WHAT'S NEW
10/27/09. A spectacular discovery: Opium pipe bowls from the famed kilns of Yixing and Shiwan, found in the Pacific Northwest, Before now, Yixing pipe bowls have not been identified in North America. Shiwan pipe bowls may not have been identified anywhere.
10/28/09. Shootout at Sedro-Woolley. The tragicomic story of two
sets of customs agents, both chasing the same prize. In 1891.
11/14/09. The most beautiful Chinese cemetery in North America?
In Victoria BC.
11/16/09. The biggest opium making center outside Asia. Also in Victoria BC.
The story of Suzy Ying Kao
12/21/09. The opium addicts of Albany, NY: In 1880, a (Caucasian) addiction rate as bad as China!
01/09/10. The high Chinese suicide rate in Washington State, 1891-1907. A major historical problem? Also see Causes of Chinese Deaths in Washington: tuberculosis as well as suicide.
01/25/10. The oldest surviving Chinese temple in North America is not in San Francisco!
The purpose of this site and of CINARC is to encourage
collaboration in exploring the history of Chinese in the Pacific
Northwest - in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, British Columbia,
Alaska, etc. - between the first known arrival of Chinese in
1788 and the great changes in the regional Chinese
population that followed the liberalizing of U.S. immigration
laws in 1965.
Launching the ship built by the first Chinese in the Northwest, 1788
CINARC
金山西北角 -华裔研究中心
Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee
HISTORICAL CHINESE-AMERICAN TOPICS
Comments on a recent news article about the remedies preserved in the Kam Wah Chung Museum
plus new information from the account books of a merchant and labor contractor, Chin Gee Hee
a. An early herbal doctor in John Day, Oregon, ca. 1890-1930
Includes cures for shingles, toothache, swollen feet, and belly button wind c. Dr. Lamb in Butte (and Dr. Ah Fong in Boise), ca. 1870-1920 [Updated 3/24/09]
Chop Suey 杂碎
This famous food forms an important, though not always admired, part of American culinary history.
New research shows that it was invented in New York and that it came late to the Northwest.
Historians often have trouble identifying American place names in early Chinese-language writings.
This section is offered as an aid to researchers, here and in China. [Updated 12/16/09]
This will eventually include most of the U.S. and Canadian organizations that specialize in Chinese-
North American history.
A good many Chinese sailors and skilled craftsmen worked for British traders on the west coast
of Vancouver in the late 18th century. The traders were collecting sea otter furs for sale in China.
(Chinese sailors visited the East Coast even earlier, in 1785)Smuggling Chinese Immigrants 非法入境
For many decades, the border between British Columbia and Washington State saw intense smuggling
activity as well as spasmodic efforts to enforce immigration laws. Here we present outstanding episodes
in the long, sometimes comic and sometimes tragic war between coast guards and border patrolmen
on the one hand and smugglers on the other. While modern immigrant smugglers often belong to the
ethnic group being smuggled, in the historic Northwest they were mostly European-Americans - sailors,
fishermen, farmers, police, immigration officials, and just about any other sort of white citizen who had
access to a boat or lived near a cross-border trail..
