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CTURES OF OLD CHINATOWN yl ei he: THE STREET OF THE GAMBLERS. “Underneath their artistic appreciation of the grace in life, runs a hard, > streak of barbarism.’ mel RES OF OLD CHINATOWN BY ARNOLD GENTHE WITH TEXT BY WILL IRWIN NEW YORK MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 1909 | | Nt Copyright 1908, by MoFFat, YARD AND Com ANY NEW YORE §2ea — All Rights Reserve Published, September, 1908 a Reprinted, June, 1909 7 cad LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS THE STREET OF THE GAMBLERS Tue Fisu PEeppLEeR A Bootu—FisuH ALLEY THe ALLEY WAITING FOR THE Cars . Tue AIRING . Loarers YOUNG AND OLD Tue ButTcHEeR Tue Lity VENpDor Tue Toy VENDoR . Tue MorTuHer THE SHOEMAKER REscuED SLAvE GIRLS A CorNER ON THE HILLSIDE . Tue Ceitrtar Door Younc ARISTOCRATS : A Famity FROM THE CONSULATE Houipay Dress New YeEAr’s Day BEFORE THE THEATRE . Houipay FINery ‘Dress CLOTHES THe CHINESE SMILE THe MouNTEBANK A Vista Frontispiece PAGE LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS | ““No Faczs!” : ; : : : ai aed ““No Lixen!” =. ; : eta : Tuer BaLttoon Man : Wagers ‘ . On Dupont STREET. : : : So Tue SwEETMEAT STAND ; ; é Re: Tue Lity-Foor Woman ; : “aie ““ Doorways IN Dim Hatr-ToNeE” . Re « Try > Hor Vienne eas eee <3 Be: Tue Leoparp SKIN. ; : : oe ee Tue Morninc Market : 5 : era Tue TonG ProciaMATION . 5 ee Berore THE Bie Joss House . ‘ ; (gee : “Tur Devin’s Kircnen” spy Nigot . . . Tue New Toy . : pats ~? ee au. ‘THe CHILDREN’s Hour . ; ; , ey Tue VEGETABLE PEDDLER . : ati ““He Bione Mu!? : : Mt Tue TINKERS 3 ¥ ; ‘ Aey; oe Arter ScHoon . RD aie < oo | Tue CHINESE SaLvaTION ARMY . Mae oe Tue Paper CouLector . ; is : B : Tue Latest Born Sarak: : . ee Tue Last or Orp CuInatowN . «we 5% FOREWORD My Dear Dr. Genthe: Long before I knew who you were, I used to mark you in the shadows and recesses of China- town, your little camera half-hidden under your coat, your considering eye and crafty hand of the artist alert to take your shy and superstitious mod- els unawares. Later, it was my privilege to fol- low you sometimes—to watch you playing your Germanic patience against their Chinese patience, to marvel at you, in dark room and studio, work- ing with those mysterious processes by which you —more than any other man alive—have made art out of the play-time snap-shot. Now, after the great disaster, all that remains for your work of a decade is this same picture record of old China- town at which you worked so lovingly for eight years. In the summer of steel and steam drills and heroic enthusiasm—the summer of rebuilding—you FOREWORD and I passed through the new, clean Chinatown. It was a clear, sea-scented night, I remember, and very late. We stopped beneath the ruins of Old St. Mary’s. The new-rising city, like the old one in dim, suggestive contour—as an adult face is like its childish counterpart—stretched out at our feet. Where the vivid carouse and romance of Dupont and Kearny Streets had been, a black hollow, mysterious, awful, as though the Pit had taken Hell’s Half Acre back to itself; beyond, a — wall of steel skeletons and gaunt, windowless towers. ‘The scattered lights, placed where never lights would be in finished and inhabited struc- tures, gave a dreadful air of strangeness and des- olation to this city vista. I stood as one who sees spirits. And you spoke: “Rubber boots and copper kettles in the shop windows—and we have still to call it Chinatown!” You had been looking backward, I perceived, as I had been looking forward. So, with the ruined tins of St. Mary’s creaking above us in the night wind, we talked about that little city of our love, Chinatown. “No, it’s gone,” said I, “And beauty, or at least such beauty as they know, cannot live FOREWORD in Class A buildings.” You, like a true partizan, fell to defending as soon as you found me agree- ing with your criticisms. “They won’t remain Class A for long,” you said. “The Chinese will make them over somehow. ‘They can no more live in inappropriate ugliness than we in dirt.” Yet we both sighed for the Chinatown which we knew, and which is not any more except in the shadowing of your little films. You, the only man who ever had the patience to photograph the Chinese, you, who found art in the snap-shot—you were making yourself uncon- sciously, all that time, the sole recorder of old Chinatown. I but write as a frame for your pic- tures; I am illustrating you. If, in these writ- ings, I use the past tense, I do not mean to imply that our Californian Chinese have changed their natures or their manners. Much of what I de- scribe here has survived, and much more will pre- vail. It is just that your lenses and plates record only the past; and, I, embroidering your work, ‘have tried to keep in tone. Wii Irwin. OLD CHINATOWN BY WILL IRWIN ROM the moment when you crossed the golden, dimpling bay, whose moods ran the gamut of beauty, from the moment when you sailed between those brown-and-green headlands which guarded the Gate to San Francisco, you heard always of Chinatown. It was the first thing which the tourist asked to see, the first thing which the guides offered to show. Whenever, in any channel of the Seven Seas, two world-wanderers met and talked about the City of Many Adven- tures, Chinatown ran like a thread through their reminiscences. Raised on a hillside, it glimpsed at you from every corner of that older, more pic- turesque San Francisco which fell to dust and cin- ders in the great disaster of 1906. From the cliffs which crowned the city, one could mark it off as a sombre spot, shot with contrasting patches of green and gold, in the panorama below. Its inhabitants, 1 2 OLD CHINATOWN overflowing into the American quarters, | m bright and quaint the city streets. Its exampl: Ss of art in common things, always before the: L in “ane worse order hie our beans woul kept! In a newer and stronger San ] rises a newer, Saas more heathful me ture? ers iS the ue reach se Ros — "YI4DI ayy ajngiajsip pup Knq 02 Surziwnr. skKonjo som ‘Kd ajoym ay. papnjour saynoa asoym. ‘sdajppad asayz fo qnods Dv ‘S]WS UaajD] StL sapun Ut pls Jaay Surysy unyojiy ay, uaynr sSurusow Kvas-pjo3 asoyy uC ad Taddad HSIt AHL A BOOTH—FISH~ALLEY. “That horror to the nose, that perfume to the eye.” OLD CHINATOWN 3 perfume to the eye? Where are those broken, dingy streets, in which the Chinese made art of rubbish ? I hope that some one will arise, before this gen- eration is passed, to record that conquest of affec- tion by which the Californian Chinese transformed themselves from our race-adversaries to our dear, subject people. Theirs will be all the glory of that tale, ours all the shame. In the dawn of the min- ing rush, the little, trading Cantonese began to ap- pear in California. The American, the Celt, the Frenchman came for gold—gold washed out of the hills—uncounted millions. Gold brought the Chinaman also; but his ideas were modest. The prospect of two, four, five dollars a day was enough for him, who had made only ten cents a day at home. He asked simply to do menial work at a menial’s wage. Beside our white pioneers, he took his part in the glorious episode of the Pacific con- quest. He, with them, starved on the desert, died on the trails, faced Indian bullets and arrows. Wherever the report of gold called into being a new camp, he struggled in behind the whites, built his laundry, his cook-house or his gold rocker, 4 OLD CHINATOWN girded up his pig-tail, and went to work. In his own spirit of quiet heroism, he shared all the hard- ships of our giant men—shared in everything they held except their dissipations and their reward of glory. For glory, he had to wait half a century. That curious, black episode of early Western civilization, the Chinese persecution, followed hard upon their first arrival. Why this thing began, what quality in the Chinese nature irritated our pioneers beyond all justice and sense of decency, remains a little dim and uncomprehended to this generation. They were an honest people—hon- est beyond our strictest ideas. ‘They attended to their own business and did not interfere with ours. Their immoralities, their peculiar and violent meth- ods of adjusting social