an existential threat to the USA in the essay "The Yellow Peril" (1904) and conveyed his fear that China would some day conquer the world in the short story "The Unparalleled Invasion" (1910). London, who had visited Japan in 1893 and Manchuria in 1904 (as a reporter covering the Russo-Japanese War), predicted the rise first of Japan as a military and industrial power, the Japanese invasion of China, and then the rise of China as a military and economic power (60 years before Japan became the second world economy and 100 years before China passed Japan!)

That was just the tip of the iceberg. The bad reputation of Chinatown as a den of sin, crime and prostitution, and now also of disease, was unique in California at a time when San Francisco was trying to promote itself as a modern city, on par with the most fashionable European cities.

Sinophobia was widespread in the Anglo-Saxon world and in fact the term “yellow peril” originated in Britain, with Matthew Shiel’s novel “The Yellow Danger” (1898). The anti-foreign and anti-Christian "Boxer Rebellion" that raged in China from 1899 to 1901 was misrepresented in Britain and the USA. The American Federation of Labor, the largest union of the USA, published a pamphlet titled "Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion - Meat vs. Rice - American Manhood Against Asiatic Cooliesm, Which Shall Survive?" (1902).

The Japanese, who were migrating from both Hawaii and Japan to replace the Chinese in the farms, didn't fare much better: in 1906 San Francisco even ordered 93 Japanese schoolchildren who were attending public schools to enroll in the segregated "Oriental School" of Chinatown, an international incident after which the US president convinced the Japanese government to curb emigration to California (the "Gentlemen's Agreement" of 1907).

In April 1906 San Francisco was destroyed by an earthquake and a fire. Many of the great mansions and historical buildings were reduced to rubble.

Chinatown suffered perhaps more than any other neighborhood. The disaster made news all over the world and in particular in China. The Chinese minister Liang Cheng arrived in Oakland to lead a relief effort, another gesture of solidarity from the homeland.

California's politicians, instead, saw a chance to get rid of Chinatown. A special "Subcommittee on Relocating the Chinese" was convened, with the intention of kicking the Chinese out of the city and giving their land to real-estate speculators. China's empress Cixi had to sent her ambassador to San Francisco to defend the ethnic Chinese. The Six Companies pointed out the economic damage that would be caused by losing the lucrative Asian trade and the cheap laborers. But ultimately the project of deporting the Chinese failed for a simpler reason: at the peak of anti-Chinese sentiment, no other city was willing to accept new Chinese residents. In October 1906, amidst anti-Japanese sentiment, San Francisco renamed the Chinese School the "Oriental Public School" (with all Caucasian teachers), and the 93 ethnic Japanese schoolchildren of the city's public schools were moved to it.

And so the Chinese started rebuilding Chinatown, and by 1908 their work was done while the rest of the city was still under reconstruction. The new Chinatown was very different from the old one. The old one was basically an unappealing slum of filthy wooden tenements. The new one was designed by architects (hired by Chinese merchants) with the deliberate intention of creating a Chinese-themed tourist attraction. Hence the iconic pagoda-topped buildings of the Sing Chong and Sing Fat bazaars. That's when Look Poong-shan (born in Mendocino of a wealthy Chinese merchant man and an "Indian" woman), originally employed at the San Francisco branch of the Russo-Asiatic Bank, founded in Chinatown the first Chinese bank in the USA, the Canton Bank. The best thing about the new Chinatown was that the earthquake and fire crippled the tongs.

The Exclusion Act all but killed Chinese immigration into California. Indirectly, it redirected Chinese immigration to the East Coast: in 1892 the US government opened the immigration station at Ellis Island in New York through which millions of Europeans arrived. Despite the Exclusion Act, thousands of Chinese were admitted and set off the creation of Chinatowns of the eastern cities (New York, Boston, etc). This was an important moment in the history of US immigration because previously immigration was delegated to each state. The millions of new (mainly European) immigrants convinced the US government of the need for a national immigration policy.

There was another loophole that allowed the Chinese to immigrate specifically to California. The partial good news out of the 1906 earthquake was that the city's records were also destroyed so that any immigrant could claim to be a citizen. Many Chinese who were not citizens did so and became US citizens overnight. That allowed them to bring their immediate family members from China to the USA.

Discrimination against the Chinese continued unabated, but now the Japanese, who had replaced the Chinese in the countryside, were perhaps targeted even more viciously. The 1907 riots in San Francisco affected the Chinese but were actually started by anti-Japanese activists.

California didn't have the equivalent of Ellis Island until 1910 when the old military reserve of Angel Island, in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, was turned into an immigration station. That became the arrival point of Chinese immigrants. Because of the Exclusion Act, they were often detained there for weeks while the bureaucrats decided if they were arriving legally (as family members of US citizens) or not. The Chinese immigrants spent days and nights in the public dormitories of the island (which are still covered with graffiti, including 200 poems).

In 1913, California passed another discriminating law: the Alien Land Law, which limited the right to own land to "foreigners eligible to become citizens". Asians were not eligible under the Naturalization Law of 1870. The law (not repealed until 1952) was mainly directed against the Japanese, who now controlled most of the agriculture in California, but de facto kept the Chinese from buying land outside their own Chinatowns.

During the "exclusion years", the Chinese emigrants, who in the 1850s had mainly headed for California and Australia, often opted for the British colonies of east Asia, like Singapore, where the British needed laborers.

California had adopted a new constitution in 1879 and the Southern Pacific corporation had started interfering in its application through a vast network of corruption. The Southern Pacific had become known as “The Octopus” (even before Frank Norris' 1901 novel "The Octopus"). John Haynes, a Los Angeles land speculator, became the leader of the anti-corruption grass-roots movement in 1900 when he founded the Direct Legislation League, advocating for direct democracy. California held a debate on women's suffrage in 1896, but failed despite the support of influential women like Phoebe Hearst (George's widow, William Randolph's mother). Resentment against the Southern Pacific and against corrupt politicians like Abe Ruef and Eugene Schmitz (famously implicated in the "graft trials" of 1905-08) kept building up, and at the same time the example of other states influenced the (male and white) electorate: several states had introduced referendums (South Dakota in 1898, Utah in 1900, Oregon in 1902, Montana in 1906, etc) and five states had already granted women the right to vote (Wyoming in 1890, Colorado in 1893, Utah in 1896, Idaho in 1896 and Washington in 1910). And so in 1910 California elected as governor the anti-corruption crusader Hiram Johnson, and in 1911 the state held its first referendums, including the one on women's suffrage which this time was approved, and 22 amendments to the state constitution were approved all at once. The "Progressive Reforms" of 1911 curbed the political power of the Southern Pacific.

Capitalism was on shaky foundations, as proven by the New York Stock Exchange panic of 1907, which can be considered the first worldwide financial crisis. Socialism percolated into the social fabric. The leader of the Socialist Party, Job Harriman, had run for governor in 1898 and was a well-respected labor organizer. The Wobblies Industrial Workers of the World, founded in Chicago in 1905, were increasingly popular among the workers of California. San Francisco was the theater of escalating battles between the working class and the capitalists, like the streetcar strike of 1907. In 1908 hundreds of socialists marched in Los Angeles demanding free speech. And then there were intellectuals like Jack London, perhaps the first major writer born in San Francisco, who wrote the dystopian novel "The Iron Heel" (1908). The socialists were opposed especially by the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Harrison Gray Otis. In October 1910 the Iron Workers, formed in 1896 in Pittsburgh, who had already launched a bombing campaign in other cities, blew up the Los Angeles Times building, killing 21 people. That event alone killed the socialist movement. Finally, in July 1916 a bomb exploded in San Francisco across from the Ferry Building during a march in favor of entering World War I, killing nine people. The war was opposed by the anarchists and so it was convenient to frame two anarchists, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, although the evidence was entirely fabricated, but the press, led by William Randolph Hearst, had created a strong anti-anarchist (or, better, anti-pacifist) sentiment in the public opinion. It didn't help that coincidentally two famous Lithuanian-born anarchists and pacifists were in town: the legendary Emma Goldman, who had been invited to delivering lectures, and Alexander Berkman, who, after serving 14 years in prison for trying to assassinate a capitalist, was publishing in San Francisco his anarchist journal "The Blast". (Goldman and Berkman were eventually deported to Russia in December 1919 after serving two years in prison for opposing the military draft before the USA entered World War I). Then in 1917 the Bolshevik revolution in Russia further increased the fear of the revolutionaries.

Two events offered wealthy Chinese a chance to clean up San Francisco's Chinatown. In 1909 San Francisco decided to celebrate the 140th anniversary of Portola's discovery of the Bay with a six-day Portola Festival; in reality an event to celebrate the reconstruction of San Francisco after the earthquake and the fire. Chinatown made the best of it, presenting itself as a tourist attraction for the first time. Then in December 1915 a world's fair was held in San Francisco to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal: the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. A telephone line was installed with New York. Philadelphia sent the "Liberty Bell". Spectacular architecture (planned by a committee presided by Willis Polk) dotted the shore, including the Palace of Fine Arts designed by architect Bernard Maybeck (rebuilt in the 1960s, it is the only surviving structure), and the largest wooden-frame huilding in the world, the Machinery Palace, plus replicas of the Panama Canal, of thre Grand Canyon and of Yellowstone Park. Nearly 19 million people from all over the world attended. There was also a "Joy Zone", one of the largest amusement parks ever built, which included a "Chinese Village", whose main attraction was "Underground Chinatown", a grotesque, exaggerated depiction of the underworld of Chinatown, in particular its opium dens. While racist and insulting, this "thrilling" representation of Chinese life meant that Chinatown was becoming a tourist attraction. More importantly, it was "the" deviant aspect of San Francisco, which was otherwise trying too hard to present itself as an ordinary city. What stood out from this exhibition was that the "melting pot" of the USA was mostly a "white" melting pot but in San Francisco it was actually a confluence of white and "yellow".

In August 1915 the Pacific Mail S.S. Company announced that it would cease operations between China and California. Its ships had been the main mode of transportation for the Chinese community. Fearing that Japan (an emerging power after winning the war against Russia in 1905) would now control all the trans-Pacific traffic, Chinese merchants got together and formed the China Mail S. S. Company.

Many of the Chinese immigrants in the first half of the 20th century were self-employed business owners for the simple reason that they couldn't find employment due to the Chinese Exclusion Act. No surprise that they started hundreds of laundries and restaurants. It was obvious to any white observer that these Chinese were simply hard-working honest people, clearly very good at saving money, but the discrimination continued unabated.

Despite these attempts by the "Oriental" groups to gain legitimacy and respect, in 1917 the USA expanded "exclusion" to the whole of Asia (the "Asiatic Barred Zone Act"): Middle East, Central Asia, British India, Indochina, etc. The only exception was the Philippines, which the USA had conquered in the Spanish–American War of 1898: Filipinos were US nationals until 1934, when they were granted independence (actual independence only came in 1945). The Chinese and the Japanese were still able to immigrate into Hawaii because Hawaii was not a state of the USA (just a protectorate) until 1959. Several Chinese and Japanese tried to challenge these laws in courts, but in 1922 the Supreme Court ruled that Japanese-born people were not "white", which meant that, according to the Naturalization Act of 1790, they could not become US citizens, and in 1923 the Supreme Court ruled that Indians too did not qualify as "white". Wong Kim Ark's lawsuit of 1898 had clarified that everybody born in the USA was a citizen but foreign-born Asians were still excluded from citizenship.

In 1911, China’s last emperor abdicated and the Republic of China was established by Sun Yat-Sen, just after Sun had visited San Francisco during his exile. The USA immediately recognized the new government. In 1912 San Francisco's Chinatown elected their own representative (Kuang Yaojie, president of the Ningyang huiguan) to the national congress in China. A few years later the excitement turned into anxiety when in November 1914, during World War I, Japan, allied with Britain and France, first conquered the Chinese port of Qingdao from Germany, and when, in January 1915, Japan issued the "Twenty-one Demands" which basically amounted to China becoming a Japanese protectorate (Japan had already conquered Taiwan from China during the Jiawu Zhanzheng of 1894-95). In 1913 the young Chinese Republic descended into chaos, as Sun Yatsen’s Kuomintang party won elections but China disintegrated in the hands of regional warlords. Mongolia (1911), Tibet (1913) and seven provincial governments declared independence. China entered World War I in 1917 on the side of Britain and the USA, but was betrayed by them at the end of the war and in 1919 students protested in Beijing's Tiananmen Square the decision to grant German-controlled Shandong to Japan, and thus a new nationalist Chinese movement, known as the "May Fourth Movement", was created. The immigrants were increasingly touched by events in the motherland. At this time a number of schools for Chinese children were established, mainly in San Francisco and Hawaii, and mostly sponsored by the benevolent associations. The biggest was the Zhonghua School. These schools typically taught both the Cantonese language and Chinese classics. The Chinese communities also doubled efforts to reshape their image by fighting vices like gambling and prostitution and the tongs.

The Chinese were not allowed to own land but could lease it from white landowners. When in October 1915 a fire destroyed the 100-people Chinatown of Walnut Grove, south of Sacramento, a group of Chinese led by businessman Lee "Charlie" Bing (who had owned a gambling house, a hardware store, a grocery store, a barber shop, a pool hall and a herbal medicine store) leased land from a man called George Locke and built their own town, Locke. It was the first town in California built by the Chinese for the Chinese. More Chinese workers came, employed in the farms and canneries of the Delta region. It became famous among white people because of its (illegal) casinos (like the building that today hosts the Dai Loy Museum).

In 1919 Chen Chunrong, a lawyer who had worked for the Italian American Bank (today's Bank of America), launched the joint-stock Chinese American Agricultural Company to purchase a large farm near Stockton. Hundreds of Chinese invested in it.

There were still tong wars in the first twenty years of the new century, and they often spread to many cities. One started in 1917 in Portland and one in 1921 in Butte, north of Sacramento. But those were the last ones.

In 1919 the USA ratified the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibited "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors" and then passed the "National Prohibition Act". Nightclubs serving alcohol illegally popped up in Chinatown.

The Chinese population of San Francisco was confined to a few blocks of the city. The Chinese dared not cross California Street or Broadway, because on the other side it was "white" territory, and those Chinese who entered it risked being attacked.

San Francisco started rebuilding. The earthquake was a blessing for San Jose-born Amadeo Giannini (son of an Italian 49er who had opened a farm in the south bay) who in 1904 had founded Bank of Italy (later renamed Bank of America), which specialized in loans to the middle-class, and not only to the wealthy class. Most bankers shut down but Giannini instead extended loans to rebuild from his makeshift office on a North Beach wharf.

In 1907, the California Fruit Cannery Association (aka Del Monte) built the largest fruit and vegetable cannery in the world, located between Fisherman's Wharf and Ghirardelli's new chocolate factory (the old Pioneer Woolen Mills).

In 1907, investor Fred Swanton opened the Beach Boardwalk of Santa Cruz, halfway between San Francisco and Monterey, a complex of bathhouses, amusement park and restaurants, a “Coney Island of the West”.

San Francisco's Barbary Coast survived the earthquake. In fact, in 1908 the Dash became the first openly gay bar in the city, although it closed after a few months. But it didn't survive the press: in 1913 William Randolph Hearst's moralizing campaign in the San Francisco Examiner forced mayor James Rolph to crack down on Barbary Coast and forcing governor Hiram Johnson to enact the Red Light Abatement Act that de facto banned brothels from the state (the last ones of Barbary Coast were closed by Rolph in 1917).

Before and after the earthquake, San Francisco experienced waves of immigrants from southern Europe, notably from Italy. The Italians settled into the poorest neighborhood, North Beach, in the northwestern tip of the city, which became infamous for poverty, filth, and disease, the only ethnic enclave that was more disparaged than Chinatown. It was devastated by a new plague in 1907 and by tuberculosis in 1912-14.

The other Catholic group fared a lot better. The Irish Catholics, who during the Gold Rush era had been discriminated against no less than the Chinese by the largely Protestant business elite of San Francisco, were now fully integrated, and had even become a political force under the leadership of Edward Hanna, appointed archbishop in 1915.

In October 1913 the Lincoln Highway was dedicated, the first transcontinental highway, connecting the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast, from Times Square in New York City to the newly created Lincoln Park in San Francisco, a journey of 5000 kilometers that the average car could complete in a month and that required carrying plenty of gasoline and full camping equipment because services for motorists were scarce. And there were only one million cars. The brain behind the project was Carl Fisher, an Indianapolis businessman whose previous claim to fame was to have opened the first car dealership in the country. In order to pave with concrete ("crushed rock") the unpaved sections, Fisher launched a nation-wide collection whose contributors eventually included inventor Thomas Edison, president Woodrow Wilson and former president Theodore Roosevelt. During World War I, in 1919, the army sent a military convoy from Washington to California that arrived after two months: they had to fix bridges that were not strong enough and muddy sections, but the convoy electrified the towns along the way. In 1925 the USA established the Interstate Highways Board that assigned numbers to highways, and the Lincoln Highway became US30, US1 and finally US40 in California.

After suffrage was granted to women in 1911, single women started feeling more empowered. In the 1890s single women were still mostly employed in the apparel business but in the 1910s they increasingly took jobs such as teachers, stenographers, typists, and telephone operators. Many were migrating from smaller towns to the cities. The very religious Lizzie Glide, the widow since 1906 of Sacramento cattle baron Joseph Glide, inherited vast land, ranches and homes in multiple counties of California, and her fortune was further increased when oil was discovered in Kern County, one of the places where she owned land. She used her wealth to become a San Francisco philanthropist: in 1913 she had built the Mary Elizabeth Inn, designed by Julia Morgan, to provide safe lodging to working single women.

The earthquake offered opportunities to architects. Julia Morgan, raised in Oakland, a UC Berkeley graduate in engineering who became the first woman architect licensed in California (1904), designed an Oakland cemetery's crematorium and columbarium later renamed Chapel of the Chimes (1909), Berkeley's St John's Presbyterian Church (1910), as well as dozens of residences before becoming the Hearst family's favorite architect. Phoebe Hearst found Morgan her biggest commission: the Asilomar conference center in Pacific Grove for the Young Women's Christian Association, designed between 1913 and 1929. (Morgan never married, which was not uncommon among career women of that era).

The UC Berkeley campus was designed by French architect Emile Benard, but the implementation was left to New York's architect John Galen Howard, also the founding director of its School of Architecture in 1903. Howard designed several buildings of the campus, notably the Greek Theater (1903), the Doe Library (1911) and the Campanile (1914). He also designed the Italian-American Bank building (1907) and the Civic Auditorium (1915) in San Francisco. Three of his sons became artists and one became an architect.

Willis Polk, who had been assistant to both Page Brown and Daniel Burnham, designed San Francisco's tallest building, Hobart Building (1914) and the innovative Hallidie Building (1918).

William Bowers Bourn II, a tycoon who had inherited the Empire gold mine from his father and then, in 1902, acquired control of the San Francisco Gas and Electric Company (which was merged in 1905 to form the Pacific Gas and Electric Company) and, in 1908, of the Spring Valley Water Company, was a mentor of architect Willis Polk. Polk designed, in 1890, his Empire Cottage country estate and, in 1896, his 14-bedroom brick mansion (at 2550 Webster). When Bourn became president of the Pacific-Union Club, he had Polk renovate James Flood's old mansion (at 1000 California Street) into a brownstone house for the club (1907). In 1917 Polk built Bourn's country house in Woodside (at the southern tip of the Crystal Springs reservoir), famous for its gardens (today known as "Filoli", short for Bourn's motto "Fight - Love - Live"), modeled after an estate in Ireland that Bourn had purchased in 1910 as a wedding gift to his daughter. At the time of his death he was the wealthiest man in San Francisco. (His daughter and wife died before him, so his three surviving sisters inherited his fortune).

Arthur Brown Jr, son of the pioneering architect of Charles Crocker and Leland Stanford, designed the new City Hall that opened in 1916, with a dome taller than that of Washington's Capitol.

On the site of the 1916 bombing, in 1918 the Southern Pacific Railroad erected a large building in 1918, the tallest steel-framed structure west of the Mississippi, designed by Walter Bliss and William Faville.

In 1911 banking and shipping magnate James Rolph was elected mayor, after being endorsed by both Republican and Democratic parties, signaling that the business aristocracy was regaining control of San Francisco, at the same time that the progressives were celebrating Hiram Johnson's election to governor of California. Rolph, who developed a strong alliance with archbishop Hanna, remained mayor for 19 years, reelected for five consecutive terms, presiding over: the city-owned San Francisco Municipal Railway in 1912 (not owned by private investors like in all other major cities), the Lincoln Highway in 1913, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, the inauguration of the new City Hall in 1916, the termination of Barbary Coast in 1917, the opening of the Twin Peaks tunnel in 1918 (the longest streetcar tunnel in the world), and the completion of the Hetch Hetchy dam in 1923.

These projects were all carried out by the Irishman whom Rolph had hired as city engineer: Michael O'Shaughnessy, a railway engineer who had arrived in 1885. By coincidence, the two enterprising men who solved the water issue for San Francisco and Los Angeles were both Irish: the school dropout William Mulholland and the college graduate Michael O'Shaughnessy, coming from two opposite ends of society. Without their work, the two iconic cities would not have grown as rapidly as they did.

Perhaps more importantly, it was under Rolph that San Francisco's scientific reputation improved. In 1914 the Hooper Foundation for Medical Research, second in size only to New York’s Rockefeller Institute, selected UC San Francisco (Parnassus Hill) as the site for its research center. Mindful of the plague epidemic of 1900, Rolph in 1915 appointed a scientist, William Hassler, as chief health officer. In the same year, UC San Francisco established a graduate program that trained students in bacteriology and chemistry. And so San Francisco, that had lacked the prestigious medical institutions of the East Coast, finally got a world-class medical institution, UC San Francisco, which began its ascent through the ranks of the life sciences (the future hub of biotech). When the "Spanish flu" started spreading in 1918, San Francisco was at the vanguard of research and experimentation, even using the Angel Island's immigration facilities and the Yerba Buena Island navy base to quarantine and study infected individuals. While scientists on the East Coast underestimated the epidemic and even mocked the panic, San Francisco became the first city to enact drastic measures, starting in October 1918 with the mandate for citizens to wear gauze masks in public Hassler was scientifically wrong, as scientist John Kyle at the University of Southern California pointed out, because the tiny influenza virus could easily penetrate the gauze mask, and in fact San Francisco ended up with the same death rate of any other major city, but the people of San Francisco celebrated two victories in November 1918: victory in World War I and the (accidental) decline of the flu. When the pandemic rebounded in 1819, Hassler, aware of the success of vaccines against rabies, typhoid and diphtheria, started administering the experimental flu vaccine developed at Tufts Medical School in Boston by Timothy Leary (uncle of the future psychedelic guru of the 1960s). That vaccine didn't work because it was based non German scientist Richard Pfeiffer's theory that a bacterium caused the flu (the influenza virus was only isolated in 1933 and the first flu vaccine was only developed in 1938), but again it allowed Rolph to promote San Francisco was a world-class progressive city. More than anything else, Rolph was successful in uniting the city around altruistic and patriotic ideals.

The 1920s were the age of the skyscraper for San Francisco, not a trivial feat for a city that had been destroyed by an earthquake. George William Kelham, who had designed San Francisco's Public Library in 1917 (which now houses the Asian Art Museum) and the campus of UC Los Angeles (1926), became the specialist of the genre, building the 21-story Standard Oil Building (1922), the 32-story Russ Building (1927), the 28-story Shell Building (1929), etc.

His main competitor was the San Francisco-native Timothy Pflueger, who designed the 26-story Pacific Telephone & Telegraph building (1925), the tallest building in San Francisco for 40 years, the 26-story Four Fifty Sutter Building (1929), and the art-deco Stock Exchange Tower (1930), including a stone relief by Ralph Stackpole, a mural by Diego Rivera and a lavishly decorated City Club on the tenth floor. He was also the master of the movie theater, designing the baroque Castro Theatre (1922), the Moorish-revival Alhambra Theatre (1926) and the tropical-themed Paramount Theatre (1931), the largest of California.

In the 1920 the Bohemian Club became an elite nation-wide men-only secret society that could be joined only by invitation, and the two-week retreat at the Bohemian Grove a way for some of the most powerful politicians and businessmen to get together. To become a member there was a 25-year waiting-list and the membership fee was expensive. Artists were no longer members for life, but invited as "performers" to entertain the lifelong members. Calvin Coolidge was the first president to become a member (1923), followed by all Republican presidents until George Herbert Bush (1989). An artist who was frequently invited was the sculptor Haig Patigian, an immigrant from Ottoman-occupied Armenia, who had made the friezes and sculptures for the Machinery Palace at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

Coincidence or not, during the "Chinese exclusion" era (between 1880 and 1943) San Francisco was rather static while Los Angeles is the one that grew dramatically.

In 1880 Los Angeles was still a small town, with only about 10,000 inhabitants, compared with more than 60,000 in San Francisco and more than 20,000 in Sacramento. Even Monterey was bigger than Los Angeles. The whole of southern California (six counties from Los Angeles to San Diego) had less than 50,000 residents. The arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1876 changed all that.

The Los Angeles Times was founded in 1881 by Nathan Cole and Thomas Gardiner. In 1879 Robert Widney established a private university, the University of Southern California, predating Stanford as the first private university of California, on land donated by bankers Isaias Hellman, Ozro Childs (a former 49er) and John Downey. In 1882 a southern branch of the California State Normal School opened in Los Angeles, which later became the Los Angeles branch of the University of California, UCLA. In 1888 a real City Hall opened in Los Angeles (until then the mayor had simply resided in a rented homes and hotels).

