At three in the morning in the winter of 1867, with wind roaring through the Sierra Nevada like a freight train that did not yet exist, a foreman named Hung Wah climbed out of his bunk and walked down a corridor cut entirely through ice. Above his head, the snow lay forty feet deep. He had not seen the sky in more than a month. At the end of the tunnel of ice there was a hole in the side of a granite mountain, and inside, by the dim light of whale oil lanterns, twelve hundred men were working.

They worked in eight-hour shifts, around the clock, seven days a week, drilling into solid stone with hand tools. They had been doing it since August and would keep doing it until the next August. When they finished, they would have done something that the most respected railroad engineers in the United States swore could not be done in five years, could not be done in ten, could not be done at all. The story of how roughly twelve thousand men, most of them farmers from a single river delta in southern China, accomplished the impossible began twenty years earlier on the other side of the world, in the province of Guangdong.

In the 1840s, Guangdong was collapsing. China had lost a war with Britain over opium. Floods on the Pearl River drowned entire villages year after year. The Taiping Rebellion killed close to twenty million people.

In the four small counties around the Pearl River Delta, a region called Say Yup, families were starving. Crops failed. Saltwater from typhoons poisoned the rice paddies. A young man had three options: stay and watch his family die, join one of the armies fighting in the hills, or walk to the coast and sail across the Pacific to a place the Chinese called Gold Mountain.

Tens of thousands made that choice. They sold themselves into labor contracts to pay for the passage, crammed into the lower decks of wooden side-wheel steamships, sometimes four hundred men in a space designed for two hundred, and crossed an ocean most of them had never seen. The trip took six weeks. Some died on the way.

Those who lived stepped off the ships in San Francisco Bay carrying everything they owned in a bamboo pole and two cloth bundles. They did not speak the language. They knew no one. But they had decided that whatever waited in California could not be worse than what they had left behind.

By 1865, the easy gold was gone, and Chinese miners, pushed off the best claims by white men with guns and laws, were working tailings, panning for what others had thrown away. Then a man named Charles Crocker came looking for them. Crocker was thirty-eight years old, weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, and had a temper that could melt iron. He was one of the four founders of the Central Pacific Railroad, whose entire purpose was to build the western half of a line connecting Sacramento to Promontory Summit in the Utah Territory, where it would meet the eastern half being built by a rival company, the Union Pacific.

The federal government paid both companies by the mile of track laid, so whichever railroad built more miles made more money. Crocker’s problem was the Sierra Nevada, a range of granite so hard that chisels shattered on contact. To get a railroad over it, he would have to blast and tunnel through fifteen passages of solid stone, including the Summit Tunnel, 1,659 feet long, dug at an elevation above seven thousand feet. He needed five thousand men.

He could barely hold on to eight hundred. White workers, mostly Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans, quit constantly. They quit because the work was murder. They quit because a silver strike in Nevada pulled them away overnight.

They quit because they got drunk on payday and never came back. One day in early 1865, Crocker told his construction superintendent, a one-eyed Irishman named James Harvey Strobridge, that he wanted to try hiring Chinese laborers. Strobridge exploded. He said something close to, “Good God, they cannot handle a pick and shovel, let alone lift one.

” Crocker fired back with a question that became famous: “Did they not build the Great Wall of China, the biggest piece of masonry in the world? ” Strobridge had no answer, but he still refused. Crocker pushed, and in February of 1865, Strobridge agreed to a small experiment: fifty Chinese men hired for a single month to fill wagons with dirt. He gave them a month to fail.

On the first day, the men showed up before sunrise. They had already eaten. They had brought their own cook, whose only job was to feed twenty men three times a day. They worked steadily, not in bursts, not stopping for whiskey, communicating in Cantonese with a quiet system of shovels and wheelbarrows.

They moved like a clock. At the end of the day, they had filled more wagons than the Irish crew beside them. By the end of the month, Strobridge walked into Crocker’s office and said, “Send up more. ”

The men who came were not unskilled peasants.

They were carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, herbalist doctors, cooks, fishermen, and farmers who knew how to terrace mountainsides for rice. Many came from villages where men had built fortifications in the cliffs of the Yangtze River gorges for generations. They knew how to move rock without machines because in the world they came from there were no machines. There was only the human body, organized intelligently, repeating a small motion ten thousand times until a mountain moved.

