In nineteenth-century China, a young girl struggles to protect her family from the threat of bandits, famine, and an ideological conflict between her father and brother.

When he accidentally kills a Manchu, a fifteen-year-old Chinese boy is sent to America to join his father, an uncle, and other Chinese working to build a tunnel for the transcontinental railroad through the Sierra Nevada mountains in 1867. Dragon's gate is third in the Golden mountain chronicles: 1867, and the second book is "Mountain light." The first book is The serpent's light. The fourth book is The traitor, and the last one is titled Dragonwings....

In the early twentieth century a young Chinese boy joins his father in San Francisco and helps him realize his dream of making a flying machine.