The first group of 195 CHINESE CONTRACT LABORERS is brought to HAWAII (the Coolies with "S" for Sandwich Islands painted on their chests), and begins working in the sugar plantations. Two years later, in 1854, the CHINESE IN HAWAII establishes a FUNERAL SOCIETY as their first community association in the islands.

As counterpart to this, in 1864 U.S. plantation owners in HAWAII form a Planters' Society and a Bureau of Immigration.

1868 Japanese laborers are illegally shipped to Hawaii.

Japan, in the same period, in pursuit of their MEIJI ERA drive for modernization, signs their first U.S./ JAPAN TREATY by 1854 and six years later sends a DIPLOMATIC MISSION to the UNITED STATES (1860).

Japan is distinctively differently from China in being more receptive to Western models. The actual arrival of JAPANESE IMMIGRANTS to the U.S. mainland won’t happen for another 20 -30 years, but U.S./ JAPAN governmental contacts lay the groundwork.

By contrast a U.S./ CHINA TREATY regulating and protecting Chinese American immigration and worker’s rights is not obtained until 1868. This may have happened only because a strike the year before by Chinese railroad workers in the Sierras -- building the monumental Transcontinental Railroad -- alerted the two competing railroad companies, racing against time, to their urgent need to secure Chinese labor availability with some kind of formal state-to-state agreement. The resulting 1868 Burlingame Treaty between the U.S. and China states that the citizens of both countries have the right of free immigration with reciprocal privileges of residence, school and travel.

For the Chinese community, the harsh reality of their experience in America will never conform to the promises of the Burlingame Treaty.