Two competing transcontinental railroads had made it easier and cheaper to travel to southern California: the Southern Pacific Railroad of the "Big Four", that connected Los Angeles to San Francisco in September 1876 (when Los Angeles had fewer than 10,000 people) and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, that connected Los Angeles to Chicago in May 1887 (when Los Angeles had about 40,000 people). Their fare war caused the price of a ticket from Kansas City to Los Angeles to crash to one dollar, and their marketing of sunny weather, ocean views and cheap land attracted the first wave of immigrants from the Midwest. In 1883 the Southern Pacific extended the San Francisco to Los Angeles line to New Orleans, creating a third transcontinental route.

Tens of thousands of families could suddenly afford to move to southern California. Among the immigrants were thousands of people afflicted by illnesses who hoped that the climate of southern California would heal them: for the first time in history a frontier was being settled by the sick and the retirees. In 1890 Jerome Madden, working for the Southern Pacific Railroad, published a book on "California - its attractions for the invalid, tourist, capitalist and homeseeker".

Realtors popped up everywhere trying to sell land to investors from other states. In 1887 the first electric railway started operating in Los Angeles specifically to help sell land on Pico Street, which was far from downtown. Moses Sherman was the man who electrified Los Angeles' streets: in 1890 he founded the Los Angeles Consolidated Electric Railway Company (LACE) that quickly built electric lines crisscrossing the county.

The other magnet of southern California was the orange tree. For centuries, from the missions to the ranches to the Chinese farms, wheat had been the main crop grown in California. Around 1855 California's wheat output started exceeding local consumption and wheat could easily be exported because it did not require refrigeration. Legend has it that the first citrus orchard was planted in 1804 at the San Gabriel Mission, east of Los Angeles. In 1833 a Santa Fe fur trapper, William Wolfskill, settled in Los Angeles, and in 1838 started a vineyard, moving on, in 1841, to cultivating oranges, creating a popular hybrid, the Valencia orange. Twenty years later, the majority of California’s orange trees were in Wolfskill’s orchards. In 1877 his son Joseph was the first one to ship oranges by train to another state, thanks to the newly inaugurated Southern Pacific Railroad: the oranges, wrapped in paper and cooled with ice, reached St Louis in one month. It was an Eliza Lovell (married Tibbets) in Riverside, an early pioneer of the town, who planted seedlings of Brazilian "navel" oranges in 1873 and set a trend. People soon realized that southern California had the perfect weather for these oranges, and citrus orchards spread to Anaheim (a German colony), San Bernardino (a Mormon colony), Pasadena (an Indiana colony), Redlands (a Chicago colony), Riverside, Pomona, etc. The railway connecting Los Angeles to Chicago came at the right time. Chicago's meat-packing tycoon Gustavus Swift had invented in 1878 a refrigerated car to transport meat, but Edwin Earl, the rare native Californian, perfected it in 1890 specifically to transport oranges. The railroad had been brought to California to connect the East Coast with the gold mines, but it became truly lucrative thanks to the orange and to the agriculture in general.

The orange reflected some general trends in California's agriculture. There was a shift from large-scale grain cultivation to small-scale intensive fruit cultivation. Fruit replaced wheat as the main produce of California. It wasn't just oranges. Californian farmers indulged in experiments with genetically modified fruit. For example, in 1875 Luther Burbank settled in Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco, and started developing hundreds of new varieties of fruits. At the same time, in the 1880s California's agriculture, scarce in labor, underwent a rapid mechanization, pioneering the adoption of new machines (gang plows, large headers, combined harvesters) that had not been invented there but were increasingly built there (mostly in Stockton). In 1919 California was producing 57% of the oranges, 70% of the prunes/plums, over 80% of the grapes and figs, and virtually all of the apricots, almonds, walnuts, olives, and lemons grown in the USA. In 1920 more than 10% of California farms had tractors compared with 3.6% for the nation as a whole.

At the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Southern California pavilion designed by Chamber of Commerce's superintendent Frank Wiggins (himself one of the sick who had migrated in 1886 from the Midwest and one of the lucky ones who was indeed cured by the sunny weather) was one of the most popular attractions, depicting Southern California as an Eden: an “Olive Oil Tower” from Santa Barbara ranches, a “Walnut Tower” from Los Angeles County growers, and a 12-meter tall "Tower of Oranges".

The Midwestern immigrants were not a poor, illiterate crowd of desperados like the gold diggers of the Gold Rush: they came with money, to buy land, to build a home, to open a shop. Pasadena in the north, Santa Monica to the west and Riverside to the east were ideal locations for those who were simply looking for a piece of land to build a dream home, while Los Angeles itself appealed to those who wanted to start a farm, thanks to a growing reputation as the perfect combination of soil and climate. For example, in 1887 Frederick Rindge and his wife May moved from Boston to Santa Monica and in 1892 bought the nearby ranch of Malibu (technically speaking, the land grant Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit) for a small sum of money, at a time when there were no roads to Malibu, for the purpose of building their dream country home, modeled after the villas of the Italian and French rivieras (today Malibu is one of the most expensive places in the world). In 1887 Amos Throop, a Chicago anti-slavery politician, retired to Pasadena and four years later founded Throop University, which later became the California Institute of Technology, aka CalTech.

On New Year's Day in 1890, Pasadena held its first "Rose Parade", conceived and publicized by wealthy immigrants like Charles Frederick Holder (a naturalist who had arrived from New York in 1885) to promote the region: while the Midwest and the Northeast were buried under snow, Pasadena was celebrating the New Year in mild weather. Within a few years many newspapers in other states were covering the event.

Immigrants from the Midwest quickly outnumbered the original rancheros, and immigrants form the East Coast turned some ranches into towns.

The vast amount of free land was the equivalent of the gold mines of 1849, except that it was much easier to "discover" and monetize. It was Los Angeles's gold rush.

The first major California vineyards were established by the Catholic missions of San Gabriel and San Fernando, but not for commercial purposes at a time when nearby Los Angeles had maybe 200 people. The first commercial vineyards were created in the region, at a time when southern California was still under Mexican rule, and way before the Gold Rush. Jean Louis Vignes opened the first winery in 1833, acquired in 1855 by his nephews Jean-Louis and Pierre Sainsevain, followed by his neighbor William Wolfskill in 1841 (more famous for the Valencia oranges). When the Bay Area was overrun by 49ers in search of gold, the countryside around Los Angeles was being overrun by European immigrants venturing into vineyards, like Matthew Keller (1852), an Irishman who had lived in Mexico, and his friend and fellow Irishman Andrew Boyle (1858). In 1853 two Prussian musicians (violinist Charles Kohler and flautist John Frohling) opened a winery and then in 1857 they convinced 50 Bavarian-American families of the San Francisco area to join their Los Angeles Vineyard Society in a place that they named Anaheim. By the end of the decade there were more than 100 wineries in southern California.

In 1859 Edwin Drake had struck oil in Pennsylvania and had started an "oil rush". There were no cars and oil was not yet used for making gasoline, but kerosene quickly replaced whale oil for lighting, and that was a massive market. Oil was produced in north California already in 1865, and in 1867 Thomas Bard had started producing oil from a well in the Ojai Valley (northwest of Los Angeles), but California's oil boom started in 1892 when Edward Doheny, who was actually a silver prospector who had made money in New Mexico, and Charles Canfield discovered oil in Los Angeles.

Five years later Los Angeles was littered with 2500 wells and 200 oil companies. They quickly consolidated in a handful of companies, the biggest among them being the Union Oil Company founded in 1890 by Lyman Stewart and Wallace Hardison through a merger with Thomas Bard's company, but also Doheny's own company (which in 1916 would become the Pan American Oil Company after he had made a huge oil strike in Mexico), and also the Pacific Coast Oil Company, co-founded in 1879 in San Joaquin Valley by Lloyd Tevis (and acquired in 1900 by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, the future Chevron).

That was perfect timing: Drake had discarded gasoline, a by-product of oil distillation, but in 1886 Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler invented the gasoline-powered automobile and in 1893 the first gasoline-powered car was made in the USA (by Charles and Frank Duryea Massachusetts). 1899 is the year when car manufacturers popped up everywhere, including Ford's Detroit Autombile Company, and the year when Alexander Winton drove from Cleveland to New York taking along a reporter, thereby generating a lot of publicity and ending the trip in front of a million people. Gasoline quickly became the main reason to drill for oil. By 1903 California became the leading oil-producing state, passing Pennsylvania and Texas (that had started pumping oil in 1894, and would soon pass California thanks to the 1901 oil strikes of Beaumont, the largest of the era).

Kern County had been populated first by gold miners of the 1850s who scattered in the Sierra Nevada mountains and then by farmers of the southern states fleeing the Civil War who established cotton plantations. The town of Bakersfield had been created in 1863 as Baker's Field, the land near the Kern River acquired by Thomas Baker, a lawyer from Ohio. The early oil prospectors used gold-mining experience to mine oil and asphalt. In 1865 Josiah Lovejoy opened the Buena Vista refinery to make kerosene for lamps and lubricants for wagon wheels, and later asphalt to pave roads (in the 1890s). Like everybody else at the time, he threw away the useless liquid byproduct called "gasoline". The McKittrick oil field was discovered in 1896 but the boom started in 1899 when Jonathan Elwood and his son James discovered the Kern River oil field, northeast of Bakersfield. Overnight, tent towns were born. Within three years more than two thousand oil companies were incorporated in California. Unfortunately, overproduction in Kern County caused the price of a barrel of California crude oil to collapse (from one dollar in 1899 to 12 cents in 1904). Oil was now used also and mainly for lighting. Some celebrated discoveries added excitement to the local industry, like the Midway gusher (1909) and the Lakeview gusher (1910).

Meanwhile, Los Angeles kept expanding. In 1895 the Southern Pacific opened a branch line to Burbank, thus opening up San Fernando Valley to the Midwestern immigrants.

Southern California was now experiencing an oil boom, a tourism boom and an orange boom. And so by 1890 the population of Los Angeles had quintupled to 50,000.

As immigrants kept arriving from the Midwest and the East Coast, Los Angeles' population doubled in a decade and passed 100,000 by 1900, and then even tripled to more than 300,000 in 1910. San Francisco was still much bigger, having passed 400,000 people around 1900. Unlike multi-ethnic San Francisco, Los Angeles was a "white" city: most immigrants came from other white Anglo-Saxon cities/towns of the USA. The ethnic minorities were very small: in 1890 the Asians were 2% and the Mexicans 1% of the population. Still in 1930, out of more than one million people, there were only 70,000 Jews, 45,000 Hispanics, 30,000 Asians and 30,000 Blacks.

Ironically, the transcontinental railroad that had been conceived to link the eastern cities with the Bay Area ended up benefiting mostly Los Angeles.

Henry Huntington, nephew of Collis Huntington, one of the "Big Four" of the transcontinental railroad, applied the business model of the Pico Street electric line on a bigger scale: he established both the Huntington Land and Improvement Company (a real-estate firm to purchase, subdivide and resell land, notably in the San Gabriel Valley) and the Pacific Electric rail network, which, starting in 1901, spread to many suburbs (2,000 kms) thanks to an army of Mexican immigrant laborers. His business partner was banker Isaias Hellman. Huntington had already acquired control of LACE, now renamed Los Angeles Railway or LARy, in 1898: LARy ran yellow cars, Pacific Electric operated red cars. He even founded an electric company, the Pacific Light and Power Corporation, initially to provide electricity for his trolley cars but then also to supply electricity to the homes of Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley. Huntington got rich selling land: the railway was just a means to get people to buy land in the suburbs that he connected with downtown Los Angeles. Thanks to the interlocking success of his business triangle, Huntington became one of the region's largest employers and expanded into agriculture and hospitality. Huntington was the main force behind the dramatic acceleration of urban development in the Los Angeles area. His great invention was the detached, single-family home located in the suburbs of one of the most modern cities in the country. That was the great compromise that turned the Californian lifestyle into a national dream. While emigrants headed to the big modern cities usually lost the idyllic natural environment and vast domestic spaces of their rural hometowns, and had to accept the confined space of an apartment in a crowded block, those who emigrated to Huntington's suburbs found the best of both worlds: a house with a garden (both in the front and in the back) and equipped with the comforts of modern life (i.e. electricity). Incidentally, in 1913 he married his uncle's widow Arabella, who had inherited the fortune of her husband, and, when he died in 1924, she inherited his fortune too. Arabella became the richest woman in the USA.

Hellman was involved in many of these schemes and his influence extended to San Francisco: after fellow banker Edward Harriman purchased the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1901 and gained control of Wells Fargo, Hellman engineered a merger with the Nevada Bank to form San Francisco's biggest bank, the Wells Fargo Nevada National Bank (1905). Hellman was also crucial in restoring financial faith in San Francisco after the earthquake, and in financing the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition.

In 1893 a scenic railway opened to link Pasadena and Oak Mountain in the San Gabriel Mountains, built by David Macpherson, a Canadian civil engineer who had worked on the just completed railroad from Ciudad Juarez to Mexico City (1884) and had moved to Pasadena for health reasons in 1885. It was backed by Thaddeus Lowe, a millionaire inventor, aeronaut and banker who had moved to Los Angeles in 1887 and in 1890 had retired to his new three-story Victorian mansion in Pasadena, for whom the mountain was renamed Mount Lowe. The railway included the 1,000-meter "Great Incline" of an extremely steep gradient. In 1894 Lowe opened a white hotel at the top, the Echo Mountain House. Huntington acquired the railway in 1902 and marketed the white hotel as a tourist attraction.

Los Angeles differed from San Francisco and from most other cities in that the urban railways were private enterprises, created by wealthy individuals. Instead of expanding slowly from downtown, Los Angeles expanded by leaps and bounds in the suburbs.

The car, better known as "horseless carriage", was still a mirage. Nonetheless in 1900 Los Angeles already had the Automobile Club of Southern California, whose members were mainly rich people. The biggest obstacle to the spread of the automobile was the poor condition of the roads, designed for horses, mules and wagons. In 1906 the Automobile Club began posting road signs. 1908 is the watershed year when Henry Ford introduced the Model-T automobile, and the whole country started dreaming of owning a car. Finally, in 1910 the state of California funded a Highway Act to improve the roads, and in 1916 the Federal Road Act would further accelerate the paving of the roads.

The rapidly expanding city, located in an arid region, needed water. The Irish-born self-taught water engineer William Mulholland, a 15-year-old runaway when he had arrived in America in 1877, managed the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct (1904–13) that brought water from the Owens Valley, 400 kilometers away. It was built by about 4,000 laborers through the Mojave Desert and required gangster-style techniques to convince the ranchers of Owens Valley (1,167 of them) to sell their land to the city of Los Angeles. At 375 kms, it was the longest aqueduct in the world. It was running through 142 tunnels and countless bridges. Construction required 200 kms of railway and 800 kms of roads to bring supplies to the 4,000 workers. It was bringing more water than Los Angeles needed and so it was also used to turn the barren San Fernando Valley (like Burbank) into a land of citrus groves and tract homes. After more water was diverted by Los Angeles in 1926-27, the Owens River was all but drained and Owens Valley was reduced to a dust bowl. The townsfolk of Owens Valley were so resentful that they often resorted to bombing sections of the aqueduct. The San Francisquito Dam north of Los Angeles collapsed in 1928, just two years after completion, releasing a surging wall of water that drowned 400 people. The disaster ended Mulholland's career.

In this western paradise, workers were brutally exploited and denied the opportunity of organizing themselves into labor unions. In 1910 Harrison Gray Otis, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times who had published anti-labor articles, became a target of socialist terrorists who in 1910 bombed the the newspaper's offices, killing 20 employees.

A second Chinatown was growing in Los Angeles. Chinese and Japanese merchants funded the establishment of a new farmers' market in 1909, the City Market. Chinese merchants and workers quickly took over the neighborhood, which became known as Market Chinatown. It was a cosmopolitan Chinatown because Japanese, Italians and other ethnic groups involved in wholesale produce moved there. All sorts of food industries popped up, including David Jung's Hong Kong Noodle Company which in 1918 invented the "fortune cookie". Clearly this was not the Chinatown of opium dens and tong wars.

In the years after its invention by the Lumiere brothers in 1895, cinema had rapidly become popular even in distant places like California. "Nickelodeons" (movie theaters) popped up in every city. In 1902 Thomas Tally opened the Electric Theater, the first Los Angeles theater devoted solely to films.

New York filmmakers started shooting movies in Los Angeles because motion picture patents were held by Thomas Edison and were difficult to enforce on the West Coast. It was technically illegal to make movies without Edison's permission, but it was practically difficult to enforce this law in Los Angeles. The city also offered plenty of outdoors for films and the weather was good most of the time, a big advantage over the rainy East Coast for completing a movie in a short time with the primitive equipment of those days.

Harvey Wilcox, a wheelchair-bound polio survivor, and his wife Ida (30 years his junior) arrived from Kansas in 1883, purchased fruit orchards northwest of downtown, named the area "Hollywood" and in 1887 turned it into a subdivision. Wilcox died four years later but his wife Ida and her new husband Philo Beveridge set out to turn the subdivision into a real town (city hall, library, post office, police station, bank, theater, churches and so on). She donated lots to a French painter, Paul de Longpre', and in 1901 Canadian architect Louis Bourgeois built his eccentric mansion, which became Hollywood's first tourist attraction. Meanwhile, in 1886, the Canadian developer Hobart Whitley, having made a fortune in Oklahoma, had purchased the vast ranch next to the Wilcox land. He moved for good to Los Angeles in 1893, and in 1901 started aggressively promoting Hollywood in the newspapers, in cahoots with Harrison Gray Otis (the owner of the Los Angeles Times), and in 1902 he opened his Hollywood Hotel as a second tourist attraction.

At the same time, in 1900, oil tycoon Burton Green (who had originally moved from Wisconsin to California in 1886 to grow oranges before becoming a co-founder with Max Whittier of the Associated Oil Company) led a consortium that purchased the old Mexican land grant El Rodeo de las Aguas, which was a vast expanse of bean fields. In 1906 he renamed it Beverly Hills and hired landscape architect Wilbur Cook, a former employee of the Olmsted Brothers, to design a new residential area. Instead of the usual grid of straight lines, Cook designed a city of curvilinear streets. Henry Huntington started advertising the new community in October 1906 and in 1909 extended a Pacific Electric line to it, but Beverly Hills failed to attract customers due to the recession of 1907. For a while the only mansion of Beverly Hills was the grandiose one built in 1907 by Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey for Llewelyn Arthur Nares, a banker who had made a fortune with the Fresno Canal and Irrigation Company and also an automotive enthusiast who in 1905 had driven from from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a record 25 hours.

After struggling for a decade, Whitley finally had the right idea for Hollywood: he pitched Hollywood to David Horseley, who in 1907 had established in New Jersey the first independent film production company of the USA, Centaur, and who in 1909 had already opened a subsidiary in downtown Los Angeles, called Nestor. In October 1911 Horseley dispatched an Al Christie to open a studio in Hollywood, the first Hollywood studio. Films had already been shot in Los Angeles, but in downtown, like when in 1907 Chicago film producer William Selig sent director Frank Boggs and cameraman Thomas Persons to the city to complete his adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' "The Count of Monte Cristo", or like when David Wark Griffith had made a movie in Paul de Longpre's mansion. Griffith had even shot a movie in Hollywood, a 17-minute short, "In Old California" (1910); but Nestor was the first studio located in Hollywood. The second Hollywood studio was set up in May 1912 by Louis Burns and Harry Revier in a barn, and that's where in 1914 Hollywood's first feature film was shot: Cecil DeMille's "The Squaw Man", which marked the birth of Jesse Lasky's production company (the future Paramount). Ironically, the citizens of Hollywood didn't welcome the movie business and filed a petition to try and ban it from the region.

In 1911, the producer Thomas Ince purchased an oceanfront and mountain area in the future Pacific Palisades, and set up a studio that quickly became a self-sufficient town, Inceville, featuring stages, shops, offices, a power house, a reservoir, a post office, horse stables and so on, employing about six hundred people. In 1916 a fire convinced Ince to move most operations to Culver City, and Inceville was abandoned when Ince died in 1924.

Encouraged by Burton Green, the hotel owner Margaret Anderson hired Elmer Grey to design a new hotel in Beverly Hills, the Beverly Hills Hotel that opened in 1912, and Beverly Hills began to attract tourists. New wealthy residents included: Harry Robinson in 1911 (heir of J.W. Robinson’s department store), politician Silsby Spalding in 1912 (who would become the first mayor of Beverly Hills in 1926), King Gillette in 1915 (the man who had invented the disposable safety razor in 1903) and John Joyce also in 1915 (the Boston financier who had "stolen" the invention from Gillette). The Nares mansion was enlarged in 1913 by borax baron Thomas Thorkildsen, a man notorious for living a life of excess, and that's the house that Joyce purchased in 1915. Green himself in 1914 moved into a Beverly Hills mansion designed for him by John Martyn Haenke, and his partner Whittier followed suit in 1916 with a 38-room mansion (which 60 years later became a tourist attraction after Saudi sheik Mohammed al Fassi purchased it and added quasi-pornographic decorations).

In 1915 Karl Laemmle, a New York movie mogul who had absorbed Nestor, opened the world's largest film studio, Universal City, a few kilometers north of Hollywood. In 1916 Griffith turned a block of Hollywood into a giant replica of Babylonia for his film "Intolerance". The sky was now the limit for movie productions.

Mack Sennett, the future king of the slapstick, had convinced New York investors to let him open his Keystone Studios in July 1912, where he had launched his very successful "Keystone Cops". He chose a site in Los Angeles, and hired British vaudeville comedian Charlie Chaplin in 1914. Both Chaplin and DeMille had arrived in 1913. Both settled in Hollywood. In 1916 Cecil DeMille bought a Beaux Arts mansion in Hollywood (purchased a century later by Angelina Jolie), the first Hollywood celebrity able to afford such a luxury (Chaplin lived in a small house next to it, a house that DeMille eventually incorporated in his own).

By then, Hollywood had become the movie capital of the USA, and became the movie capital of the world after World War I since the war had crippled the European film industries. The studios that emerged, like Paramount (1912), Universal (1912), Columbia (1918), United Artists (1919), Warner Brothers (1923), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM (1924), Twentieth Century Fox (1925) and Radio-Keith-Orpheum or RKO (1928) invented the "star system" which created millionaires out of actors, screenwriters, directors and producers.

In 1918 movie star Douglas Fairbanks purchased a mansion in Beverly Hills (remodeled by Wallace Neff), which two years later he used as a wedding gift to his new wife Mary Pickford (hence the nickname "Pickfair"). They were the most famous couple in the world outside of the British royal family. Soon other stars followed them in Beverly Hills: Charlie Chaplin (who built his 20-room home next to "Pickfair"), Gloria Swanson (who in 1923 purchased King Gillette's home), Rudolph Valentino (who built "Falcon Lair" in 1925), Harold Lloyd (whose super-lavish "Greenacres" was built in 1928 by Sumner Spaulding), etc. Beverly Hills finally realized its founder Burton Green's dreams. And then came other wealthy people, notably oil tycoons like Edward Doheny, whose gigantic 55-room Tudor-style "Greystone" (1928) was designed by Gordon Kaufmann, and Ralph Lloyd (an "independent" who in 1911 had "discovered" the vast Ventura Avenue oil field), whose Mediterranean-style villa (1930) was designed by John DeLario.

By 1920, cinema employed about 100,000 people in the Los Angeles area. Dreamers flocked from all over the world to Hollywood, and tourists came to see the places made famous by the stars.

Hollywood's only rival was the theater, for the simple reason that movies were silent and theater shows were spoken and sung, but in 1927 or 1928 the first "talkie" debuted (depending if one considers "The Jazz Singer" or "Lights of New York" as the first talkie) and cinema became the main form of entertainment. In 1927 Walt Disney invented the cartoon character Mickey Mouse and thus launched one of the most successful products of Hollywood. Also, in 1927, Sid Grauman opened the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, with the famous courtyard of movie stars' footprints.

Hollywood had been a tiny village in 1910 but in 1930 it was a city of 130,000 people. The Oscars were first awarded in 1929. By then, cinema had become the USA's fifth largest industry by revenue.

World War I ended in 1918 and the "Spanish flu" pandemic petered out in 1920. The "Roaring Twenties" (or "Jazz Age") were bookended by two momentous events: the USA banned consumption of alcohol in 1920 (a law that was repealed only in 1933), and in 1929 the stock market crashed. There were other milestones: the population of the USA passed 100 million in 1920, and, for the first time in the history of the USA, more people lived in cities than in the countryside, and in 1920 the Constitution was amended to allow women to vote. The economy expanded rapidly between 1922 and 1929, and the economic engine was truly the movement to the city that turned the USA decisively towards industry instead of agriculture. Meanwhile, the media (the radio and the record besides the press) made the country more uniform, with people in every city listening to the same music (like jazz) and dancing the same dances (like charleston). The media also created the consumption society through the boom in advertising, which made people all over the country buy the same things, like Coca Cola. The car became ubiquitous, with Detroit companies (mainly Ford and General Motors) producing the vast majority of all the cars made in the world, and the government passed the Federal Highway Act for building an interstate system of highways. During that decade, Los Angeles' population more than doubled from 577,000 to over 1.2 million, the fifth largest in the USA. Los Angeles' boom of the 1880s had been driven by land speculation. The boom of the 1920s was many booms fueling each other: oil, cinema, agriculture, tourism, real estate.

