New-York Times / June 9, 1852
China and the Chinese seem to be looming up everyday into additional magnitude and consequence in the eyes of the nations. The edicts that shut them off from all communication with the rest of the world are gradually relaxing. By the exclusion of strangers from their empire they have hitherto remained a secret from mankind. The interior of the Flowery Land was penetrable only in disguise. We were in ignorance of their people, laws, customs and habits, except as the knowledge was scantily gleaned from the visits of our merchants to a few points on the coast. We knew them only by their tea boxes, covered with inscrutable hieroglyphics, and filled with the enlivening leaf, or their porcelain, bearing the most exquisite one golden tracery. But we were introduced by British cannon. The stringent restrictions against foreigners have since been giving way. The outside barbarians now trade more freely at her ports; the great wall itself has become surmountable; they are beginning to appreciate the people of other countries, and the venerable doctrines of Confucius are obliged to sustain themselves against the assaults of other creeds.
But an unexpected events tends, and will tend to more than any other, to draw this mysterious people from their shell. Hitherto they could only be reached by most protracted voyages. Long days, and weeks, and months were necessary to effect communication between them and Europe or America. They were far removed from civilization. Inaccessible by land, except by the solitary traveler, and if he reached so far, the Chinese wall presented a barrier to his steps. Commerce could only touch them from the sea. It could reach their ports from Europe or America, only by the tedious and perilous journey around one or the other of those continental continuations that stretch for the Pole. The doubling of Cape Horn or Good Hope was inevitable.
But, suddenly, a nation wakes up in the Eastern border of the Pacific. A metallic soil draws thither the surplus hosts of the world; and, as by magic, a populous, active, and most enterprising nation inhabits and decks with villages the desert fields. Between this people and the swarms of China extend of the calm, unruffled floods of the Pacific. The surge of the same ocean rolls in on the beach of China and California. They are separated by but a few days of time -- months are almost crowded into days. A continuous and propelling breeze bears the unchanged canvas from Canton to San Francisco. Fleets are organized, whose prows may never part other than Pacific waters. The Capes may push their solitary juts into the southern sea, in vain. They can no longer obstruct the approach to China, or put the embargo of delay upon her commerce. The enticement is too great for Chinese exclusiveness. Ancient laws, customs, and prejudices are swallowed in the excitement of the new time. Chinese gongs no longer confine their hideous roaring to Chinese soil, but American hotels are filled with the sounding monsters, and only justify their noise by the repasts to which they so thunderously invite. Chop-sticks ply under the American Constitution. Birds’ nests, sharks’ fins, and trepangs adorn our bills of fare. Cargoes of Chinamen cover the waters of the Californian port. Soon they are found, working side by side with the emigrants of other countries, in the mines, and their almond eyes glisten at the sparklets their delicate finger busily pick up from the earth. America and China begin to mingle
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and socialize. Mandarin robes glide over Republican pavements. The territorial scenery of California is animated by throngs of “Celestial” visitants. Their industry, temperance, and economy, have aroused the jealousy of the Yankee miner. He finds it necessary to add other hours to his labor, or the Chinese leave him behind. In these newcomers, the criminal law finds nothing to take hold of. None of them are swung from trees by Vigilance Committees. None of them look through the diamonds of the jail. The public tax is not increased for their support. They do not take both sides of the walk as they go through the streets. They are natural supporters of the Maine Law. The Chinese emigration does not increase the tenants of prison, hospital, or insane asylum. But each man works, economizes, and augments his shining heap. Less earnest or more spendthrift miners look askance at these diligent workers and their increasing stores of golden flakes. A jealous feeling spreads through the placers, and rolls on, with added force, until it reaches the governor, and from the gubernatorial pen issues a proclamation of most anti-Democratic tendency. According to Governor BIGLER’s interpretation of our institutions, America is no longer an asylum for all. The Celestials are an exception. All other nations may freely come and freely work. Irish, Scotch, and English -- French, German, and Italian -- the Dane, the Swede, the Pole, -- the Indian, Mexican, and Spaniard -- even the Sandwich Islander, the Patagonian, and Terra del Fuegan -- may rock their mud-filled cradles in search of gold. But the Chinaman is not known to the Constitution. He is not of the right color. True, he is not so dark as the African, less tawny than the Indian, not so white as the Canadian, and although his cutaneous tints are, to the common eye, almost identical with the Mexican, yet the artistic optics of Governor BIGLER descry a difference -- a shade too much, or too little, of yellow ochre in the compound The Governor finds “a skin not colored like his own,” and straightaway denounces it as an unconstitutional skin, and dooms its hapless owner to an ineligibility to dig.
