From 1910 to 1940, a million immigrants seeking a better life in the U.S., most of them Chinese, were processed on Angel Island, a tiny dot of land in the San Francisco Bay, roughly 45 minutes from San Francisco. In 1970, the Angel Island Immigration Station was scheduled for demolition, but a California state park ranger named Alexander Weiss made a remarkable discovery: hand-carved fragments of Chinese poetry hiding under layers of graffiti and plaster in the walls of the derelict barracks.

Ling Woo Liu (’06) writes TIME Travel.

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