All of this happened while organized crime wove a network of corruption in City Hall. Former anti-corruption crusader George Edward Cryer was formally mayor of Los Angeles between 1921 and 1929, but in reality the political boss of Los Angeles was his campaign manager Kent Kane Parrot, who protected crime kingpin Charlie Crawford, owner of brothels and gambling houses, and, by extension the top bootleggers of the city, both born in Italy: Tony Cornero (who made enough money to launch two floating casinos off the cost of Los Angeles in the 1930s) and Albert Marco (who was finally jailed for murder in 1929). Crawford was killed by prosecutor Dave Clark in 1931 and Clark's trial became the trial of the decade. Crawford's widow Ella was rich enough to build an open-air shopping mall on the site of the shooting, the Crossroads of the World (1936), designed by Robert Derrah. Cryer's and Pattor's careers had already ended in 1929 with the election of John Clinton Porter, a member of the Ku Klux Klan and an ally of the fanatical radio evangelist Robert Shuler (not a great improvement for Los Angeles' politics).

Oil strikes continued throughout the 1920s: Huntington Beach in 1920, Santa Fe Springs in 1921, and so on. Each one generated a tent city that thrived for a few years. The Santa Fe Springs one generated the fortune of Alphonzo Bell, the son of cattle rancher and Occidental College co-founder James Bell, who used the money to buy the old Mexican land grant Rancho San Jose de Buenos Ayres, west of Beverly Hills, and created (in 1923) a new subdivision, Bel-Air, soon to become a favorite of Hollywood stars. In 1923 Alphonzo Bell purchased the Santa Monica Land and Water Company (the one created by Arcadia Bandini and John Jones) and created subdivisions north of Pacific Palisades, overlooking the Pacific Ocean all of them Mediterranean-themed, notably Castellammare, whose first home was the 35-room Villa Leon (1928), designed by architect Kenneth McDonald for wool tycoon Leon Kauffman, and Miramar Estates, developed by Arthur Weber and George Ley. In 1928 Harry Chandler's newspaper Los Angeles Times hired architect Mark Daniels, who had designed several homes in Bel-Air, to build the luxury 14-room Villa Aurora, a showcase for the latest electric and gas appliances (with wooden ceilings imported from Spain, and a fountain imported from Italy). It was a failure as nobody bought it until 1943.

There were other speculators/investors. In 1905 Abbott Kinney purchased a tract of beach and began building a commercial Venice of California, which he called Venice: a network of canals (with gondolas from Italy), Renaissance-style buildings, a boardwalk, a pier, shops and restaurants.

In 1922 Methodist Church’s local leader Charles Scott wanted to create a religious utopia and convinced his congregation to purchase Pacific Palisades, the land that had belonged to John Jones. They hired architect Clarence Day to lay out a town and the Olmsted Brothers to expand it. Nestled between Malibu and Santa Monica, it ended up appealing more to Hollywood stars than to devout believers. Will Rogers and Mary Pickford were the first celebrities who moved there. Scott turned out to be a savvy investor and in 1926 partnered with Robert Gillis to acquire a piece of the original Abbot Kinney development which, designed by Mark Daniels became Huntington Palisades.

Harry Chandler took over the Los Angeles Times in 1917 and turned it into the most successful newspaper in the western states. He used his wealth to invest in real estate from San Fernando Valley to Mulholland Drive in Hollywood.

San Pedro Bay had been selected as the official port of Los Angeles in 1897 but it took until 1909 for it to become part of the city. After the Panama Canal opened in 1914, the port of Los Angeles became a strategic piece of international trade. In the 1920s Los Angeles passed San Francisco as the busiest port of the West Coast.

William Randolph Hearst was perhaps the most bizarre character of the 1920s, of the era called the "Jazz Age" and the "Roaring Twenties". The son of the mining investor and now senator George Hearst, William had built a newspaper empire starting with his father's San Francisco Examiner (1887), for which he hired star journalist Ambrose Bierce, and especially the "penny paper" New York Morning Journal (1895), whose exaggerated sensationalism and passionate defense of the Cuban rebels in 1898 (leading the USA into war against Spain) had generated record sales. Hearst had also founded the Chicago Examiner (1900), the Los Angeles Examiner (1903), the Boston American (1904), and acquired the Atlanta Georgian (1912), the Washington Times (1917), the Detroit Times (1921), the Seattle Post-Intelligence (1921), the Washington Herald (1922), plus magazines like Cosmopolitan (acquired in 1905) and Harper's Bazaar (acquired in 1913). Hearst got even richer when he inherited his father's mining fortune upon his mother's death in 1919, a fortune which he used to build an eccentric 165-room palace (today known as "Hearst Castle") on his family's vast coastal ranch near San Simeon. He hired art expert Julia Morgan and imported antiques from all over Europe as well as exotic animals from all continents (it became the world's largest private zoo). Despite being located four hours north of Hollywood, movie stars flocked to Hearst's wild parties at his "castle", the ultimate exhibition of opulence, where alcohol was free despite the Prohibition (between 1920 and 1933 alcohol was illegal in the USA). In 1918 Hearst founded a Hollywood film production company, Cosmopolitan Pictures, specifically to promote his lover, the actress Marion Davies, and in 1925 Hearst gave her a romantic gift: the medieval St Donat's Castle in Wales, Britain. In 1925 Hearst even purchased an entire 12th-century monastery from Spain and had it shipped to New York. In 1929 Hearst also financed a 110-room Santa Monica villa for Davies, designed by the same Julia Morgan, a giant beach house that became famous for costume parties. Then the Great Depression of the 1930s took a toll on his business empire: in 1933 he had to mortgage his "castle" to Los Angeles Times' owner Harry Chandler and in 1937 he started selling his monumental art collection to pay debts. The dismantled Spanish monastery remained in New York until, after his death, some investors rebuilt the monastery and relocated it to Florida.

Even the universities were beginning to make inroads: in 1921 CalTech hired Robert Millikan, a physicist renowned for having measured the charge of the electron. Two years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, a first for California (although for work done in Chicago) and he shaped one of the most important schools of Physics in the country..

Religious movements came with the Midwesterners. The Canadian-born Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, the widow of a missionary who had died in China, and later divorced from both her second and third husband, built a reputation as a charismatic preacher in the world of the nomadic tent revivals, and in 1918 settled in Los Angeles. She collected enough money from her ecstatic followers to build the first megachurch of the USA, Angelus Temple (1923). She ran both a weekly magazine and a radio station (1924), becoming the first major radio evangelist and a national phenomenon, the West Coast's version of Maria Woodworth-Etter (who had died in 1924). When she disappeared in 1926, and was believed drowned, the whole nation held its breath. When she reappeared, thousands of fans celebrated, but many suspected that she had simply eloped with a secret lover. Her rival was the Methodist preacher Robert Shuler, another evangelist who launched his own radio station in 1926, who attacked her integrity.

Citrus farming, cinema and the aircraft industry required land, thereby increasing the need to expand outside the crowded downtown. Los Angeles became the most spread-out metropolis in the world, a confederation of urban communities rather than an organic town.

In 1920 the USA already boasted one car for every 13 people and Los Angeles (the capital of the oil economy) had one car for every 5 people. For the record, Britain had 1 for every 228 and Germany 1 for every 1017. By 1927 (when Ford finally retired the Model T) there were more than 20 million cars in the USA (20 million potential tourists) and there was a car for every other person in California. In 1926 a 4,000-kilometer stretch of road connecting Los Angeles and Chicago was designated as Highway 66, soon to become a legendary name.

Alvah Warren Ross is credited as inventing the shopping experience for car drivers. In 1920 he started developing a large retail center outside downtown that was specifically designed for cars, not pedestrians: the Wilshire Boulevard Center. It was New York's Fifth Avenue for people who drove instead of walking. In 1929 it became known as the "Miracle Mile" of Los Angeles.

The car restored the personal freedom that had been lost in the age of the railroad.

Just before the Great Depression, Los Angeles was celebrating its status as a booming metropolis. In June 1929 Los Angeles inaugurated the Roosevelt Highway (today's Pacific Coast Highway) that allowed tourists to drive 80 kilometers of uninterrupted coastline through Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades and Malibu. William Randolph Hearst financed the first round-the-world journey by an aircraft, Hugo Eckener's dirigible Graf Zeppelin: it was also the first aircraft to fly nonstop across the Pacific Ocean, taking off from Tokyo and landing in Los Angeles (to please Hearst) in August after a 79-hour flight.

At the same time, Los Angeles became famous for earthquakes after the Santa Barbara earthquake of 1925 that killed 13 people and the Long Beach one of 1933 that killed more than 100 people.

This was now largely a story about immigrants form other parts of the USA, not a story about foreign-born immigrants: the foreign-born population of the USA began to decline after the passage of the tough "Emergency Quota Act" of 1921 and the "Immigration Act" of 1924, which limited the number of immigrants through a national origins quota.

The 1920s witnessed the largest domestic migration in the history of the entire continent: more than 100,000 people flocked to southern California every year.

Following Orville and Wilbur Wright's first successful flight in 1903 in North Carolina, Los Angeles was smitten by aviation fever. (To be fair, John Joseph Montgomery of Santa Clara College had built one of the earliest airplanes in the 1880s, two decades before the Wright brothers). Most Los Angelenos had never seen a flying machine until January 1910 when the city staged an eleven-day international air show called "Aviation Meet", co-sponsored by William Randolph Hearst and Henry Huntington. In October, Hearst offered a large prize to the aviator who could make the first transcontinental flight. Almost one year later Calbraith Rodgers succeeded, starting from near York and landing in Pasadena 49 days and some 70 stops later (he didn't get the prize because of a caveat that the journey be completed in less than 30 days). It even helped that Rodgers died in a plane accident over Long Beach a few months later. The air show and the transcontinental flight triggered enthusiasm in the region and dozens of amateur aviators started flying and building airplanes.

Allan and Malcom Loughead funded the Alco Hydro-Aeroplane Company in San Francisco in 1912 and during the Panama-Pacific Exposition offered flights to the crowd. In 1916 they relocated to southern California and opened a new company, the Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company. In 1926 Allan Loughead partnered with Jack Northrop and renamed it Lockheed. Meanwhile, in 1921 Donald Douglas founded an aircraft-building company in Los Angeles to commercialize his "Cloudster", the first airplane to lift a load exceeding its own weight, and in 1925 Claude Ryan founded a company in San Diego to build the Ryan M1 (Charles Lindbergh's "Spirit of St Luis" that flew from New York to Paris in 1927 was a Ryan plane). Both Douglas and Lockheed soon came to rely on lucrative contracts from the military (e.g., the World Cruisers of 1924, the T2D-1 torpedo bomber of 1927, the flying boat Sinbad of 1930).

Using a donation by philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim, the California Institute of Technology (formerly Throop Polytechnic Institute) opened the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT) in 1928. The lab featured a state-of-the-art wind tunnel and teachers such as Harry Bateman (a British mathematician), Todor Karman (a Hungarian physicist) and Douglas' chief engineer Arthur Raymond. This group pioneered the collaboration among university research, industrial labs and government agencies that would become common in the Bay Area. That collaboration changed a world that was still dominated by railroads.

Meanwhile an important decision was taken by the government. The Post Office had launched air mail in 1918 using old British planes built by Geoffrey de Havilland at the Aircraft Manufacturing Company (Airco), then the largest aircraft manufacturer in the world. Transcontinental air mail had begun in 1924 but the complexity of manning the equipment required for safe long-distance air travel had prompted the government to subcontract mail delivery to commercial airlines. A scandal led in 1934 to a law ordering the dissolution of holding companies mixing airlines and aircraft manufacturers, thus boosting competition in the field.

One year after its DC-1 had set a new record for coast-to-coast flight (11 hours from Los Angeles to New York in april 1935), Douglas struck gold with the 21-passenger DC-3 (first delivered to American Airlines in june 1936) that did for air travel what the Ford Model T did for car travel.

Its transcontinental record, meanwhile, was beaten repeatedly by Howard Hughes' H-1 Racer planes, down to 7 hours in 1937. By 1939 Southern California was home to most of the aircraft industry of the USA and Douglas airplanes were carrying more than 90% of civilian air passengers.

Meanwhile at GALCIT the self-taught Jack Parsons experimented with solid-fuel rockets (the JATO of 1942), Karman's student Frank Malina with liquid fuel (the WAC Corporal of 1945, built jointly by Douglas and GALCIT), and the Chinese-born Qian Xuesen, aka Hsue-shen Tsien, even speculated about nuclear-powered rockets. In 1942 these university researchers (Karman, Malina, Parsons) founded a company, Aerojet Engineering, thus pioneering the model of the start-up. In 1944 Karman, Parsons and Malina founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to work on rockets, ostensibly a joint project between the army and the university, and in 1945 Karman was drafted by the military to start Project RAND at Douglas, the prototype of the "think tank", later turned into the self-standing RAND Corporation (1948). Malina was a kinetic artist who in 1968 founded the magazine Leonardo devoted to artists-scientists. Parsons was an occult sex magician, member of Aleister Crowley's esoteric cult, and died in a mysterious explosion in 1952.

World War II made the fortune of several other aircraft builders: Northrop, who founded his own company in 1939 in Los Angeles, Jim McDonnell, who established his firm in St Louis (Missouri) also in 1939, and, of course, Boeing (founded in 1916 in Seattle by William Boeing, that reached its wartime apogee with the B-29 of 1944, the first intercontinental bomber). In the Los Angeles area the other big ones (besides Douglas, Lockheed and Northrop) were Vultee (originally founded by Jerry Vultee and Vance Breese as the Airplane Development Corporation in 1932 to sell six-passenger V-1 passenger planes to American Airlines) and Dutch Kindelberger's North American Aviation, another huge beneficiary of military contracts.

Lockheed became a darling of the Air Force when its Lockheed Advanced Development Projects (LADP), aka "Skunk Works", located on the northern side of the San Gabriel mountains, established in late 1943 under Kelly Johnson, designed the first jet fighter of the USA, the P-80 Shooting Star, later followed by other strategic projects like the spy plane U-2 (1957) and the F-104 Starfighter (1958). By 1943 the industry had already built 100,000 warplanes. By the end of the war industrial production in the Los Angeles area was second only to the Detroit area. Uniquely in history, Los Angeles had been industrialized in a brief period of time (the war) and largely by government intervention, creating a third massive industrial region (after the Northeast and the Midwest). In other words, World War II had the side effect of revolutionizing the economy of California and of integrating California with the national industrial complex.

The history of aviation in the Los Angeles area well illustrates how California developed via the interaction between defense spending, university research and industrial business. Aviation was the first high-tech industry to spread globally from California.

In 1867, Canadian immigrant Prudent Beaudry (who had arrived in 1852 following his brother Victor) acquired most of an uninhabited hill near downtown Los Angeles, named it Bunker Hill and sold lots to wealthy families interested in building luxury two-story Victorian homes. After his death, a short cable railway opened in 1901 to carry people to the top of the hill, the "Los Angeles Incline Railway" (today's "Angel's Flight").

The immigrants expected life in Los Angeles to be different from life in their towns and cities of the East. Those who came with money expected to live in grand extravagant buildings. Among the spectacular mansions of Bunker Hill were the Brunson Mansion, built in 1882 by Anson Brunson, a former judge who had been hired as a lawyer by the Santa Fe Rail Road, and the Potts Mansion, built in 1886 by James Wesley Potts (who had arrived in 1852 via the Overland Trail, started out as a fruit vendor but became rich buying land) and acquired in 1887 by silver-mining magnate Lewis Leonard Bradbury. (The Brunson Mansion was demolished in 1917 and the Bradbury in 1929).

Those who came with less money were attracted by a new kind of house, the "bungalow", a little box with a porch surrounded by a garden, an idea imported from British India that worked well in Los Angeles' hot climate and gave the middle class a sense of privacy that was hard to get in the cities of the East.

Another high-class neighborhood sprang up on Crown Hill, just west of Bunker Hill. In 1885 three businessmen, Henry Witmer (a Wisconsin banker who had moved to Los Angeles in 1884), Edward Hall (the son of a 49er who had founded a San Francisco auction house, first acquired by Henry Mayo Newhall and then turned into the Newhall's Sons and Company) and Jesse Yarnell (a newspaperman who in 1881 had gained control of the newly established Los Angeles Times), purchased Crown Hill, which at the time was a desolate land, then subdivided the property into 1400 lots and finally built a cable railway (modeled after the San Francisco one) to connect it with downtown, the Second Street Cable Railway, notable for the steepest gradient of North America. Crown Hill soon became a fashionable district, its homes auctioned by Newhall’s Sons. In 1887 San Francisco architects Samuel and Joseph Newsom, who had just completed the jewel of Victorian houses in California, the Carson Mansion in Eureka, built for Witmer the so-called Witmer Bank Block, a four-story Romanesque building that in 1888 became the headquarters of a new bank, the California Bank, with Henry Newhall (of Newall's Sons) as president.

In 1888 a retired Arizona judge named Charles Silent acquired a plot near the University of Southern California and in 1899 he created an upscale subdivision called Chester Place. The first residents were the mining baron Oliver Posey and his socialite wife Sarah (a painter, musician and amateur architect), who had moved from Wisconsin to Los Angeles in 1893, and who hired Theodore Eisen and his new partner Sumner Hunt to build an opulent mansion resembling a chateau. That home was purchased in 1901 by oil baron Edward Doheny. By 1903 there were twelve mansions in Chester Place.

Nearby was "Millionaires Row", a string of mansions owned by millionaires. It started when in 1890 Chicago lumber tycoon Thomas Stimson decided to retire in Los Angeles and commissioned architect Carroll Brown to build a 30-room mansion. Stimson used the same architect for the Stimson Block, an office building on Spring Street that opened in 1893, the first six-story building in Los Angeles and therefore the tallest.

The boom of the 1880s made Los Angeles proud enough to erect grandiose buildings such as the County Courthouse, completed in 1891 by Theodore Eisen (demolished in 1936), and the Hotel Nadeau, built in 1882 by Remi Nadeau, the first four-story building in the city and even boasting the city's first elevator. In July 1888, Asher Hamburger (who had moved from Sacramento in 1881) opened the Peoples Store in Phillips Block, next to City Hall, the second four-story structure in Los Angeles, designed by Burgess Reeve in the French Renaissance Revival style. In 1908 his heirs A. Hamburger & Sons opened the "Great White Store", the largest department store west of Chicago, a city within the city (it even hosted the post office and the public library). Another four-story building was erected in 1886, an addition to the Pickit Villa of Donald and Katie Pickit, who then turned it into a fancy hotel, the Bellevue Terrace Hotel. A five-story office building, designed by Sumner Hunt, was erected in 1893 for gold-mining tycoon Lewis Bradbury.

The Boston merchant Joseph Winchester Robinson, who had moved to Southern California in 1882 to invest in orange groves, opened a "Boston Dry Goods Store" which in 1895 his heirs expanded into the vast department store J.W. Robinson’s, designed by Theodore Eisen and Sumner Hunt and located opposite City Hall.

Already aware of earthquakes and with plenty of space to build, Los Angeles eschewed from the beginning the high-rise building. In 1905 a city ordinance limited the height of a building to "150 feet" (about 50 meters).

The area around Spring Street became the "Wall Street of the West".

Spring Street is where architect John Parkinson opened his studio in 1894. An apostle of the Beaux Arts classicism which had become fashionable after Daniel Burnham's large-scale Beaux-Arts buildings at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, Parkinson designed the steel-frame Homer Laughlin Building (1897), the Susana Machado Bernard House (1901) in the Art Nouveau style, Los Angeles’ first skyscraper, namely the Braly Block (1902), the eight-story luxury Hotel Alexandria (1906), which became the heart of Spring Street, and the Rosslyn Hotel (1914), the city’s biggest hotel yet.

Albert Walker and Percy Eisen (the son of Theodore Eisen) designed many of the high-rise landmarks: the twelve-story Wurlitzer Building (1923) for the piano manufacturer, billed as "the world's largest music house" (it contained a concert hall), the twelve-story National City Bank building (1924) on Spring Street, the twelve-story Fine Arts Building (1927) of artist studios and an exhibition hall, as well as the Hollywood Plaza Hotel (1924) in Hollywood and the Beverly Wilshire Hotel (1928) in Beverly Hills.

Architects were inspired by landscape painter Dana Bartlett's book "The Better City" (1907), which envisioned Los Angeles as the prototype of the "City Beautiful" movement that originated from the "Garden City" movement in Britain and from Burnham's work at the Columbian Exposition.

One of the precursors of the "City Beautiful" movement had been Frederick Law Olmsted, the first major landscape architect of the USA, who had designed Central Park in New York City with his partner Calvert Vaux (1857), and then many other landscapes including the campuses for UC Berkeley (1866) and Stanford University (1886), as well as the World's Columbian Exposition (1893). In 1902 his son Frederick Jr worked with Daniel Burnham on the masterplan for Washington's monumental area. In 1913 New York-based banker Frank Vanderlip purchased the old Mexican land grant Rancho de los Palos Verdes, in the south of Los Angeles, and hired Frederick Jr and his brother John to develop it for affluent residents.

During the years of the multiple booms, from 1880 to 1920, Los Angeles became a laboratory of urban and architectural experiments driven by the new wealthy class.

The Mission Revival style or Spanish Colonial style was largely the invention of Arthur Page Brown, first with his California Building at the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 and then with the five "Crocker Row" houses in Santa Barbara, commissioned in 1894 by William Crocker (son of railroad baron George Crocker). By the turn of the century the Mission Revival style became popular among resort hotels, like the Potter Hotel of 1901 designed by John Austin, and even for train stations. All sort of secular buildings borrowed architectural elements of the Spanish missions of the colonial era. The style influenced Elmer Grey's Beverly Hills Hotel (1912) and Julia Morgan's Los Angeles Examiner building (1913), built for William Randolph Hearts, which was the world's largest building for a newspaper. Frederick Jr and John Olmsted designed the Palos Verdes community (that was started in 1913) and Lilian Rice, another pioneering female architect, designed the planned community Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego (1922) in the Spanish Colonial Revival style.

Bertram Goodhue popularized the Spanish Colonial Revival style with his El Prado Quadrangle in San Diego's Balboa Park for the 1915 Panama–California Exposition, notably the California Building in the form of a Roman basilica. The influence of that project was felt throughout California. That style helped cement the myth that California was the Mediterranean of the USA. The more sophisticated Mediterranean style of the following decade was mastered by San Diego architects Richard Requa and Frank Mead, who in 1917 designed the Ojai community northwest of Los Angeles and in 1919 the Bailey House in LaJolla; and by George Washington Smith, who settled in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, and built his own "Casa Dracaena" (1917), which inspired countless others, followed by the "Casa del Herrero" (1925) for St Louis industrialist George Fox Steedman, and "La Toscana" (1927) for New York banker Kirk Johnson, married to Genevieve Joyce (heiress of John Joyce), both in Montecito. The Colonial Revival style culminated in William Mooser's Santa Barbara Courthouse (1929). The Colonial Revival merged with Modernism in the work of San Diego architect Irving Gill, who designed the St James Chapel in La Jolla (1908) and the Walter Dodge house in Los Angeles (1916).

The "Arts and Crafts" movement that had originated in Britain with intellectuals such as William Morris and John Ruskin took roots in Los Angeles.

Charles Lummis, a Harvard dropout and poet who, hired in 1884 by the Los Angeles Times, walked from Ohio in 143 days to his new job writing weekly dispatches for the magazine. In 1886 he spent two months at a fort in Arizona covering the campaign to capture the legendary Apache rebel Geronimo. From 1895 he edited the magazine Land of Sunshine (renamed Out West in 1902) which attracted artists, writers and free thinkers to Los Angeles. In 1895 he spearheaded the formation of Los Angeles' Landmarks Club for the preservation of the old Spanish missions and Mexican adobes, a move that would influence California's architecture. A self-taught ethnographer in the company of anthropologist Adolph Bandelier, he invented the idea of a cultural "Southwest”. The first museum in Los Angeles was the Southwest Museum that he opened in 1907 in downtown Los Angeles at the main station of Henry Huntington's Pacific Electric. His home El Alisal, built between 1898 and 1910 by himself using local river stones and help from indigenous laborers, became the center of a burgeoning community of bohemian artists and writers who were escaping the traditions of the Eastern states and searching for a new alternative lifestyle. That home spread the Arts and Crafts philosophy to the Arroyo Seco neighborhood between Los Angeles and Pasadena.

Masters of the Arts and Crafts style were Irving Gill, who designed the Marston House (1904) in San Diego, and especially the brothers Charles and Henry Greene, who designed the Gamble House (1908) in Pasadena, built for a wealthy Ohio retiree, David Gamble, heir to the fortune of the James Gamble (who had formed the famous company with William Procter).

William Lees Judson, one of the sick people who moved from the Midwest (Chicago) to Los Angeles (in 1893), settled in the Arroyo Seco, built a home in the Garvanz (a neighborhood named for the garbanzo beans that were grown there), established in 1901 the College of Fine Arts of the University of South California for which he found a building across the street from his home, and co-founded the Arroyo Guild of Fellow Craftsman in the same building (with a three-day grand opening in October 1909).

Irving Gill coined a stripped-down style with his 1908 buildings: the five-story Cabrillo Hotel and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, both in La Jolla. They predate both Peter Behrens' "Turbo factory" (1909) in Berlin and Adolf Loos' "Steiner house" in Vienna (1910).

