For the recent project on Chinese cemeteries across Montana, click here.

The History of the Chinese Experience in Montana

From the earliest days of non-Native settlement of Montana, when Chinese immigrants made up more than 10 percent of the territory’s population, Chinese pioneers played a key role in the region’s development. But this population, so crucial to Montana’s history, remains underrepresented in historical accounts, and popular attention to the Chinese in Montana tends to focus on sensational elements—exoticizing Chinese Montanans and distancing their experiences from our modern understanding. The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky recovers the stories of Montana’s Chinese population in their own words and deepens understanding of Chinese experiences in Montana with a global lens.

Mark Johnson has mined several large collections of primary documents left by Chinese pioneers, translated into English here for the first time. These collections, spanning the 1880s-1950s, provide insight into the pressures the Chinese community faced—from family members back in China and from non-Chinese Montanans—as economic and cultural disturbances complicated acceptance of Chinese residents in the state. Through their own voices Johnson reveals the agency of Chinese Montanans in the history of the American West and China.

The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky winner of the 2023 W. Turrentine Jackson Award & The Caroline Bancroft History Prize
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  • “With great care and insight, Johnson works to recover the rich history of Chinese in Montana, all the while grappling with limits of the historical record. Particularly noteworthy is his extensive use of Chinese-language sources, which add vivid details to the local community. Montana may seem an unlikely location for this transnational history, but Johnson reveals the deep roots of the Chinese diaspora in Big Sky country.”

    —Beth Lew-Williams, author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America

  • "This is an excellent, very readable book that is meaningful to students and the general public on Asian American history, rural America, racial prejudice, transnationalism, and relations between China and the United States."

    —Sue Fawn Chung, author of In Pursuit of Gold: Chinese American Miners and Merchants in the American West

  • “The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky fills a gap in the history of Montana as well as of Chinese immigration. . . . Joining a group of new scholars, Johnson takes a transnational approach in dealing with the topic and provides a good example of this new kind of scholarship.”

    —Liping Zhu, professor of history at Eastern Washington University and author of The Road to Chinese Exclusion: The Denver Riot, 1880 Election, and Rise of the West

  • "Johnson offers a fascinating history of the Chinese diasporic experience in Montana from 1870 to the 1950s, using previously ignored and untranslated collections. . . . Johnson's attention to sources makes this work critical reading for scholars interested in the history of the Chinese diaspora and transnational relations, as well as historical methods."

    —Laura Madokoro, author of Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants during the Cold War

  • “Mark Johnson draws insights from a cache of untranslated documents . . . to understand the challenges of Chinese experiences in Montana and the American West. Highlighting voices of Montana’s Chinese residents via their own words, Johnson artfully connects personal accounts with regional and global history. The result is an important book about risk, agency, resilience, resistance, cooperation, and hope.”

    —Kelly J. Dixon, professor, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Montana, author of Boomtown Saloons: Archaeology And History In Virginia City

  • “Johnson’s transnational approach to his subject sets his work apart from most all other studies done on the Chinese experience in Montana. The author makes excellent use of primary sources, including materials that help to capture the Chinese voices in the story and have rarely, if ever, been utilized by other historians.”

    —Robert R. Swartout Jr., professor emeritus of history at Carroll College and editor of Montana: A Cultural Legacy

  • “This book is a unique and important contribution not only to Montana’s history but how primary voices can be used to explore the granular texture of events well-trodden in history books.”

    —Christopher Merritt, author of The Coming Man from Canton: Chinese Experience in Montana, 1862–1943

  • "The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky offers a valuable, close-up view of Chinese workers' almost century-long struggle, from the 1860s to the 1950s, to find a stable footing between their desperate homeland families' need for money and the unceasingly hostile, unwelcoming world of Montana where they labored to earn it."

    —Sara Tucker, Kansas Journal

  • "The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky is a rich and textured view of the Chinese and Chinese American communities in Montana from the 1880s to the 1950s. . . . [It] recovers the stories of Chinese Montanans in their own words; the book is both a compelling argument about this community's history and a valuable case study in historical methodology."

