The record.

The Empress of China clears New York

Eight years after independence and locked out of British markets, American merchants sent a single converted privateer to Canton loaded with ginseng and furs. She came home with tea, silk and porcelain, and a profit near twenty-five percent.

The Old China Trade that followed built the early fortunes of Salem, Providence, Boston and New York, and gave the young republic a commercial life independent of London. Chinese merchants at Canton extended credit to American captains they had never met.

25% return on the first voyage, enough to send a hundred ships after her.

Yung Wing takes a degree at Yale

Brought to New England as a boy by a missionary teacher, Yung Wing became the first Chinese graduate of an American university. He spent the rest of his life arguing that his countrymen should be educated in the sciences abroad.

In 1872 he got his way. The Chinese Educational Mission placed one hundred and twenty boys with families across Connecticut and Massachusetts, where they learned mathematics, engineering and baseball. Those who returned built China's first railways, telegraphs and mines.

120 students, boarded in American homes, 1872–1881.

Chinese crews cut the Central Pacific through the Sierra

The eastward grade from Sacramento was the hardest engineering on the continent, and it was built almost entirely by Chinese labour, at the peak roughly nine in ten of the workforce. They cut the ledge at Cape Horn, drove the Summit Tunnel through solid granite by hand, and worked two winters under avalanches that killed men whose names were never recorded.

The transcontinental railroad is the single largest physical contribution any immigrant group made to the American interior, and Americans have been slow to say so.

~12,000 Chinese workers on the line at its height.

Sun Yat-sen is schooled in Honolulu and funded on American main streets

Sent to his brother in Hawaii at thirteen, Sun Yat-sen took his schooling at Iolani and Oahu College before qualifying in medicine at Hong Kong. The republic he spent twenty years organising was paid for, in significant part, by Chinese launderers, cooks, grocers and shopkeepers in American cities who gave what they had to a man promising a constitution.

When the Wuchang uprising finally came in October 1911, Sun was in Denver, Colorado, reading about it in a newspaper. He became the first provisional president of the Republic of China three months later.

Denver, 1911 — where the founder of the Chinese republic learned it had begun.

The indemnity is turned into scholarships

Rather than keep the full reparations owed after 1900, the United States returned a large portion earmarked for Chinese education. The preparatory school founded to place students in American universities became Tsinghua, today one of the strongest scientific institutions anywhere.

Over the following decades American foundations and church bodies built Peking Union Medical College, Yenching, and St. John's in Shanghai, staffed them, and endowed them. Generations of Chinese physicians, engineers and scholars came out of them.

Tsinghua, 1911 — begun as a preparatory school for study in America.

Pearl Buck writes The Good Earth

Raised in Zhenjiang by missionary parents and fluent before she was literate in English, Buck wrote an American bestseller about a Chinese farming family that refused every caricature then in circulation. It won the Pulitzer and, in 1938, the Nobel Prize in Literature.

More than any treaty or delegation, that book decided how ordinary Americans pictured ordinary Chinese people on the eve of the war, as farmers with land, debts, sons, and dignity.

The Flying Tigers, the Burma Road, and the Hump

Claire Chennault's American Volunteer Group flew for the Republic of China's air force before the United States was formally at war, in aircraft painted with a shark's mouth that became the most recognised marking of the conflict.

When Japan closed the Burma Road, American and Chinese crews kept the supply line open by flying it over the eastern Himalayas, in unpressurised transports, through weather that killed more men than the enemy did. They delivered more than six hundred and fifty thousand tons and lost around six hundred aircraft doing it.

650,000+ tons flown over the Himalayas. ~600 aircraft lost.

Chinese villagers shelter the Doolittle crews

Sixty-four of the eighty American airmen who bombed Tokyo came down in coastal China with no fuel and no plan. Farmers and villagers who owed them nothing hid them, fed them, carried the injured, and moved them west to safety.

The reprisal campaign that Japan ran across Zhejiang and Jiangxi that summer killed Chinese civilians on a scale historians still put in the hundreds of thousands. They had been warned what sheltering Americans would cost, and they did it anyway. This is the single heaviest debt in the whole account, and it runs from China to America.

64 airmen brought out alive by people who paid for it.

Soong Mei-ling addresses the Congress; exclusion is repealed

In February the Republic of China's first lady spoke to the Senate and then the House, in English, without notes, and made the case for Asia's war to a country that had been thinking mostly about Europe. She was the first Chinese national ever to do it.

That December the Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, sixty-one years of law struck down, in large part because Americans had come to know who they were fighting beside.

December 1943 — Chinese exclusion repealed after sixty-one years.

The Republic of China signs the Charter first

At San Francisco the delegation of the Republic of China signed the United Nations Charter ahead of every other nation, in recognition that it had been resisting Axis aggression the longest, since 1931, and in full war since 1937.

China's place among the founding powers was earned by fourteen years of holding a continental front, at a cost in Chinese lives that dwarfs American losses in every theatre combined.