Then there were the modernists. Chicago master Frank Lloyd Wright built the Hollyhock House (1921) for oil heiress Aline Barnsdall and the Ennis House (1924), which resembles a Mayan temple, for retailer Charles Ennis, both in Hollywood, and, in Pasadena, the Millard House (1923) for bookseller Alice Millard. Austrian immigrant Rudolph Schindler, employed by Wright for the Hollyhock House, built his own Schindler House in Hollywood (1922) and the Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach (1926) for physician Philip Lovell; and his former junior partner Richard Neutra, another Austrian immigrant, designed the Lovell Health House (1929) in Hollywood, a pioneering steel-frame house.

There were stories within stories about these architects and their wealthy patrons. Aline Barnsdall was a young Chicago socialite who inherited the fortune of her father, Theodore Barnsdall, the largest independent oil producer, when he died in 1917. She was a feminist, a bohemian, an anarchist sympathyzer and a single mother, and obsessed with producing experimental theater, first in Chicago and then in Los Angeles. In 1919 she purchased Olive Hill (an olive orchard) in Hollywood and ask Frank Lloyd Wright to design not just a house but an entire art colony centered around a theater. Wright was busy in Tokyo and delegated the construction of her Hollyhock House to Schindler. The rest of the compound was never built. Meanwhile, Philip Lovell (a Jew born Morris Saperstein) was an health guru who promoted natural "drug-less" cures. He had traveled around the country without founding disciples until he arrived in Los Angeles. Through a weekly column in the Los Angeles Times (Harry Chandler was one of his early patients) and a radio show, Lovell built a following of wealthy people. He married Leah Press, a teacher who applied the unconventional educational theory of John Dewey in the kindergarten she shared with Schindler's wife Pauline. Barnsdall hired Leah Press as a tutor for her daughter and introduced the Lovells to the Chicago architects. Leah’s sister Harriet and her husband Samuel Freeman commissioned Wright their home (1925) but then hired Schindler to complete it, and the Lovells commissioned Schindler their beach house. The Schindlers were also friends with other Chicago immigrants, like Edward Weston and Karl Howenstein, who had been hired as director of the Otis Art Institute in 1922.

The Art Deco style spread after construction of the Central Library, designed by New York architect Bertram Goodhue but completed in 1926 after his death; of the Bullocks Wilshire building (1929), designed by Donald Parkinson (John's son); and of the new City Hall (1928), the tallest building of the city for 40 years,designed by John Austin and Albert Martin.

Inspired by the movie sets of Hollywood, many businesses commissioned ornate exotic-themed buildings and Los Angeles became a cacophony of extravagant shapes. Buildings became three-dimensional advertisements of Los Angeles' crazy world, like the Spadena House (1926) in Culver City, designed by Harry Oliver, or the Mayan Theater (1927) in downtown Los Angeles, designed by Stiles Clements, or the Tower Theatre (1927) in downtown, that launched the career of Simeon Levi, who went by the name Charles Lee.

In the middle of the booming 1920s, Christine Sterling (born Chastina Rix) was the first resident to think about preserving the Mexican heritage of the city. In 1926 she allied with the Los Angeles Times' publisher Harry Chandler to save the Avila Adobe, the oldest remaining home, dating from 1818. Funded by Chandler, who sensed a business opportunity, she created Paseo de Los Angeles (aka Olvera Street) on the site where El Pueblo de Los Ángeles had been founded, a touristy recreation of a traditional Mexican street, a sort of open-air theme park.

No wonder that in 1920 the publisher John Coke Brasfield started a magazine devoted to Los Angeles' mansions and gardens: the Architectural Digest.

The proximity of Chinatown to the Hollywood studios opened opportunities in the nascent business of cinema. Some movies were shot in Chinatown itself. Some Chinese, like Willie Fung, found employment as actors. However, Hollywood routinely depicted the Chinese as sinister characters. Chinese Americans started making their own movies. When she directed "The Curse of Quon Gwon" in 1917, Marion Wong became the first Chinese-American filmmaker and one of the earliest female filmmakers in the world. In 1922 Anna May Wong, an ethnic Chinese born in Los Angeles, starring in Chester Franklin's film “The Toll of the Sea", became the first Chinese movie star of Hollywood. She starred alongside Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's "Shanghai Express" (1932). The second Chinese-American star was Keye Luke, popular in the 1930s. Eventually, a Chinese-American production company was established in San Francisco: it was called Grandview Films.

The Chinese communities were wealthy enough to be considered worth the trip across the ocean by stars of the Cantonese opera (like Li Xuefang who visited San Francisco in 1927) and of the Beijing opera (like Mei Lanfang who spent almost the whole of 1930 in San Francisco).

During the Great Depression that started in 1929, the Chinese-Americans community continued to suffer from prejudice but also continued to make inroads in mainstream culture.

Hostility towards the Chinese community led to the demolition of Los Angeles' Chinatown in 1931 to make room for the city's new train station. Chinese-American farmers were devastated by the Great Depression and by the competition of Japanese-American farmers. The latter often took over the farms of the former.

Thanks to activist and investor Peter Soo Hoo, in 1938 Los Angeles' New Chinatown opened (north of the original one) and also absorbed much of Market Chinatown. Soo Hoo's association found a way to purchase the land and hired architects Erle Webster and Adrian Wilson to create attractive buildings with Chinese motifs, including two gates and a five-tiered pagoda. The intention was to make it a tourist attraction, just like its San Francisco counterpart. This was a fancier Chinatown, with restaurants that drew Hollywood stars. One of the first movies produced in New Chinatown was Josef von Sternberg's masterpiece "The Shanghai Gesture" (1941). This is where You Chung Hong, the first Chinese-American lawyer of California, lived. Like its San Francisco counterpart, New Chinatown was funded and constructed by Chinese Americans. Many buildings were designed by the first Chinese-American architects to graduate from the University of Southern California: Gilbert Lester Leong and Eugene Choy (the first affluent Chinese American to build a home in the Silver Lake neighborhood, soon followed by others). Fung Chow Chan, owner of a famous New Chinatown bakery, founded the first Chinese-American commercial bank in California: Cathay Bank.

In 1935 two second-generation Chinese, Chingwah Lee (an art historian and the son of a merchant who had emigrated to San Francisco in 1877 and had become a herbalist of traditional Chinese medicine and an art collector) and Thomas Chinn (born in Oregon, whose maternal grandfather had arrived in California in 1849), founded the Chinese Digest, the first English-language magazine written by and for second-generation Chinese Americans.

Chiang Kai-shek, the new leader of the Kuomintang after Sun’s death, reunified China in 1927 and moved the capital to Nanjing, but civil war erupted between the Kuomintang and Mao’s Communist Party, founded in 1921. Chiang Kai-shek's economy experienced a boom from 1927 until 1931. His economy was insulated from the Great Depression because China was on the “silver standard” instead of the “gold standard” of the West and of most Asian countries. Since the 13th century its main coin had been the silver yuan. For more than a century, China had been selling its goods to the New World in exchange for silver. As the world sought safety in gold, the price of gold increased and the price of silver decreased, making Chinese goods exports more competitive. Modern industries began to appear in China, particularly in the cities of the Yangtze Delta, like Shanghai, and a rich urban bourgeoisie emerged. In June 1931 the floods of the Yangtze Kiang killed more than three million people, in September 1931 Japan attacked Manchuria, and in November 1931 Mao declared a Chinese Soviet Republic in pockets of land controlled by his communist rebels. But the most lethal blow dealt to the Chinese economic boom came from the USA: in June 1934 the USA decided to purchase silver because it made the Chinese currency appreciate (one year later, China abandoned the silver standard). And then in July 1937 Japan launched a large-scale invasion of China, whose most notorious event was the “rape of Nanjing” in which 350,000 Chinese were killed and 100,000 women raped. The Chinese intellectuals of the USA were now fighting on three fronts: fighting Japanese imperialism in Asia, communism in China itself and racism in America. Starting in 1938 and until 1941, the Chinese associations were successful in mobilizing public opinion with their annual "Bowl of Rice" parties that were basically fund-raising events to benefit Chinese civilians. They were held simultaneously in the major Chinatowns of the USA and in many other participating towns. More than 200,000 people attended the one in San Francisco in 1940. This was an important moment: for the first time a large number of white people joined the Chinese in Chinatown (to celebrate a national Chinese issue). Clearly those white people didn't think of Chinatown as a nest of opium dens and brothels.

The population of California had rapidly increased from 1.5 million in 1900 to 2.4 million in 1910 and had more than doubled again in the next two decades: it stood at 5.7 million in 1930. It was now the sixth most populous state after New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio and Texas, ahead of both Michigan (Detroit's state) and Massachusetts (Boston's state). The growth was largely due to southern California. Three transcontinental railroads had opened between 1876 and 1883, but especially the car was now responsible for making it easier to travel across the country. Tourism became a new lucrative industry in California. In 1925 the first motel opened (the Milestone Mo-Tel in San Luis Obispo). And many tourists decided to relocate permanently. In 1900 San Francisco's population was 130,000 and in 1930 it was 474,000. In 1900 Los Angeles' population had barely passed 100,000 but in 1930 it was more than one million (1,238,000), more than double that of San Francisco. Southern California's population had passed that of northern California already in 1920. There were 800,000 cars registered in Los Angeles in 1930, almost one per person.

The man elected US president at the end of 1928 was the mining magnate Herbert Hoover, who had been one of the first students to graduate from Stanford in 1895, and in his youth had traveled the world as a mining engineer, starting in the Sierra Nevada and in Australia, but also managing gold mines in China at the time of the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901).

In October 1929 the New York stock market crashed, and in 1930 banks started failing, ushering in the Great Depression, the biggest economic crisis in the history of the USA. California was hard hit, but the rest of the USA was hit even harder, and so the Great Depression sent young people "west" again. Also affected were the thousands of elderly couples who had retired to southern California in the 1920s, lured by nation-wide marketing campaigns. Starting in 1931 and lasting the whole decade, a drought ravaged the farmlands of Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas, lands which became known as the "Dust Bowl" (and its people generically "Okies"), and thousands of "Dust Bowl" refugees (of "Okies") headed to California. The plight of the Okies inspired the novel "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939) by John Steinbeck, the second great novelist born in California (and later its first Nobel Prize in literature).

Okies, Arkies (from Arkansas) and Texans moved to Kern County. That's when Bakersfield became a capital of country music, a city of honky-tonk bars that spawned country stars like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens.

The other victims were the Mexican immigrants. They had greatly increased after the Exclusion to replace Chinese agricultural laborers, especially in the 1920s when demand for their labor was high, but as the crisis hit the USA started deporting them by the tens of thousands (about two million by 1940, including many who had become US citizens). The mass repatriation of Mexicans was even worse than the "exclusion" of Chinese.

San Francisco philanthropist Lizzie Glide built the "Glide Church" in 1931 that during the Great Depression (and after) offered free meals and other services to low-income families.

Inevitably, the crisis led to xenophobic riots. In 1930 anti-Filipino riots broke out in rural Watsonville and spread to San Jose.

Hoover, besides presiding over the economic crisis, was not friendly to immigrants. He launched a campaign to prosecute illegal immigrants, limited immigration to individuals who had already found a job from abroad and deported one million Mexican-Americans of Southern California (mostly born in the USA and therefore US citizens).

Former San Francisco mayor James Rolph was elected governor of California in 1931 but died in 1934 and was succeeded by his lieutenant Frank Merriam, an early "Okie" who had moved from Oklahoma to Long Beach California in 1910. Merriam suppressed the 1934 Longshore Strike by the International Longshoremen's Association (during which two workers were killed, leading to a general strike) and in 1938 an investigation exposed the degree of corruption in Sacramento (notably by Charles Lyon, a conservative representing Hollywood and Beverly Hills). During his tenure, Art Samish, raised in destitute poverty and with no education, became the first major lobbyist of California, using his client's money to get politicians elected or dismissed. Meanwhile, FBI detective Edwin Atherton, tasked with investigating organized crime in San Francisco, delivered a scathing report in March 1937 in which he unmasked the clandestine operations of Peter McDonough and his brother Tom, including dozens of brothels and gambling houses, and implicated dozens of San Francisco police and government officials in a vast scheme of bribes. A popular joke was that the organized crime of Chicago and New York had no chance to infiltrate San Francisco because the entire city was just one big racket.

At the same time Los Angeles was facing a similar problem. While Hollywood didn't suffer from the Depression, Los Angeles in general was affected by the Prohibition. Los Angeles became the bootleg capital of the West. Drinking and gambling gave L.A. a sinister image, captured in Raymond Chandler's noir thrillers. This was made possible by the widespread corruption in City Hall which became endemic after the Canadian-born businessman Frank Shaw was elected mayor in 1933. Clifford Clinton, raised in China by missionaries who later opened a chain of restaurants in San Francisco, came to Los Angeles in 1931 and opened his own chain of cafeterias, specializing in affordable meals for the people hit by the economic crisis (originally his "Penny Cafeteria" served meals for one cent each). Clinton emerged as an anti-crime and anti-graft crusader. His cafeterias hosted gatherings of both religious and civic events. In January 1937 a bomb almost killed private investigator Harry Raymond who was shadowing Shaw, and a police captain was suspected of planting the bomb. In 1937 Clinton formed with a group of religious leaders an organization called C.I.V.I.C (Citizens’ Independent Vice Investigating Committee) to expose the gambling and prostitution rackets protected by City Hall. They literally discovered hundreds of brothels and gambling dens. In 1938 the people of Los Angeles voted to remove him from office and then elected reform candidate Fletcher Bowron, who remained in office a record 14 years. (For the record, Clinton later expanded his mission to feed the hungry and in 1944 founded the non-profit "Meals for Millions" that operated worldwide).

The people of California revolted and elected the leftist Culbert Olson as governor from 1939 until 1943. A renegade Mormon from Utah, he was a political ally of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a friend of socialist Upton Sinclair.

Despite the economic crisis, Los Angeles kept growing: in 1930 it opened its international airport LAX, and in 1932 it held the Olympic Games (only the second time they were held in the USA). Despite the 1935 crash off Monterey Bay of the Macon, a helium-filled dirigible airship stationed in Sunnyvale, the largest aircraft in the world (a little shorter than the Hindenburg but bigger), the aviation industry was thriving: in 1932 Howard Hughes started Hughes Aircraft and Hughes in person set the world's speed record (1935) as also the record for the transcontinental trip (1937) and round-the-world trip (1938). In 1935 Douglas introduced the DC-3, a faster airplane that cut the flight from California to New York to 15 hours. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was founded in 1936 at CalTech by Frank Malina, Hsue-shen Tsien (Xuesen Qian) and others.

Iconic building rose like Gordon Kaufmann's Los Angeles Times building (1935) in the Art Deco style, and Robert Derrah's Crossroads of the World (1936) in Hollywood and his Coca-Cola Building (1939) in Los Angeles, the latter shaped like a cruise ship.

It was during the Great Depression (around 1932) that the Los Angeles-based self-taught architect Cliff May conceived the ranch-style home, the home that personified the California lifestyle: seclusion, relaxation, comfort. It was not important how the home looked (they all looked pretty much the same) but how "livable" they were. New Yorkers spent as much time as possible outside their homes, Californians spent as much time as possible at home. The ranch house was a detached, single-family, one-story building surrounded by a garden and with a spatious garage for the car. The ranch house was typically located in the suburbs, far from the crowds, noise and crime of downtown.

Like Los Angeles, San Francisco too went through the Great Depression relatively unscathed. Major works that opened in the 1930s include the Coit Tower in 1933 (designed by Arthur Brown Jr in the Art Deco style) and in 1934 a new aqueduct carrying water from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite (269 kilometers away).

The Italian-born opera lover Gaetano Merola, originally based in New York, came to California with Fortunato Gallo's itinerant San Carlo Opera Company. In 1922 Merola organized an open-air program of opera in Stanford University's stadium and in 1923 he founded the San Francisco Opera Association, financed by the city's business aristocracy, and for a decade staged operas in the Civic Auditorium. Finally in 1932 there was enough money to inaugurate a proper opera house across from City Hall, the War Memorial Opera House (designed by Arthur Brown Jr in the Beaux-Arts style). The following year Merola established both the San Francisco Opera Ballet, the first professional ballet company in the USA, and the San Francisco Ballet School under the direction of Russian-born choreographer Adolph Bolm (who had graduated from the Russian Imperial Ballet School in Saint Petersburg and worked with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris). The ballet became its own independent entity when in 1938 Willam Christensen became its director (originally an itinerant vaudeville dancer). Christensen went on to stage the first full-length American productions of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's ballets "Swan Lake" (1940) and "The Nutcracker" (1944), soon to become staples of every ballet in the USA. In 1945 the War Memorial Opera House would be chosen as the birthplace of the United Nations.

Next to the Opera House and City Hall, the San Francisco Museum of Art was inaugurated in 1935 on the fourth floor of the Veterans Building (also designed by Arthur Brown Jr in 1928, a late Beaux-Arts building), the second museum in the USA devoted exclusively to modern art. Its first director was art historian Grace Morley, a Berkeley native and UC Berkeley graduate who had studied in Paris, and the first lesbian to direct a major California institution. At the time it was not common at all for a woman to be in such a position of power. Under her leadership, the city began the shift from European modernism to US abstract art. For example, she purchased Jackson Pollock’s "Guardians of the Secret" (1943) when Pollock was not famous at all.

After the repeal of the Prohibition in 1933, a secondary tourist economy was fueled in San Francisco by gay, lesbian and transgender entertainment. Bohemians of the North Beach district resurrected the gay bar, for example the Black Cat Cafe that reopened in 1933. The city's first lesbian nightclub opened in 1934, Mona’s, the first of many in North Beach. In 1936 Joe Finocchio opened the gay bar "Finocchio's" on Broadway.

The region inaugurated the Bixby Bridge in 1932 (south of Monterey), the Bay Bridge in 1936 (between San Francisco and Oakland) and, the following year, the Golden Gate Bridge, designed by Oakland native Irving Morrow (who had the idea to paint it orange), finally enabling car traffic across the famous strait.

In February 1939 San Francisco celebrated its two new bridges with a world's fair (the "Golden Gate International Exposition") that was held on an artificial island in the middle of the Bay, Treasure Island, which had been created in three years of work. The exposition's highlight was Ralph Stackpole's 24-meter tall colossus "Pacifica" (dynamited in 1942 to make room for a naval base). The layout was designed by skycraper specialist George William Kelham and directed by structural engineer William Peyton Day, who had built several movie theaters around the Bay Area. The California Pavilion included Jo Mora's 30-meter 64-sculpture diorama "Discovery of the San Francisco Bay by Portola". By May 1940, when it closed, the exposition had attracted 16 million visitors. Alas, both "Pacifica" and the diorama were later destroyed.

The most ambitious public work of the era was the Central Valley Project, designed in 1933 to provide power and water to the farming region of the San Joaquin Valley, some 700 kilometers away, by connecting dams built in the north with reservoirs in the south via canals, starting in 1936 with the construction of the Shasta Dam.

Other engineering feats of the era include the completion in 1936 of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, the tallest in the world, and its power plant, the world's largest, and the completion in 1937 of the coastal highway between San Simeon and Carmel through Big Sur (thanks to convict labor, using inmates from San Quentin Prison who exchanged work for shorter sentences). Previously the few settlers of that coast had to travel by boat or via horse trails. This section completed the coastal highway connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles (today's Highway 1). It was now possible to travel by car from the beaches of southern California to the forests of northern California. In 1939, after six years of work, the Colorado River Aqueduct was completed to bring water to the Los Angeles area: another 400-kilometer behemoth, it had originally been conceived by William Mulholland in the 1920s. It was during its construction that a physician named Sidney Garfield launched a pioneering health-insurance program for the 5,000 workers, setting up a small hospital in the Mojave Desert. The year 1940 also witnessed the opening of California's first freeway, the Arroyo-Seco Parkway (also the first one in the entire USA).

In 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president of the USA and launched his "New Deal" to confront the Great Depression. In the same year the socialist and writer Upton Sinclair launched a grass-roots movement, "End Poverty in California" (EPIC). He also ran for governor of California, but was defeated thanks to the smear campaign unleashed by newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst and Harry Chandler.

In 1939 the Bay Area was finally awarded a Nobel Prize (to Ernest Lawrence of UC Berkeley).

In 1940 the state's population was almost seven million, of which 1.5 million in Los Angeles and 634,000 in San Francisco. The south bay was still irrelevant: 175,000 in the entire Santa Clara Valley, of which 68,000 in San Jose and 17,000 in Palo Alto.

The Great Depression ended with World War II, which started in 1939 in Europe and in 1941 in America (and in 1937 in China).

The New Deal and World War II sent huge government investments to the West Coast, which started fortunes in construction. Henry Kaiser, who had paved roads in Cuba, was one of the contractors for the colossal concrete Hoover Dam (inaugurated in 1936), then built the first integrated steel mill in the Pacific states (at Fontana, near Los Angeles, in 1942). During World War II his shipyards built thousands of cargo ships (Richmond alone in the north Bay built 727) employing the latest technology (inherited from the prefabrication techniques of dam building) that allowed him to shorten the shipbuilding process from one year to 48 days. Those shipyards alone caused a population boom. Kaiser was getting immensely rich and his conglomerate was actually known for treating the workers humanely. In the 1940s Kaiser's corporate welfare programs were among the most generous in the USA. After building two more giant dams (the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams), Kaiser ventured into aluminum, steel, real estate, broadcasting and many other businesses. To take care of the workers of the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, in 1938 Kaiser opened a hospital in collaboration with physician Sidney Garfield, who had already experimented a health-insurance program for the workers of the Colorado River Aqueduct, and the project was replicated in 1942 in Oakland for the workers of Kaiser's shipyards. That's when Kaiser's Permanente health-care plan was born, which was opened to the general public in 1945 (so named from the creek near Kaiser's Cupertino cement plant). Kaiser Permanente would remain the largest health-care provider of California to this day.

The Hoover Dam also created the fortune of another Bay Area construction and engineering company, the one that would become number one in the country. Started by a railroad worker, Warren Bechtel, it remained (and still remains) privately held within the family. Before the Hoover dam, they had built roads (the Klamath Highway in Northern California in 1919), dams (the Bowman Lake Dam northeast in a remote part of the Sierra Nevada in 1927), pipelines (first in 1931) and bridges (the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland in 1933-36). Warren Bechtel's son Stephen expanded the business overseas, notably with pipelines in Venezuela (1940), in Saudi Arabia (1947) and in Iraq (1952), and expanded it to building oil refineries (the Richmond one in 1937), ships (almost 600 during World War II), whole cities (Marin City in 1942, north of the Golden Gate Bridge, for workers of the wartime shipyards), nuclear power plants (starting in 1949), subways (the Bay Area Rapid Transit System or BART in 1964), and eventually airports (the Riyadh airport in 1978) and tunnels (the undersea tunnel linking Britain and France in 1994). Today, Bechtel is the second largest construction company in the USA.

In 1941 Japan attacked the USA at Pearl Harbor causing the USA to enter World War II on the side of China. China was now allied with the USA, Britain and the Soviet Union in fighting international fascism. In fact, "volunteer" aviators from the USA known as the "Flying Tigers" fought alongside the Chinese. For the first time ever, China had a very positive image among the US public. The Chinese were hailed as heroes fighting against the common enemy, Japan's fascism and imperialism. More than anyone else, it was China's first lady who charmed the public opinion of the USA. China was ruled by Chiang Kai-shek (known as Jiang Jieshi in Mandarin China) and in February 1943 he sent his US-educated wife, known simply as Madame Chiang, on a "goodwill" tour of the USA. She became the second woman and the first Chinese to ever address the US Congress (a nationally-broadcast speech). She was received enthusiastically in San Francisco in March. Following her visit, and the dramatic change in the perception of Chinese people that she generated, the Exclusion Act was finally repealed in December of the same year.

However, the same "Magnuson Act" that in 1943 ended 62 years of Chinese "exclusion" also established a yearly quota of only 105 visas for Chinese immigrants: it didn't exactly open the gates to Chinese immigration. The story was different for Japanese Americans (many of them third generation), who were interned in concentration camps like Manzanar by the tens of thousands. Ironically, this reversed the situation of the previous 40 years, when the Japanese had been able to acquire farmland from expelled or disillusioned Chinese farmers: in 1942 many farms run by ethnic Japanese were taken over by Chinese farmers.

Until the 1940s China was de facto a "western" country. Chinese scientists such as Ta-You Wu (who graduated from the University of Michigan in 1933) shared research with US and European scientists. Chinese universities were world-class universities. The scions of wealthy families often studied at western universities, like the female physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, who graduated from the University of Michigan in 1936, went to work with Emilio Segre' at UC Berkeley and later worked on the atomic-bomb project for the USA (the "Manhattan Project"). Wen Tsing Chow arrived in 1941 to study at MIT and in 1956 invented the programmable read-only memory (PROM), originally for a military project (an airborne digital computer for an intercontinental ballistic missile). Jeffrey Chuan Chu arrived in 1940 and ended up at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School, working as an electronic engineer on the pioneering electronic computer ENIAC in the team led by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert. Chung-chin Kao studied in Europe but in 1942 moved to the USA working for the Chinese military during the war but based in New York. After the war he joined IBM where in 1947 he built the first electric typewriter for the Chinese language, whose 36 keys were able to produce thousands of Chinese characters, a machine that also pioneered "predictive typing" (based on most frequently used phrases and characters).

