The first transcontinental railroad in the United States could not have been built without Chinese laborers. At any given time in the late 1860s, between ten and twelve thousand Chinese workers were engaged in building the railroad, almost all of them employed by Central Pacific on the line's western half, which extended from Sacramento, California, to Promontory, Utah. But despite their numbers, write Gordon H. Chang, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Hilton Obenzinger in their introduction to The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad, “there is no extant letter, diary, memoir, or even oral history that tells us something about their lived experience from their point of view” (3). They came, they built, they vanished.

Or so it seemed. This edited collection's central aim is to recover the lives, labor, and legacy of Chinese railroad workers. The book is a product of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University, an extensive years-long international, multilingual, multidisciplinary research project. Its output also includes school curricula, exhibitions, a detailed website with primary sources, and a trade book by Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain, all of which aim to communicate the project's conclusions to a wider public.Footnote ¹ The research project and this edited collection succeed in confirming the historical significance of Chinese railroad laborers and their work in building the first U.S. transcontinental railroad.

The collection's essays are organized into five parts. Part One, “Global Perspectives,” uses global and transnational frames to interpret the history of these workers, showing how their experiences are more fruitfully understood across national boundaries than within them. This approach deepens our understanding of the social backgrounds of those who left China to work on railroads in the United States and emphasizes the long history of connections between North America's Pacific Coast and the wider Pacific World.

In Part Two, “Ties to China,” essays by three scholars from China investigate how social, family, and economic links connected Chinese railroad workers to their hometowns, or qiaoxiang, in southern China. These essays draw on financial documents and cultural sources (including ballads, poems, and memoirs) to show how remittances and return migration shaped southern China's physical landscapes, cultural life, and social networks. In doing so, these essays show what work in North America looked like from the vantagepoint of southern China.

Part Three, “Life on the Line,” reconstructs the lived experience of Chinese railroad workers by drawing on archaeological research. These workers left no textual documents, but they did leave thousands of objects—yet historians have rarely integrated insights from archaeology into their studies. The project's Archaeology Network, directed by Barbara Voss, makes archaeological research about Chinese railroad workers more accessible through workshops, websites, and publications. Four chapters in this section draw on archaeological research to detail Chinese railroad workers’ relationship to the Southwest's desert environment; their use of food, drink, and medicine; their leisure activities; and their funerary practices. Other chapters explore these workers’ religious and spiritual beliefs, their encounters with Native peoples, and their representations in contemporaneous travelogues and photographs. The result is a textured reconstruction of how Chinese railroad workers experienced life on the railroad.

In Part Four, “Chinese Railroad Workers in Cultural Memory,” essayists consider representations of the Chinese railroad worker in American and Chinese history and literature. In both countries and both modes of writing, this figure's meaning has shifted over time in response to larger political changes. At the same time, Chinese American authors have used literary representations to claim the centrality of the Chinese railroad worker to the Chinese American experience. While Central Pacific relied on Chinese laborers for its construction only briefly—most of their work took place between early 1865 and mid-1869—these essays show how the figure of the Chinese railroad worker experienced a much longer cultural afterlife.

Part Five, “Chinese Railroad Workers After Promontory,” follows the lives of Chinese railroad workers after the completion of the Union Pacific/Central Pacific line. Many found work building other railroads in the United States and Canada, including the Canadian Pacific Railway, Canada's first transcontinental railroad. For others, railroad work was one in a series of jobs they held, although they shaped communities across the American West in other ways. The final essay, by Chang, explores the complicated relationship between the Stanford family and Chinese people. While California governor, Leland Stanford condemned Chinese immigrants as “degraded and distinct”. As Central Pacific president, he praised them as “quiet, peaceable, patient, industrious, and economical” workers (349–50). That the university which Stanford endowed with wealth gained from a railroad built by Chinese workers should now host such a rich investigative project into those workers’ lives and legacies demonstrates history's complexities and contradictions. As these last two sections make clear, Chinese railroad workers had a lasting impact on the United States.

More than two dozen images supplement the essays, along with several tables of statistics and archaeological data. The collection includes only two maps, although an investigation so frequently interested in the spatial aspects of Chinese railroad workers’ history could easily have used cartographic approaches to greater benefit.

Like the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project itself, this collection is ambitious, wide ranging, and artfully constructed—an essential text for historians of the U.S. West, the Pacific World, and the nineteenth-century United States; and for scholars interested in labor, migration, memory, material culture, and Asian America. In its willingness to utilize non-textual sources and incorporate archaeological methods into a historical investigation, it represents the best aspirations of multidisciplinary research. Taken together, these essays make visible the enduring legacy of Chinese railroad workers and powerfully demonstrate how the construction of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad is more than an American or Chinese story—it is a global story, written in labor records, folk ballads, and ceramic fragments. The collection neatly presents what this project's scholars have uncovered so far and lays a foundation for future work.