China Beach Traditional Cache
Nomex: No response from owner. If you wish to repair/replace the cache sometime in the future, just contact us (by email), and assuming it meets the current guidelines, we'll be happy to unarchive it.
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Located in Sea Cliff with amazing views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Marin Headlands.
Cache is in small altoid tin, which is log only. IT IS NOT IN THE PLANTER, SO DON'T GO IN IT.
At the head of the trail down to the beach is a large trapezoidal stone marker placed by Chinese Americans in 1981:
China Beach
Since Gold Rush times, this cove was used as a campsite by many of the Chinese fishermen who worked in and around San Francisco Bay. Their efforts to supply the needs of a young city helped establish one of the area's most important industries and traditions.
It's proper to have some Chinese American history on the California landscape because Chinese Americans played a major role in the West, not just building the railroads, but also in mining, farming, business, personal service, heavy construction, and as this marker tells, fishing. Indeed, in the early 1880s Chinese Americans made up 50 percent of all fishing crews in the Bay area. But this marker tells only half the story.
During most of the twentieth century, the beach was not called China Beach but Phelan Beach. 1 That's because whites expelled Chinese people from the beach and from the fishing industry in the 1890s. In 1880, California passed "An Act Relating to Fishing in the Waters of this State": "All aliens incapable of becoming electors of this state are hereby prohibited from fishing, or taking any fish, lobster, shrimps, or shell fish of any kind, for the purpose of selling, or giving to another person to sell..." Conveniently, only Chinese were aliens not eligible to vote. Courts declared the bill unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, but the legislature continued to pass similar measures until the end of the century. California's senators got Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which cut Chinese immigration from 39,500 in 1882 to just ten persons five years later. Meanwhile white fishermen resorted to extralegal strong-arm tactics. By 1890 only 20 percent of the fishing community were Chinese, and their numbers continued to dwindle the rest of the century.
Prize for FTF
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Guvax Cvax Syblq
Treasures
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