a. Ralph's trailblazing investigation of immigrant smuggling, 1890 [Updated 3/11/09]
b. Annals of Northwestern smuggling 1: by sea [Latest entry: 4/7/09]
d. Joking about the murder of smuggled Chinese at Deception Pass [Posted 2/12/09]
Fishing and Fish Processing
For the newest features, click on What's New. For info on (1) the CINARC logo and (2) rows of boxes in the text, click on the bottom of this page]
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Why Chinese in the Early Pacific Northwest Died 亡命天涯
Historians agree that there were many deaths among Chinese sojourners in the Northwest duringthe 19th and early 20th centuries. However, we have little aggregated information about how manydied, and why. The provincial archives preserved in Victoria, B.C., provide more complete data on earlyChinese mortality than do records in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, or Alaska. If so, you're not carrying out the principles of unionism" This quote from a 1906 union newspaper
shows that the hostility of organized labor toward Chinese in Seattle even included laundries. [3/11/09]
A New Find: a Previously Unreported 19th Century Chinese Secret Society Manual -- in Clinton. B.C. 加拿大卑斯省天地会会簿
The woodblock-printed manual, in color and dated to 1892, bears the name of the Heaven and Earth Society or Tiandihui. The Society opposed the alien Manchu dynasty that ruled China and thus had to
stay underground. In British Columbia, however, daughter organizations could come into the open and
played an important social role. The visit by an Imperial Commission led by an actual prince, Tsai Tseh (or Tai Ze), improved relationsbetween European-American and Chinese-American leaders. The commissioners were the highest-ranking Chinese to visit Seattle until after World War II. [Updated 7/22/09]The Prince arrived on the Great Northern Railroad's steamship Dakota, then one of the two largest shipson the Pacific. As with its sister ship, the SS Minnesota, many sailors on the SS Dakota were Chinese.[03/01/09]temple in Marysville! [NEW 01/25/10] A fire damaged much of the temple in the 1990s, but some of its most important antique furnishings survived, including several censers, a bell, and inscribed boards, all of which bear dates (In imperial reign years) that prove the temple already existed in the 19th century. [11/30/08]
One of the finest shrines in Nortjh America features splendid calligraphy by notable persons back in China [NEW 12/14/09] Inscriptions by the great Wu Ting Fan and others at an important center of Daoist worship [NEW 01/26/10]It turns out that a once-notorious detention center for Asian immigrants in Seattle still survives -- as amini-storage facility about a mile north of the city's central waterfront. The editors visited it in thecompany of historian John R. Litz, who rediscovered it recently through archival detective work. [1/15/09]In the late nineteenth century, Canada ran one of the nastiest prisons on the continent for Chinese awaiting deportation and for clarification of immigration status. Neither the U.S. nor Canada kept convicted murderers under worse conditions. [Updated 6/20/09]Port Townsend's fine but doomed detention house 华盛顿州砵党顺华人拘留所
Compared with the one in Victoria, Port Townsend's facility for housing would-be Chinese immigrantssounds relatively humane. Unfortunately, it would soon be closed due to the clout of Seattle and theGreat Northern Railroad. [Updated 4/16/09]Ben Ure, famed smuggler and leading citizen of Whidby Island, is reputed to have routinely drowned his illegal Chinese passengers to avoid detection by the Customs Service. Local folklore treats this as
amusing. We think it is not. [02/12/09]
The dragon's well-preserved remains, no longer in working condition, have been found at the Bok Kai Temple in Marysville, CA. It is the largest and most important surviving Asian artifact from the AYPE.[02/16/09]
The CINARC logo consists of the character for "gold (jin in Mandarin; gum in Cantonese), as written by a famous Tang Dynasty calligrapher, over an image of Mt. Rainier. just south of Seattle. "Gold Mountain" is what the Chinese still call San Francisco and formerly called the entire west coast of the U.S.
Rows of small squares like this -- -- in the text are actually Chinese characters in Microsoft's widely used Unicode format. To see them as readable characters, you might like to activate the Chinese fonts that come with Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS 9 and higher.
Imperial Jugglers, Magicians, and Acrobats [Updated 5/16/09]
A Swede from Butte compares China Day and Japan Day [Posted 2/15/09]
Japan vs. China: Judge Burke takes sides [Updated 7/7/09]
The genetics of World Fairs: Rev Fung Chak and family 冯牧师家族万国博览会结缘 [Posted 3/31/09]
Were there two or three official Philippine exhibits? (with AYPE Asian exhibit map) [Updated 3/6/09]
Igorot attitudes toward the AYPE [Posted 2/24/09]
Names of Igorots at the AYP Exposition [Posted 2/24/09]
"Igorrote terrifies housewives near Fair" [Posted 2/26/09]
Should Seattle Apologize to the Igorots? [Posted 7/6/09]
More pictures of named Igorots at the AYP Exposition [Posted 7/7/09]
More paranoia: The alleged Japanese "tea plantation" on the Strait of Juan de Fuca in 1908 [Posted 7/27/09]
Seattle's Japanese give the U.S. president a sword-guard vase [Posted 3/21/09]
Ando, Suzuki, &Yamaha: at the AYPE and still active in 2009 安藤 鈴木, 雅马哈老字号 [Posted 3/21/09]
President Taft accepts a "pretentious" cloisonne vase from Japan 美国总统受大礼 [Posted 4/1/09]
Rival businessmen unite to support the Streets of Tokio [Posted 4/26/09]
Japan and Japanese-Americans ラスカ・ユーコン 太平洋博覧会
In the Northwest, Japanese outnumbered Chinese by 1909, although racist persecution was
growing despite protection by the Japanese government. That government mounted a major
official exhibit at the AYPE. But local Japanese-Americans produced their own exhibit anyway.
