Blood on Gold Mountain artwork

Blood on Gold Mountain

12 episodes - English - Latest episode: 8 months ago - ★★★★★ - 9 ratings

1871 Los Angeles was a dangerous place, especially for the refugees, migrants and troublemakers who lived on Calle De Los Negros, at the heart of Chinatown.

Yut Ho, a beautiful young refugee, came to LA and fell in love, only to be drawn into a showdown between two of Chinatown's most notorious gangsters. Before long, the entire city was caught up in a life or death struggle where old-world values of kinship, honor and loyalty clashed with new-world issues of race, sex, and identity. The ensuing conflict would threaten the lives of Yut Ho and all the denizens of Chinatown– and would change the face of Los Angeles forever.

This true but largely forgotten event from California's past is brought to you by the Holmes Performing Arts Fund of the Claremont Colleges, the Music Department of Scripps College, the Pacific Basin Institute of Pomona College, the Entrepreneurial Musicianship Department at The New England Conservatory, and the Public Events Office at Scripps College.

Blood on Gold Mountain was written and produced by Yan-Jie Micah Huang, narrated by Hao Huang, introduced by Emma Gies, and features music composed by Micah Huang and performed by Micah Huang and Emma Gies. A special thanks to Evo Terra from Simpler Media Productions for his expertise and support.

History Society & Culture Documentary
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Episodes

Iron Horse Road: a Tale from Gold Mountain

July 19, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutes - 53.8 MB

Iron Horse Road: a Tale from Gold Mountain recounts one of the great untold epics of American history: The story of the Chinese laborers–neither truly enslaved nor truly free–who built the most rugged stretches of the Transcontinental Railroad. More than 150 years ago, these Gold Mountain Men tunneled through mountains, dangled over cliffs, and dragged entire trains over alpine summits where other Americans feared to tread. The prosperity of the gilded age was founded on their blood, sweat ...

Jianchi/ Perseverance

May 15, 2022 07:00 - 29 minutes - 33.6 MB

Act One of the play Jianchi/Perseverance is based on the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900 in San Francisco Chinatown, which led to suspicion and demonization of Chinese who were identified with the “China plague,” a term used to describe the bubonic plague. The history of Chinese in San Francisco is a fraught affair. Drawn at first by mid-nineteenth century stories of riches to be found in “Gold Mountain” (California) just for the working, many impoverished Chinese laborers left home to e...

Blood on Gold Mountain

July 14, 2021 07:00 - 1 hour - 77.6 MB

By some lights, this episode is what Blood on Gold Mountain is all about. The Massacre.  This episode has been very difficult in every way. How do you make something good or beautiful out of a mass murder? How do you take the experience of being a perpetual foreigner, persecuted and exploited, mocked and belittled, and turn it into something redemptive?  This episode has taught me the answer: You don’t. You just do what you have to do. This episode is about love, and loss. It’s about the ...

Heathens

June 30, 2021 08:15 - 51 minutes - 58.7 MB

In this episode, we are introduced to Christianity through the eyes of Yut-Ho’s Gwailo marriage to Lee Yong in a Christian church. Can you imagine being married in the holy place of a foreign religion without having any context for the iconography all around you?  Understandably, Yut Ho  is horrified by the sight of Jesus nailed to the cross, “his head hanging down in an attitude of infinite pain and weariness.”  She understands the pendant cross hanging from his neck as the Chinese symbol f...

The Underworld

June 16, 2021 07:00 - 40 minutes - 46.4 MB

If there’s one person who could be said to truly be at the center of the 1871 LA Chinatown drama, it might be Yo Hing. While Yut Ho’s love intrigue was nominally the reason for the conflagration of Chinatown’s ongoing gang conflict, it would never have happened if it hadn’t aligned with Yo Hing’s plans.  Yo Hing represents a side of Chinese America that both Western nativists and Chinese assimilationists are reluctant to face. Ironically, he also represents the embodiment of many of the nom...

Beasts of Prey

June 02, 2021 07:00 - 27 minutes - 31.9 MB

Sam Yuen Sam Yuen is one of the larger-than-life characters that drive the historical narrative of the LA Chinatown massacre. Historical sources paint a picture of a laconic, stoic-minded business leader whose traditional methods and lack of adaptability made him and his company vulnerable to disruption.  Sam Yuen was the leader of a conservative faction who thought that the Chinese community should restrict its contact with outsiders as much as possible. They were willing to provide servi...

Empire of Orphans

May 19, 2021 07:00 - 32 minutes - 37.3 MB

No one knows just how the historical Yut Ho and Lee Yong met. Perhaps, as in our story, it was in the course of their daily routines. Yut Ho would almost certainly have lived a secluded life with her new husband. In Chinese immigrant society, most women worked alongside their menfolk. As a wealthy married woman Yut Ho had the uncommon luxury of staying home, but in practice, that luxury probably felt like a gilded cage. Chinatown was the most violent part of a violent, dangerous town, and Hi...

Bride Price

May 05, 2021 07:00 - 38 minutes - 44.4 MB

Life in California’s early Chinese communities was challenging and dangerous, particularly for women. Discriminatory laws made it harder for women to emigrate, leading to a severe gender imbalance in California’s Chinatowns.  Eve of Exclusion Initially, the gender gap was a result of American employers’ perception that men were a more desirable form of cheap labor. However, the exclusion of women quickly became a mechanism for preventing Chinese communities from taking root in America. Yut...

The Widow

April 21, 2021 07:00 - 33 minutes - 38.8 MB

This episode addresses one of the most important and neglected aspects of early Chinese immigrants’ experience in California.  Relations between Chinese immigrants and their Anglo counterparts were not always hostile. Despite the fact that there were few women in California when Chinese men started arriving, sometimes relationships would form. The only references to such relationships that we have in the primary sources have to do with the Anglo establishment’s attempts to prevent them. Som...

Rebels

April 07, 2021 07:00 - 20 minutes - 19.4 MB

In some ways, one might think of this episode as containing our version of a land acknowledgement. Immigrants are always trying to listen to natives and learn from them, and I thought Yut Ho and Ah Choy deserved a chance to do so. Indian Camp is a fictional waypost in the foothills of the coastal range near Big Sur. The Elder who dwells there is called only by his title, Haya, which is a transliteration of the Esselen word for “Father.” He is a member of the Esselen tribe who, like many oth...

Outlaws

March 24, 2021 07:00 - 27 minutes - 25.2 MB

This episode introduces some key players in the story of the Chinatown Massacre, and gives some background about the social and political conditions for Chinese Immigrants in Wild-West California. Yut Ho and Ah Choy are based on historical figures. For more information about them, a great resource to check out is “The Chinatown War,” by Scott Zesch, who has collected and attempted to decode a number of primary sources contemporary with the events in this story. Accounts of the lives of Chi...

Now Releasing: Blood on Gold Mountain

March 08, 2021 12:00 - 1 minute - 1.4 MB

Los Angeles, 1871, was the murder capital of the Wild West, and nowhere was wilder or more dangerous than Chinatown.  Blood on Gold Mountain is an original storytelling podcast, which follows the journey of Yut-Ho, a young woman who arrives in LA as a refugee, only to become embroiled in a love intrigue, a gang war, and one of the deadliest race riots in American history.  Set in a vivid Western landscape and based on true events, Blood on Gold Mountain brings to life this little-known cha...

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@evoterra 9 Episodes