Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"On the other hand, one of the most extraordinary results of the wonderful discovery is the impulse it has given to the enterprise of the Celestial Empire. Chinamen, hitherto the most impassive and domestic creatures of the universe, have started into new life at the tidings of the mines and have poured into California by the thousands. . . . until by 1876 there were about 111,000 or 25 per cent of all non-California-born inhabitants of the state. They brought with them their skill, intelligence and enterprise, and incidentally introduced western civilization to that most powerful cultural export of the east, the Chinese restaurant, which was already flourishing in 1850. Oppressed, hated, ridiculed and from time to time lynched--eighty-eight were murdered during the slump of 1862, climax of a long racialist agitation, brought to an end what was perhaps the first example in history of a voluntary, economically induced, mass migration from an oriental to an occidental society." [Hobsbawm: Capital, p. 63]