What is the history behind San Francisco's Chinatown?

Why it matters

San Francisco's Chinatown is the oldest Chinatown in North America and one of the largest Chinese communities outside Asia. Beginning in the eighteen-fifties, immigrants from the villages of the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong came to San Francisco, drawn first by the Gold Rush and later by work on the first transcontinental railroad, and many settled here partly for refuge from the hostility they met elsewhere in the West.

The neighborhood has kept its own customs, languages, temples, family associations and newspapers ever since. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, known as the Chinese Six Companies, has its headquarters here. It is the umbrella for the district's family and regional associations, and it seeded similar bodies in other Chinatowns across the American West.

Chinatown draws more visitors in a year than the Golden Gate Bridge, yet it is also a living neighborhood, and a crowded one. The city's planning department calls it the most densely populated urban area west of Manhattan, and many residents are elderly and speak Cantonese or other Chinese languages rather than English. A visit is richer for remembering that.

A history of exclusion and survival

Chinatown's history is bound up closely with the laws aimed at its people. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first American immigration law to target a single ethnic group, and for decades Chinese arrivals were held and interrogated at the immigration station on Angel Island, often for months at a time.

In 1900, when a Chinatown resident died of bubonic plague, city health officials quarantined the whole district and ordered its property burned and fumigated. That treatment continued until a federal court intervened and stopped the city from sealing the neighborhood off from the rest of San Francisco, a ruling that let residents and merchants return to ordinary life.

The 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed Chinatown completely, and city officials and developers saw in the ruins a chance to move its residents to the southern edge of the city, away from the business district they coveted. The community refused to go, and its merchants began rebuilding within weeks of the disaster.

They built first in wood, then in brick salvaged from the fire, and by the Chinese New Year of 1907 several dozen buildings were finished. Of the roughly thirty thousand people who had lived in Chinatown before the earthquake, about five thousand had returned by the end of that year.

The rebuilt district

The Chinatown a visitor walks through today is largely that rebuilding. A group of Chinese merchants, including Look Tin Eli, hired American architects to design in a deliberately "Oriental" style, with pagoda roofs, upturned eaves and bright colors, meant to bring visitors back to a district officials had wanted gone.

The pagoda-topped Sing Chong and Sing Fat buildings, on the corners of Grant Avenue and California Street, are the best-known result of that choice. It turned the exoticism once used against Chinatown into a reason for outsiders to visit, a canny answer to officials who had wanted the district gone altogether.

Older than any of it is Old St. Mary's, a Gothic Revival church of red brick built in 1854 at California Street and Grant Avenue. It survived the 1906 earthquake itself only to be gutted by the fires that followed a day later, and was rebuilt inside its original walls.

The Tin How Temple on Waverly Place, dedicated to the Queen of Heaven, traces its founding back to the early 1850s and is counted the oldest Chinese temple in the United States. It has occupied the top floor of a four-story building on that same narrow alley since 1910, unchanged in its position for more than a century.

What you see

Most visitors enter Chinatown through the Dragon Gate at Grant Avenue and Bush Street, a gate built in the style of a traditional Chinese pailou and given to the city by the Republic of China in 1969. It marks the start of Grant Avenue, the district's best-known and most visited street, rather than any older boundary of the neighborhood.

Beyond it, Grant Avenue climbs gently north under strings of lanterns and past shop after shop selling tea, porcelain, silk and souvenirs. The dragon street lamps that line the curb were first paid for by the community in 1925 and remain part of the street's everyday decoration, as familiar to regulars as to first-time visitors.

One block west, Stockton Street is where the neighborhood actually shops: crowded sidewalks, produce and live fish markets, bakeries and roast-meat counters, with signs mostly in Chinese rather than English. The narrow alleys between the two streets are worth wandering, especially Waverly Place, lined with painted association balconies overlooking the street below.

Portsmouth Square, on Kearny Street, is the district's living room, busy through the day with men playing Chinese chess and, early in the morning, with residents practicing tai chi. It also holds a bronze replica of the Goddess of Democracy, the statue raised during the Tiananmen Square protests, a quieter corner worth a slow walk-through.

How to visit

Chinatown is a few minutes' walk from Union Square: walk up Grant Avenue from Bush Street, or ride the California Street cable car, which crosses Grant at Old St. Mary's. The streets rise gently from Kearny toward Powell and steeply toward the top of the hill; see the hills page for the gradients.

Two or three hours, including a meal, makes a good visit to Chinatown, and nothing in the district needs booking ahead of time. Mornings are the liveliest time on Stockton Street, when the markets are at their busiest and the neighborhood is going about its own day rather than performing for visitors.

The temples and the association buildings are places of worship and community, not visitor attractions, even where their doors stand open. If you go inside, be quiet, follow any posted rules and ask before taking photographs of the altars or the people praying. For dim sum and the neighborhood's bakeries, see eating and drinking.

The Chinese New Year Festival and Parade, first organized in the 1950s, is Chinatown's biggest event of the year, and the Autumn Moon Festival in mid-September fills Grant Avenue with stalls, performances and mooncakes. Either festival is worth planning a visit around, since both change the street's usual rhythm for a day or two.

Myths and facts

Chinatown's pagodas and dragon-roofed corners are not centuries old, however they look to a first-time visitor. They were designed after the 1906 earthquake, largely by American architects working for Chinese merchants, to make the rebuilt district appealing to visitors rather than to preserve any older architectural style that had stood there before the fire.

The Dragon Gate at Grant Avenue and Bush Street is younger still, a gift from the Republic of China in 1969 rather than a relic of the district's founding in the Gold Rush years. It marks a ceremonial entrance to Grant Avenue, not an ancient boundary of the neighborhood itself.

Grant Avenue, with its lanterns and souvenir shops, is not the whole of Chinatown. The district's daily life happens a block away, on Stockton Street and in the alleys behind it, among markets and signs that most visitors never see on a short walk through the gate at Bush Street.