Other Chinese moved to the USA thanks to US scholarships. Yung Wing, educated at a Christian missionary school in Canton/Guangzhou, was sponsored by a missionary to study at Yale University and in 1854 became the first Chinese student to graduate from a US university. Upon returning to China, he convinced the Chinese government to establish the Chinese Educational Mission in 1872, which every year for four years sent 30 Chinese teenagers to study Western culture in the USA (in Connecticut). After the failed Boxer insurrection of 1899-1900, the foreign powers forced China to pay indemnity for the damages caused to their Chinese possessions. In 1909 the US government, under pressure from missionaries, decided to return some of that money in the form of a scholarship program for Chinese students to be educated in the USA: the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. To prepare the students, in 1911 the USA funded the establishment of Tsinghua College (today's Tsinghua University). The students were selected through a very competitive process: between 1909 and 1937 (when World War II started), the scholarship sent about 1,300 Chinese students to study in the USA out of the tens of thousands who applied. Most of the "winners" went to MIT. This scholarship became a model for the future Fulbright Program. Among the students who arrived thanks to the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program were Hsue-shen Tsien (Xuesen Qian), one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1936 at CalTech (accused of being a communist and expelled by the USA in 1955, he would launch the space program of Mao's China); and the winners of the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics: Chen-Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, two Chinese who had studied with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago in the 1940s. Tsou Tang arrived in 1941 and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1951, later becoming an influential political scientist. One of the Chinese students who arrived in 1943 and went to MIT was Ju-Chin Chu (Rujin Zhu), father of future Nobel laureate Steven Chu. Before and during the war, China also had a program to train young engineers abroad for two years. One of the last ones to benefit from that program was An Wang, a graduate from Chiao Tung/ Jiao Tong University in Shanghai (the "MIT of China") who arrived in the summer of 1945 and was accepted at Harvard. Wang later founded Wang Laboratories, the company that in the 1970s revolutionized word processing and killed the typewriter.

Another wave of educated Chinese immigrants started in 1949, when Mao's communists seized power in China. One of the scientists who fled China in 1949 was Shu-tian Li, maternal grandfather of the same future Nobel laureate Steven Chu: he had graduated from the USA in 1926 but had returned to China to found several colleges and universities in western and southwestern China. And so the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, Steven Chu, was born and raised in the USA, but was the son of a Chinese immigrant of the 1943 wave and grandson of a Chinese immigrant of the 1949 wave.

When his father (a physicist who had graduated in the USA in the 1920s) died in 1949, Chih-Tang "Tom" Sah was adopted by William Everitt, a dean of Engineering at the University of Illinois, and went on to graduate from Stanford University, to join Shockley's lab in 1956 and then Fairchild in 1959, where in 1963 he and Frank Wanlass invented CMOS logic, a fundamental step in the development of computers. Sah literally witnessed the birth of Silicon Valley.

An important event for the many Chinatowns was a ruling in 1948 by the Supreme Court that de facto banned limitations on what a Chinese could own. The Chinese population of the USA had been deprived for three decades of the right to buy a home outside their Chinatown by the various Alien Land Laws. Now they were finally able to move into other neighborhoods of their city. Within a few decades, the Chinese that moved out of Chinatown changed the demographics of San Francisco's Richmond and Sunset districts, and wealthy Chinese families began moving to the suburbs of the Bay Area, like Millbrae, Cupertino (founded in 1955) and Fremont (founded in 1956 near the historic Mission San Jose'). The city of Cupertino counted about 500 families, and several Chinese families ran the main industries of Cupertino: flowers and orchards. Finally, in 1952 the "white person" restriction of the Naturalization Act of 1790 was abolished (with the "McCarran–Walter Act") so that now non-white immigrants could become citizens just like white (i.e. European) immigrants.

In 1949 Mao Zedong's communists won the civil war and seized power in mainland China, establishing one of the most isolated regimes in the world, while Chiang Kai-shek's government fled to Taiwan, which became de facto an independent country. For mainland Chinese, it wasn't just difficult to enter the USA: it was even difficult to leave China. Right after the 1949 revolution the USA received thousands of political refugees who were escaping Mao's regime. The few Chinese students who visited the USA in the 1950s were strongly encouraged to become US citizens and stay because the USA was now afraid of leaking know-how to the communists. For example, Chung-mou "Morris" Chang (the future founder of TSMC) moved to the USA via Hong Kong after his family fled the mainland in 1949 and then studied at Harvard, MIT and Stanford universities, and joined Texas Instruments in 1958.

The annual immigrant quota for China was 105 but between 1953 and 1956 the Refugee Relief Act added about 200,000 special non-quota immigrant visas for refugees and escapees from communist countries, and Chinese refugees received 2,000 of these visas. Ethnic Chinese in the USA increased to 150,000 in 1950 and 237,000 in 1960. But soon immigration from mainland China became virtually non-existent for three decades. The Chinese of America knew little of what was happening in China during the dramatic years of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao in 1966. It was literally another world: the USA was experiencing an economic boom while people in China were starving. All sorts of Chinese businessmen in San Francisco and Los Angeles were becoming rich, while their relatives in mainland China lived in utter destitution.

Respectability came also because of the success of ethnic Chinese politicians: in 1950 Gary Locke, a third-generation Chinese American, became governor of Washington State, the first Chinese-American governor of the USA; and in 1959 Hiram Fong (the son of a Cantonese who had immigrated to Hawaii in 1872) became the first Chinese-American senator.

It is telling that in 1952 the television series "The Gallery of Madame Liu-Tsong" became the first television program with a Chinese-American lead (the already famous Anna May Wong).

World War II accelerated western migration, and California's population grew from 7 million in 1940 to 10.5 in 1950, until in 1962 California passed New York state as the most populous state of the USA.

World War II, which ended in 1945 with the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a godsend for California. The wartime economy turned Los Angeles into a major manufacturing hub, especially for aircraft production, and the government research agency DARPA invested massively in the Bay Area, jumpstarting its high-tech industry. The shipyards in both San Francisco and Los Angeles boomed, producing thousands of warships at record pace, and drawing tens of thousands of black workers from the southern states, so much so that in 1950 California had a population of almost 500,000 Blacks. This was one of the massive migrations of Blacks out of the South.

California had been one of the three top recipients of military spending during the World War, and it became the main one in 1958 during the Cold War, when it absorbed about one fourth of the US military budget. There were three main reasons: firstly, its geographic location, that had served well to fight Japan and was now ideal to patrol a Pacific Ocean that had become a "mare nostrum" (as the Romans called the Mediterranean); and, secondly, its aerospace industry, which had been started by eccentric characters like Hughes, but turned out to be as valuable as the gold mines of the "Gold Rush"; and, last but not least, it had to do with a new technology: the computer.

During World War II, Stanford professor Fred Terman, the one who had encouraged his students William Hewlett and David Packard to start a company, was appointed head of the Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University. At the end of the war he established a new Electronics Research Lab at Stanford and, thanks to his political connections, Stanford became the top beneficiary on the West Coast of military projects. Following the Korean War (1950-53) and the Soviet Union's launch of the artificial satellite Sputnik in October 1957, the military budget greatly increased.

In 1946 Stanford spun off the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), an industrial research center to use Stanford's high-tech know-how in industrial (mainly military) projects, and in 1951 it established the Stanford Industrial Park for startups like Varian, founded in 1948 by two of Terman's students, brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian, as well as for corporate labs.

The first commercial computers, the Ferranti in Britain and the Univac in the USA, were introduced in 1951, following several years of academic experiments in both the USA and Britain. California's pioneer of computers was Harry Huskey, who worked on two prehistoric projects of stored-program computers: with Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the Moore School in Philadelphia on the EDVAC (the machine that pioneered the "Von Neumann architecture" of computers) and with Alan Turing at Cambridge University on Pilot ACE. In 1950 Huskey designed at UCLA a computer code-named Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC), commissioned by the National Bureau of Standards, which for one year was the fastest computer in the world. In 1956 he designed a computer (the G-15) for a maker of appliances and radios of the Midwest, Bendix, a relatively small computer that took input from paper tape or punched cards, stored data on a magnetic drum, and sent its output to a typewriter: the configuration that became standard in the 1960s. Another important research center of Los Angeles was the RAND Corporation (RAND stands for "Research and Development"), a non-profit "think tank" spun off in 1948 from the Douglas Aircraft Company to work on military projects. In 1953 RAND unveiled a clone named Johnniac of the IAS computer built in 1951 by John von Neumann's team at the Institute for Advanced Study (in New Jersey, next to Princeton University).

In general, California lagged far behind the East Coast and Britain. The computer industry of the West Coast, located far from the research centers of the large office automation companies (IBM, NCR, Burroughs, Remington), peripheral to the strategies of the giants of the electronic industry (General Electric, RCA, AT&T) and left out of the loop of the large government-funded computing projects (Boston's Lincoln Lab, Philadelphia's Moore School and New Jersey's Institute for Advanced Study), was limited to serve the needs of the booming aviation industry of Los Angeles, namely Northrop, Douglas and Hughes. The local computer manufacturers were small and didn't last long like Computer Research Corporation (CRC), started by Northrop engineers in 1950, or Electrodata, a spin-off of CalTech that in 1954 built a computer for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or Packard Bell's computer division, started by Bendix engineers in 1957. They paled in comparison with the computer manufacturers of the East Coast, particularly IBM.

Despite the fact that only a tiny group of scientists could see them, and an even smaller elite could use them, computers caused quite a bit of excitement. The media were referring to computers as "electronic brains". Computer science was simply a continuation of Mathematical Logic, but a new science, Artificial Intelligence, was emerging. While the famous conference that gave the field its name took place in Boston, organized in 1956 by John McCarthy, the first influential conference for designers of intelligent machines had taken place in 1955 in Los Angeles: the Western Joint Computer Conference. At this conference Allen Newell (of RAND Corporation) and Herbert Simon (of Carnegie Mellon University) presented the "Logic Theory Machine", Newell also presented his "Chess Machine", and Wesley Clark and Belmont Farley of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory described the first artificial neural network. Artificial Intelligence almost immediately split into two competing groups: McCarthy and other founding fathers focused on "symbolic systems", and in 1957 Newell and Simon unveiled a program touted as the "General Problem Solver", while at the same time Frank Rosenblatt of Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo and other mavericks were trying to emulate the brain with artificial neural networks.

All of this was happening far away from California. The electronics industry was however growing.

In 1954 Sylvania, a Pennsylvania manufacturer of vacuum tubes and transistors, opened a laboratory in the Santa Clara Valley that quickly became one of largest companies of the Bay Area. But soon, the biggest employer of the south bay would be Lockheed, that had moved its Missile Systems Division from Los Angeles to rural Sunnyvale, and was working on two huge military projects: a satellite to spy on the Soviet Union (the Corona, first launched in 1959) and a submarine-launched ballistic missile (the Polaris, first deployed in 1960).

In 1952 IBM opened its first West-Coast laboratory in San Jose, a lab that revolutionized data storage and retrieval: in 1956 it unveiled the RAMAC 305, the first computer to use a magnetic "hard disk", which was demonstrated in 1958 at the World's Fair in Belgium, one of the most influential "demos" of all time.

The IPOs (initial public offerings) of Varian (1956), Hewlett-Packard (1957) and Ampex (1958) signalled the commercial emergence of the Bay Area's high-tech industry. Ampex had been founded in 1944 by Alexander Poniatoff and took off after the war by stealing a German invention: the tape recorder, a novelty that a soldier had brought back from occupied Germany.

In 1956 Ampex demonstrated the first practical videotape recorder, a device that revolutionized television programming: previously, all programs had been broadcast live, and, obviously, at the same time in all time zones.

In 1958 NASA acquired the naval air station of Sunnyvale, the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, northwest of San Jose, known to the locals as Moffett Field, next door to the farmland purchased by Lockheed.

I told the story of Silicon Valley in a separate (lengthy) book, "A History of Silicon Valley", but, briefly: a Stanford professor named Fred Terman encouraged his students to start companies (notably Hewlett Packard in 1939 and Varian in 1948), William Shockley opened the first transistor startup in nearby Palo Alto (1955), and then eight of his engineers started Fairchild Semiconductors (1957), where in 1959 Robert Noyce invented a practical microchip ("integrated circuit"). When in 1961 president John Kennedy launched the Apollo program to put a man on the Moon, NASA contracted MIT to build the Apollo Guidance Computer and MIT boldly decided to make a computer out of integrated circuits, the silicon microchips that had just begun production at Fairchild Semiconductors. Fairchild is also where in 1965 Gordon Moore predicted that the processing power of computers would double every 12 months ("Moore's law"). In a sense, Moore predicted the speed at which Silicon Valley would grow. Many of Fairchild's engineers started other companies, notably Intel in 1968 and AMD in 1969. By the end of 1970 the Santa Clara Valley was home to five of the seven largest US semiconductor manufacturers: Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, AMD, Four Phase and Signetics. By 1972 more than 60 semiconductor companies had been founded in the Santa Clara Valley, many by former Fairchild engineers and managers, and a writer, Don Hoeffler, popularized the term "Silicon Valley" for Santa Clara Valley, the region of Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Cupertino, cities that would soon become the headquarters of world famous high-tech companies.

But back then computer technology was not one of California's main businesses. There was nothing in California comparable to Bell Labs or the IBM research centers. But the know-how was slowly trickling west thanks to ambitious projects such as: Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab (where John McCarthy moved in 1962), UC Berkeley's Project Genie (1964), Lockheed's Dialog (1967), Lawrence Livermore Lab's Octopus network (1968), Tymshare's Tymshare (1968), IBM Palo Alto Lab's CICS (1969), and SRI's NLS (which Douglas Engelbart famously demonstrated in December 1968). DEC was the leader in the field of minicomputers. DEC's rival on the West Coast was Hewlett-Packard (HP), who in November 1966 demonstrated a minicomputer built with integrated circuits from Fairchild and memory chips from Ampex. In October 1969 the USA inaugurated the computer network Arpanet with four nodes, three of them in California (UCLA, SRI and UC Santa Barbara). In 1970 Xerox set up the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which became notorious for a work environment that was egalitarian and casual while fostering creativity. This resulted in some of the most influential inventions of the era, from the desktop computer with a graphical user interface to the local-area network (both unveiled in 1973). In 1971 Ted Hoff and Federico Faggin at Intel created the first microprocessor. In 1972 Nolan Bushnell's Atari invented a new business, videogames.

Silicon Valley's startup ecosystem created and was created by some of the most daring venture capitalists in the world, like Kleiner-Perkins, founded in 1972 by Eugene Kleiner of Fairchild Semiconductor and by former Hewlett-Packard executive Tom Perkins, and Sequoia Capital, founded also in 1972 by Don Valentine of Fairchild Semiconductor.

The Bay Area became home to the tech industry's most famous and colorful self-made tycoons, people like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who founded Apple in 1976, Larry Ellison, who founded Oracle in 1977, Bill Joy, who co-founded SUN Microsystems in 1982, etc.

At the same time, the Bay Area was laying the foundations for the "biotech" industry of the future: in 1973 Stanley Cohen of Stanford University and Herbert Boyer of UC San Francisco created the first recombinant DNA organism, and two years earlier Berkeley's nuclear physicist Donald Glaser had founded Cetus Corporation, considered the first biotech company.

Throughout the 1960s the defense industry remained the main employer of the Bay Area. Fairchild's main customers were NASA and (indirectly) the Pentagon. The Bay Area had become a "blue-collar" region with many manufacturing jobs and at the same time was still a farming region. Santa Clara County, in particular, was a case of split personality: still a rural area of orchards, that depended on the shipment of dried and canned fruit by rail to the rest of the country, but also home to a vast military-industrial complex.

This technological transformation happened while the San Francisco Bay Area was experiencing a cultural and social transformation: the beat poets and the hippies of San Francisco, the radical student protests of Berkeley, the artist colonies spread south and north, the countless rock bands, electronic and minimalist music, etc. In 1967 young people were moving to San Francisco from all over the country not for jobs but to join the "Summer of Love", to attend the Monterey Pop Festival (which attracted a record 200,000 people), to experiment with the drug LSD, and to be part of the "counterculture".

For better and for worse, World War II and the Cold War created in California a new huge industrial complex and a new world-class scientific environment.

The Nobel Prizes became more frequent: Felix Bloch was the first Nobel laureate of Stanford in 1952, followed by two more in the decade, and the University of California won four in ten years (Edwin McMillan in 1951, Linus Pauling in 1954 and Emilio Segre` in 1959, Donald Glaser in 1960). In the following decade CalTech added Richard Feynman (1965) and Murray Gell-Mann (1969). UC Los Angeles and UC San Diego won one each.

San Francisco, however, entered an existential crisis, transitioning from being a port and manufacturing center to being simply a financial center (and a "Bohemian" artists' paradise).

Dwight Eisenhower, who had been president of the USA from 1953 to 1961, and previously during the war had been the country's top general, gave an odd farewell speech in which he warned his fellow citizens against not the communist enemies but the USA's own military-industrial complex: his blunt message was that the USA risked being dragged into wars simply to satisfy this monster's insatiable hunger for warfare. In previous times the USA had built weapons only when needed and using existing civilian companies. Now the USA had “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions”, which didn't exist before the war, and this industry was profitable only if there were wars. For the time being for California that military-industrial complex was the new economic "rush", after the "gold rush" and the "oil rush" and the "Hollywood rush".

At the end of World War II, more than seven million soldiers returned from Europe and Asia. Throughout the country there weren't enough houses for them. Many of those who had been stationed in California wanted to relocate there. About one million soldiers moved to Los Angeles between 1945 and 1950, and an additional two million in the 1950s. Los Angeles developers took over the orange groves and turned them into residential tracts.

The Los Angeles economy also benefited in the 1950s by the emergence of the television studios, as the television set replaced the radio as the top entertainment and news device in millions of homes. In 1946 there were only six thousand television sets in the USA, and all of them in New York's metropolican area. By 1949 there were three million in many more cities, and that number more than doubled in 1950, and then it decupled in the following decade reaching to 52 million in 1960. Television became the dominant broadcast medium during the 1950s.

Los Angeles, the movie capital of the world, quickly pivoted towards television programming. The three networks that would come to dominate television broadcasting were born as radio networks: the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), spun off in 1926 from the Radio Corporation of America (RCA); the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), founded in 1927; and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), spun off in 1943 from NBC when the government mandated a divestiture of NBC's quasi-monopoly. All three established their West Coast headquarters in Los Angeles:

NBC in 1938 on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood (known as Radio City West), ABC in 1948 east of Hollywood, and CBS in 1949 on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Television broadcasting was authorized by the US government in July 1941. Both NBC and CBS debuted their television programming on the same day in New York (WNBT was the NBC television station and WCBW the CBS one), and ABC followed in 1948. Their first hit series were mostly produced in New York, like CBS' "The Ed Sullivan Show" (1948-71) and NBC's variety show "Your Show of Shows" (1950–54). ABC's "American Bandstand" (1952-89) was hosted since 1956 by Dick Clark in Philaldelphia. But soon the center of mass shifted towards Los Angeles: NBC's "Dragnet" (1951-59) and Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show" (1962–92) were made in Burbank; NBC's "Star Trek" (1966–69) in Culver City and Hollywood; CBS' sitcom "I Love Lucy" (1951-57) was made in Hollywood; and ABC's many hits, like the sitcom "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" (1952–66), that promoted the stereotype of the idealized middle-class family, "The Andy Griffith Show" (1960–68) and "The Brady Bunch" (1969–74), all of them in Hollywood. In 1950 Music Corporation of America or MCA, the largest talent agency in the world, rented studios in Hollywood to produce "The Adventures of Kit Carson" (1951–55). And there were many others.

Television added to a wild mix of wealth-generating businesses. During the Great Depression, Los Angeles' oil magnate Jean Paul Getty expanded his business in the USA, and after the end of World War II he expanded it in the Middle East, becoming by 1957 the richest man in the country. An avid art collector, in 1954 he turned his Malibu mansion into a private museum (which after his death would become the largest and richest art institution in the world), and in 1974 he opened to the public a replica of a Roman villa stuffed with Roman antiquities (an imitation of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum in Italy). At the time he had moved to a sprawling 16th-century estate in England, surrounded by a harem of pretty girls, with a pet lion, and made the international headlines mostly not for his art but for the kidnapping of his teenage grandson John Paul Getty III in Italy in 1973.

Another oil tycoon and an art collector was Armand Hammer, who became rich by doing business with the communists of the Soviet Union in the 1920s (he was the son of a Russian Jew who co-founded the Communist Party of the USA) and by selling alcohol legally (for medicinal purposes) during the Prohibition era through his United Distillers of America, finally purchasing the struggling Occidental Petroleum in 1957 and expanding its oil business all over the world.

Hollywood, while declining due to the competition of television, had created manywealthy and powerful people who ran the film studios: Jack Warner, Louis Meyer, Samuel Goldwyn, Karl Laemmle, Walt Disney, Darryl Zanuck, Adolph Zukor, ... And then there were the movie stars (countless), and the filmmakers (from all over the world). And the singers, popularized by both radio and cinema: Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, ...

The county of Los Angeles expanded rapidly after World War II, with its total population increasing by more than one million between 1940 and 1950 (2.78 million to 4.15 million). Los Angeles' real-estate developers ranked among the most daring and ambitious in the nation. Bob Symonds, who had worked with A.W. Ross on the "Miracle Mile" project, created in 1951 the open-air Valley Plaza shopping center in the San Fernando Valley. The genius of the suburban shopping mall was Victor Gruen, an Austrian who had designed in Minnesota the first enclosed shopping mall in the country, Southdale Mall (1956), and who designed several in California, starting with the Westfield Valley Fair in San Jose (1956), and quite a few in the Los Angeles area (such as the South Bay Center in Redondo Beach in 1959), besides planning the town of Valencia in 1965 (more famous for the rollercoaster-crazy amusement park Magic Mountain that opened in 1971). In 1953 developer Ben Weingart, inspired by the success of William Levitt's Levittown (built in Long Island in 1947), inaugurated a 17,000-home community near Long Beach named Lakewood, the largest planned city in the country yet, which heralded a new era of mass-produced housing. It generated a home-buying frenzy among war veterans (who, by law, were able to get home loans at very favorable conditions). Weingart's partner in that venture was Mark Taper (a Polish Jew who had already made a fortune in England), who specialized in low and middle-income suburban housing for returning soldiers. William Zeckendorf (a French Jew who was already a famous New York developer) turned the studios of 20th Century-Fox into Century City (construction began in 1960). Henry Kaiser and home builder Fritz Burns formed Kaiser Community Homes which built the 3,000-home Panorama City in the San Fernando Valley between 1947 and 1952, a short distance from a General Motors factory. Kaiser applied the same idea to cities of the Bay Area where car manufacturers had opened factories, as in San Leandro (Chrysler) in the East Bay.

The specialist of "tracts" of single-family houses was in the Bay Area: Joe Eichler (the son of an Austrian Jew), who democratized the "modernist" style of famous architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He built more than 3,000 homes in Santa Clara County, starting with Sunnymount Gardens in Sunnyvale (1949) and University Gardens in Palo Alto (1950). His style was the brainchild of young architects Robert Anshen and Claude Oakland, and later of Quincy Jones, who designed the Greenmeadow Tract in Palo Alto (1955). In 1958 Jack Foster purchased an island within the Bay, Brewer's Island, and turned it into a new city, today's Foster City (completed in 1964).

In 1959 the University of California acquired James Irvine's ranch (60 km) southeast of Los Angeles) and charged architect William Pereira to build an entire city around a new campus (UC Irvine), which opened in 1965 (the city itself was finally incorporated in 1971).

If San Francisco was becoming a hotbed of the nascent counterculture, Los Angeles was a merry-go-round of subcultures: in 1954 amateur artist Simon Rodia completed the Watts Towers; in 1955 Disneyland Park opened to the public; in 1960 the Hollywood Walk of Fame was inauguated; and in 1961 the Beach Boys' first single, Surfin' immortalized the city's beach culture and its iconic sport. Among the gurus of modernism, Lloyd Wright built the Wayfarers Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes (1951) and Louis Kahn the Salk Institute in San Diego (1965). The other architectural wonders of the era were designed by local architects. Wayne McAllister's Bob's Big Boy restaurant in Burbank (1949) and John Lautner's Googies Coffee Shop in Hollywood (1949) launched the "Googie" style of architecture. John Elgin Woolf and Paul Revere Williams (the rare Black architect of the time) designed houses for countless movie stars in what came to be known as the "Hollywood Regency" style. Wallace Neff designed luxury homes like the one for Sol Wurtzel in Bel Air (1931) and the one for Ralph Chandler in Hancock Park (1960). Welton Becket's Capitol Records Building in Hollywood (1956), the first circular office building, and John Lautner's Chemosphere in Los Angeles (1960) were other important buildings of the era. William Pereira designed the Geisel Library at UC San Diego (1960), the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport (1961) in collaboration with Paul Revere Williams, and the skyscraper of Crocker Citizen's Bank (1969), which was the new tallest building in Los Angeles. In 1953 three major freeways (the Pasadena, Hollywood and Santa Ana) were connected in downtown Los Angeles by a four-level interchange that was a world's first. Nicknamed the "stack", it became an iconic image of Los Angeles just like the Tour Eiffel in Paris. Paris had a panoramic tower for people, Los Angeles had a freeway interchange for cars.

In 1960 Los Angeles' population (2.5 million) surpassed Philadelphia as third in the nation.

In 1940 California's population was almost seven million, having doubled in 20 years, and then it passed ten million by 1950 and jumped to 15.7 million by 1960. In 1962 California passed New York to become the most populous state, and in 1971 it reached 20 million.