differences, affected only themselves. Not for thirty years was there reason for believing them a danger to American working- men. But the fact remains. Our pioneers cut off their sacred pig-tails, cast them forth disgraced, beat them, lynched them. Professional agitators made them a stock in trade. By the power of re- iteration, this honest people came to figure in the public mind as a race of thieves, this cleanly the ce Bed THE ALLEY “ Those broken, dingy streets in which the Chinese made art of rubbish.” © ef a’ ae, SudaAs yADp IY ut a g _CSSIUISNG DIAS (jamb ~passaap ays uo KjJuU0 pposgn quam, ays pun ‘K4r71QvIIadSa4 SIUIWDIY AIgos YIM ADY AY punog * ‘SUVO AHL XOX ONILIVM c WmAofiun yYyoryR * upmom asauiyy a1qnjIa0gsa4 aYT ,, OLD CHINATOWN Si people—inventors of the daily bath—as “dirty” and “‘diseased,” this heroic people, possessed of a passive fortitude beside which our stoicism is cow- ardice, as poltroons. With a dignity all their own, they suffered and went about their business, though death lay at the end. The day came when the Chinese themselves nearly justified the professional labor agitator. The romantic, unsettled period of the gold rush passed into history; the age of bonanza farming followed; the state buckled down to stable industry. But two and three and five dollars a day was still a lure to the Canton man. ‘Their number increased with every Pacific steamer. Even yet they were no real menace to American labor—the state at any time might have swallowed up fifty thousand more without harming a single white workingman—but that menace lifted itself in the immediate future. Ripples from the black Dennis Kearney outrages, the shameful Montana massacres, reached Wash- ington. Congress passed the Exclusion Law. When that happened, there vanished the last log- ical objection to the Californian Chinese. A gradual change passed over the spirit of Cali- 6 OLD CHINATOWN fornia. We were a long time learning that human souls, different but equal, souls softened by forty centuries of highly moral civilization, lay under those yellow skins, under those bizarre customs and beliefs. The Chinaman, being a gentleman, gives himself forth but charily. I think that we first glimpsed the real man through our gradual under- standing of his honesty. American merchants learned that none need ever ask a note of a China- man in any commercial transaction. His word is his bond. Precedent, as well as race characteristic, makes it so. The newer generation of Californians grew up with baby-loving, devoted Chinese servants about them. The Sons and Daughters of the Golden West did not, indeed, draw their first sustenance from yellow breasts, as the Southener has drawn it from black ones. That mystic bond was lacking. But a Chinese man-servant had watched at the cradle above most of them, rejoiced with the par- ents that there was a baby in the house, laughed to see it laugh, hurried like a mother at its ery. A backyard picture in any of the old Californian OF mien: le a eee <— og td gl ii ae F eo THE AIRING. “ With what pride the father—never the mother—used to carry the boy baby down the street in all his finery.” ~e UDIUNAOfIIDI [DIA IY OF JIDIS Mats Aaaau YyIum ‘sjaaajs ayy fo afy sy ‘GTO CNV ONNOA SYAAVO OLD CHINATOWN Teoy mansions included always the Chinese cook, grin- ning from the doorway on the playing babies. This Chinese cook was a volunteer nurse; for him, the nursery was heart of the house. He was the consoler and fairy-teller of childhood. He passed on to the babies his own wonder tales of flowered princesses and golden dragons, he taught them to patter in sing-song Cantonese, he saved his frugal nickels to buy them quaint little gifts; and as the better Southerner, despising the race, loves the individual negro through this very association of childhood, so the Californian came to love the Chinaman that he knew. In his ultimate belief, indeed, he outstripped the Southerner; for he came first to a tolerance of the race and then to an ad- miration. The older people, and more especially the house- wives among them, reached understanding and admiration through a different channel. The Chinaman was an ideal servant. Now, when the insolent and altogether less admirable Japanese are taking their places beside the cook stoves, your San Francisco housewife will never cease lament- 8 OLD CHINATOWN ing for the old order. His respect for a contract, written or spoken, made him observe every article of the servant’s code. Unobtrusive, comprehend- ing in all its subleties the feminine mind, part of the household and still aloof from it, the Chinese servant did the work of two. American maids and stirred up no friction in the process. Supreme vir- tue of all to his mistress, he delighted in “com- pany,” in all the pomps and parades of a house- hold. Nothing pleased him more than to take the responsibility of a dinner or a reception upon him- self, to plan confections for it, to have a hand in the decorations. ‘The other side of his life, which might be frescoed with fan-tan and highbinder troubles, he kept for Chinatown and his night off. Perhaps on that might he dropped his month’s wages in the gambling houses of Ross Alley, per- haps he smoked a few pipes of opium, perhaps he knew more than the police would ever learn of the highbinder shooting proclaimed all across the first page of that newspaper which he handed you at breakfast. He never troubled you with these things. To you, he was first the perfect servant, and, if his term lasted long enough, the shy, and «SDM ays yoy. sysyav Jo A129 ay. OISIIUDALT UDS ayDUe 07 paysom “UDIAAWP paumunipiun ayy a4ofaq skvaryo ‘siury, uowwod ut yan jo savjduaxa s4z ,, “AHHOLNA AHL fo wuawmo ayy, 40f sayy jo zjnf spuvy siy ‘s,Avax man asauiyy uo suyjvo ‘uvmkapunndy 40 YOO asauiyy Anok upyz Sno1p4AT asou oY ff ,. “MOGNHA ATIT AHL OLD CHINATOWN oe gentle familiar, versed in the arts of friendship. Who more gracious than your Chinese cook or laundryman calling on Chinese New Years, his hands full of lilies for the women of the family, his pockets of nuts for the children? Under kind- ness, he might blossom into a feudal retainer of the family, lingering on for years in a voluntary slavery, truced only when, the price of Chinese serv- ice having gone up, he made his just demand for a yraise in pay. So, out of family life, both child and parent learned to appreciate and love the race. The Chinese had conquered our foolish hatred by patient service; and I call it a glorious conquest. Long before this, a whole generation before, and while they still lived amidst terrors and alarms, they had laid the foundations of that which became Chinatown. Like all Spanish towns, San Fran- cisco clustered first about a plaza—Portsmouth Square the pioneers renamed it. On its fringes, in the days when the streets ran gold and the Vigi- lantes were the whole law, appeared the first mod- ern buildings. Then, with the unaccountable, restless drift of American cities, shops and whole- sale houses passed on down into the hollows and 10 OLD CHINATOWN “made lands” reclaimed from the Bay marshes. The Chinese, following in, took possession of those old buildings about Portsmouth Square. An un- written city ordinance, strictly observed by succes- sive Boards of Supervisors, held them to an area of about eight city blocks. Old St. Mary’s Church, the first Roman Catholic Cathedral, marked the southern edge of that area; and to the last day of the old city any report that the Chinese were moy- ing south of St. Mary’s drove the newspapers and the city fathers to arms. The Chinese conquest of affection never proceeded so far that the Amer- icans wanted them for neighbors. These eight blocks, supporting a population which varied between ten thousand and thirty thousand according to the season of the year, lay close to the very centre of San Francisco, between the business district and the old palaces of Nob Hill. Wealthy citizens, walking down to their offices from the citadel of the town, used to envy the Chinese their site; the city authorities were forever starting a movement to get “dirty Chinatown” out into the suburbs, that the white might take the Quarter back. But the Chinese owned much of