In September 1865, the Central Pacific reached Cape Horn in Placer County, where the North Fork of the American River ran at the bottom of a canyon and the mountainside dropped away at an angle of seventy degrees. The roadbed had to be cut into the face of that mountain, more than thirteen hundred feet above the river, on a curve that hugged the slope. White engineers called it the most dangerous piece of work on the route; some said privately it would take three years just to get past it. The Chinese crews cut a complete railroad ledge across the entire face of the promontory in eight months.

Watching them work the cliff face, hanging over the canyon, Strobridge told one of his foremen, “These men are not afraid of falling. ” That was not entirely true. They were afraid. They were just more afraid of starvation.

By the late summer of 1866, the railroad reached the base of Donner Summit, named for the pioneer party that had been trapped there by a freak October blizzard twenty years earlier, less than half of them surviving the winter. Now the Central Pacific had to put a railroad through it: fifteen tunnels through solid granite, totaling more than six thousand feet of bored stone. The largest was the Summit Tunnel, 1,659 feet long, the highest railroad tunnel in the world. American engineers calculated it would take three years to dig.

The Chinese crews started in August of 1866, working in gangs of twelve with a single English-speaking foreman, usually Irish, and a Chinese cook. Each gang took an eight-hour shift, three shifts per day, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, no holidays, no Sundays. Inside the tunnel, the only light came from candles and lanterns. The air after a round of blasting was thick with rock dust and sulfur smoke.

Three men worked as a single drilling unit: one held a four-foot iron chisel against the granite, turning it slightly between every blow, while the other two swung eight-pound sledgehammers onto its head. The man holding the chisel, if he flinched, lost a hand. So he did not flinch. They drilled holes two and a half inches wide and two feet deep into solid rock; each hole took about eight hours.

After the hole was finished, they packed it with black powder, filled the rest with hay and clay to direct the blast inward, lit the fuse, ran, and listened. A good day of blasting moved the tunnel forward about eight inches. The crews averaged fourteen inches in twenty-four hours. Then the engineers tried something never attempted before: they sank a vertical shaft, eight by twelve feet, straight down from the top of the mountain to the center of where the tunnel would run.

It took three months to dig. Once it reached the center, two more crews started digging in both directions, so four faces were worked at once. But at the bottom of the shaft, with no ventilation, a man could not work more than a couple of hours before he had to be hauled back up to breathe. And then the winter came.

The winter of 1866 to 1867 remains one of the worst in Sierra Nevada history: forty-four separate snowstorms, more than forty feet of snow at the summit. The crews could no longer walk to work; the tunnel portals were buried under thirty feet of packed snow. So they dug tunnels through the snow to reach the tunnels through the rock, snow tunnels with snow walls and snow staircases, some of them two hundred feet long, leading down through the drift to the dim opening of the granite below. From the air, the mountains looked empty.

Beneath forty feet of snow, ten thousand men burrowed forward fourteen inches a day. Avalanches began coming down in January, erasing camps in seconds. The company did not keep records of the Chinese workers’ names; they were paid by gang, not by individual. Many who died were buried where they fell.

Some bodies were never found until spring. Some were never found at all. Even in that brutal winter, the Chinese crews kept an evening routine. Every night after their shift, before they ate, every man in the gang took a hot bath.

The cooks heated water in iron pots and filled tubs made from empty whiskey kegs cut in half. The men washed, changed into clean clothes, and drank tea instead of whiskey. Strobridge, who arrived at work hungover and filthy, watched this every night and later testified that the Chinese were the cleanest workers he had ever seen. In February 1867, the engineers brought in a British chemist who offered to make nitroglycerin on site.

It was eight times more powerful than black powder and so unstable that a crate of it had leveled an entire San Francisco building the year before. The miners called it “the soup. ” Most American crews refused to touch it. The Chinese crews did not refuse, not because they were fearless but because they were terrified and had no choice: they were paid by the gang, they could be replaced and sent home with no wages if they refused, and ten thousand more men in Guangdong were waiting to take their places.

The nitro worked. Daily progress in the Summit Tunnel jumped from fourteen inches to two feet. With the soup, the tunnel broke through in August of 1867, and when the crews working from east and west met in the middle of the mountain, they were off by exactly two inches after sixteen months of digging from four directions through solid granite. American engineers called it the most accurate piece of tunnel work they had ever heard of.

In June of 1867, with the tunnel still unfinished, three thousand Chinese workers organized in secret and went on strike. They demanded forty dollars a month instead of thirty-five, a ten-hour day, and an end to corporal punishment. Strobridge tried to bully them and failed. Crocker came up to the camp and cut off all food and supplies.

