This essay is the foreword to an artistic inquiry into immigrant Chinese life in rural nineteenth-century California – a communal life that was itinerant, vulnerable, preyed upon, resilient, and centrally important in the state's and the nation's history. The project integrates new photographs of the remnants of Chinese settlements in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Sacramento delta areas into a forgotten governmental account of Chinese immigrants, made by D. D. Beatty in Downieville, c.1894. The result is a remade book, part document, part poetic archaeology.