You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest today is Andy Liu,

the author of T-War, a history of capitalism in China and India, who teaches at Villanova University

in Pennsylvania. He has a piece in the

latest issue of the LRB on Chinese migrant workers in the gold mines of the British and American

empires of the mid-19th century and the racial prejudice they faced. It's a review of the Chinese

question, the gold rushes and global politics by May 9. Hello, Andy. And thank you very much for joining me.

Thanks so much for the invitation. I look forward to it. So maybe we, as a starting point,

we could take the alleged moment when gold was discovered in California, the beginning of the

California gold rush. Yeah. So the two major gold rushes that take place are in the 1850s. In California, the story goes

in 1848 on a site called Sutter's Mill. Gold was just kind of discovered in the riverbed, and this

led to this great rush to kind of define more gold that could actually be accessed without mining,

and eventually they do turn to mining. And that's

in 1848 and very famously 49ers are the people who kind of rush over by the next year. And news of

gold reaches Hong Kong, I think within a year or two after that. And so Chinese would be miners are

alerted very early. The parallel story to that is in Australia. There's a man named Edward Hargraves that, you know, May kind of tells this anecdote that she was visiting Australia at an academic conference and realized, it looked a lot of California, and this was probably the same realization Edward Hargraves had, where he had tried to mine for gold in California, and he must have realized, you know, if there's gold in California, there's probably some gold in here as well. So every hard grades in the early 1850s is credited with kind of turning Australia into a site of a gold rush. Anecdotally, it's kind of worth noting in the Chinese language. Today if you go to the airport and you go to like San Francisco, the airport will say like San Fan Shi, like sounds like San Francisco. But the old name, and I remember my grandma

who's Cantonese would say this, she would call San Francisco Jiu Jin San or Gao Gan San,

which is old gold mountain because new gold mountain was Melbourne, right? And these are names that

are sort of like this

relic of the 19th century or people of a certain age from certain parts of China, which

still call these cities those names based on their reputation in China as the two destinations

for gold in the 19th century. And so California and Australia are really parallel stories

from the 50s to the 80s and 90s. And that is kind of the first half, you know, two-thirds of the book.

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