Abstract
“Boys, I believe I have found a gold mine!” These words, uttered In 1848 In the hills east of Sacramento by the New Jersey carpenter and mechanic James W. Marshall, opened a new episode in California history.1“El Dorado” was the new drama that would not only change the local life of Alta California, but also inspire a new performance cast from across the nation and the world. The Gold Rush started the next year, as gold seekers came from the eastern states, from Europe, and from the other side of the Pacific Ocean. It is estimated that in the Gold Rush decade (1849–1859) an average of 7,100 Chinese arrived in the United States annually, with only 2,660 returning to China each year.2 San Francisco, or “Gold Mountain” in Chinese, became the first significant Sino-American contact zone in the United States. Following the gold seekers came a second wave of adventurers, who thrived on the gold wealth created by the gold seekers. This secondary gold mine encompassed everything related to frontier life, including a booming entertainment industry San Francisco in the nineteenth century was a world theatre that constantly staged international shows for international audiences. By the end of 1852, Chinese actors were playing in their own new theatre building in San Francisco, contributing to the cultural life of the bustling young city.
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Notes
For an account of the discovery of gold in California, see Peter J. Blodgett, Land of Golden Dreams: California in the Gold Rush Decade, 1848–1858 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1999), 11–33.
Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States 1850–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 50.
See Susan Mann Jones, “Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion,” in The Cambridge History of China, Late Ch’ing 1800–1911, part 1, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 10
Him Mark Lai’s “Guangdong Origins” is a good introduction to the local, national, and international connections of Guangdong. See Him Mark Lai, Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004), 3–18.
Bell Yung, Cantonese Opera: Performance as Creative Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xi.
See Fan Ye, The History of the Later Han Dynasty (Houhanshu) (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1991), 10:2829.
See Lai Bojiang and Huang Jingming, The History of Cantonese Opera (Yuejusht) (Beijing: Zhonghua Xiju, 1988), 4.
See Lula May Garrett, “San Francisco in 1851 as Described by Eyewitnesses,” California Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 22 (September 1943): 253–280.
See Donald Ridelle, Flying Dragons, Flowing Streams: Music in the Life of San Francisco’s Chinese (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983)
Liu Boji, The History of American Chinese Overseas (Meiguo huaqiao shi) (Taipei: Xingzhengyuan qiaowu weiyuanhui, 1976), 616.
See Jack Chen, The Chinese of America (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 1980), 60–61
Jacuqes Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), 104.
J.D. Borthwick, Three Years in California (1851–54) (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1857), 46.
Herbert Ashbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underground (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1933), 34.
See Arthur Murphy, The Orphan of China, A Tragedy. By Arthur Murphy, esq., as Performed at the Theatre-Royal, Drury-Lane (London: G. Cawthorn, 1797), v-xv.
See Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), 117–210.
Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 56.
James S. Moy provides many examples of displaying Chinese in “The Panoptic Empire of the Gaze: Authenticity and the Touristic Siting of Chinese America.” See James S. Moy, Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 7–22.
Anthony Kubiak, Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 219
William H. Brewer, Up and Down California in 1860–1864, the Journal of William H. Brewer, Professor of Agriculture in the Sheffield Scientific School from 1864 to 1903, ed. Francis Farquhar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 366.
Frank Soulé et al., Annals of San Francisco (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 1999), 382.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 19.
Michel S. Laguerre, The Global Ethnopolis: Chinatown, Japantown and Manilatown in American Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 18–52.
Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 4.
Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1969), 498
Helen Hunt Jackson, Bits of Travel at Home (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878), 72–73.
See Eric Lott, love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 49–55.
Gertrude Atherton, My San Francisco: A Wayward Biography (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1946), 55.
B.E. Lloyd, Lights and Shades in San Francisco (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 1999), 256–259.
Caroline H. Dall, My First Holiday; or Letters Home from Colorado, Utah and California (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1881), 375.
Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 24.
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little Brown, 1998), 88–89.
Such taxation targeting the Chinese included foreign miner tax (1853), Chinese police tax (1862), the laundry ordinance and others. A good collection of relevant documents is William L. Tung’s The Chinese in America 1820–1973: A Chronology & Fact Book (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1974).
Thérèse Berton, The Real Sarah Bernhardt: Whom Her Audiences Never Knew, trans. Basil Woon (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), 267–276.
Richard Lockridge, Darling of Misfortune: Edwin Booth: 1833–1893 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971, 1932), 298.
See Gilbert A. Harrison, Gertrude Steins America (Washington, DC: Robert B. Luce, Inc., 1965), 67–68.
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 31.
David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontiers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 337.
George Rupert MacMinn, The Theater of the Golden Era in California (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1941), 507.
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893),” in History, Frontier and Section: Three Essays by Frederick Jackson Turner (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1933), 59–91.
Dan Caldwell’s “The Negroization of the Chinese Stereotype in California” is a good source for such comparisons. See this article in Southern California Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 2 (June 1971): 123–131.
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© 2006 Daphne Pi-Wei Lei
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Lei, D.PW. (2006). Chinese Theatre and the Eternal Frontier in Nineteenth-Century California. In: Operatic China. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06163-8_2
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