the prop- TOY VENDOR. . = TH Rig SEO LEAT RE RE Eph EEA RGN GROUT RRR THE MOTHER. “ Soberly dressed, keeping close that they might not dishonor their lords through the glance of forbidden eyes.” OLD CHINATOWN 11 erty, and paid a high rental for the rest. With their conservatism and their persistence, they stuck. They stuck even after the fire, when San Francisco, starting a dozen projects in the heroic rebound of its spirit, tried to seize the occasion to move China- town. This district of old-fashioned business blocks, laid out on fine lines by the French architects who wrought before the newly-rich miners began to buy atrocities, the Chinese transformed into a sem- blance of a Chinese city. They added sheds, lean- tos, out-door booths, a thousand devices to extend space; they built in the eternal painted balconies of which the Chinaman is as fond as a Spaniard. Close livers by custom, they lodged twenty coolies in one abandoned law office; they even burrowed three stories under ground that they might make space for winter-idle laborers, overflow of the northern canning factories. Clinging always to their native customs and dress and manners, they furnished forth their little stores and factories, their lodging houses, their restaurants, with the Chinese utensils of common life in which they ex- press their inborn art sense. 12 OLD CHINATOWN So the quarter grew into a thing like Canton and still strangely and beautifully unlike. Dirty—the Chinaman, clean as a whistle about his person, in- ventor of the daily bath, is still terribly careless about his surroundings. Unsanitary to the last degree—Chinatown was the care and vexation of Boards of Health. But always beautiful—fall- ing everywhere into pictures. . This beauty appealed equally to the aTae citi- zen, who can appreciate only the picturesque, and to the artist, with his eye for composition, subtle coloring, shadowy suggestion. From every door- way flashed out a group, an arrangement, which suggested the Flemish masters. Consider that panel of a shop front in Fish Alley which is to me the height of Dr. Genthe’s collection. It is a_ Rembrandt. Such pictures glimpsed about every corner. Youlifted youreyes. Perfectly conceived in coloring and line, you saw a balcony, a woman in softly gaudy robes, a window whose blackness suggested mystery. You turned to right or left; be- hold a pipe-bowl mender or a cobbler working with his strange Oriental tools, and behind him a vista of sheds and doorways in dim half tone, spotted with THE SHOEMAKER. “ Human souls, different but equal, souls softened by forty centuries of high civil- ization, lay under those yellow skins.” * is f RESCUED SLAVE GIRLS. “A girl four years old, past the delicate stage of infancy, would bring from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars as a speculation.” OLD CHINATOWN 13: the gold and greens of Chinese sign-boards. Beau- tiful and always mysterious—a mystery made visual by that green-gray mist which hangs always above the Gate and which softens every object exposed to the caressing winds and gentle rains of the North Pacific. In the greatest of his short stories, Frank Norris said that there were three circles in Chinatown. The first was this life of the streets, which never grew stale to the real Californian. The second was that prepared show which the tourist saw and which supported those singular persons, the Chinatown guides. ‘The third was a circle away down below, into which no white man, at least none who dared tell about it, ever penetrated—the circle which re- volved about their trafficking in justice, as they conceived of justice, about their trade in contra- band goods, such as opium and slave girls. Rather, I think, were there four circles, for in between the circle of Show Places and that of Hid- den Things came the family life and industrial activity of the quarter. This Chinatown was a Tenderloin for the whole Chinese population of the Pacific Coast, the pleas- 14 OLD CHINATOWN ure palace where fish cutters from the northern salmon canneries, farmers from the Sacramento deltas, fruit pickers from the hot San J oaquin, gold washers from the Sierran placers, came to en- joy themselves and to squander their earnings be- tween seasons. Although a part of its reputed viciousness was the exaggeration of race hatred, no man could deny that it was tough. Also, it had gathered about it the lowest of those white tramps and soldiers of ill fortune who haunted that termi- nus of Caucasian civilization, San Francisco. The habitation of a darker race has an attraction for the debased; witness the environs of negro streets in the South. Because “sin is news and news is sin,” this side of Chinatown was always before the public. Nevertheless, a real life of homes and quiet in- dustry went on there also. The Chinese overall, cigar and shoe factories were important enough to draw the hatred of labor unions for a generation long. Much of the American tea and silk trade was controlled from those streets. The Six Com- panies, virtually the Chinese Chamber of Com- merce—though bound by an alliance closer than Sp Sar ee ¢ . 4 . _ A, CORNER‘ON THE HILLSIDE. “This bit of the mystic, suggestive East, so modified by the West that it was neither Oriental nor yet Occidenal—but just Chinatown.” THE CELLAR: DOOR. “Children high and low, rich and poor, they had the run of the streets.’ OLD CHINATOWN 15. any commercial organization which we know—had but to assert itself, and the whole Pacific Coast paid attention. The merchants, as they grew rich, sent to China for their old wives, married new ones by proxy, slipped brides past the inspectors, bought them from the slave dealers. In their toy estab- lishments, rich often with spoils of the Orient, they bred children and developed a kind of polite so- ciety. To a degree which we cannot comprehend, the place of the respectable Chinese woman is in the home. So the foreign American seldom saw the true lady of the Chinese Quarter. She lived tight in her little flat, she bound her hair with sober fil- lets, she dressed quietly in the dark greens that uniform respectability, and she went abroad only on great business or on the occasion of great festi- vals. But children,—high and low, rich and poor, they had the run of the streets. And they were the pride, joy, beauty and chief delight of the Quarter. Hope of heaven and everlasting worship to their fathers, nothing was too bright and beautiful for them. So mothers and nurses decked them out in 16 OLD CHINATOWN the brightest tunics, the most cleverly conceived caps all tinkling with golden devil-chasers, the whitest little socks and shoes, the most gorgeous ear-tassels, fit, otherwise, only for the altars of the joss. Tiny, yellow flowers of the world—how the American women, native and tourist, used to crane their necks and smile and coo at them as they passed! With what pride the father—never the mother—used to carry the boy baby down the streets in all his finery! How the Chinese, child lovers from the bottoms of their hearts, used to pay them court on the corners! Usually, they were con- tented and rather stolid babies; only once in a blue moon did one of them cry. And when it happened that a baby cried on the streets, the Chinese, bar- gaining at the open shop-fronts, used to look after him and grin and exchange comments in Can- tonese sing-song as though it was the greatest joke in the world. ‘ School, whether in the Oriental schoolhouse which the city maintained or in the private Chinese seminaries of the rich and conservative, was out by four o’clock. ‘That was the brightest hour of all the day in those streets. Dupont and Washington YOUNG ARISTOCRATS: “ How the Chinese, child lovers from the bottom of their hearts, used to pay them court on the corners!” y e . * ‘ Cre ’ » hes - ‘ A FAMILY FROM THE CONSULATE. “ Hope of heaven and of everlasting worship to their fathers. . . . Nothing was too bright and beautiful for them.” = OLD CHINATOWN Las: and Stockton blossomed with racing, tumbling ba- bies, all bright in silks. The barber, the grocer, the butcher, the lantern maker, dropped tools and occupation and came to the doorways to watch them play. The elder sisters, too many