In World War II the USA had been technically an ally of both the Soviet Union (the leader of the communist world) and China, but in 1949 the Soviet Union had become a nuclear-armed rival and China had been taken over by Mao's communists. In February 1950 an obscure senator, Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, announced that communists were infiltrating both the government and the army. In June 1950 the communist regime of North Korea launched an invasion of US-supported South Korea. The USA invaded the peninsula in September 1950 and quickly pushed back the North Korean troops and even captured Pyongyang. In October 1950 Mao's regime invaded North Korea to push back the USA. And so for the first time the USA was at war with China. The war ended in 1953 with a stalemate. In 1950 the USA imposed economic sanctions on Mao's regime, which made it illegal for Chinese Americans to send money to their relatives in China or to do business with China. At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party, especially in Guangdong province, was pressuring the relatives of Chinese Americans to ask their American relatives to send money. Remembering what had happened to Japanese Americans during World War II, Chinese Americans were fearful that a similar fate awaited them. They often went out of their way to show their loyalty to the USA and their hostility towards Mao's regime. For example, in 1950 San Francisco's Six Companies established the Chinese Six Companies Anti-Communist League. In 1950 CalTech's rocket scientist Qian Xuesen, accused of being a communist, was placed under house arrest for five years and then deported to China in a prisoner's exchange. In 1955 Everett Drumright, the US consul-general in Hong Kong (the only place where Chinese could apply for a visa to enter the USA), wrote a report that described the Chinese refugees applying for asylum as potential communist agents, and hinted that many recent Chinese immigrants were illegal immigrants. This was actually true. During the "exclusion" years, many Chinese used the “paper son” system to enter the USA: they paid a Chinese American to declare them close relatives, the only remaining way to be admitted to the USA. The US government launched a large-scale investigation of the "paper son" system and in 1956 the Six Companies agreed to cooperate with the investigation and encouraged immigrants to confess. It didn't matter that most "paper sons" were not communists. They lived in constant fear of being discovered and deported. The new Chinese immigrants arriving by ship were detained on Angel Island and subjected to weeks of interrogations to determine their true identity.

Close to two million refugees flooded to Hong Kong during Mao's dictatorship to escape from political persecutions, from the famine of the Great Leap Forward (1955-61) and from the terror of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Hong Kong's economic miracle of the era was largely fueled by the low-paid work of these refugees that enabled an export manufacturing boom.

In 1910 there were only 7600 Blacks in Los Angeles. By 1920 they had more than doubled (16000), the majority coming straight from the rural south. Los Angeles’ Black population grew rapidly during the Great Depression of the 1930s. By the end of the decade, when the Black population had passed 65,000 (4% of the population), two Los Angeles neighborhoods were home to most of the Black families: South Central and Watts. During World War II, there were plenty of jobs in the aerospace and military industries of Los Angeles and in the shipyards of San Francisco. Los Angeles’ Black community doubled to almost 200,000 in 1950 and 350,000 in 1960, out of 600,000 (or 6%) in the whole of California. By the end of the 1960s, the Black share of Los Angeles' population would be almost 20%. The wealth gap between Whites and Blacks was colossal. At the same time, about 60% of Watts was under 25 years old and young people were often unemployed or underemployed. Blacks were de facto banned from the larger San Fernando Valley region, a White conservative suburban area, and rich neighborhoods like Beverly Hills were de facto off-limits.

The entire nation was waking up to the injustice suffered by the descendants of the African slaves. To remedy this, the US government passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, but material improvements failed to match legislative commitments, and California passed the Fair Housing Act in 1963.

The civil-rights movement changed the national image of Los Angeles from a beacon of tranquil prosperity to a hotbed of racial discrimination and segregation, with a reputation for police brutality. Tensions accumulated until in August 1965 Watts was shaken by six days of civil unrest, resulting in 34 deaths and more than 4,000 arrests.

The Hispanics or "Latinos" of Los Angeles were less visible, but of course a lot less discriminated against. They were about 1.5 million in 1960, when the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) was established. They had their own fight for basic rights, but in their case the fight was rather about fair housing and fair salaries. In 1962 Cesar Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association to protect the rights of agricultural laborers.

Similar issues were the main concerns of the Filipino minority. In September 1965, hundreds of Filipino laborers went on strike in the vineyards around the town of Delano in Central California.

In the Bay Area the political turbulence was more ideological than racial. The first student protests erupted at UC Berkeley in 1964, when Mario Savio and others founded the Free Speech Movement. Even the Black Panther Party, founded there in 1966 by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Angela Davis and other Black activists, was more influenced by Maoist rhetoric and Che Guevara-style armed resistance than by the "Black Power" movement. The Black Panthers were unique in that they resorted to terrorism. The vast majority of the protest marches and sit-ins were instead peaceful and directed against the war in Vietnam (launched in earnest in 1964), at a time when any young person could be drafted into the army and forced to fight for a pointless war in another continent.

At the end of World War II, many gay men discharged from the army had settled in gay-friendly San Francisco. The alternative lifestyles promoted by beat poets and hippies helped homosexuals gain some social legitimacy. In 1964 Life Magazine ran a story titled "Homosexuality In America" in which San Francisco was called "the gay capital of America”. In August 1966 the second nation-wide convention of homosexual groups was held in San Francisco, following the National Planning Conference of Homosexual Organizations held in Kansas City a few months earlier.

In 1969 a group of Chinese intellectuals founded the Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), whose struggle for minority rights ended up benefiting all minorities, notably the Black and Hispanic ones (like the right to bilingual education).

Nobody cared for the indigenous population, that kept declining: in 1965 there were only 75,000 people in California who still claimed descent from the native tribes.

California became a leader in environmental regulation and wilderness preservation.

California seemed immune to White terrorism, the kind of terrorism that had killed president John Kennedy in November 1963 in Dallas and civil-rights leader Martin Luther King in April 1968 in Memphis. However, in June 1968 presidential candidate Robert Kennedy (John's brother) was assassinated in Los Angeles, although by a Palestinian protesting the US support for Israel.

Possibly a reaction to the chaos of the 1960s, in 1969 the conservative politician Richard Nixon was elected president of the USA, the first native-born Californian to get the job, and a Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, was elected governor of California in 1967, a job that he retained until 1975.

In 1960 there were 237,293 Chinese Americans (combining immigrants and citizens) of which 40% lived in California and 16% in New York (and also 16% in Hawaii). Los Angeles' Chinese community had ballooned from 2,111 in 1900 to 8,000 in 1950 to 20,000 in 1960. Between 1962 and 1966, the USA authorized about 15,000 Chinese refugees who had fled from communist China to Hong Kong to enter the USA (the Hong Kong Parole Program).

Somehow the Chinese community started feeling proud of itself, even though the "white" elite still ignored their contributions. In 1963 five second-generation Chinese founded the Chinese Historical Society of America (Meiguo Huaren Lishi Xuehui). They were: Thomas Chinn, Chingwah Lee, Chan Hoon Kwock (born in Hawaii to a merchant couple of Zhongshan), Henry Kwock Wong (owner of several shops and a journalist for the Chinese Digest and Chinese World) and Thomas Wai Sun Wu (a dentist).

The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which repealed quotas, finally eased immigration into the USA from Asian countries. However, due to the closure of Mao's China, most Chinese immigrants of the 1960s and 1970s came from Hong Kong (still a British colony) and Taiwan (de facto independent and strongly allied with the USA, which still recognized its government as the legitimate government of all China), although about 70% of the 75,000 who entered the USA from Hong Kong during the 1960s were born in China. Because very few people were able to leave mainland China in the 1950s and 1960s, the 9,657 recorded Chinese immigrants of the 1950s and the 34,764 of the 1960s were mostly from Taiwan. Chinese-American demographics changed. And these were immigrants who often didn't identify with the old Chinatowns of California and were more likely to scatter in the suburbs.

In 1970 the population of the USA passed 203 million and the number of ethnic Chinese reached 436,000. There were actually more Japanese Americans (about 600,000) than Chinese Americans due to the fact that immigration from mainland China had died out after 1949. At the same time, millions of immigrants arrived from Indochina, following the "Vietnam War", especially after South Vietnam was conquered by communist North Vietnam in 1975. Many of the Vietnamese immigrants were ethnic Chinese. Within a decade from the end of the Vietnam War, half of all New Chinatown businesses in Los Angeles were owned by Vietnamese Chinese.

Between 1971 and 1973, Bruce Lee's movies launched Chinese martial arts (kung-fu) in the West. New Chinatown became popular for rock music: Madame Wong’s and the Hong Kong Cafe' became two of the main venues for the "new wave" of the late 1970s. The stereotype of Chinese Americans was changing rapidly.

Silicon Valley began in the 1950s with early semiconductor startups. At the time there were virtually no Chinese engineers: mainland China was ruled by Mao, whose Great Leap Forward destroyed Chinese classical education without creating a modern one, and Taiwan was just beginning to embrace electronic technology. China was no longer graduating world-class scientists, and Taiwan's science and technology was still in its infancy. In the 1960s there were still very few Chinese in Silicon Valley and discrimination was the norm to the extent that many realtors didn't want to sell homes even to those Chinese who held graduate degrees from US universities and worked for mainstream US companies. They were professionally isolated in a world dominated by white engineers, executives, investors and entrepreneurs. Just like in the 1860s the Chinese had been discriminated against, excluded from the most lucrative jobs, and had to start their own businesses like laundry services and restaurants, so in the 1960s the Chinese engineers, facing discrimination within the corporations for which they worked, decided to start their own companies. Lester Lee left Ampex in 1970 to start Recortec, David Lee left Xerox in 1973 to start Qume, and David Lam left Hewlett-Packard in 1979 to start Lam Research: they were all escaping unfair treatment by their bosses. When Lee sold Qume to ITT in 1978 for $165 million, it marked the first time that a Silicon Valley startup was sold for more than $100 million.

And so, after more than half a century during which Los Angeles had overtaken San Francisco and relegated the Bay Area to a marginal economic and cultural role, in the 1970s the Bay Area began a rebirth that shifted again the balance of economic power away from Los Angeles and towards San Francisco. Coincidence or not, this shift corresponded with the arrival, after more than half a century, of a new wave of Chinese immigrants into the Bay Area.

The Japanese had colonized Taiwan in 1895 and had launched a program of industrialization in the south of the island, making Kaohsiung the leading manufacturing center and the main port. Japan had also instituted modern education in Taiwan and children from the elite families often studied in Japan. Therefore the Taiwanese were accustomed to high standards of education, the manufacturing culture and and the practice of studying abroad.

When World War II ended, Taiwan was returned to China by defeated Japan. The local population was well-versed in Japanese culture, not in Chinese culture, and the native language of most Taiwanese was Hokkien, not Mandarin (and still is today, although 80% are also fluent in Taiwan's version of Mandarin, known as Guoyu or Huayu). When Chiang Kai-shek's government fled to Taiwan in 1949, the "mainlanders" who followed him created a new social class, which ruled the political sphere and was often wealthier.

The first wave of Taiwanese immigrants included many who started by joining a US university as graduate students and then were hired by US companies upon graduation. This was the time of the Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union (and indirectly also Mao's China, although Mao's China was still very poor), a time when the USA was recruiting high-skill talents from all over the world. The USA provided grants and scholarships to help good students do so. The USA was in the middle of a long economic boom that had started in 1958 and would end only 15 years later in 1973, a period during which unemployment remained at a record low (3.4% in 1968, still unbeaten in 2024): the US economy needed immigrants, and especially skilled immigrants. The Taiwanese who migrated to the USA in the 1950s were often mainlanders who had escaped to Taiwan, or, better, their children, sent to study to the USA in order to provide the family with a second option. The number of Taiwanese students in the USA steadily increased between 1950 and 1965 (1416 in 1950-54, 2645 in 1955-59, 6719 in 1960-64) and stabilized at about 2,000 per year between 1965 and 1974. Because of poor English-language skills, many of those born before 1945 went to study in Japan rather than in the USA. The reason they didn't stay in Japan was that Japan didn't provide a path to citizenship (and not even to permanent residence) for Taiwanese immigrants. The Japanese government was also in cahoots with the Taiwanese dictatorship, and Taiwanese students or professionals suspected of pro-democracy activities were often kidnapped in Japan. During the Japanese colonial period, the favorite field of study for the Taiwanese had been medicine, and naturally that turned out to be a favorite subject also for the students who went to the USA.

After graduation, the Taiwanese students easily found employment at a time when the USA was recruiting highly-skilled talents from all over the world for its electronic, aerospace and nuclear industries during the Cold War, as well as physicians for the "baby boom" era (1947-61). In fact, many found employment in the military-industrial complex despite not being US citizens.

For example, Taiwanese-born chemist Yuan Tseh Lee (Yuanzhe Li), who arrived in 1961 to study at UC Berkeley, became in 1986 the first Taiwanese-born Nobel laureate for work he conducted at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Taiwanese physicist Chenming "Calvin" Hu, who arrived at Berkeley in 1969, went on to develop the FinFET (fin field-effect transistor) in 1999 at UC Berkeley, hailed at the time as "the invention that saved Moore’s Law". Pauline Leung (now Lo Alker), raised in nearby Hong Kong by Guangdong parents who had fled the communists in 1949, studied in Arizona thanks to a scholarship and in 1965 reached Silicon Valley where she rose through the ranks of General Electric, Amdahl, Four Phase, Intel and Convergent to become a powerful executive (in 1994 she led the most successful IPO yet in Silicon Valley, Network Peripherals).

After 1965 the majority of Taiwanese immigrants were college-educated, and they were coming from Taiwan or Hong Kong. For example, Winston Chen (of Solectron fame) joined Harvard from Taiwan in 1965 on a graduate fellowship. Also, the Chinese-born David Lee (of Qume fame) was raised after 1949 in Taiwan. David Lam (of Lam Research fame) was raised in South Vietnam, which was first a French colony and then a de-facto US protectorate. One of the Taiwanese who arrived in 1965 was the 13-year-old David Ho (Da-I Ho), who reunited with his father, who had arrived in 1957 under the Magnuson Act. Ho later became a famous virologist at Columbia University and in 1996 was named Time magazine's "Man of the Year" for his contribution to curing AIDS. Taiwanese mathematician Bang-Yen Chen arrived in 1968 and quickly became one of the world experts in differential geometry.

After 1949, Taiwan's scientific and college population consisted of two different populations: the native Taiwanese and the refugees from the mainland who were escaping Mao's communist regime. The native Taiwanese were privileged among the Chinese population by the fact that Japan (which had ruled Taiwan between 1895 and 1945) had instituted modern education in the island, and that many Taiwanese had studied in Japan's best universities. It wasn't a difficult mental step for a Taiwanese to think of finding employment in the USA or enrolling into a US university. The families of mainland China that had moved to Taiwan in 1949 (the refugees) were often from the elite social classes of the mainland, the ones penalized by communism, generally highly educated and relatively wealthy, i.e. they could afford to send their children to study in the USA. It was psychologically easy for those college-educated Chinese who had moved from the mainland to Taiwan to think of making one more move and head for a US university. Indirectly, by constantly threatening Taiwan, Mao's regime encouraged college-educated Chinese refugees of Taiwan to emigrate to the USA (just like in the 2020s Xi's regime is indirectly encouraging a new generation of Taiwanese entrepreneurs, investors and scientists to move to the USA). Chiang Kai-shek's regime also contributed indirectly to the exodus of Taiwanese brains because it enacted strict migration controls: the Taiwanese were generally not allowed to travel (martial law was lifted only in 1987) but there was an exception for studying abroad.

After 1965 Taiwanese immigrants came to include physicians, dentists, engineers and scientists, migrating with their whole families in search of a higher salaries, safety and freedom. In 1965 only 47 scientists and engineers emigrated to the USA from Taiwan, but in 1967 the number increased to 1321. By 1980, only 5.4% of Taiwanese adults had a college degree but 61% of adult Taiwanese immigrants in the USA had one. Taiwan was still under martial law with an uncertain future. And Taiwan's dictatorship was not any better than Mao's dictatorship on the mainland: the Kuomingtang party spread “white terror” through detentions and executions. All the main pro-democracy leaders were arrested in the "Kaohsiung Incident" of December 1979. Taiwan's government even maintained a network of spies in the USA that reported back home those who engaged in pro-democracy activities, who were then blacklisted and denied reentry if they tried (in 1984 Henry Liu, who had written a book critical of Chiang, was murdered in the Bay Area). Taiwanese were allowed only in 1976 to leave the country for tourism.

The exodus accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s, when an estimated 20% of Taiwanese college graduates went abroad for higher degrees (18537 in 1975-79, 26626 in 1980-84, 35233 in 1985-89). More than 100,000 young Taiwanese left to study abroad between 1950 and 1999. In the 1980s probably only 8% of those who left returned to Taiwan upon completing their masters or PhDs.

The migration of so many students and researchers resulted in a massive "brain drain" for Taiwan: in 1980 a whopping 61% of the adult Taiwanese immigrant population in the USA held a college degree, compared with a meager 5.4% in Taiwan itself. Ironically, Chiang Kai-shek's regime often also forbade college students to return to Taiwan if they were suspected of having become too fond of democratic values, viewing them as potential troublemakers. Taiwanese students made up a significant percentage of international students in US universities well until 1990. By 1975 there were more Taiwanese students than Canadian, Japanese or Indian students in the USA (and virtually none coming directly from mainland China, which remained completely isolated from the rest of the world until Mao's death in 1976). Employment-based immigration of Taiwanese peaked in the 1960s when the USA was desperate to import doctors and nurses due to shortages in US hospitals. During the 1970s Taiwanese migration shifted from college admission towards family sponsorship, peaking in the early 1980s, but even the family members were generally college-educated (in Taiwan).

Wealthy immigrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan demanded better housing conditions than Chinatown. Realtors understood that they were ideal buyers, and started pitching prime properties also to Hong Kong and Taiwanese families, than just to white families. For example, in 1972 a realtor named Frederic Hsieh (a Hong Kong immigrant himself) started pitching homes in a white Los Angeles suburb called Monterey Park, that already had the largest Chinese population outside of Los Angeles' Chinatown, to wealthy Taiwanese, and soon that suburb was known as "Little Taipei" with a population of mostly Chinese. Monterey Park was the vanguard of the Chinese “ethnoburb" (a suburban ethnic cluster). Chinese immigrants spread to neighboring towns of the San Gabriel Valley and in the 1990s the San Gabriel Valley surpassed Los Angeles' Chinatown in ethnic Chinese population and business. Monterey Park is an example of the “suburban Chinatowns” created by Taiwanese immigrants. Another example is Flushing in the New York area.

The old urban Chinatowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento were not appealing for the new immigrants. The Chinatowns represented an older generation that hung on to old traditions whereas the new immigrants were often "westernized" and were eager to integrate in the multi-ethnic US society. The Chinese who settled in Silicon Valley in this period had little in common with the older generations of manual laborers, fishermen and farmers who had come from Hong Kong and Guangdong province and who lived and worked in San Francisco's relatively closed Chinese neighborhoods. Silicon Valley's new Chinese immigrants were networked with the East Coast and Asia and more interested in a single-family, detached, suburban house with lawn and swimming pool. Chinatowns became mainly tourist destinations.

The plight of the poorer Taiwanese immigrants and of the very few mainland Chinese immigrants is less well documented, but it is visible in the thousands of Chinese restaurants and small businesses scattered throughout the USA. As far as the lower classes go, it was generally still single men who moved to California. While the young people from wealthy families came to study, the poor ones came with little money, worked multiple jobs, saved money, over time bought their own business, and then worked even harder to make their business succeed. They often found a wife back home and brought her to California. Over the years, thousands of "mom and pop" businesses were created by such humble immigrants.

The "brain drain" was not completely negative, otherwise Taiwan could have easily stopped it: the students and scientists who did return to Taiwan helped Taiwan start its own high-tech industry. For example, Taiwanese physicist Chih-yuan Lu studied in the USA and returned to Taiwan in 1978, worked at Bell Labs for a few years, and returned to Taiwan again in the 1990s to work on Taiwan's first submicron manufacturing technology.

The normalization of diplomatic relations between the USA and mainland China in 1979 created anxiety among the Taiwanese that the USA would abandon Taiwan. Likewise, Hong Kongers felt uneasy. Therefore in the 1980s an increasing number of Taiwanese and Hong Kongers relocated to the USA simply out of fear of mainland China. The loophole of the tourist visa opened the floodgates for wealthy Taiwanese families to travel to California and buy up homes in the suburbs of the Bay Area and of Los Angeles. These were businessmen who had gotten rich under the export economy in the period of the "Ten Great Projects" (大建設) of national infrastructure launched in 1974 (six in transportation, three in heavy industry and one in nuclear power). As more Taiwanese families settled in the "Little Taipeis" of California, they drove the same secondary immigration that the "Gold Rush" immigrants had generated: Taiwanese restaurants, grocery stores, bookstores, etc. Taiwan's “brain drain” generation of the 1950s-70s, many of them Hokkien-speaking migrants, was replaced in the 1980s and 1990s by these businessman immigrants who were generally more cosmopolitan.

Unlike the Chinese immigrants of the "Gold Rush" era, immigrants from Taiwan were relatively wealthy and many had a college degree. They spoke Mandarin or just Hokkien, not Cantonese. They encouraged their children to assimilate in the American culture and were not attached to the Confucian tradition. Therefore the Chinatowns (mostly Cantonese-speaking and poor) were as alien to them as the white suburbs. Taiwanese immigrants generally brought their whole family with them, and several were single women. Other women came as wives of US soldiers returning home. In fact, women generally outnumbered men among Taiwanese immigrants. That was another major difference with the old Cantonese immigrants.

Taiwan was also learning from US investors. US corporations invested in Taiwan to take advantage of cheap manufacturing labor, and this resulted in a transfer of technical know-how from the USA to Taiwan. Taiwanese businessmen quickly learned the secrets of the trade.

General Instrument Corporation of New Jersey opened the Taiwan Electronics Corporation in 1964, the real beginning of Taiwan's electronic industry. The National Taipei University of Technology and the National Taiwan University had been established by the Japanese (respectively, in 1912 and 1928, under different names), and, unlike in the mainland, were not crippled by the ideologues. The Taiwanese learned quickly from US and Japanese companies and in the mid-1960s started producing television sets, transistor radios and electrical appliances. Taiwan also started producing world-class engineers.

Summarizing, the "Chinese" immigrants of 1965-1980 were a different kind of Chinese immigrant because: 1. they came from Taiwan, not from the mainland; 2. they spoke Mandarin and not Cantonese; 3. they were highly educated (doctors, engineers, etc) rather than unskilled laborers; 4. they moved to suburbia rather than Chinatowns; 5. they were more likely to settle in the Los Angeles area than in the San Francisco Bay Area; 6. there were more women than men; 7. many of them returned to their country.

Taiwan was unique among the non-European countries sending immigrants to the USA because the others were neighbors (like Mexico and Cuba), former US colonies (like the Philippines), theaters of US wars (like Korea and Vietnam, where thousands of cross-nation marriages happened during the occupation periods) and English-speaking (like India, Hong Kong and Singapore). As mentioned, Taiwanese immigrants were also generally wealthier and better educated than most non-European immigrants. Even after the USA recognized communist China as the legitimate government of China, the Taiwan Relations Act enacted in 1979 allocated 20,000 slots of immigration for Taiwanese citizens.

In 2008, half of the 342,000 foreign-born Taiwanese living in the USA lived in California: 83,000 lived in the Los Angeles area and 53,000 in the Bay Area. Seventy per cent had a bachelor degree or higher. About half were employed in finance, computers and medicine. Their contribution to the society and economy of California was significant.

Mao died in 1976, having caused the death of millions of Chinese people. In 1977 communist China removed restrictions on emigration, and emigration of college students and professionals resumed from mainland China, although in the beginning it was just a trickle. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping seized power in Beijing. In December 1978 at the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, Deng launched economic reforms that reopened mainland China to the world. In January 1979 formal diplomatic relations with the USA were reestablished after 30 years of hostilities. In 1979 the Chinese benefited from a change in US immigration policy: the USA decided to treat Taiwan like an independent country, and therefore its immigrants did not affect the quota for mainland China. Ditto for Hong Kong that was technically part of Britain. Separate quotas for mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong meant a higher total number of Chinese immigrants. In November 1985 China adopted the Emigration and Immigration Law that guaranteed the rights of Chinese citizens to travel outside China.

In 1978 there were only 28 students from mainland China in all US universities. The USA and mainland China agreed on a program of student exchange in July 1978, five months before they reestablished diplomatic relations. Deng Xiaoping had enthusiastically welcomed the proposal: as a young man, he himself had been a student abroad in 1920 in France for five years under the “diligent-work frugal-study” program (留法勤工儉學運動) organized by Chinese anarchists in exile. At the end of the year, the first batch of 50 Chinese students arrived in the USA. Ironically, they were mostly in their 30s (the oldest was 49): during the Cultural Revolution, for ten years students had been sent to work in the farms or had joined the "Red Guards", and China's universities had been shut down.

