Chinese in Nevada

The Chinese helped build Nevada and were rarely thanked for it. Thousands came in the 1860s, most laying the Central Pacific's track over the Sierra and across the desert—the hardest, most dangerous work on the transcontinental line. Afterward they stayed to grade the Virginia and Truckee, cut wood, run laundries and gardens, cook, and trade, and Chinatowns grew in Reno and other towns. They met heavy discrimination, exclusion laws, and worse, yet their labor underlies much of what the state became. The marker acknowledges a people written out of too many frontier stories.

What the plaque says

This honors the heroism and hardihood of the thousands of Chinese who played a major role in the history of Nevada. From across the Pacific the Chinese came to California during the Gold Rush of '49 and on to the mountains and deserts of this state where they built railroads, cut timber and performed countless humble tasks. Sizeable Chinese communities grew up here in Virginia City and other towns. Their contribution to the progress of the state in its first century will be forever remembered by all Nevadans.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Reno — 3.3 mi
  The river crossing the Comstock needed, made a city by the railroad—then reinvented as divorce capital, gambling town, and now tech hub: the Biggest Little City in the World
• Virginia City — 17 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Chollar Mine — 17 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Sand Harbor — 25 mi
  The crown of Lake Tahoe's Nevada shore—car-sized granite boulders standing in water so clear the boats above them seem to float on air, on a beach the Washoe kept for thousands of summers

More markers nearby

• Southern Pacific Railroad Yards — steps away
• Glendale School (1864- 1958) — steps away
• Sparks — 0.7 mi
• Coney Island — 1.4 mi