of them, alas, with the bound feet that showed how high their mothers expected them to marry, walked arm on waist like school-girls the world over, swaying with that gentle motion which marks the Chinese lady from her common sister. The big boys, much more subdued than our own twelve year olds, got out those feathered shuttlecocks with which the Chi- nese youth imitates football, and frisked along Dupont street or over into Portsmouth Square. A curious game that was, without team work or rules—nothing to it but dexterity of foot. Some- thing essentially Oriental in its grotesque grace ap- peared in the attitudes of these boys as they kicked the ball, first forward like the punt of a Rugby player, and then backward over their shoulders like a French movement in la savate. Sometimes the more radical mothers joined their babies after school, walked down to the Square—a fearful jour- ney for them—and made a little picnic about the 18 OLD CHINATOWN football players. That children’s hour of the Quarter showed Chinatown at its sweetest and most — gracious. Once only, in my recollection, came a day when all the women, high and low, virtuous and lost, had free run of the streets. This was the Good Lady Festival, celebrated every seven years in honor of that illustrious Chinese woman, princess and mar- tyr, who was raised for her virtues to godhood. Her symbol is the little shoe, the tapering shoe of the lily feet, which she threw into the river before she died. And on the day of her festival, woman was raised to the level of man. She was free to walk the streets, to sacrifice, to bow publicly be- fore the outdoor altars where priests in white robes and white fillets tapped their little gongs and sang incessantly to the joss. The “Prayer store” on Du- pont Street, where one might buy anything and everything sacred to Chinese religion, banked its counter and filled its windows with tiny shoes, from a thing of gold which one might hang on his tunie as a souvenir to a valentine thing in pink rice paper, large enough to clothe a proper lily foot. On that day, also, might the respectable woman HOLIDAY DRESS. ““ On that day might the respectable woman wear those parti-colored robes, those trou- sers of pale, neutral shades, those jade and gold ornaments for the hair. . . .” 4 g re eee ys " ee aes bd De a ‘ % oR ¥E bd NEW YEAR’S DAY BEFORE THE THEATRE. “ Four or five times a year, some fixed or movable feast brought out everything that was wonderful in the Quarter.” OLD CHINATOWN 19 wear those parti-colored robes, those trousers of pale, neutral shades, those jade and gold ornaments for the hair, publicly appropriate at other times only to the fallen among women. From the brass and cedar treasure chests kept carefully under the beds in their tiny flats, they took these festival clothes, saved, perhaps, since the wedding; and Chinatown became one blaze of color. Here, as everywhere else, fashions changed; one marked that phenomenon usually by the varying patterns in the children’s caps. That year, I remember, light blue was most in vogue. The really modish tunic, at that festival of the Good Lady, was of a robin’s egg color, above and below: but about the centre of the body ran a band of deep blue, edged with scroll work and embroidered, like as not, in gold. The black, straight hair, glossy with oint- ments, was usually bound by a great clasp of flat gold which amounted almost to a cap. Down the street, that night, walked a procession of priests in white robes. They carried a great banner inscribed with sacred Chinese characters: to right and left of them walked stavemen bearing weapons of the old Empire. Behind followed the 20 OLD CHINATOWN women, for all the world like a swaying bed of great, gaudy flowers. Along the sidewalks burned unnumbered sacrificial candles and lights, sur- rounded with the roast pig and rice bowls of a Chinese sacrifice. When the procession was over, the women, emancipate for the night, went to feast—those of no caste to the restaurants, the la- dies to their sombre homes. : Next morning, when the careful priests of Con- fucius had picked up the papers on the streets and burned them, that the sacred name might be sullied by no base uses, the women were back in their nests again, soberly dressed, keeping close that they might not dishonor their lords through the glance of forbidden eyes; and only the harlot and the very young maiden walked freely and frequently abroad until their next holiday. Alas, that festival of the Good Lady came again in a year when no one knew if there was to be any more Chinatown! They love a fiesta, those Californian Chinese; four or five times a year, some fixed or movable feast brought out everything that was wonderful in the Quarter. Two or three of these holiday occasions linger in memory. On Stockton street HOLIDAY FINERY. *“So mothers and nurses decked them out in the brightest tunics, the most clev- erly conceived caps all tinkling with golden devil-chasers, the whitest little socks and shoes, the most gorgeous ear-tassels, fit, otherwise, only for the altars of the joss.’ DRESS CLOTHES. “They wore the long, silk tunic of neutral tint which is dress coat and frock coat both to the Chinese gentleman.’ OLD CHINATOWN 21 stood the clubhouse of a merchant organization only one whit less powerful than the Six Compa- nies. Do not ask me its name;if I could remember, you would forget. ‘Those Chinese monosyllables are dreadfully elusive. Once in three years, this club celebrated the glories of its joss and kept open house. ‘The reception was for white and Chinese alike; in this time of peace and good will, they drew no color line. All races mixed in the crowd which packed their rooms to drink tea and scan the in- numerable paper altars in honor of this immortal god or that dead hero. Mostly, these altars told, in flimsy paper statuettes and legends on red rice paper, some tale of old China. ‘There, life size, was the great god, sitting in fearful state and cast- ing insolent eyes upon the priests who sang before him with many prostrations. About him, stood a dismounted hero in the tasseled and feathered war bonnet of old China; the princess his wife; a horse which was a caricature of an animal in shape and a wonder of art in blended coloring; the seven god- desses, gazing indifferently upon rich offerings of - roast pig, punks and fruit. Near the entrance, in a recess of his own, sat the 22 OLD CHINATOWN terrible and luck-bringing joss of the Tong. He is a devil as well as a god; he is beatifically kind and terribly cruel. His image is all white in face and clothing, but his eyes are weeping tears of blood. He is so lucky that just to touch him will make you win at lottery or fan-tan, and if you should but own him, no game from pie-gow to Wall Street could resist you. So he was much sought by the thievish; and between festivals the Tong kept him in a burglar proof vault. _On this public occasion, when his owners brought him out to bless and help their guests, two white watchmen guarded him with club and gun. No Chinese watchman could be trusted, in face of that awful temptation to win everlasting prosperity at one stroke. Once, in this week of festivity, they brought him — out on the streets. That was on the last night, when the elders of the ‘Tong, in caps and long dress tunics, publicly distributed bread and meat to all the poor of Chinatown, whether white or yellow. Then, priests bore him high in air on their shoul- ders that he might radiate fortune on the unfor- tunate. I wonder sometimes whether he, bearer of luck and material salvation, saved himself in the THE CHINESE SMILE. “A .backyard picture in any of the old Californian mansions included always the Chinese cook, grinning from the doorway on the playing babies.” + Lae 4 ¥ 3 = heh Bom Sy PaaS eS > : = + THE MOUNTEBANK. “Who forgets the Pekin Two Knife Man who used to perform for nickles a sword dance of the Old Empire?”’ OLD CHINATOWN 23 great disaster; or whether he went down to de- struction in the downfall of his house. I remember, too, a certain night in the annual festival of devils, when the orthodox Chinaman purifies his house, as the Hebrew sprinkled the blood of sacrificial lambs on his lintels. The air, in the Chinese cosmos, is full of these devil people; a Chinaman wastes a deal of his time and energy worrying about them. At home, I believe, the very orthodox never make a straight entrance to any building—for devils cannot turn a corner, and a crooked entrance is a safeguard. Behold how su- perstition yields to convenience! The Chinese of San. Francisco had adapted to their uses abandoned American stores and business blocks. It was in- convenient, almost impossible, to screen against devils the entrances to American-built stores. The practical Chinaman, therefore, gave up the doctrine of his creed, and took the more ardently to propitiatory sacrifices and offerings and devil- scaring firecrackers. And at the great devil feast, he fairly outdid himself in casting out all the works of evil, that his house might be clean for another year. 24 OLD CHINATOWN On the night which I am recalling, a certain ob- servation upon the Chinese crystallized in my mind. Out of his mental difference from us, his oblique thinking as contrasted with our straight reason- ing, his subtlety as contrasted with our directness, his commercial honesty as contrasted with our com- parative commercial dishonor, his gentility as con- trasted with our rudeness; further, out of our wholly unnecessary persecution and race hatred, he has come to a superior contempt of us and our ways. Certain broad spirits among them look across the race line and regard us as human beings; certain humble personages among them, such as the old family retainers whom I have mentioned al- ready, develop a curious, dog-like affection. But in the main, they feel a passive contempt. We were to them a medium of commerce when we stopped at the stores to buy, meddlers when we interfered with lotteries, fan-tan games, plague, highbinder wars and other affairs which were none of our business, plain pests when we swept down upon them with uniforms and patrol wagons, but always Things—never persons. You passed them on the streets; they turned out for you; but they A VISTA. “Spotted with the golds and greens of Chinese sign-boards.’ , S NOSPACE ST’ “ He would notice you no more than a post—unless you pulled a camera on him,” OLD CHINATOWN 25 glanced at you no more than they glanced at the innumerable sleek cats sunning themselves in the doorways. You might pick a specially beautiful or interesting Chinaman and stare at him all day; he would notice you no more than a post—unless you pulled a camera on him. A Chinese father would, indeed, soften if you stopped to pay court to the baby in his arms; it was too much to expect that he would refuse tribute from anything in the earth below or the air above to the pride of his heart and the hope of his immortal salvation. That, it seemed to me, was the only point at which your Chinese willingly granted intercourse to the de- spised race. But on that night, when the punk-sticks and the pocket altars burned at every corner and before every sweet-meat stand, when all the alleys were canopied over for the use of the priests, when every window glowed soft from the sacrificial lights within; on that night, when horror and mystery held the air—then you paid court to no Chinese baby. Approach him, and his father drew him sharply away; persist, and his bearer would hurry off on his slipping, high-soled shoes in a panicky 26 OLD CHINATOWN run. Pidgin English brought no answer to your most polite inquiries. The children imitated their elders; the big brother or sister, caring for little Ah Wu or tiny Miss Peach Blossom of the lily feet, scattered fearfully from the foreign touch. We, inferior, uncomprehending, were brothers to the powers of the air. Only this I noticed—your money was still welcome at the stores. Perhaps it was right to take devil tribute. It seems that there is no Lent, no Thy of Atone- ment, in the Chinese calendar. All religious fes- tivals are also feast days. Even on that night, men turned from fighting the devils to make holi- day. Every restaurant held its banquet, every wealthy home its reception. What is it which makes one picture of life linger in memory while others, and more marvelous ones, fade out? As vivid as though its bright im- pression was still dancing on my retina, I remem- ber a dinner party which I saw that night. Per- haps I had with me a friend, whose identity is the one thing which has gone from me, but whose strong and stimulating pull on my mind lingers in this rise of memory to a permanent thing; per- 4 GR MM BB od ONO LIKEE!” elders; the big brother or sister, caring for little Ah Wu or tiny Miss Peach Blossom of the lily feet, scattered fearfully from the foreign touch.” “The children iniutaited tlreir «Mpjg way, YIM 07 * * * Uo1Ddnz20 pun sj00} paddoap ‘aaynut UsdJUD] IY} “AYIING B44 ‘4aI043 |Y1 ‘4IQAKq IYT ,, ‘NVW NOOTIVd AHL OLD CHINATOWN 27 haps that was one of those nights of youth when the world is right and life dances down before you, and all your powers are multiplied by some golden number of the gods. At any rate this picture re- mains, while greater and brighter things linger only as blurred outlines. It was on the top floor of the old Man Far Low Restaurant on Dupont street, a show place it is: true, but also the great café of the rich and disso- lute. That floor, running clear through the block, was a succession of private dining rooms, divided one from the other by pictured, scroll-work screens. Carved woods and painted lanterns decked the walls; the tables were of black teak, delicately and minutely inlaid. The guests sat not on chairs, but upon square stools of the same teak wood. From the front apartment, you stepped out upon a bal- cony made into a little Chinese garden. This looked upon the dark stretch of Dupont street. At the rear was another balcony, a small, undec- orated thing; and from that you saw first Ports- -mouth Square with its gilded caravel set to remem- ber Robert Louis Stevenson; further on the city buildings, topped by the masts and spars of Adven- 28 OLD CHINATOWN ture Ships in from Pacific voyagings; and still fur- . ther the golden delights of the great bay. One who came to enjoy the Man Far Low must buy at least tea and sweetmeats. The tea, poured from the crack between two bowls, one inverted over the other, was of a light lemon yellow, and in taste no more than hot water slightly flavored by an aromatic herb. Color and taste were de- ceptive; it would kill sleep for a night. One ate the sweetmeats—picked ginger, preserved nuts, plums and citron—from the end of a spindly tin fork. When the guest had finished, the waiter stood at the head of the stairs and bawled some- thing in Cantonese. That was the check; the cash- ier, sitting in round cap and horn spectacles at the desk below, knew by it how much to collect. That night, however, the Chinese occupied it; a great, expensive dinner, costing its tens of dollars a plate, was proceeding in the front apartment. At the biggest table sat a dozen Chinese men- about-town, very dignified as to dress, for they wore the long, silk tunic of ravishing neutral tint which is dress coat and a frock coat both to a Chinese gentleman. With each man sat his woman ce Mp1 asauiy v fo aruvjquias D oJUut pamsof{supsy asautyD ayy ° * * 4oIaqsip sry ,, ‘OS]D a4ayz UO quan Kajsnpur qainb pun samoy fo afi pvas Pp “LHAaULS LNOdNd NO THE SWEETMEAT STAND. . . . Flashed out a group, an arrangement, which suggested the Flemish masters.” ‘e OLD CHINATOWN 29: —not at the table, but just behind, so that she had to reach caressingly over his shoulder to get at the hundred viands in their toy porcelain bowls. When her lord’s appetite failed, she fed him with her plaything hands; when he wanted a cigarette, she lighted it for him between her own rouged lips. One of these women, I remember, had a homely, irregular face, with a broad mouth, but with an illumination and expression in her features exceptional among Chinese women—they tend to the brainless, doll type. A soubrette sauci- ness showed in her every gesture, but you felt that it was a measured impudence which knew its con- venient bounds. Musicians, squatted on a woven straw couch in the corner, were tormenting a moon fiddle, a sam yin and a gong. In the rests of that sound, which I shall not call music, she would Jean forward and throw out a remark; and the company, already a little gone with rice brandy, would laugh mightily. Presently, the feast having reached the stage when food is less to the feaster than drink, they began to play “one-two.” I must explain that game, so simple and so appealing to the convivial. 