While the picturesque Cambria town revels in its quaint vibe and the glorious stands of Monterey pine, my partner and I traveled there mostly for the alluring, nay sensational, cliffside walks on the bluff trail in the 430-acre Fiscalini Ranch Preserve (see 4.1.1.).
The two-hour drive from Santa Barbara was the first leg of our journey, but the second portion lasted just 10 minutes when we drove from our Cambria bed and breakfast to the start of this stunning and easy bluff-top trail.
We wandered along the well-trod main pathway, much of it given over to solid boardwalk in order to protect the threatened native plants. All the while, a booming sea hammered black rocks, crashing green, blue and foamy white as the shorebirds screeched and called out.
Lately, I’ve made a sort of study of local California bluff-top trail offerings with hikes at Ellwood, Naples and including the favorite cliff-top hike between Refugio and El Capitan state beaches.
None of them matches the endlessly captivating seascapes of Fiscalini. Alternating mottled brown and green cliffsides frame the mighty Pacific Ocean that lashes the blackened rocks below. Nearby Moonstone Beach with scores of motels also offers pleasant, flat rambles down by a seaside boardwalk, but it has no equivalent clifftop views like one sees at the Fiscalini.
Old-town Cambria, so-called East Cambria, also supplies interest for short perambulations. Near Robin’s fine restaurant, I spied a rare and beautiful Port Orford cedar tree (chamaecyparis lawsoniana), planted there 121 years ago in 1905.
Strolling around town, the local historical society features a 19th-century well, the 1875 Maggetti House and even the local jail dating from 1888.
The Cambria Historical Society has been very active, and it leads us into pondering the presence of Chinese immigrants in California and Cambria by the mid-1800s. Even before the massive labor needs of the transcontinental railroad (1863-69), there were several thousand Chinese immigrants living in California.
Lacking sufficient workers to complete the arduous western section of President Abraham Lincoln’s Transcontinental Railroad, the Central Pacific Railroad Co. brought in between 12,000 and 15,000 Chinese workers. After 1869, those men — all male — remained in California and roamed about the West performing very difficult manual labor. For those of us living in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement anti-immigration-era United States, it can be difficult to imagine the lack of governmental control or even awareness of Asian and other immigrants after the Civil War.
Mining first, then completing spur railroads to those mines, as well as agricultural and maritime work supplied the men with the wherewithal for room and board, but it was a difficult existence. Since the U.S. government, even then, had strict legal rules against allowing Chinese women to immigrate into California, those guys were effectively marooned without partners in California. Many went to San Francisco, of course, but some migrated into the Cambria area and the central California coast. California historians note significant anti-Chinese prejudice at this time, especially after about 1875 when white nationalism and anti-Asian prejudice spiked in our state.
Writing in his book “Roughing It” about the 1860s, Mark Twain wrote of the Chinese immigrants in California (mainly San Francisco): “They are a kindly-disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific coast. No Californian gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinese, under any circumstances … .” Once the crucial transcontinental railroad had been constructed, the urgent need for Chinese workers dropped and narrow prejudice and anglo self-interest predominated.
The presence of architectural remains of a Chinese “temple” or “association building” in historic Cambria proves their existence here, and their need for some kind of community center.
This lurid poster over-exaggerates and mostly shows the intricately carved doors that archaeologists have recovered and some small object finds. The general dates of this small Asian colony in Cambria began during the 1870s and 1880s. We know that Cambria had mines boring for the valuable mineral quicksilver (cinnabar; mercury), and during the 1880s a large quicksilver operation was mounted. It would have obviously utilized the available Chinese men, most of whom had experience in mining construction. Quicksilver is essential for the process to remove pure silver from silver ore. The 1870s Comstock Lode and other mining operations in California enabled some of the desperately poor Chinese immigrants to survive as mine workers.
In this sense, Cambria was a typical central California town getting by through what some economists term “bonanza capitalism.” A run of quicksilver, followed by a huge market for dairy products, meant Cambria waxed and waned, and was particularly reliant on the railroads.
Displaced Chinese immigrants also found work diving and foraging along the rich coastal littoral here. Kelp was a main product, which Chinese agriculturalists dried out in the open and then shipped back to Asia.
In a black-and-white 1885 photograph, we see two Chinese immigrants in Cambria who have slaughtered a pig and are about to roast it for their community.
The Chinese, like the Irish, the Italians, the Greeks and the Jews, usually would hang together, and often cling to their religious rituals and funerary customs. The immigrant Chinese created local associations where they would gather on free days, for festivals, memorials and for crucial burial rites. Some call these regional associations huiguans, and they served a wide variety of social purposes, not only as “temples” for burial and other life rituals. Praying, gambling, talking about “home” were primary activities in these huiguans, or “temples.”
Anti-asian sentiment and prejudice became rampant in late 19th-century America, and the situation of these itinerant Chinese males had to be precarious in several ways. Twain was writing about the 1860s in California, but the Chinese man’s life was certainly not like that of Hop Sing, caricatured in the 1960s TV western “Bonanza” (see 4.1.1.).
By 1916, the temple and all the Chinese immigrant men had disappeared from Cambria. In less than 10 years, the infamous Immigration Act of 1924, also called the Johnson-Reed Act, would appear. This exclusionary law is reminiscent of our post-modern American immigration debates today in 2026.
More than a century ago, this Immigration Act kept out the rising tide of east Europeans and other groups our white supremacist 68th Congress detested. The act completely barred immigrants from Asia, while it crudely terminated the 1907 so-called “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with imperial Japan by banning all Japanese immigration, too.
I imagine a Chinese immigrant worker harvesting kelp from the Cambrian coast in happier 1870s and 1880s. The U.S. government wouldn’t even countenance single Chinese women immigrating to California, to perhaps become partners or wives to these marooned men.
Contemporary novelist Lisa See has written evocative novels concerning social and civil life for female Chinese immigrants; in 2026’s “Daughters of the Sun and Moon,” three Chinese women live in 19th-century Los Angeles and experience brutal anti-Asian and anti-Chinese sentiments — e.g., in the anti-Asian LA riots of 1871, more than 17 Chinese were murdered.
Those Chinese divers who must have walked the cliffside at what we today call the Fiscalini Ranch Preserve witnessed the same beauty and capacious seascapes we enjoy today. We are all “immigrants.”
4.1.1.
Directions: Drive Highway 101 north past Santa Maria. At San Luis Obispo, leave Highway 101 and take Highway 1 to Morro Bay, past Cayucos, to the signed Cambria exit (two to 2½ hours. “Hop Sing” was a traditional Chinese servant/cook character in the popular TV series “Bonanza,” which ran from 1959 to 1973. Victor Sen Yung played this cook.