    —Award Committee for the W. Turrentine Jackson Award through the Western History Association

Chapter Descriptions for The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky

  • Ch. 1: Telling the History of Montana's Chinese Pioneers

    This chapter details the early Chinese settlement of Montana examining the pressures facing the community and efforts of Chinese leaders to navigate tensions while preserving Chinese traditions. These tensions are most pronounced through events surrounding the 1870 lynching of a Chinese man in Helena and resulting uncertainties including the status of Chinese Montanans before the law and the degree to which they could safely celebrate cultural practices. The chapter explores the difficulties in reconstructing Chinese history of the region due to limited sources and the tendency of myth to fill in when the documentary record appears fragmentary.

  • Ch. 2: Pressures on Butte's Chinese Residents, 1880s-1920s

    This chapter examines connections between Butte’s Chinese community and relatives in southern China, a region beset by natural disasters and political upheavals that caused many to seek opportunities abroad. Through translation and interpretation of close to one hundred letters from the 1880s to the 1920s, the pressures, motivations, and goals of Montana’s Chinese community become clear. Certain that their relative in Montana was earning great wealth, family members wrote that “your hands are bathed in gold,” urging him to send more money, become involved in various investment schemes, and to care for extended family members with his earnings.

  • Ch. 3: Chinese Resistance to the 1892 Geary Act

    Frustrated that Montana’s Chinese population grew despite the Chinese Exclusion Act, Senator Wilbur Sanders expressed an ominous sentiment during debate on the 1892 Geary Act: “It is not desirable that these people shall be multiplied in this country, but that they shall be diminished to extinction.” The Geary Act moved from the policy of exclusion to a more active policy of expulsion. The Chinese in Montana and across the West fought against the enactment of the Geary Act through strategic non-compliance and vigorous community activism, building networks of resistance that grew over the next several decades.

  • Ch. 4: The Chinese Empire Reform Association

    During the 1890s, political upheaval in China reverberated throughout Chinese communities around the world. Exiled reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao built support for a modernized China from abroad through the creation of the Chinese Empire Reform Association. Montana’s Chinese communities proved especially active in this global movement. The combination of experiences with technical skills and use of the American legal system made Montana’s Chinese particularly useful for the proposed efforts to modernize and westernize China.

  • Ch. 5: The Anti-American Boycott of 1905

    During their time in the region, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao witnessed oppression of Chinese Montanans through the 1905 Special Census round-ups and resulting deportations. Liang and Kang advocated on behalf of Chinese workers, initiating a China-wide boycott of American products to pressure the government to improve treatment of Chinese residents in the U.S. The coming together of exiled Chinese reformers with Overseas Chinese sparked one of the first manifestations of unified Chinese nationalism, with unlikely roots in the experience of the Chinese in Montana.

  • Ch. 6: Chinese Religious and Burial Practices

    Chinese religious traditions and burial rites garnered frequent attention in Montana’s newspapers, with non-Chinese residents often emphasizing the exotic nature of the practices. Chinese Montanans adapted their spiritual practices to life in the West, providing cultural continuity and comfort in a land far from home.

  • Ch. 7: The Changing Status of Chinese Women, 1860s-1950s

    Due to Chinese cultural traditions that discouraged women from migrating combined with American legal obstacles designed to exclude Chinese women from entering the nation, Chinese communities in Montana had a severe gender imbalance. The few Chinese women in the region suffered negative assumptions about their character from non-Chinese Montanans and experienced oppression within patriarchal Chinese cultural traditions. Despite these obstacles, several extraordinary Chinese women emerge in the documentary record, exhibiting a strength of spirit that helped them carve out influential roles in Montana’s Chinese communities and beyond.

  • Ch. 8: Cold War Fears and Chinese Communities, 1930s-1950s

    The experiences of Wing Hong Hum, who lived in Butte from 1933-1958, illustrate the complex status of Chinese America during the Cold War. One of the first workers of Chinese ethnicity to labor in the city’s mining industry in more than sixty years, Wing Hong Hum became thoroughly Montanan, hunting, fishing, and joining the miners’ union. Upon his arrival to America in 1933 Wing Hong Hum was recognized as a citizen through derivative citizenship. Due to changing geopolitical tensions, his brother, with an identical claim to citizenship, was barred entry due to fears of communist infiltration. Through the translation of more than 200 letters, the struggle of the brothers to reunite shows the changing nature of the Chinese-American experience through the first decades of the Cold War.