30 OLD CHINATOWN You challenge a partner. If he accepts, you throw out from your closed hand any number of fingers from one to four and call off in a loud tone of voice the. proper number of fingers. He throws out the same number of fingers and calls the num- ber after you. But at last you call out, craft- ily, any one number, and throw out a different number of fingers. And if, by calling that num- ber after you, he shows that he has failed to watch your hand, he has lost; and he must drink a cup of rice brandy as a forfeit. He who first becomes drunk is “it.” It goes faster and faster, until all the table is playing it in pairs. “Sam!” “Sam!” “See!” > ““Seel". ~- “Weel: 222 F Gri. seen “Sam!? Then a howl of Oriental laughter, more crackling and subdued than ours; for the propo- nent, on “Sam” (three) has thrown forward only two fingers, and the opponent, falling into the trap, has thrown out three. So he is caught, and down his throat goes the forfeit. | And as they drank and played, and played and drank, something deep below the surface came out in them. Their shouts became squalls; lips drew THE LILY-FOOT WOMAN. “ Swaying with that gentle motion which marks the Chinese lady from her common sister.’ eae FORMAL DRESS. A woman in softly gaudy robes.’ , Hae 4 OLD CHINATOWN 31 back from teeth, beady little eyes blazed; their very cheek bones seemed to rise higher on their faces. I thought as I watched of wars of the past; these were not refined Cantonese, with a surface gentility and grace in life greater than anything that our masses know; they were those old yellow people with whom our fathers fought before the Caucusus was set as a boundary between the dark race and the light; the hordes of Ghengis Khan; the looters of Atilla. The “its” fell out one by one, retired with some dignity to the straw couch and to sleep. She of the saucy, illuminated face crept close to her lord and whispered in his ear—she, like all her kind, was taking the moment of intoxication to ply her business; and the debauch was nearly over. Only when I was out on the street, and purged somewhat from the impression of Tartar fierceness which that game of “one-two” had given me, did this come into my mind: there had been not one un- seemly or unlovely act in all that debauch of young bloods and soiled women, not one over-familiar gesture. Tartar though they had shown them- 32 OLD CHINATOWN selves, they had remained still Chinese gentlemen and—may I say it of women in their class/— Chinese ladies. | _ These pretty and painted playthings of men furnished a glimpse into Frank Norris’s Third Circle, the underworld. We shall never quite un- derstand the Chinese, I suppose; and not the least comprehensible thing about them is the paradox of their ideas and emotions. On the anomalies of Chinese courage, for example, one might write a whole treatise. A Chinese pursued by a mob never fights back. He lies down and takes his beat- ing with his lips closed. If he is able to walk when it is done, he moves away with a fine, gentlemanly scorn for his tormentors. To take another in- stance; at Steveston, in the mouth of the Frazer River, the white and Indian fisherman struck. The owners, supported by the Canadian militia, decided to man the boats with Oriental cannery laborers. The Japanese jumped at the chance. The Chinese, to a man, refused to go out on the river. They were afraid of it. Yet a Chinese merchant condemned to death by the highbinders, aware that the stroke may come at any time from Juapiza fo yID] AOL ,, payvAauoxa pup “K]yJuou papws svar yorym asnoy suyquios 31q V—aI1;0d ay} 07 s4aQ2auU puv—~asauty) ayy 07 pajouap Sudajun] asay ] «ANOL AIVH WIG NI SAVMUOOT ;, Mpyjuowm *U020} bury 07 wunido jo saavjs Kaqqvy ‘Surgaasr ISIY} IAIN OS “KIUNUIMOD UDIIdM Py UD 02 SpADYUNApP UhdL0Z ay} Sp «ANAUIT dOH, AHL OLD CHINATOWN 33 any alley, walks his accustomed way through the streets without looking to right or left. So it goes, all through their characters. Nothing fits our rules. By the same token, underneath their essential courtesy, fruit of an old civilization, underneath their absolute commercial honor, underneath their artistic appreciation of the grace in life, runs a hard, wild streak of barbarism, an insensibility in cruelty, which, when roused, is as cold-blooded and unlovely a thing as we know. Chinatown, the Tenderloin for all the Western Chinese, lived not only by tea and rice and overalls and cigars and tourists, but also by the ministry to dissipation. It had gathered to itself the tough citizens, and especially the gamblers. Gambling is a darling sin to all the race; take his fan-tan counters and his pie-gow blocks away, and he will bet on the number of. seeds in an uncut orange. With most, it is a mere diversion. Your efficient, quiet houseboy, no more trouble about the place than a well ordered cat, will go into Chinatown on Saturday night, have his little whirl at fan- tan, smoke, perhaps, his one pipe of opium, and 34 OLD CHINATOWN return in the morning none the worse for his social diversion. Others get the passion of it into their blood. One hears continually of this or that Chinese laborer, who, having saved for fif- teen years to go back to China and live on his in- come, has dropped into a fan-tan house on the eve of his departure, lost his whole pile in one night, and returned, with a great surface indifference, to begin a life of service over again. Fat and power- ful waxed the keepers of gambling houses. ‘They came to be controlling factors in the vicious side - of Chinatown; and they gathered under them all the priests of vice into one alliance of crime and graft. ‘Those who traded in slave girls, those who ran the cheap, internicine politics of the ward, those who lived by blackmail, and especially those gen- tlemen of fortune known as_ highbinders, whose reason for being was paid murder, lived and moved in the shadow of the gambling game. In the age of public exposés, we have discovered that the powers which we pay to keep order and virtue among us and the powers which minister to: our dissipation have a mysterious affinity—that the policeman is constitutionally apt to unite himself KIN. ARD 5 4 THE LEOP “LAMUVW ONINYOW AHL OLD CHINATOWN 35. in a business way with those who live by vice. In this development of civilization we are as children beside the Chinese; and out of this situation grew the highbinders, adventurers in crime. [Tor they were not only criminals; they were formal and rec- ognized agents of justice. Crime and punishment had become tangled and involved beyond any power of ours to separate them and straighten them out. The constituted police of San Francisco struggled with this paradox for a generation long; and, finally, perceiving that the Chinese would settle their own affairs in their own way, gave it up and let the thing go. They kept only such interest in the Quarter—these Caucasian police—as would per- mit them to gather that rich graft which made a Chinatown beat a step toward fortune. Before I go on with the Highbinder Tongs, of which no white man knows too much, I must ex- plain that the Chinese have a positive talent for organization. They do everything, from running a store to keeping up public worship, by companies. Your insignificant Chinese shop-keeper may belong to a half dozen tight, oath-bound organizations— social, religious, financial, protective. In the early 36 OLD CHINATOWN seventies of the last century, certain organizations known to the whites as “Chinese Masons” began to attract journalistic attention. So, at about the same time, did certain mysterious and unavenged Chinese murders. These Masons and these mur- ders, closely connected beyond a doubt, were the first public manifestation of the Highbinders. Some of these societies, the Chinese say, are off- shoots from the old Triad