Bill for bringing 60 sets of bones to Stockton, CA $780 Itemized as -Western [White] diggers, $5 x 60 = $300 -License, $0.50 x 60 = $30 -Packing?$7.50 x 60 = $450
Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee, CINARC
It was a common practice in late 19th century America to return a person’s bones to their family home in China. After the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it became difficult to bury Chinese bodies in the United States. The Chinese immigrants already living here were considered permanent aliens until the Act’s repeal in 1943. They were excluded from citizenship and also unable to return if they left the country. As such, most were not at all eager to be laid to rest permanently so far from ancestral land, running the risk of being forgotten in family ritual worship. Secondary burial—exhuming the dead, cleaning the bones, and then burying them again—had a long tradition in Southern China as well. Each paid $5 to one of the many family associations that were established in America in the earliest years of Chinese immigration in order to ensure that their bones made it back home. The Chow Chong family recalls their use of China Beach from 1868 to 1890 as an anchorage for junks that they used to transport bones from the nearby Chinese section in City Cemetery (now part of Lincoln Park Golf Course) to Kwong Hoy, China. Their bone repatriation was done clandestinely (shipped to China as fish bones), since the bodies were exhumed covertly to avoid the $10 city tax for removing human remains. They did so not for business reasons but because they formed an organization called the Kwong Hoy Seamen’s Society that was a precursor to the Chinese Six Companies.