But though the Chinese may not be permitted, under the stripes and stars, to work, they can, it seems, write, reason, print, and answer proclamations; and lo! an anomaly in American newspapers. HAB WA, LONG ACHICK, and SAM and TON WO, representing their countrymen in California, boldly meet the Governor face to face. They turn his arguments against him -- prove his premises erroneous, his conclusions illogical, and altogether effect as complete a demolition as ever a Governor suffered. Those Oriental pens are sharp-nibbed. The Chinaman is as dangerous a competitor in argument as in gold-hunting. He wields a pick and a quill with equal dexterity. BIGLER has evidently mistaken his man, or he would not have aroused these slumbering powers of ratiocination. This letter to his Excellency is an extraordinary production. No other equal number of lines, recently published, starts so many suggestions. If this is a sample of what may be found hidden under the mystic cipher in which Celestial are literature is recorded let us have speedy translations.
Are we not accomplishing, by this very California process, what all commercial nations have been always anxious for -- nay, what England fitted out her formidable armaments to achieve -- what we are even now sending forth, to the joy of the world, an expedition to execute with the neighboring isles of Japan -- to wit, commercial intercourse, free and unrestricted trade with the swarming legions of China? When English cannon opened the Chinese ports, with what avidity did all the nations wish to avail themselves of the new market! America paid her charges on tea with her own manufactures, instead, as formerly, with bills on London. She completed, in one respect at least, a more advantageous treaty than England herself. The treaty-making power was greedy to deal with China, notwithstanding the color of her people. There was no constitutional objection to that. BIGLER had not yet been foisted into power. Belgian ladies’ cloth sought entrance, under English disguise, into Chinese markets. Russia poured her goods from the north into Chusan and Hong-Kong, and almost cut off the woollen trade of the English. French and Swiss chintzes bent the Chinese shelves. The instincts of commerce proved the value and importance of the trade with China. She counts her population by hundreds of millions. Commercial intercourse with such a people is a prize that a nation may well strive after and fight for. And here, without battle or effort, by the natural current of events, we have this Oriental traffic thrown into our own hands. Chinese merchants leave their homes, and bring their rich argosies to San Francisco. One Celestial clerk, in an American store, has sometimes footed up his daily sales of Chinese goods at ten thousand dollars. CHY LUNG, FOI CHAONG, SAM WA, and TUK SHAONG, can, respectively, no sooner get a cargo of Chinese articles on their shelves, than they are purchased, and the adventurous merchants are sent back to their native shores for fresh supplies. They give employment to all those whose services are necessary in the details of commercial business -- ships, steamboats, sailors, stevedores, carmen, stores. No one can estimate the importance of the trade that is now opening between these two great countries. The imagination would fall, with wearied wings, ere it could reach the results, in this regard, of the next twenty years. Within half that time a railroad and telegraph may unite New-York and San Francisco, brining us in direct communication with China herself. Boxes of delicious Oolong may make their fleet transit, within a fortnight’s space, from Shanghai to New York. Yet Gov. BIGLER would borrow an idea from the Chinese of two thousand years ago, and erect a formidable wall between us and them. Surely there can be no room for diversity of sentiment on this subject. Let us take the goods the gods provide us, and gratefully acknowledge the wisdom of that Providence which so easily and naturally accomplishes what man might have labored for ages in vain to achieve.