Philippines
Very few Filipinos lived in the region at the time of the AYPE. The exhibits, which included living
Filipinos, were produced by and for European-Americans.
China and Chinese-Americans
The Chinese population of the Pacific Northwest had fallen sharply since the anti-Chinese riots
of the mid-1880s. China, unable to protect local Chinese, did not take part in the AYPE. And
yet those local Chinese, with surprising confidence, chose to mount a China exhibit of their own.
The AYP Exposition and Other Fairs
The AYPE was not the first world fair for U.S.-resident Asians. They had joined such fairs
since 1893. The fairs played a central role in the growth of new Asian-American identities
Asian-Pacific Women and the AYPE
Women's suffrage was a big theme at the Fair, and Washington women won the right to vote in the next
year, 1910. However, as shown by images of Asian-Pacific women at the Fair, sexism was hardly dead
Based largely on work with primary sources, the AYPE page of this website contains much as-yet
unpublished data about Asian- (Chinese-, Japanese-, Filipino-) American participation in the AYPE.
The AYPE is compared with other American world fairs with Asian exhibits, especially the World's
Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) and the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland (1905).
ラスカ・ユーコン 太平洋博覧会会議
The editors of CINARC organized a 2-day symposium to examine the roles of Chinese, Japanese,Filipinos, and Hawaiians in the AYPE. The symposium was attended by 101 persons at twoSeattle venues - the National Archives and Records Administration (9/12) and the Burke Museum ofNatural History and Culture (9/13). Partial funding came from 4Culture of King County.
舍路保皇会注册文件
As it turned out, China needed revolution, not reformation. Before that, however, the Baohuanghui, thePreserve-the-Emperor Association, offered new status to U.S. and Canadian Chinese [Updated 7/30/09]落叶不归根 : 抓李抓嚹早期华人墓地
At least in Walla Walla, Washington, persons buried in the 1920s and 1930s often stayed thererather than being exhumed and shipped back to their home towns in southern China [07/02/09]The home belonged to a wealthy Japanese-American, Masajiro Furuya. It served as a summer resort formany Seattle Japanese and as a private agricultural experiment station [07/15/09]Amazingly, some of the trees Furuya imported and planted still survive. They include spectacular Japanese cypresses [07/19/09]
OPIUM 鸦片烟
The drug played an important role in the lives and budgets of North American Chinese during the 19thcentury. For some modern Chinese-Americans it is a closed, forbidden subject. We think it is time that the subject be opened up. Producing and selling opium 煮烟 Smuggling opium, 1880-1920 走私 Using opium 吸烟 Coming soon: Opium pipe bowls 烟斗excavated in North America, from the famous kilns of Yixing 宜兴(Jiangsu province), Qinzhou 钦州(Guangxi province), and Shiwan/ Shekwan 石湾 (Guangdong province), as used by Chinese immigrants in the U.S. and Canada, We believe these Shiwan examples to be among the first pipe-bowls from that kiln center ever published, in or outside China.Threats from, and actual violence by, local whites bent on ethnic cleansing were a fact of life for Chineseimmigrants in the Pacific Northwest. So why did Chinese come, though neither desperate nor poor? Whydid they stay with such stubborn bravery? One goal of this website is to seek answers to questions likethose. The "Tacoma Solution" 1885 Coming soon: German-Irish-English pride in the "Tacoma Method" for driving out Chinese
HOME PAGE
1909 AYPE TOPICS
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