Society, responsible for the Tai-Ping Rebellion and later for the Boxer trouble; some of them are legitimate social organi- zations, degenerated and gone wrong. ‘Through vicissitudes of which the best-informed Chinatown detective knows only the shadows, they settled down into five or six unions of toughs and paid thugs, the hatchets and revolvers of their members always at disposal of any Chinese who wanted revenge or sued for justice. Blackest and toughest of all, perhaps, were—and are—the Bow Ons, who com- bined blackmail with their murder; but they were all black enough. For dead and wounded, their lists must read like the roster of a Civil War regi- ment. I wonder if I can convey the process by which, Saousnl sof pans 40 asuanads pajuvm oy t asaury Kuno fo qyosodsip yw skvnyv saaquam arayz Jo s4aajoaas pun syayoqny ayy ‘sdnyi pwd puv sysnoz fo suo1un x18 40 aang ,, ‘NOILVNV100Ud ONOL FHL Mey om oe i etic | BEFORE THE BIG JOSS HOUSE. “They built in the eternal painted balconies of which the naman ts as fond as the Spaniard.” Chi- OLD CHINATOWN 37 in this transplanted Orient, assassins combined with justice to keep social order? Be it known that the Chinese has the most haughty contempt for our law. He seldom appeals to it; when he does, look out for some deeper plot. Perhaps he is not wholly in error; he has perceived how easily a clever lawyer can beat American courts. Aloof from our laws, then, and still apart from the laws of the Orient, these perpetual foreigners had to create some system of justice and punishment among themselves. Of this justice and punishment, the Highbinders, criminals themselves, are also the ex- ecutioners. Suppose, then, that you are Wong Kip, Chinese merchant, and that one steals from you or commits the fearful crime of repudiating a just debt. You do not bother with the American courts. If the thing is bad enough to warrant the trouble, you or your Tong-man negotiate with a Bow on or Suey Sing Highbinder. For a sum varying according to your needs and resources, the hired assassin gets out his gun. One night, the man who has injured you walks fair and straight through the streets of Chinatown; 38 OLD CHINATOWN and a shadow falls in behind him. The shadow glances right and left to make sure that no white person is watching. The Chinese spectators—they do not matter. The shadow walks with his hands tucked, muff fashion, in his long sleeves. They two, avenger and victim paired, reach a dark spot by awning or alley. The shadow creeps up close; his hands fly suddenly apart; a revoiver goes off; the sacrifice to justice crumples up on the pave- ment. The murderer, with the motion of a quarter-. back passing the ball, tosses the revolver to another Chinese; it goes on from hand to hand. When the police come at last, the murderer is chattering with the crowd about the body, and that revolver lies in an entrance a half a block away. Twenty Chinese saw it done and know who did it. Will they testify to it in court? Not as they value their lives—not even if they are brothers of the dead. Only—and here comes the imperfection in jus- tice of this kind—the brothers and tong comrades . of the executed felon often question the verdict and take an appeal. Hiring a highbinder from another tong, they mark the man who put the wheels of justice into motion—or one of his tong; it is SHE Vil oe RLEOREN © BY NIGHT: All who have followed a guide through Chinatown will remember this show-place. The quarters which tourists paid to “ see the hop fiends”’ kept it going for years, in spite of the Health Board. OLD CHINATOWN 39 nearly the same thing—and hold an execution on their own account. This may lead to more re- prisals and still more, an endless chain. Such is the highbinder situation in one of its simplicities. But the further you follow it the more complex it becomes. In the first place, these Chi- nese toughs, like white toughs, grow restive under peace. When no employment offers, they start trouble among themselves. ‘The Bow Ons and the Suey Sings were eternally straining each at the other. An insult, a quarrel over fan-tan or the price of a slave girl, might set off the mine. There might, too, be a real grievance. It might be a mis- tress that had deserted her Bow On lover and taken up with a Suey Sing. Here, as elsewhere, women played ducks and drakes with the affairs of men. The offended Suey Sing man would slaughter a Bow On. Not of necessity the offending Bow On; anyone would do who wore the hated badge. The Bow Ons, touched in their soldier pride, would even up the score; the Suey Sings would dispute that the ~ score was even and pick off another Bow On; and the war would begin. Where were our police all this time? “Baffled.” The Chinese took care of 40 OLD CHINATOWN that. The blue devils who jumped from the noisy wagon would arrest the “suspicious loiterers’” whom they found about the corpse, keep them awhile, and let them go for lack of evidence. The police of the little New York Chinatown had the same trouble when they tried—and failed—to control the late war of the On Leongs and the Hip Sings. This war cost a dozen lives at least; it brought not a single conviction. A few Chinese have been hanged in California for highbinder murders. In every case there remains a dreadful suspicion that we hanged the wrong man, his life sworn away for some dark purpose of the Chinese. Further to complicate the mess, these highbinders had a way of playing foul with their own clients. Constitutional blackmailers, they lived, between wars, on the terror which their name inspired. An order for an assassination might always be turned into blackmail money. ‘The executioner would ap- proach his marked man with a polite, Oriental trans- lation of “Dilly, Dilly, come here and be killed.” When the condemned felon had pleaded enough, the executioner would promise to let him go upon payment of a weekly fine. The poor actors in the THE PALACE HOTEE.” An angle of “ The Devil’s Kitchen’’--the most dilapidated hole in Chinatown and * a constant reproach to the Board of Health. OLD CHINATOWN 41 two theaters, men of no standing whatsoever among their countrymen, suffered terribly from this highbinder game. ‘The slave girls were always falling in love with actors and finding ways to meet them. This offense, in the law of custom, meant death for the actor. The highbinders watched these little games, got evidence, and, by threats of reporting to the legitimate owners of the girls, kept the actors penniless. A highbinder war tended to go on and ever on. It ended, usually, in a general adjustment brought about by intervention of the Six Companies. Once, a war got beyond all power of this supreme Chinese tribunal in the Occident, and came to trouble the Imperial Master in Peking. The See Yups represent the laboring class, the “unions,” in Chinatown, and the Sam Yups the capitalists. In the early nineties, disputes about the price of labor grew into a general strike of all the shoe, overall and cigar operatives. When the strike reached that stage when Occidental strikers begin to picket and ~ to loosen entertainment committees, one side or the other called in the highbinders. So wide were the interests involved, so bitter were both the Sams and A2 OLD CHINATOWN Sees, that this became a general war, with weekly murders in sheaves of twos and threes. It lasted a year, it sent Chinese merchants into bankruptcy by the score, and it paralyzed all industries except the tourist trade. Its Gettysburg, its Marengo, came when the highbinders lined up in opposite doorways of Ross Alley, the narrow, overhung street of the gamblers, and fought until the police reserves charged in between. At about the same critical period in this war, the See Yups bagged a general. “Little Pete,” Chinese millionaire, gambler and man of affairs, had been lord of that little parish. A mere coolie in the beginning, he had the golden touch; he made everything pay. He formed a kind of gambling trust in the Quarter, and went out after the Cau- casian racing game. He had played at Chinese gambling like Riley Grannan—cold, calculating, without excitement, making the real gambler pay. Just so he played the races, until he had mastered that game and was ready to corrupt it—if it were possible to corrupt Californian racing. Only when a great scandal broke out in the affairs of the California Jockey Club did the whites discover « THE NEW “TOY, “But always beautiful—falling everywhere into pictures. +3 ‘ > . P ‘ Fy I Z ints # ? * r é ’ , . A —~ ‘ ie, ’ 3 * Mes , Q 2 ? . — € y 2 . . 