The Forgotten Chinese Flower Growers in the S.F. Bay Area

Bay Curious

This episode of Bay Curious explores the forgotten history of Chinese immigrant flower growers in the San Mateo and Santa Clara counties dur

Key takeaways

• Chinese and Japanese immigrants leased land to grow flowers due to legal restrictions on property ownership.
• Chrysanthemums were a major crop, with up to 200 acres cultivated—equivalent to 150 football fields.

Main topics

• Chinese immigrant agricultural history
• Discrimination against Asian American landowners

Notable quotes

"If you could imagine as you go down towards El Camino Real... you would have seen just fields of flowers."

Conclusion

Though their farms have vanished beneath urban development, the legacy

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:01) From KQED. The Bay Area is already a place that deals with flooding in the winter. Now, scientists are warning of what that flooding could look like with El Nino. But what is El Nino? And how exactly is it going to affect us here in the Bay? I'm Erika Cruz-Guevara. Subscribe to The Bay, local news to keep you rooted, to hear how the Bay is preparing for this year's Super El Nino, wherever you listen to podcasts. Speaker 6 (0:34) We are in uncharted territory. Staff writer Evan Osnos on The New Yorker Radio Hour. I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day. And there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scope of history and context. That's what I come to The New Yorker for. I'm David Remnick, and each week, my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. And I hope you'll join us for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Speaker 7 (1:03) The firehose of news from America can feel like a lot these days. Speaker 6 (1:08) If you're trying to figure out what to make of it all, we got you. Speaker 7 (1:12) I'm Katie Simpson. And Speaker 6 (1:13) I'm Paul Hunter. We're correspondents here in Washington. Speaker 7 (1:16) Working just around the corner from where much of the action is taking place. Speaker 6 (1:21) Two blocks from the White House. Speaker 7 (1:22) And that's the name of our podcast. For Speaker 6 (1:24) top-notch analysis of U.S. politics from a Canadian perspective. Find Two Blocks in the White House every Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (1:33) Including YouTube. I'm Olivia Allen Price. This is Bay Curious. We start today's story at Stanford University at the office of archaeologist Laura Jones. Speaker 3 (1:45) The first big surprise is the sculpture just outside, a half-human, half-animal figure that she's storing for an indigenous tribe. Then there's the colorfully embroidered tapestry of campus landmarks inside, and the three-dimensional map on her wall. Things that don't quite make the cut for a museum end up here, in Laura Jones's office. So when a retiring colleague offered her some old Stanford maps from the 1950s, Laura said it was an easy yes. Speaker 2 (2:14) She shows me this map that's got all these colored pencil areas on it, where the Stanford Shopping Center is today, where the Stanford Research Park is today, where our graduate student housing is today. And they're coded for what flower is being grown. Speaker 3 (2:29) Fields and fields of flowers blooming as Speaker 2 (2:32) far as the eye could see. In black pencil, dark black pencil, are the names of the farmers. And they're all Chinese and Japanese. Speaker 3 (2:43) For a solid stretch of the 20th century, the Bay Area was home to a burgeoning flower industry, shaped in part by Japanese, Italian, and Chinese farmers. In 1948, about 200 acres of chrysanthemums were grown in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. Imagine, that's like 150 football fields. Some of these flowers were grown on Stanford lands between the 1890s and the 1960s in plots leased to Asian American farmers. Speaker 2 (3:11) If you could imagine as you go down towards El Camino Real at the shopping center or where our graduate students live today, you would have seen just fields of flowers. Speaker 3 (3:22) KQED reporter Gabriela Glick met up with Laura to learn more about this history and the contributions of Chinese-American growers in particular. This story first aired on the California Report magazine. Speaker 1 (3:38) Beginning in the late 1800s, farmers in Santa Clara Valley began planting fruit orchards, and the area's rich, fertile soil helped the region develop into an agricultural powerhouse, one that came to be known as the Garden of the World. Much of this agricultural land was owned by white farmers, but they regularly hired Chinese immigrant laborers and also leased them land. Speaker 2 (4:01) Chinese immigrants arrive in California in the 1840s and 1850s during the gold rush. Not everybody found gold, so Chinese immigrants fan out across California looking for other things