All over California several new ethnic Chinese communities appeared far away from the traditional urban Chinatowns. Millbrae south of San Francisco, a railway interchange (where the suburban Caltrain line meets the downtown subway BART) for easy commute to both San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and adjacent to San Francisco International Airport, emerged in the 1980s as a major Chinese enclave. In 1960 there were only two Chinese in Millbrae, but in 2010 they were more than six thousand, while the total populations of Millbrae did not change significantly in the 40 years from 1970 to 2010 (about 20,000), a sign that the new Chinese immigrants bought homes from white families. It was mainly populated by newcomers from overseas, not by old Chinese families moving out of San Francisco. The first wave of Chinese to settle in Millbrae were wealthy Mandarin-speaking Taiwanese families in the late 1970s. After the “Sino-British Joint Declaration” of 1984 (promising the handover of Hong Kong to China by 1997) and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, a new wave of Chinese immigrants arrived, mostly speaking Cantonese. Especially the Hong Kong situation triggered a mass migration of affluent or at least skilled Hong Kong residents (not only to San Francisco but also to Britain, Canada and Australia). Chinese businesses followed, not predated. For example, Cantonese restaurants began to move to downtown Millbrae in the 1990s, when the critical mass of Cantonese-speaking immigrants made Millbrae as appealing as San Francisco. The dynamics was clearly different from a century earlier because in the second half of the 20th century the Chinese were now considered the ideal tenants and employees: hard-working, honest, and financially stable. Unlike a century earlier, when only factories and farms looking for low-wage laborers wanted them, now everybody had a preference for the Chinese. There was no more discrimination against the Chinese, the way there was now against other ethnic minorities (e.g. the Hispanics). In fact, realtors and employers competed for Chinese customers and workers. The concentration of Chinese immigrants in suburban enclaves was therefore a case of voluntary residential clustering. Instead of assimilation, Millbrae’s Chinese immigrants chose "self-segregation", i.e. bilingual Chinese-owned businesses that can provide goods and services familiar to Chinese families (from foods and herbal medicine to acupuncture and Chinese television). The sense of belonging and trust in/preference of Chinese-owned businesses was more important to them than speaking English without an accent or watching the Superbowl or celebrating Thanksgiving. Like in Monterey Park, the new Chinese immigrants didn't dream of a condo in Chinatown but of a detached, single-family house with a lawn and a backyard. Either because of the money they carry with them or because of their well-paid jobs, they had the means to afford an upper middle-class world. Millbrae became an upscale Chinatown.

The post-war economic boom of the USA had ended, but a new boom had started in California: Silicon Valley, centered in the old Santa Clara County between Stanford and San Jose. After the invention of the microprocessor in 1971, startups multiplied.

Chinese immigrants and their children had already begun founding several high-tech startups: Compression Labs (CLI) by Wen Chen (1976) to make video conferencing and digital television components; Solectron by Winston Chen (1977) to make printed circuit boards; Data Technology Corporation (DTC) by David Tsang (1979) for floppy-disk and hard-disk drives; Lam Research by David Lam (1980) for equipment for chip manufacturing (or "etching"); Integrated Device Technology by Chun Chiu, Tsu-Wei Lee and Fu Huang (1980) for semiconductor components; Weitek by Edmund Sun, Chi-Shin Wang and Godfrey Fong (1981) for chips for high-end computers; fiber-optic pioneer E-Tek Dynamics of Ming Shih (1983); magnetic-disk manufacturer Komag of Tu Chen (1983); etc. They were typically based at the periphery of Silicon Valley proper.

And then in the 1980s software became another lucrative field of the area. The foreign-born population of Silicon Valley more than doubled. In 1990 Santa Clara County had a higher percentage of foreign-born residents than San Francisco (23%). Almost two-thirds of all foreign-born engineers and scientists were Asians, mostly Chinese (51%) and Indian (23%). San Francisco's Chinatown was increasingly just a tourist attraction: most Chinese immigrants were scattered around the south bay. These were mostly new immigrants, as opposed to descendants of the old immigrants: in 1990, 71% of the Chinese working in Silicon Valley's high-tech industry had arrived after 1970 (many already with a degree) and 41% after 1980. The Chinese engineering workforce in Silicon Valley was dominated by Taiwanese immigrants between 1949 and the late 1970s and still into the 1980s, but in the 1990s the tide started turning towards mainland China. Ditto for students: fewer and fewer Taiwanese went to study to the USA, whereas more and more Chinese did.

In 1979 Lester Lee, David Lee, David Lam and other Chinese entrepreneurs set up in Silicon Valley a branch of the Chinese Institute of Engineers, and in 1980 eight Chinese engineers led by Lester Lee founded the Asian American Manufacturers Association (AAMA), both of which were initially dominated by Taiwanese-born engineers (the National Taiwan University Alumni Association alone had more than one thousand members in the Bay Area). To those who knew the history of the 19th century, these Chinese organizations, aimed at protecting and helping new immigrants, were Silicon Valley's 20th-century version of the "Six Companies" of the 19th century.

Until the mid-1970s most foreign immigrants into California had come from Europe. In 1975 the USA surrendered in and withdrew from Vietnam, leaving all three countries of Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) under communist rule. During that decade and the following one, Asian immigrants escaping communism flooded California. In the 1980s also many Filipinos and South Koreans moved to Los Angeles. From that point on, most immigrants into California came from Asia and Latin America. Thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and to the opening of China under Deng Xiaoping, the number of immigrants from mainland China almost doubled from 299,000 in 1980 to 536,000 in 1990. By 1994, 40% of the Asian population of the USA was in California. More than 100 languages were spoken in California.

Nationals of Hong Kong began moving to California in large numbers only in the late 1960s. By 1980, there were 85,000 Hong Kong-born immigrants in the USA, 204,000 in 2000 and then increased slowly to 233,000 in 2018. Therefore the majority of Hong Kong-born immigrants arrived before 2000, whereas the majority of mainland Chinese immigrants arrived after 2000 (about 24% between 2000 and 2009 and 34% between 2010 and 2019).

In 1980 the population of the USA was 226 million and the Chinese population had doubled to 812,178. The ethnic Chinese population increased rapidly: 1,645,472 in 1990, then 2,432,585 in 2000, then 3,794,673 in 2010 (when the US population had passed 300 million), and 5,400,000 in 2020 (out of 331 million people).

There was a trace of China's tradition of manufacturing even in the high-tech world of Silicon Valley: the Chinese tended to gravitate around hardware, while the Indians preferred software.

The Taiwanese were now a tiny minority again. In the late 1980s Taiwanese-born engineers began flooding back to Taiwan because of active government recruitment and sheer opportunity created by a booming economy. Many specialized in bridging the high-tech worlds of Silicon Valley and Taiwan.

The early 1970s were turbulent years for the USA. In August 1971 the USA abandoned the gold standard, leading to today's world of floating exchange rates. The Watergate scandal erupted in 1972 and forced US president Richard Nixon to resign in 1974. In October 1973, Arab nations of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo against the USA in protest for the USA's support of Israel. In a car-centric country that had become totally dependent on oil, this wreaked havoc. In April 1975 the last remaining US troops fled Vietnam amid apocalyptic scenes. Inflation kept rising until it hit 14% in 1980.

In the midst of all the chaos, California was an island of optimism. Silicon Valley was moving past the microchip and into the world of personal computers: Atari was founded in 1972 and Apple was founded in 1976. North of San Francisco, in Napa Valley, Robert Mondavi had opened in 1966 the first major winery of the region since Prohibition and was revolutionizing California winemaking. The ports of California, especially Los Angeles, were booming thanks to the shipping container (pioneered by Malcolm McLean in 1956 in New York). Pacific trade was expanding rapidly thanks to the economic boom of Japan and then of the Asian Tigers (Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, etc). Hollywood too was booming again after having suffered the competition of television. A number of films revitalized Hollywood (nicknamed "Tinseltown" since 1975): Warner Bros' "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967), United Artists' "The Graduate" (1967), Paramount's "The Godfather" (1972) and "Nashville" (1975), Columbia's "Taxi Driver" (1976), Paramount's "Days of Heaven" (1978), United Artists' "Manhattan" (1979), and so on. Hollywood movies became international phenomena that could influence tastes and fashions far away from California. Hits became super-hits, or, better, blockbusters, like: Universal's "Jaws" (1975), Twentieth Century-Fox's "Star Wars" (1977), Paramount's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), etc.

At the same time, television was moving away from the family sitcom and unconventional TV shows were hugely successful, watched by all generations: "M*A*S*H" (1972-83), whose final episode remained the most-watched television broadcast until 2010, "Happy Days" (1974-84), "Wonder Woman" (1975-79), "Charlie's Angels" (1976-81), "The Love Boat" (1977–87), "Dallas" (1978–91), "Three's Company" (1976–84), "The Dukes of Hazzard" (1979–85), "Night Court" (1984–92), "Married with Children" (1987–97), "The Simpsons" (1989), "Baywatch" (1989–2001), etc.

The energy was spilling over into both the urban landscape and the arts. Cementing Los Angeles' reputation for innovative architecture, Welton Becket designed the Performing Arts Center (1964), Albert Martin's son designed the twin ARCO Plaza towers on Bunker Hill (1972), and Charles Luckman designed the United California Bank on Wilshire Boulevard (1973), the tallest building west of the Mississippi and the tallest in Los Angeles until 1990. International architects didn't look down on L.A. anymore: the Crystal Cathedral (1980) was designed by Philip Johnson for televangelist Robert Schuller and the Museum of Contemporary Art (1986) was designed by Arata Isozaki. Three landmarks of San Francisco's skyline appeared: Pietro Belluschi's 52-story Bank of America Center (1969), the tallest building west of the Mississippi River for four years, Pierluigi Nervi's St Mary's Cathedral (1971) and William Pereira's Transamerica Pyramid (1973), the new tallest building of the city, built on the site of the demolished Montgomery Block. John Portman designed the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco (1973), with the world’s largest hotel lobby, the sprawling Embarcadero Center also in San Francisco (1971), and the Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles (1977).

Homosexuals started moving to the "Castro" district of San Francisco in large numbers around 1970, the year when the first "Gay Pride Parade" was held. In 1977 Harvey Milk became the first openly gay politician elected to a major post (city supervisor). Starting from 1982, a new disease, AIDS, devastated the gay community of San Francisco (and soon the whole world).

The environmental movement became an important force in California's politics after an oil spill in 1969 off the coast of Santa Barbara. San Francisco's peace activist John McConnell had the idea of an yearly "Earth Day" that was first celebrated in 1970 and spread all over the world.

In 1981 Reagan was elected president of the USA and throughout his eight-year tenure he pushed for a huge increases in military spending, which helped to revive California's defense and aerospace industries as well as NASA. Reagan was succeeded as California governor by Jerry Brown (1975-83), an emblem of the liberal Left. In a sense, the two represented the two souls of California: the business soul and the intellectual soul. They somehow merged in the unorthodox technological creativity of Silicon Valley and in the narrative and stylistic revolution of the "New Hollywood" generation of filmmakers.

California now competed with the Boston area for the title of main technological hub of the country. Besides the leadership in semiconductors, California produced the first Artificial Intelligence startups (like Stanford-spinoff Intellicorp, 1980), the first major computer with a graphical user interface (Apple's Macintosh, 1984), the first virtual reality startup (Jaron Lanier's VPL Research, 1985), the first digital camera (Dycam, 1990), the first genetically-engineered food (Calgene's "Flavr Savr" tomato, 1992), etc.

Increasingly, California was a top scientific center. Its scientists won several Nobel Prizes, notably at Caltech (seven in 1960s, six in the 1970s, three in the 1980s, etc) and at UC Berkeley (four in the 1950s and in the 1960s, three in the 1980s, etc).

Some of the most important scientific theories of the era came out of California. In 1964 Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech conceived the "quarks", fundamental particles that make up protons, and in 1980 Alan Guth Stanford proposed his "inflationary theory" to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe.

And the Bay Area remained a center of the counterculture, whose manifestations shifted with technology: Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories (1978), Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Lectronic Link or "WELL" (1985), John Law's "Cacophony Society" (1986), Kevin Evans's "Burning Man Festival" (1990), etc.

However, Los Angeles had already become even more cosmopolitan: by the mid-1980s LA boasted the largest populations of Mexicans, Koreans, Japanese, Armenians, Iranians, Filipinos and Vietnamese in the USA (and more Mexicans than any city in Mexico except Ciudad de Mexico).

In 1980 Los Angeles passed Chicago as the second-largest city in the nation with just three million inhabitants. California's population kept increasing rapidly: from less than 24 million in 1980 to more than 30 million in 1990.

There was another way in which Taiwan helped California: it saved Silicon Valley when, still in its infancy, Silicon Valley was about to prematurely die.

During the 1960s Taiwan was still a poor and underdeveloped country. The tech industry was established by US and Japanese multinational corporations that built assembling factories in Taiwan, taking advantage of Taiwan's cheap labor.

In 1980 the Taiwanese government attempted to recreate the innovative atmosphere of Silicon Valley on Taiwanese soil and established the Hinschu Science-based Industrial Park. It specifically aimed at attracting Taiwanese engineers and scientists who had studied or worked in California, i.e. who had experienced first-hand the spirit of Silicon Valley. By the 1990s, Taiwan had become the world’s third largest producer of tech gadgets for customers in the USA and Europe, notably the top computer vendors and cellular-phone manufacturers. The success of Hinschu was such that already in the mid-1980s the vast majority of Taiwanese emigrants with a college degree returned to Taiwan, including those who had acquired that college degree in the USA. In 1983 there were only 27 "returnees" working in Hinschu, while in 2000 there were more than five thousand and by then about 40% of Hinschu's 284 startups had been founded by Taiwanese who had studied in the USA. It helped that Taiwan finally lifted martial law in 1989 (after exactly 40 years): the pro-democracy movement had been growing since the "Kaohsiung Incident" and, starting in 1986, Nan-jung Deng had spearheaded the "Green Ribbon Campaign" of increasingly large street demonstrations against martial law. The formation of Taiwan's identity among young generations who had not experienced the civil war also contributed to motivate young people to choose Taiwan over the USA. In 1988 Taiwanese were finally allowed to visit China (previously they could be executed for doing it), where many still had close relatives. Those emotional reunions had a funny psychological impact on the Taiwanese: before 1988 they viewed themselves as a somewhat inferior province of China, not any freer because of the dictatorship of the Kuomintang, but after witnessing the poverty and destitution of their home towns they started viewing themselves as the lucky citizens of a superior nation. Comparing the two systems instilled in the Taiwanese a sense of pride. In 1992 Taiwan held its first democratic elections and returning Taiwanese didn't have to fear anymore from blacklisting and persecution because of their political affiliations. The quality of life kept improving and in many ways Taiwan became a better, cleaner and safer version of California (not of mainland China), at least as far as the technocratic elite went. At this point English was as common as Mandarin, and cities like Taipei were as much a consumer society as Los Angeles.

The brain drain of the first three decades was reversed in the 1990s, and Taiwan even started attracting foreign talents.

Countless cities have tried to copy the structure and method of Silicon Valley: Hsinchu was perhaps the first one. In 1973 Shien-siu Shu, the former head of National Tsinghua University, was appointed Minister of Science and Technology, and established the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). In 1976 Shu proposed to create a science and technology park that would replicate the fundamental mechanism of Silicon Valley, and he located it in Hsinchu, near Tsinghua and near National Chiaotung University (viewing them as the Stanford and Berkeley of Taiwan). Chung-mou "Morris" Chang (aka Zhongmou Zhang), the veteran executive of Texas Instruments, was hired to lead ITRI in 1986. Following a clue from Electronic Design Automation (EDA), pioneered at UC Berkeley, which enabled the separation of design and manufacturing of chips, ITRI split its design and fabrication divisions: one became the United Micro-electronics Corporation and the other (in January 1988) Taiwan's Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), run by Chang in person. The Taiwanese government was the main "venture capitalist" who invested in both. TSMC was technically a joint venture with Dutch multinational Philips and also had private investors. Its original goal was to provide fabrication services to Taiwanese startups that couldn't afford to build their own factory due to the rising costs of wafer fabrication facilities. In 1990 TSMC inaugurated its first fully-owned semiconductor wafer fabrication plant on the campus of ITRI. There had been companies that offered the same services before, but they usually made more money making their own chips, and frequently copied the chips of their customers. Chang decided that TSMC would only manufacture chips for others, and never design its own. He thus pioneered the "foundry model" that rapidly changed the shape of the semiconductor industry and TSMC soon became the world's biggest chip manufacturer. Chang advertised a business model that encouraged startups to remain "fabless" and use instead TSMC factories. From the beginning the idea appealed also to the existing big chip factories that were unable to compete with the Japanese. For the first year Jim Dykes was the CEO of TSMC under Chang (chairman of the board). Dykes traveled to San Francisco to speak to potential investors and delivered a famous speech titled "The Four Little Dragons of the Orient and an Emerging Role for Semiconductor Companies" in which he explained that the scary big dragon was Japan and the four little dragons were Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan (note that China wasn't even mentioned back then), and that Taiwan was enjoying a period of renaissance.

1985 was the year of the first crisis of Silicon Valley's semiconductor industry, brought about by cheaper Japanese products. The Japanese government, via the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), had sponsored a project headed by Yoshio Nishi at Toshiba for Very Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) with the primary goal of conquering the memory chip (DRAM) market. By 1985 Japanese firms had gained 70% of the DRAM market. Intel, AMD and Fairchild had to exit the DRAM market. In 1981 USA manufacturers had enjoyed a 51.4% share of the world's semiconductor market, whereas Japanese companies had 35.5%. In 1986 the situation had been reversed, with Japan's share reaching 51% and USA companies reduced to a 36.5% share. Thousands of hardware engineers were laid off in Silicon Valley. Intel sent the first large order to TSMC already in 1988. TSMC saved Intel and, one by one, all the other silicon corporations. They all became fabless semiconductor companies: AMD, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Nvidia... TSMC's business plan literally saved Intel and the other chipmakers of Silicon Valley.

The team of TSMC added many other returnees such as: Lih-shyng "Rick" Tsai aka Lixing Cai in 1989 (he had graduated from Cornell in 1981 and then worked for eight years at Hewlett-Packard), Mong-song Liang in 1992 (who had studied at UC Berkeley from 1978 under Chenming Hu and graduated in 1983 and then worked for a decade at AMD), Shang-Yi Chiang in 1997 (who had studied at Princeton University in 1969 and graduated from Stanford in 1974 and then worked at Texas Instruments and HP), and Chenming Hu himself in 2001.

In 1988 Taiwanese corporations like Foxconn started using mainland China for cheap labor the way the US corporations had done in the 1950s with Taiwan. The physical manufacturing of electronic goods moved to Chinese cities like Zhengzhou, where its largest manufacturing facility opened in 2010.

In the 1990s tiny Taiwan replaced the USA as the world's largest producer of computer components (motherboards, monitors, keyboards, etc) and even of laptop computers. In 1996 Taiwanese firms manufactured 32% of the world's laptops (50% in 2000, 80% in 2007 and 94% in 2011). While Japan had created a computer industry that was largely independent of the US counterpart, Taiwan's computer industry was closely integrated with the USA. But Taiwan's success story turned out to be Silicon Valley's success story: it didn't create a competitor, it created a collaborator. By 1992 Intel was the world's largest semiconductor company.

One can wonder if the success of Silicon Valley would have been possible without the diligent work of Taiwanese chip makers, i.e. how much Silicon Valley owes to Taiwan. In a sense, Chang deserves to be considered co-founder of Silicon Valley with the likes of Fred Terman and William Shockley.

Two major events shaped the 1990s: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Internet.

In 1989 communist regimes started falling all over eastern Europe. In 1991 the Soviet Union itself was dismantled, and its members became independent countries: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, the three Caucasian republics, the three Baltic countries, the four Central Asian republics, etc. The end of the Cold War resulted in a dramatic reduction of military and aerospace investment by the US government. Military bases closed all over California. In particular, the Presidio closed (the fifth largest employer in San Francisco). Naval facilities closed, including Alameda and Treasure Island. Defense contractors, including Lockheed that had been instrumental in the development of early Silicon Valley, laid off workers. In 1990 California experienced its biggest recession since the Great Depression.

Racial tensions resurfaced in April 1992 when a jury acquitted four officers of the Los Angeles Police Department who were accused of brutality against a black man named Rodney King (the first major case of a witness filming an incident involving police misconduct). Riots erupted in South Central Los Angeles and lasted for six days, after which 63 people were dead and more than 12,000 were arrested.

To make things worse, California was not new to earthquakes but two strong ones contributed to erode the relaxed optimism of the sunny state: in 1989 in San Francisco (the "Loma Prieta" that killed 63 people) and in 1991 in Los Angeles (the "Northridge" that killed 57). Overlapping those earthquakes California experienced (between 1987 and 1992) the second driest period in its recorded history.

Luckily for California, three events boosted California's economy and soon propelled it to new heights. In 1991 a British scientist in Switzerland invented the World-wide Web, running on top of the Internet (as the Arpanet had been officially renamed in 1984), and in the following years Silicon Valley became the center of the new Internet economy. A slew of software startups introduced all sorts of "online" services and businesses, aiming to transform the "brick-and-mortar" economy into a "net economy" (eBay, etc) Secondly, in the 1990s California (mostly Los Angeles) produced about 90% of all prime-time television programs and three-fourths of all feature films of the USA: by 1995, Hollywood had become a bigger employer than the entire defense sector. Thirdly, China had started economic reforms that promoted international trade, and China's economic boom triggered an increase of trade with California: by 1995 Los Angeles had become the largest port on the Pacific Coast and passed New York for foreign trade.

From the viewpoint of immigrants, the situation was schizophrenic. On one hand, the booming high-tech industry needed to import software engineers. On the other hand, unemployment was so high that the working class was hostile to more immigrants. The dotcom boom and the "Y2K bug" generated a huge demand for computer scientists. The immigration reform of 1990 recognized the need for engineers and created the a special visa program, H-1B, for them. This further increased the number of Chinese and Indian immigrants to Silicon Valley, as both China and India graduated thousands of engineers every year (and the Indians were also fluent in English). Up until then, most of the Chinese immigrants (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) admitted to the United States had come under family-sponsored preferences or as immediate relatives of US citizens, but now one could come to the USA just because of her/his studies and profession.

At the same time, the economy was not improving and illegal immigrants were easy scapegoats. The anti-immigration campaigns were mainly directed against the unskilled Mexicans that were pouring in from the border. The population of Mexico ballooned from 39 million in 1960 to 100 million in 2000, due to soaring birth rates in Mexico. Similar demographic and economic issues plagued the rest of Latin America. Inevitably, the pressure to emigrate to rich California was increasing by the year. New Hispanic immigrants had spread all over California, with East Los Angeles being particularly dense. In 1994 California's governor Pete Wilson took an anti-immigration stance that was mainly directed against them. In November 1994 an anti-immigrant proposition (the "Save Our State" initiative) supported by Wilson was approved by voters. The hidden truth is that Latinos constituted a large pool of low-wage unskilled labor, and an easily exploited one.

Silicon Valley kept creating multi-millionaires in the Internet industry: Marc Andreessen of Netscape (founded in 1994 to browse the World-wide Web), Jerry Yang of Yahoo (founded in 1994 to catalog the websites of the World-wide Web), Pierre Omidyar of eBay (founded in 1995 to sell on the WWW), Craig Newmark of Craigslist (founded in 1995 to advertise for free on the WWW), Reed Hastings of Netflix (founded in 1997 to rent videos via the WWW), Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google (founded in 1998 to search the WWW), Marc Benioff of Salesforce (founded in 1999 to move business applications to the "cloud". i.e. on the WWW), etc. Their services disrupted the traditional economy, as did Amazon in Seattle, originally an online bookstore. In 1993 Taiwanese-born Jen-Hsun Huang founded Nvidia to make "graphics processing units" (initially used to accelerate videogames but later crucial to accelerate Artificial Intelligence systems). Thousands of new millionaires were created in just the year 1999.

California was becoming a leader in multiple technologies, and not only in the Bay Area: in 1995 Pixar made "Toy Story", the first feature-length computer-animated film, and in 2000 Craig Venter's team in San Diego sequenced the human genome (actually only 92% of it, and the rest had to wait until April 2022).

Always at the vanguard of social issues, in 1993 California became the first state whose two senators were both women (Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer). In the same year Condoleezza Rice became Stanford's youngest, first female and first non-white provost.

Los Angeles was becoming a city of high-rise buildings, such as Henry Nichols Cobb's Library Tower (1989), the tallest building in California for 27 years, and Ieoh Ming Pei's First Interstate Bank World Center (1990), of modern campuses, such as Frank Gehry's Loyola Law School (1990), and of great museums, such as Richard Meier's Getty Center (1997).

In 1990 the USA enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act which almost tripled the number of visas granted on the basis of occupational skills from 54,000 to 140,000 annually.

The population of Chinese workers in the high-tech industry kept swelling in the 1990s. At the same time the population of Chinese students in California universities was swelling even faster. In 1990, 23% of the Chinese employed in Silicon Valley were college graduates with a master or PhD, compared with only 11% for the white population (only the Indians boasted a higher percentage of graduates).

Feifei Li represents the Deng-era wave of immigration. Her parents moved to the USA in the late 1980s and she grew up in suburban New Jersey before moving to California for university. At Caltech she created ImageNet (2006), an important step in the development of Artificial Intelligence, so much so that in 2013 she became the director of Stanford's AI Lab.

The 1990s witnessed the Internet revolution, which started in 1991 with the inauguration of the World-wide Web and the first "browsers" and "search engines". The first wave of Chinese founders in Silicon Valley was almost entirely of Taiwanese-born founders, like Jen-hsun Huang of Nvidia (1993), Jerry Yang of Yahoo (1994) and Steve Chen of YouTube (2005). Many of the Chinese executives in major Silicon Valley companies were also from Taiwan, like Kai-fu Lee, an executive first of Apple and then of Google. Finally a founder of a major company who was born and raised in mainland China appeared: Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom in 2011.

