What is the irony of the founding of Stanford University and Chinese railroad workers?

In April 2016, Chinese Railroad Workers Project scholars from Canada, China, Taiwan, and the U.S. traveled to the Sierra Nevada mountains to explore tunnels — many of them cut from solid granite — that Chinese workers excavated.

The terrain was unforgiving, even in the spring. Fisher told The New York Times that the guide she and her colleagues had been traveling with slipped on a patch of black ice in a tunnel and broke their shoulder.

“We literally would not be sitting in these buildings — these buildings would not exist — without the work of these Chinese workers.”

Shelley Fisher Fishkin

The labor was undoubtedly dangerous. Chang said that great numbers died, perhaps over 1000 workers. Construction casualty records were not kept, so the specific number remains unknown, but historians estimate that one in 10 workers lost their life from explosion accidents, landslides, avalanches, heatstroke or hypothermia. Research also shows the callous way in which Chinese workers, whose individual names were not recorded by Central Pacific, were often treated.

“To avoid interrupting construction schedules, labor contractors and line supervisors maintained a pool of able-bodied men who could replace injured and dead workers at a moment’s notice,”

a flatwork hope this

because it took place after the war of 1812 had come to an end.