2 . ’ . 4 ; . - ' vee > ‘ 2 - pr ca ! . 7 a Pra ' . - . ‘sys Ur qydiug 110 ‘sar1gog suyqung ce ‘BUlgva Ypir pdwosso)g UuojyI0IS PUD UopsUrysD pun quodnq ‘sjaasjs asoyz ur Kop dy} 2)D JO ANOY 48344314Q 342 SBM BOY L ,, ‘MNOH S.NAUAATIHO AHL OLD CHINATOWN AB that a system of pulling horses and permitting “long shots” to win, a system which had been sus- pected for some time, was conceived and conducted solely by “Little Pete.” Little Pete was a Sam Yup. The See Yups, whose paid highbinders were running behind the score, put a heavy price on the head of this promi- nent citizen. He sat one afternoon in a barber’s chair, having his ears scraped. Two bullets, fired through the open door, caught him in the back and finished him. His funeral was the greatest public ceremonial that Chinatown ever saw. Echoes from its gongs reached the Chinese Empire. The Consul General got orders to make this foolishness stop. He failed; the war, the state of bankruptcy, went on. The Minister removed him. Hs successor had no more luck. Finally, the minister put in Ho Yow, Ox- ford graduate, brother-in-law of Wu Ting Fang, member of a progressive family, a man who under- stood the whites and the Chinese alike. Ho Yow studied the situation and sent represen- tations to China. Suddenly, in scattered districts of Canton, certainly innocent persons found them- Ad OLD CHINATOWN selves under arrest. These were the _ relatives, even to the third degree, of the men respon- sible for this war in San Francisco. He served notice on See Yups and Sam Yups alike that any more murders in Chinatown would be avenged upon the persons of these Cantonese relatives. This ended the war with a bang; before the Consul General and the Six Companies, capital and labor made peace. This heroic measure discouraged, temporarily, the highbinder industry. The threat of arrests in China, shaken at the Tongs, has more than once been a restorative of order. The underground passages of Chinatown have appealed mightily to the imagination of melo- dramatists, authors of sensational tales, writers of specials for the Eastern press, and others who guide and stimulate the popular imagination. A|- though some declare them a myth, those passage- ways of the Third Circle really did exist at one time. Their end antedated the great fire. In the late nineties, a Board of Health, appointed by the last honest municipal government which the old city knew, forestalled epidemics by going through the Quarter with warrant and deputy. Against MATGCCAd ATAVLAUOAA AHL OLD CHINATOWN AS the diplomacies and concealments of the Chinese, the inspectors closed up cellar after cellar, filled in passage after passage. A few, effectually hid- den from that Board of Health or restored under the venal Schmitz administration, remained to the end. Still those who knew old Chinatown mar- veled, when they looked into the gaping cellars left by the fire, to see how little of this mole-work re- mained.: | - So wide was this maze, in earlier days, that a Chinese who knew his way might travel by it from almost any point in Chinatown to almost any other. A reporter who held the confidence of the Chinese has told me how he subnavigated the quarter during the quarantine of 1901. The Federal doctors, sus- pecting bubonic plague, had drawn a line tight about Chinatown; and, since Federal and not mu- nicipal authorities were doing this thing, the pro- hibition against passing the lines was absolute, even.to “gentlemen of the press.” A Chinaman, caught outside himself, said to this reporter: “I take you.” They entered the little den of a white cobbler in California street. The cobbler, after a whispered exchange of words, 46 OLD CHINATOWN opened a trap door under his counter. The Chinese guide, crouching in the shadow, lighted a red paper lantern; and down a ten-foot ladder they went. The rest was a bewilderment of knife-edge passage- ways, stopes, ladders; sudden encounters with closed doors, from behind which came murmers of a | mysterious life within; glimpses, through the terrific glooms, of other pedestrians in those underground streets. Once, they passed through a mouldy lodg- ing house, its walls dripping with exhalations of the earth, its day-shift of inmates peering out at them — in affright; once they came upon a latticed window, strangely futile in this unlighted world, through which the reporter saw slatternly women working with something on the floor—doubtless they were, rolling, for warmed-over consumption, the scrap- ings of opium pipes. Once, he thought he heard the sound of moaning. Rumors of plague were in the air. It came to him that this might be some one sick unto death with it. The sense of darkness and confinement made the thought of contagion by Black Death doubly terrible; it was as though he were shut in a dungeon alone with a spectre. They came at last square up against a rough “HE B’LONG ME!” * A Chinese father would soften if you stopped to pay court to the baby in his arms.” OLD CHINATOWN 47 wooden wall. The guide fumbled and scratched; a panel slid back as though Mrs. Radcliffe had im- agined it. A drop of three feet brought them intc a cellar; from there they walked out of a Chinese grocery store into the full daylight of the Quarter. When the reporter had looked about to his satis- faction, the guide said: “You go back notha’ way.” Starting from a lodging house next door to the grocery, they traversed more drops and rises, dark passages, hidden apartments, and came out in a cellar of the Latin quarter. They had walked all the way under Chinatown. Another man has told me how he rambled through some of these passages with a Chinese ac- quaintance—this was a mere visit of curiosity. When, bewildered and utterly lost, he declared that he had enough of foul air and suggestion of horri- ble mystery, his guide mounted a ladder and scratched at a trap door. It opened; and they were in the kitchen of the Jackson street Chinese Thea- tre, with the gongs of a Chinese orchestra clang- ing on the stage above their heads. The exchange of opium, smuggled in from Pacific ships by bay pirates; the heartless slave 48 OLD CHINATOWN trade; the preparation of bodies for convenient re- turn to their ancestral grave mounds; the hidden revenges of the Highbinders—all went on in these catacombs, twenty feet below the pavement of Du- pont and Washington. What tragedies their earthen walls must have witnessed, what comedies, what horror stories, what melodramas! ‘There it was, below everything; the Third Circle whose cir- cumference was darkness and whose centre death. Doubtless I am following here the newspaper fashion and dwelling too much upon this criminal aspect of the Quarter. If so, it is because the crime was so picturesque, because it expressed so clearly the difference of this civilization from its parent Orient and its adopted Occident. I am not quite done with it, either, for I must speak of the slave trade. The world knows from Christian missionaries how little the careless and criminal, among the Chinese at home, value a girl baby. The sale of such children is an established custom—born of the low esteem in which women are held and of the ter- rible Chinese famines. Those Californian Chi- nese, who were degraded enough to stoop to such cc OSUIS 44D UdOQUuI 41947 ssaaguva hayz yoy wr afr) uowwmoa Jo spisuayn asauiyy ay Tt ,, ‘SUYMNIL AHL OLD CHINATOWN 49 things, sold these babies into pure shame and the ruin of souls. So small was the supply, owing to the difficulty of smuggling women past Federal in- spection, that prices were high; it paid a coolie woman to bear female children. : Mn Pe Wee Pei ate ahi “dye eei (Hissar : 45) etal ae Fateh uae be ae y a * yf ire Sate sintet et le ssid ne a 7 a cn = spose Ree ees aye ; a4} ere ode * = y, Ma - Woe ahre 4 (co or es * io ;, Lug a aged os Rts Matitascinte wleetge se el eienepar ts Roe} este z icy M4