Chinese immigration

Chinese gold miners using rocker boxes

One early potential origin for the phrase is from the California Gold Rush of 1849. The travel time for news of the gold rush to reach China was quite long, and by the time Chinese immigrants arrived to prospect, many of the rich mines were already claimed. These Chinese immigrants who missed out had to work with only those lands which had already been exploited or which were rejected by others, meaning these late-arriving immigrants had a slim chance of success. The historical record, however, indicates that many Chinese combined efforts with each other and did very well in the goldfields, introducing mining techniques then unknown to non-Chinese.^{[6]: 104–107} Alternatively, in 1920 the phrase was explained to describe the low probability for the Chinese in America to make a fortune at gold mining. Although there were Chinese in the gold mining camps soon after the news broke, "they were extremely unpopular [and] the slightest excuse was sufficient to warrant their being beaten or chased away; consequently they had no chance to get a real foothold" to establish mining rights.^[7]

Chinese laborers replacing the trestle at Secret Town with an earthen embankment (1877)

Another potential origin of the phrase Chinaman's chance traces it to the high probability of death or injury during the construction of the U.S. transcontinental railroad in the late 1860s. During its construction, unstable bottles of nitroglycerine were used for blasting. Chinese workers reportedly were lowered over cliffs by rope and boatswain's chairs to set the nitroglycerine in place. In this work, if they were not lifted back up before the blast, serious injury or death would result.^[8] Although these accounts of construction techniques have been debunked as mythmaking after the work was complete,^[9][10] it is undeniable that many Chinese immigrants died while building the railroad. According to a newspaper article published in 1870, 20,000 pounds (9,100 kg) of bones from Chinese railroad workers were shipped to China for interment. The article calculated the bones were from 1,200 workers.^[11] It is estimated that 20,000 Chinese immigrants worked to build the railroad.^[12]

Rock Springs Massacre (1885), published in Harper's Weekly

A third possibility is in reference to the low probability of a fair verdict in murder trials with a Chinese victim, assisted partly by California state law first issued in 1850.^[13] The conviction of a white man for murdering a Chinese miner was overturned in the case of People v. Hall (1854).^[14] In that ruling, the California Supreme Court expanded the definition of "black person" in the California Crimes and Punishments Act of 1850^[15] to exclude "all races other than the Caucasian", throwing out evidence provided by a Chinese immigrant's testimony.^[13] The law was amended in 1863 to explicitly exclude testimony from witnesses of certain races: "No Indian, or person having one half or more of Indian blood, or Mongolian or Chinese, shall be permitted to give evidence in favor or against any white person."^[16] In a second case, People v. Brady (1870), the Supreme Court of California upheld the statute against the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, stating "the power of testifying is neither an object of desire, nor in any sense a right".^[17] New evidence laws were passed in 1872, superseding the prior rules and restoring the right to testify to Chinese Americans.^[18]

Bill Bryson believed the phrase could be traced to the Rock Springs Massacre of 1885, referring to the forced expulsion of Chinese American residents, whose chances of living were slimmed by the dual threat of armed mobs and freezing overnight temperatures.^[19] In 1887, as many as 34 Chinese gold miners were massacred along the Snake River in Oregon by a gang of white horse thieves, typical of the anti-Chinese violence in Oregon of the time. Three were arrested and tried for the massacre in Oregon, but none were convicted.^[20]

Delicate chinaware

Tad Dorgan used the phrase in a 1914 comic

The lower-case term "chinaman" also has a non-pejorative interpretation as a dealer of porcelain from China; the "chinaware" they sold were notoriously delicate and fragile.^[21] Based on this, several scholars have advanced a hypothesis that "chinaman's chance" refers to the low probability of avoiding broken chinaware during the long journey from their sources in China to chinaman shops in Europe.^[21][22]

William Morris advanced the lower-case "chinaman" hypothesis in 1957, stating "the phrase 'a chinaman's chance' accurately describes the odds against a merchant of china if he were to find 'a bull in his chinashop!'"^[22]

In addition, Peter Tamony concluded in 1965 the phrase can be traced back to the sport of boxing in early 19th-century Great Britain. Tamony's hypothesis is based on terms such as having a crockery chin or a china chin, which characterize some pugilists as delicate and fragile. An equivalent American idiom would be to say a fighter has a glass jaw.^[21] Tamony stated the lowercase phrase chinaman's chance was transferred to the United States via Australia, but based this on his belief the first use of the phrase was from 1914, in a cartoon drawn by Tad Dorgan and published in the San Francisco Call.^[23]

In fact, the phrase was already in use by 1893,^[24][25] and as Kenneth Porter wrote in a Western Folklore article published in 1966, "in American usage [Chinaman's chance] is clearly [a reference] to the little chance a native of China would have in any controversy with white Americans. Americans who use the expression, if they consider its origin at all, probably associate it with the anti-Chinese agitation of the 1870's and '80's."^[26] Under this interpretation, the phrase may have originated as local slang in California and spread via the journalism of William Randolph Hearst and his flagship newspaper San Francisco Examiner in the 1890s.^[21]

Cultural usage

Children's Valentine's Day greeting card featuring the phrase, c. 1930s