In the 1990s the motivation for the Taiwanese to emigrate was greatly reduced: Taiwan was moving towards a democratic government (the first direct presidential election took place in 1996), Taiwan had become a high-tech country (TSMC had been founded in 1987 and in 1990 the Industrial Technology Research Institute launched a five-year program to develop submicron fabrication technology), the economy was growing rapidly (12.8% in 1987), and Taiwan's per-capita income was growing rapidly ($8,000 in 1990, double the 1986 level, compared with $24,000 in the USA but with a much lower cost of living). The number of Taiwanese students on US campuses peaked in 1993/94 at more than 37,000 and then it started declining. Last but not least, Taiwan's educational system had been reformed (in 1990 junior colleges were converted into four-year institutes of science and technology, and the threshold on the college entrance exam was lowered to expand the college population) and its National Taiwan Institute of Technology (instituted in 1974) had become world-class.

In 1997 Hong Kong returned to be part of mainland China, a fact that induced many Hong Kongers to move to California, but for the most part Chinese immigration was now mainly from mainland China, and soon Mandarin-speaking mainlanders greatly outnumbered the Taiwanese and the Cantonese.

In 1997 Michael Chang, who had immigrated from Hong Kong as a student, was elected mayor of Cupertino, the first Chinese American to become mayor in the Bay Area. There wasn't a San Francisco mayor of Chinese descent until 2011, when Ed Lee got elected. In the same year, Jean Quan was elected mayor of Oakland.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Asian Americans became the fastest-growing ethnic group of the USA, thanks mainly to Indians and Chinese, which replaced the Japanese as the leading Asian-American groups. The new crop of Chinese American immigrants were either students or engineers. About 15% of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans are employed or do research in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math), and about 4% of STEM graduates from US universities are ethnic Chinese. Immigrants constitute 69% of the high-tech workforce of Silicon Valley, with Chinese immigrants being approximately 14%. Asians are the richest group in the USa. Chinese neighborhoods have the reputation of having the lowest crime rate, no drugs, no prostitution. Chinese children have the reputation of studying and winning prizes, not joining gangs. What a change from the days when Chinatown was considered a concentrate of opium dens, brothels and tongs.

But habits are apparently difficult to break. When in 2020 the covid pandemic spread from China into the USA, president Donald Trump called it "the China virus" and the Chinese were again targeted by white suprematists. Just like back then, hostility towards the hard-working Chinese and negative portrayals of Chinese communities spread on the media that had taken the place of the newspapers: social media.

Silicon Valley (the south bay in general) is home to one of the largest foreign-born populations in the USA. Asian Americans (mainly Chinese and Indians) make up about 39% of San Jose’s population (whites only 24%) and 42% of Santa Clara County (whites are only 29%). Therefore they are under-represented among founders and executives. The relatively low number of ethnic Chinese founders in Silicon Valley is usually explained as a consequence of a value system that prioritizes education and hard work but also low risk. Therefore they tend to be highly paid engineers but not the founders of the companies for which they work. Asian-American families enjoy the highest median income. Asian-American students are so successful that Affirmative Action, a program invented to help minorities like them, became an obstacle for them. The founders in Silicon Valley are overwhelmingly white, often foreign but European, and sometimes Indian, rarely Chinese.

Just like during the "gold rush", relatively few Chinese were managers, founders and generally speaking stars (a` la Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc), and so just like during the "gold rush" the media ignored their contribution. Was the Silicon Valley boom truly so different from the gold rush of 1850s?

Just like in the 1850s, the "Chinese" (many of whom were born in the USA) are not the owners of the "gold mine" but instead the workers who make it work. Chinese provide the "labor" of the digital age, especially in the hardware sector (the machines that make Silicon Valley software move). It is incorrect and unfair to claim that Silicon Valley is the manifestation of the founders when it is the hard work of tens of thousands of engineers that make their startups succeed.

The boom of Silicon Valley created the need for tens of thousands of engineers. Would Silicon Valley have developed so fast without those tens of thousands of skilled Chinese (and Indian) engineers and scientists?

The boom of Silicon Valley didn't start with silicon and didn't start with the microprocessor, both innovations that weren't appreciated at the time. The boom of Silicon Valley started with the Immigration Act of 1965 and in earnest in the 1980s, precisely when Chinese (and Indian) engineers started flocking by the thousands to Silicon Valley; and Silicon Valley became a worldwide phenomenon after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1990 which dramatically increased the number of college-educated Chinese (and Indian) immigrants. By luck, at the same time Deng was pushing mainland China through an epochal economic and social transformation from a land of peasants and factory workers to a land of small and big business owners, and restoring the Chinese educational system to its pre-Mao degree of excellence.

Is it a coincidence that Silicon Valley (the place where most Chinese immigrants arrived) exploded whereas the Boston area, arguably a more technologically advanced region in the 1950s, didn't? Is it possible that what fueled the boom was precisely the abundant supply of skilled Chinese (intellectual) labor, just like in the 1850s the boom of California was largely fueled by the abundance of skilled Chinese (manual) labor?

Silicon Valley happened some 100 years later in what had been the first destination for Chinese immigrants to the USA: the San Francisco Bay Area. In the 1850s they came for the gold and for the railway, but is it a coincidence that 100 years later Silicon Valley happened in that very place, the place with the first and biggest Chinatown, the place with many Chinatowns scattered all over the region?

In April 2000 the NASDAQ stock market crashed, wiping out trillions of dollars of evaluation from the "dotcom" startups of the 1990s. In reality it was just a bump on the road towards the "net economy", because in the next few years defining technologies of the future were born. Netflix, Google and Salesforce had just been founded, each one causing major disruptions in business and in ordinary lives. In 2000 Paypal, a system for online payments, was introduced by immigrants like Max Levchin (Ukraine), Peter Thiel (Germany) and Elon Musk (South Africa). In 2001 Jimmy Wales launched Wikipedia, a multilingual encyclopedia that was meant to be collaboratively edited by the Internet community. In 2002 Elon Musk founded SpaceX to develop space transportation and in 2004 it acquired electric-car maker startup Tesla. 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched the social network Facebook (2004) and in 2006 Jack Dorsey launched the social network Twitter. In 2005 Google acquired the Android operating system for mobile phones and launched the navigator Google Maps. In 2005 former Paypal employees launched the video-sharing website YouTube, acquired the following year by Google. By 2005, Silicon Valley (a small region) accounted for 14% of the world’s venture capital. That was just the beginning of the dotcom renaissance. In 2007 Apple launched the iPhone and created a whole new "mobile" economy, and turned Steve Jobs into a sort of Silicon Valley saint. The following year Google introduced a rival system, Android, that was used by all other smartphones. Airbnb (2008) and Uber (2009) created yet another economy, the "sharing economy", and also marked the revival of San Francisco, rapidly becoming an appendix of Silicon Valley. And the decade ended with the crypto-currency Bitcoin, launched in January 2009 by a mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto.

The contribution of the immigrants was not negligible, and in fact it was a major factor to explain how the Bay Area was outperforming the rest of the world in advanced technology. In 2000, about one third of Silicon Valley’s high-skilled workers were foreign-born, mostly from Asia; and in 2005 more than half of Silicon Valley’s high-tech companies launched between 1995 and 2005 had been founded by at least one immigrant.

In 2003 another Hollywood actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger (known for movies like "The Terminator"), became governor of California. In 2005 San Jose’s population of almost one million passed San Francisco, so that San Jose was now the third largest city of California (after Los Angeles and San Diego) and the tenth largest city in the USA.

All of this happened while the USA was going through a lot of trouble: the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks in New York and Washington (2001), the invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), and the Great Financial Recession (2008). If you only read the news coming out of Silicon Valley, you wouldn't know any of these events. You would have known, though, that a Black man had been elected president: Barack Obama, who led the USA between 2009 and 2016. Obama won all nine counties of the Bay Area, and in particular a whopping 84% of the vote in San Francisco. His 2008 campaign had relied heavily on social media. He embraced the growing power of Silicon Valley while it was causing anxiety in Europe.

The recession ended in 2010. In 2012 Facebook's IPO (initial public offering) was the biggest high-tech IPO in history; and new social media appeared (Pinterest and Instagram in 2010, Zoom in 2011).

The decade witnessed science-fiction become reality. In 2010 Craig Venter's team in San Diego reprogrammed the DNA of a living organism, and in 2012 it became relatively easy to edit the genome of living organisms thanks to the CRISPR-cas9 technique invented at UC Berkeley and other labs. Deep Learning was the new flavor of Artificial Intelligence popularized in 2012 by a neural network ("AlexNet") built in Canada by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and their PhD advisor Geoffrey Hinton. In 2014 Google ventured into Deep Learning buying the British startup DeepMind and two years later a system designed by DeepMind, AlphaGo, beat the world's most famous Go master. In 2016 Elon Musk, Sam Altman and several young scientists (including Ilya Sutskever) established a nonprofit research center called OpenAI. In 2018 Google and OpenAI demonstrated the first "language models", capable of answering questions written in ordinary language, of summarizing texts and even of having conversations. Meanwhile, the iPhone and Google's Android had revolutionized how people communicated, shopped, worked, obtained their news and found information: since 2016, more people users around the world were accessing the Internet from mobile phones than from desktop computers.

World-famous architects celebrated California's status with futuristic buildings such as: Rafael Moneo's Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles (2002), Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (2003), Renzo Piano's Broad Contemporary Art Museum in Los Angeles (2008), Cesar Pelli's Salesforce Tower in San Francisco (2013), the tallest building in San Francisco and the second-tallest building west of Chicago, Norman Foster's Apple headquarters at Apple Park, aka the "Spaceship" (2017), etc. Wilshire Grand Center (2017), the tallest building west of Chicago, was instead designed by the illustrious local architecture firm of Albert Martin.

At the same time that business was booming, Nature was not being kind to the people of California. Between 2000 and 2017 California experienced one drought after the other: the 2000-04 drought was the worst one in California's history when measured against the Palmer Drought Severity Index, and the 2011-17 drought included the lowest snowpack ever recorded in California's history (in 2015). Between 2017 and 2021 California was devastated by massive wildfires: in Santa Rosa in October 2017; in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties (southern California) in December 2017; near Mendocino in July 2018; the "Carr Fire" of July 2018 in Shasta and Trinity Counties (northern California); the "Camp Fire" of November 2018 in Butte County (northern California); the "Woolsey Fire" near Los Angeles in November 2018; several big ones in August 2020 (notably one in Wine Country, one in the Santa Cruz mountains and the "North Complex" in Plumas National Forest); in 2021 the "Dixie Fire" (again in northern California) and the Caldor Fire near Placerville; the Borel Fire that in 2024 destroyed the historic town of Havilah in Kern County; and the multiple wildfires of January of 2025 (notably the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire) that devastated Pacific Palisades and Malibu and caused the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the state.

Nature had its own way to remind Californians of who was in control of the planet while humans edited genomes and built intelligent machines.

In 2000 California's population was 47% white, 26% Hispanic and 11% Asian. But these numbers didn't tell the whole truth: the new Asians were much wealthier than the native Hispanics and Blacks, and often fetched higher salaries than the native Whites. In 2000, 44% of Asian Americans had a bachelor’s degree, compared with 26% of the white population. Studies showed that consistently Asian-American kids outperformed white kids in school. For example, in 1995 Asian-American 11th-graders studied six hours more per week than their white peers, and in 2007 more than two-thirds of Asian-American high school students did homework five or more days a week, while only about 40% of white kids did. In 2010 about 40% of the freshman class at UCLA and 37% of the freshman class at UC Berkeley were Asian Americans (14% of California's population). Parental expectations were a strong motivating factor for Asian-American kids, coupled with a Confucian focus on hard work and with a “moral mandate” for self-improvement (as Brown University psychologist Jin Li called it). Asian Americans were also more likely to study for occupations that yielded higher salaries, notably physicians and lawyers. By 2020, 32% of California's physicians were Asians (compared with 33% white and 8% Latinos) Ruth Chao popularized the authoritarian Chinese way of parenting in her paper "Beyond parental control and authoritarian parenting style" (1994), and then Amy Chua popularized the term "tiger mom" in her 2011 memoir "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother". Chinese parents expected their children to excel in all subjects and even outside school, even at playing classical Western instruments (prodigy pianist Lang Lang being the role model). By the turn of the century Asian Americans had become the "model minority", known for hard work and education, despite the fact that between the 1850s and the 1950s they were treated like the worst one, even denied the fundamental civil rights .

In 2000 San Francisco's population was 35% Asian, mostly Chinese. The Chinese immigration in San Francisco, however, was different from the Chinese immigration in Silicon Valley in that many new immigrants had taken advantage of the 1965 reform and were "sponsored" family members, not engineers or college students like in the south bay.

Greater Los Angeles consists of five counties: Los Angeles County in the middle, Ventura County in the west, San Bernardino County and Riverside County in the east, and Orange County in the southeast. It had become the second most populous metropolitan area in the USA after New York.

Before 1960 the county of Los Angeles had been mostly White, but in the following 40 years White families had moved to the outer suburbs while Asians and Latinos had taken over. The total population of Los Angeles County in 1960 had been 6 million, and it had increased to 9.5 million in 2000, but the White population in the county had dropped from almost 5 million to 3 million (from 80% in 1960 to 32% in 2000), while Latinos had increased to more than 4 million (from 10% in 1960 to 45% in 2000), Asians to more than 1 million (from 2% in 1960 to 13% in 2000), and Blacks to almost one million (from 8% to 10%). The "Asians" of Los Angeles were less Chinese than in the Bay Area because of the large Filipino and Korean communities, but still mostly Chinese (Taiwanese, Hong Kongers and mainlanders). The total population of the Greater Los Angeles (all five counties) had more than doubled between 1960 and 2000 from less than 8 million people to more than 16 million, but the White population had remained slightly over 6 million: Los Angeles had originally been populated from the Midwest but now it was being populated, to a large extent, from across the Pacific Ocean. The ethnic Chinese community of Monterey Park had fanned out to other towns of the San Gabriel Valley (the northeast portion of Los Angeles County), so that in 2000 it contained eight of the ten cities with the largest percentages of ethnic Chinese: Monterey Park, Alhambra, Arcadia, Diamond Bar, Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights, San Gabriel, San Marino, Walnut. Ethnic Chinese had also moved to the western part of the San Gabriel Valley, in particular to Pasadena (where CalTech was located). In that valley, the ethnic Chinese had increased 60% in ten years (1990-2000) compared with a general increase of 6%. Latinos were still the majority, followed by Whites, but the Chinese had increased from 11% of the San Gabriel Valley population in 1990 to 17% in 2000. Just like in the Bay Area, the ethnic Chinese families were generally better at finding well-paid jobs, saving money and buying homes. In 1980 home ownership was 57% among the native-born White population and 37% among Chinese immigrants. In 1990 it was 72% among Whites and 83% among Chinese. The City of Industry, incorporated in 1957 and located in the San Gabriel Valley, was an oddity: a town of 200 people with offices and factories, employing tens of thousands of workers, which made it effectively the economic powerhouse of the San Gabriel Valley. In 2000 about one quarter of its 2200 businesses were Chinese-owned, many of them import–export firms trading with Taiwan or mainland China via the port of Long Beach.

In 2002, the USA received 61,000 mainlanders, 6000 Hong Kongers and almost 10,000 Taiwanese.

In 2013, 47% of Chinese immigrants (aged 25 and over) had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 28% of the total immigrant population and 30% of the native-born population. In 2013, the median income of Chinese immigrant households was $57,000, compared to $48,000 and $53,000 for overall immigrant and native-born households.

In the 2014-2015 academic year more than 300,000 Chinese students were enrolled in US colleges and universities, an almost five-fold increase from just a decade earlier, and their preference was for the Los Angeles and Bay Area universities: University of Southern California in Los Angeles, UCLA and UC Berkeley. Just before the covid pandemic, for the 2019–2020 academic year, Chinese students accounted for almost one-third of all foreign students (372,532 in the whole of the USA).

The population of Chinese immigrants in the USA had increased almost seven-fold since 1980, reaching almost 2.5 million in 2018, or 5.5% of the overall foreign-born population; and in 2018 China replaced Mexico as the top country of origin.

The number of immigrants from China residing in the USA almost doubled from 1980 (366,000) to 1990 (677,000), and again by 2000 (1,192,000) and 1.8 million in 2010 and more than 2.5 million in 2019.

In 2020 Whites made up 37% of California's population, Asians 15% and Latinos 39%.

In 2021 the enrollment rate for Asians (share of enrolled divided by share of the general population) was about 5-6 times the same rate for Whites. In 2024 China was still the leading origin of international students in the USA, accounting for more than 27% of the total.

While every few years some pundit predicted the end of Silicon Valley, technological progress kept accelerating in the 2020s. In 2020 alone the covid pandemic created a boom in "cloud computing" and e-commerce, Google's division Waymo launched its first self-driving "robo-taxis", SpaceX took two astronauts to the International Space Station, Tesla became the top car manufacturer in the world by market capitalization, OpenAI revolutionized Artificial Intelligence with its GPT3 "language model", and Google's Artificial Intelligence system AlphaFold solved a 50-year challenge in biology (predicting protein structures), a feat that was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2024. In 2021 OpenAI introduced the image generator DALL-E, SpaceX became the most valuable start-up in the USA, and Tesla's and SpaceX's owner Elon Musk became the richest person in the world. In 2022 Apple became the first company to reach the $3-trillion valuation, greater than the GDP of Britain, Nvidia became the world’s most valuable semiconductor company, and OpenAI introduced the groundbreaking chatbot ChatGPT.

The 2024 presidential election was truly fought in California: powerful and sinister Silicon Valley figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen funded the campaign of a senile, dumb and amoral politician, Donald Trump, against Kamala Harris, a California senator representing the traditional political establishment, who was in turn supported by Berkeley politician Nancy Pelosi (former speaker of the House) and California governor Gavin Newsom. And Silicon Valley won.

Historians debate at which point the USA started declining. Some point to the pointless (and lost) Vietnam War of the 1960s, which basically ended the military expansion of the (virtual) military empire of the USA after the successful annexation of South Korea and Japan. Some point to the OPEC oil crisis of the 1970s, which revealed how the US economy was an oil-based economy inevitably doomed to decline as oil become scarcer. One could start by blaming the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, when government debt tripled and income inequality skyrocketed (the gap between the rich and the poor). After the brief Bill Clinton era (when communism fell all over the world, the Cold War ended, and the USA was briefly the only superpower), the decline accelerated with George W Bush's pointless and failed wars (Afghanistan and Iraq), with the Great Financial Recession of 2008, and with the 2020 covid pandemic disaster under Donald Trump.

It is a fact, however, that California experienced one boom after the other precisely during the decline of the USA. By 2018 California (with a population of 40 million) had become the fifth largest economy in the world, after China (1.4 billion people), Japan (124 million) and Germany (84 million), and the Bay Area (a relatively small area with a population of seven million) was home to most of the world's most successful tech companies: Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, Cisco, Netflix, etc. It wasn't only Hollywood and Silicon Valley: California was still the leading state in agricultural output, producing more than 13% of the total US agricultural value, and the largest producer of nuts, cheese, tomatoes, oranges, wine, etc.

By 2020, California had literally obliterated the competition within the USA.

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• Chen, Aspen: “Going to America” (2021)
• Chen, Yong: "Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943" (2000)
• Chinn, Thomas: "A History of the Chinese in California" (1969) (I digitized it because it doesn't seem to be in print anymore)
• City of Los Angeles: "Chinese Americans in Los Angeles, 1850-1980" (2018)
• Crouch, Gregory: "The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Riches in the American West" (2018)
• DeQuille, Dan: "A History of the Comstock Silver Lode & Mines" (1889)
  Faragher, John: "California" (2022)
• Flood, Frances: "A Study of Architecture of the Period l869-l900" (1941)
• Fogelson, Robert: "Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930" (1967)
• Gregory, James: "American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California" (1989)
• Guinn, James Miller: "A History of California" (1915)
• Hardesty, Donald: "Archeology and the Chinese Experience in Nevada" (2003)
• Hildebrand, Evelyn: "The Chinese in California: "Archaeology and Railroads at the Turn of the Century" (2020)
• Issel, William and Cherny, Robert: "San Francisco, 1865-1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development" (1986)
• James, Holliday: "The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience" (1981)
• Li, Wei: "Ethnoburb - The New Ethnic Community in Urban America" (2009)
• Lienhard, Heinrich: "A pioneer at Sutter's fort 1846-1850" (1898)
• Lotchin, Roger: "San Francisco, 1846-1856: From Hamlet to Modern City" (1974)
• Lyman, Chester: "Around the Horn" (1850)
• Massey, Douglas: "Ethnic Residential Segregation" (1985)
• McWilliams, Carey: "California: the Great Exception" (1999)
• Millard, Bailey: History of the San Francisco Bay Region (1924)
• Model, Suzanne: "Why are Asian-Americans Educationally Hyper-selected? The Case of Taiwan" (2018)
• Myrick, David: "Railroads of Nevada and Eastern California" (1962)
• Norton, Henry: "The Story of California" (1913)
• Pfaelzer, Jean: "Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans" (2008)
• Pisani, Donald: "From Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California, 1850-1931" (1984)
• Polk, Michael: "Chinese Workers at Central Pacific" (2019)
• Procter, Ben: "William Randolph Hearst - The Early Years, 1863- 1910" (1998)
• Rice, Richard: "The Elusive Eden: A New History of California" (2019)
• Saxenian, AnnaLee: "Silicon Valley's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs" (1999)
• Saxton, Alexander: "The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti- Chinese Movement in California" (1971)
• Scaruffi, Piero: "A History of Silicon Valley" (2014)
• Scott, Edward: "The Saga of Lake Tahoe" (1957)
• Shamberger, Hugh: "The Story of the Water Supply for the Comstock" (1972)
• Speer, William: "The Oldest and The Newest Empire" (1877)
• Starr, Kevin: "Americans and the California Dream 1850-1915" (1986)
• Straka. Thomas: "Timber for the Comstock" (2008)
• Takaki, Ronald: "Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans" (1989)
• Workman, Boyle: "The City That Grew" (1936)

• Lyman, Chester: "Around the Horn" (1850)
• Blackburn, Abner: "Biography of my Adventures" (1851)
• Speer, William: "The Oldest and The Newest Empire" (1877)
• DeQuille, Dan: "A History of the Comstock Silver Lode & Mines" (1889)
• Lienhard, Heinrich: "A pioneer at Sutter's fort 1846-1850" (1898)
• Norton, Henry: "The Story of California" (1913)
• Guinn, James Miller: "A History of California" (1915)
• Millard, Bailey: History of the San Francisco Bay Region (1924)
• Workman, Boyle: "The City That Grew" (1936)
• Flood, Frances: "A Study of Architecture of the Period l869-l900" (1941)
• Scott, Edward: "The Saga of Lake Tahoe" (1957)
• Myrick, David: "Railroads of Nevada and Eastern California" (1962)
• Fogelson, Robert: "Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930" (1967)
• Chinn, Thomas: "A History of the Chinese in California" (1969) (I digitized it because it doesn't seem to be in print anymore)
• Saxton, Alexander: "The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti- Chinese Movement in California" (1971)
• Shamberger, Hugh: "The Story of the Water Supply for the Comstock" (1972)
• Lotchin, Roger: "San Francisco, 1846-1856: From Hamlet to Modern City" (1974)
• James, Holliday: "The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience" (1981)
• Pisani, Donald: "From Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California, 1850-1931" (1984)
• Massey, Douglas: "Ethnic Residential Segregation" (1985)
• Starr, Kevin: "Americans and the California Dream 1850-1915" (1986)
• Issel, William and Cherny, Robert: "San Francisco, 1865-1932: Politics, Power, and Urban Development" (1986)
• Bancroft, Hubert Howe: "History of California: 1848–1859. Vol. XXIII" (1988)
• Bancroft, Hubert Howe: "History of California: 1860–1890. Vol. XXIV" (1988)
• Takaki, Ronald: "Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans" (1989)
• Gregory, James: "American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California" (1989)
• Procter, Ben: "William Randolph Hearst - The Early Years, 1863- 1910" (1998)
• McWilliams, Carey: "California: the Great Exception" (1999)
• Saxenian, AnnaLee: "Silicon Valley's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs" (1999)
• Chen, Yong: "Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943" (2000)
• Hardesty, Donald: "Archeology and the Chinese Experience in Nevada" (2003)
  Chang, Iris: "The Chinese in America" (2003)
  Arrigo, Linda: "Patterns of Personal and Political Life Among Taiwanese-Americans" (2006)
  Chang, Iris: "The Chinese in America" (2003)
• Pfaelzer, Jean: "Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans" (2008)
• Straka. Thomas: "Timber for the Comstock" (2008)
• Li, Wei: "Ethnoburb - The New Ethnic Community in Urban America" (2009)
• Scaruffi, Piero: "A History of Silicon Valley" (2014)
• Model, Suzanne: "Why are Asian-Americans Educationally Hyper-selected? The Case of Taiwan" (2018)
• City of Los Angeles: "Chinese Americans in Los Angeles, 1850-1980" (2018)
• Crouch, Gregory: "The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle over the Greatest Riches in the American West" (2018)
• Chang, Gordon: "The Chinese and the Iron Road/ Ghosts of Gold Mountain" (2019)
• Polk, Michael: "Chinese Workers at Central Pacific" (2019)
• Rice, Richard: "The Elusive Eden: A New History of California" (2019)
• Hildebrand, Evelyn: "The Chinese in California: "Archaeology and Railroads at the Turn of the Century" (2020)
• Chen, Aspen: “Going to America” (2021)
• Faragher, John: "California" (2022)