Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky: Experiences of Chinese Immigrants to the US

From the earliest days of non-Native settlement of Montana, Chinese pioneers played a key role in the region’s development. But the Chinese immigrant community remains underrepresented in historical accounts. Mark Johnson’s forthcoming book, The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky, recovers the stories of Montana’s Chinese population in their own words.

Johnson has mined several large collections of primary documents left by Chinese pioneers, rendered in English here for the first time through a transnational translation project. These collections, spanning the 1880s-1950s, provide insight into the pressures the Chinese community faced—from family members back in China and from non-Chinese Montanans—as economic and cultural disturbances complicated acceptance of Chinese residents in the state.

Through their own voices, The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky reveals the agency of Chinese Montanans in the history of the American West and China.