The Chow Chong Family and the Return of Chinese Bones to China

In late 19th-century America, it was common practice to send a Chinese immigrant's bones back to the family home in China. At China Beach, a site of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, one family carried out that work for more than two decades.

Why bones went home

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it hard to bury Chinese people in the United States. Chinese immigrants already in the country were treated as permanent aliens until the act was repealed in 1943: they could not become citizens, and if they left, they could not return. Most had no wish to be buried for good so far from their ancestral land, where they risked being forgotten in the family's ritual worship. Southern China also had a long tradition of secondary burial — exhuming the dead, cleaning the bones and burying them again.

To make sure their bones would get home, immigrants each paid $5 to one of the many family associations founded in the earliest years of Chinese immigration. One surviving bill, for bringing 60 sets of bones to Stockton, California, charged $780: $300 for diggers, $30 for licenses and $450 for packing.

The Chow Chong family at China Beach

The Chow Chong family recalls using China Beach from 1868 to 1890 as an anchorage for junks that carried bones from the Chinese section of the nearby City Cemetery — now part of Lincoln Park Golf Course — to Kwong Hoy, China.

The work was done in secret. Bodies were exhumed covertly to avoid the city's $10 tax on removing human remains, and the bones were shipped to China labeled as fish bones. The family did it not as a business but through an organization they formed, the Kwong Hoy Seamen's Society, a forerunner of the Chinese Six Companies.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Chow Chong Family and Bone Repatriation" (Golden Gate National Recreation Area): https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/chow-chong-family-and-bone-repatriation.htm
• The images of the bill on the source page are credited to the Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee and are not reproduced.