Ah Louis and the Tunnel Behind the Coast

The brick building on the corner dates to eighteen eighty-five, when Wong On, known in San Luis Obispo as Ah Louis, rebuilt in brick the wooden shop he had opened on this same lot in eighteen seventy-four to serve the Chinese community that had been gathering in the region since the Gold Rush era. He had arrived from China in eighteen sixty-one. By the time he built his store, he was already one of the most important figures in the local Chinese community, running what was in practice a bank, a post office, a labor exchange, and a general store all in one building.

In eighteen eighty-four, Southern Pacific Railroad gave Ah Louis a contract to organize the workforce for one of the most technically demanding infrastructure projects on the California coast: four railroad tunnels through the Santa Lucia mountains at Cuesta Grade. The mountains that had isolated San Luis Obispo from Northern California were going to be breached by the railroad, but doing it required drilling and blasting through thousands of feet of hard rock. Ah Louis recruited and managed more than two thousand Chinese laborers to do this work. The project took approximately ten years to complete.

The men who blasted those tunnels were operating under the Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two, which barred them from citizenship, from owning property, and from most legal protections available to other workers in California. They performed the most dangerous work on a project that would transform the economic geography of the central coast. When the coastal railroad line was complete, San Luis Obispo was connected to San Francisco and Los Angeles, agricultural and commercial goods moved freely, and the region's economy changed fundamentally. The tunnel the workers dug is still in use today.

Ah Louis lived in San Luis Obispo until his death in nineteen thirty-six. His store is now a California State Historic Landmark. The workers who built the tunnels are not commemorated at the site.