He ordered that no Chinese worker be sold a single pound of rice anywhere along the line, and he shut down the trains the workers used to travel back to Sacramento. The strike lasted eight days. By day eight, the men were starving. They went back to work.

They got nothing. By the spring of 1868, the railroad was through the mountains, and the race began across the deserts of Nevada and Utah. The government paid sixteen thousand dollars per mile on flat ground, forty-eight thousand per mile in the mountains, so whichever railroad laid more track made more money. The Central Pacific moved forward an average of two and a half miles a day across a landscape where summer temperatures hit 120 degrees, where water had to be hauled forty miles to the camps, and where ten thousand Chinese workers graded an advance line while mostly Irish crews laid the rails behind them.

In April of 1869, the two railroads were within fourteen miles of each other, both heading for Promontory Summit. The Union Pacific bragged it had laid eight miles of track in a single day. Crocker said, “We can do ten. ” He spent two days organizing: ties laid for miles in advance, thousands of rails stacked along the route, eight of his strongest Irishmen selected to handle the rails, and between three and five thousand Chinese workers ready to do everything else.

On April 28, 1869, the whistle blew at five in the morning. The eight Irish rail handlers lifted iron rails weighing 560 pounds each and ran them forward two pairs at a time while the Chinese crews dropped each rail onto the ties, lined it up, drove the spikes, bolted the joints, and moved on. By 1:30 in the afternoon, six miles had been laid. Crocker called a one-hour lunch break; none of the rail handlers accepted his offer to be released for the rest of the day.

By dusk, the crews had laid ten miles and fifty-six feet of track in a single day: 25,800 wooden ties, 3,520 rails, 55,080 spikes, 14,050 bolts. The record has never been broken. Crocker ran a heavy locomotive over the entire ten miles at forty miles an hour. The track held.

Twelve days later, on May 10, 1869, the two railroads met at Promontory Summit. A golden spike was prepared, and Leland Stanford, governor of California and a Central Pacific founder, swung the hammer. A telegraph operator sent a single word that reached every major American city within seconds: Done. The famous photograph was taken about an hour later, showing two locomotives facing each other, two chief engineers shaking hands, and a crowd dressed in coats and hats.

Eight Chinese workers had moved the very last rail into position less than an hour before the photograph was taken. Their names, recorded only later, were Ging Cui, Wong Fook, Li Shao, and five others whose names did not survive. They are not in the photograph. That night, Strobridge invited a group of Chinese workers to dine in his personal car, and when they entered, all the Central Pacific officers and guests stood up and cheered.

It was the only formal recognition the Chinese workers received on the day the railroad was finished. The next morning, the trains began to run. By the summer of 1869, the Central Pacific no longer needed twelve thousand Chinese workers and laid them off in waves. Some stayed in the west, building other railroads or draining the swamps of the Sacramento Delta into farmland.

Some returned to Guangdong as relatively wealthy men. But many faced a country that did not want them anymore. Anti-Chinese violence broke out across the west: a massacre in Los Angeles in 1871 killed at least seventeen; an attack at Rock Springs, Wyoming, in 1885 killed at least twenty-eight coal miners. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration law in American history to single out a specific national group.

It was renewed in 1892, made permanent in 1902, and not repealed until 1943. For sixty-one years, the men who built the western half of the transcontinental railroad and their descendants were prohibited by law from bringing wives and children to join them. When the fiftieth anniversary of the golden spike was held at Promontory in 1919, three of the eight men who had moved the last rail were still alive. They came to the ceremony and were photographed at the edge of the crowd.

None of the speeches mentioned them by name. Only in 2014 did the United States Department of Labor induct the Chinese railroad workers as a group into its Hall of Honor, 145 years after the work was completed. The payroll sheets that survive at the California State Railroad Museum record the names of the gang leaders. The other men are listed as numbers.

The Central Pacific tracks across the Sierra Nevada are still in use in part, though the old Summit Tunnel went out of service in 1993. If you hike to its eastern portal above Donner Lake, you can walk inside. The walls are still covered with divots from chisels, thousands of them, showing where each three-man drilling crew worked. Put your hand on those marks, and you can stand inside a mountain that was moved by men whose names were written as numbers, men who were not in the photograph, who slept in snow tunnels, who took hot baths in whiskey kegs, and who walked into a mountain and came out the other side.

Their names should be in the photograph. They are not. But the railroad is.