WHAT'S NEW
05/19/13. New Discovery! The first description by a Chinese, Xie Qingguo, of the British Columbian and Alaskan Coast. Published in 1820!
05/19/13. The Sea Otter Fur Boom: a list of European ships sailing from Macao to the Northwest Coast between 1787 and 1795. Many had Chinese crew on board.
04/21/13. The Chelan Massacre: The worst incident of anti-Chinese violence in U.S. history. Several hundred Chinese miners were killed on the Columbia in 1875. The editors now believe that it actually happened.
04/18/13. Yet another result of Chinese interracial marriage: successful entertainers. For instance, the four Kim Loo Sisters, the "Kimmies," whose grandfather, Louie Gar Hip, was a merchant in Seattle. One sister, the lead singer, used the not-very-Chinese name "Bubbles."
03/26/13. A description of the Lam Kee opium factory in Macao: the main source of the smoking opium smuggled into the U.S. and Canada in the 1920s and 1930s.
03/18/13. New feature: a page on the role of Chinese imperial honors in North America before the 1911 revolution.
U. S. and Canadian Chinese were deeply interested in the right to wear dragon robes, mandarin squares, and officials' hats. As far as the editors know, this is the first published discussion of that subject.
03/04/13 & 03/13/13. The Tacoma Art Museum (TAM) sells off Chinese collection given in memory of the 1885 driving-out. This website responds to the TAM's director's request "Help me understand how Chinese Imperial robes help to tell the story of the Chinese in the Northwest."
03/02/13. New date for the founding of the Chee Kung Tong in North America (in 1880; the parent Hongmen Society is older) and more data on the expansion of the Bing Kung Tong (from 1914 onward). These are the only two secret societies that use the name "Chinese Masons."
02/25/13. The perils of digging up the dead: a ghost story as told by a 1870s Chinese American newspaper.
02/04/13. Much new Intermarriage data added: Defending mixed marriages, successful Chinese-Caucasian marriages, backgrounds of white wives, and Sino-American families: the products of miscegenation. With many previously unpublished pictures.
01/08/13. A new Intermarriage page, focused on early marital/sexual relations between Chinese and Whites, Blacks, Native Americans, and other Asians. Such "miscegenation" was common and not always seen as bad.
11/22/12. Revised sketches of the lives of Chinese women in the early Pacific Northwest: Prostitutes, Merchants' Wives, American-Born. Includes a new discussion, sparked by Ruthanne McCunn, of the Chinese names of Polly Bemis
10/22/2012. New data on San Francisco's Yeung Wo Association temple, the only well documented temple from he first decade of the Chinese presence in North America. Now with reconstructed dedicatory texts.
10/05/2012. New "Cities" page. With short summaries of the Chinese history of various cities in the Pacific Northwest, including cross-links to relevant articles on other pages. So far, Portland, Port Townsend, Seattle, Tacoma, and Astoria have been posted. 10/23: Victoria too. Vancouver, Spokane, and Boise will follow in due course.
10/03/2012. Cannery contractors in Northeastern Oregon 砵仑地区罐头鱼工头. Detailed listings of known Chinese contractors in both Portland and Astoria, with biograhical data. They played key roles in the growth of the most important industrial center north of California.
09/25/2012. Bibliography: more books and articles have now been added: some new, some especially good, and some flawed but important.
09/16/2012. How San Franciscans counterfeited high-priced Hong Kong opium--a law suit against the Federal government provides many fascinating details.
09/11/2012. The brighter side of cannery labor. It was not all bad, even before unionization in the 1930s.
09/03/2012. Chin Gee Hee, railroad contractor and visionary: How he got contracts, became a merchant-engineer and built his own railroad
08/22/2012. Victoria wins an opium price war against a giant Asian exporter. 域多厘商人压倒澳门烟商
08/20/2012. Fortunate finds--a time capsule and plaque--at the Empire Reform Association's first headquarters in Victoria
08/20/2012. A public-spirited narcotics cartel? The surprisingly modest profits made by opium refiners in British Columbia. 域多厘烟商利润低
08/13/2012. The first entries on the new Business page. More will be added on North American Chinese businesses and businessmen.
08/08/2012. The mysterious disappearance of the Chee Kung Tong in Portland and Seattle Somehow, the most powerful Chinese Masonic organization in the Pacific Northwest vanished suddenly in 1912. Did the Bing Kung Tong, also Chinese Masons but not friendly with the CKT, replace it?.
07/16/2012. Marketing opium by and to European Americans in the 19th century. As the federal DEA Museum's exhibits show, respectable white corporations sold a lot of opiate drugs to white addicts.
07/13/2012. A new listing of 19th century opium brand names, as used by Chinese in the U.S. and Canada. Intended mainly for use by archaeologists and economic historians. The most complete available anywhere.
06/26/2012. Dedicating a memorial to the 34 Chinese miners killed in the Snake River Massacre. A modern community takes responsibility for racist murders committed 125 years ago.
06/10/2012. The only known Chinese temples ("joss houses") in Seattle before modern times.
06/02/2012. Yip En and Yip On were not the same. A niggling genealogical detail is clarified and with it our understanding of how Charley Yip En became Canada's national president of the Empire Reform Association.
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. 美洲西北岸华裔早期历史
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 03/24/09]
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.
The First Chinese in Northwest America? - on Vancouver Island with Captain Meares in 1788 西北角最早华人在1788年登陆温哥华
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 03/11/09]
b. Annals of Northwestern smuggling 1: by sea [Latest entry: 04/7/09]
For the latest features, click on What's New. For info on (1) the CINARC logo and (2) strange rows of boxes in the text, click here]
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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. [03/11/09]
Secret Societies or Chinese Freemasons
The goal of many secret societies in China was revolution against the Manchu dynasty thast ruled thecountry. In southern China, the most important such society was the Hongmen or Tiandihui. In the Americas, renamed the Chee Kung Tong, the society and its offshoots played central roles in Chinatownsduring the19th century 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 07/22/09]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! [01/25/10] 1871- now The North God: Bi Di, Bok Dai, Bok Kai, Beuk Aie important antique furnishings survived which bear dates (In imperial reign years) that prove the temple
already existed in the 19th century. [11/30/2008] 加拿大域多利埠中华会馆大堂 One of the finest shrines in Nortjh America features splendid calligraphy by notable persons back in China [12/14/2009]
三藩市岡州会馆 - 权贵显赫门楣 Inscriptions by the great Wu Ting Fan and others at an important
center of Daoist worship [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. [01/15/09]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 06/20/09]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 04/16/09]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]
A New Discovery -- the Great Parade Dragon from the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition Still Exists! 龙头再现 - 西雅图1909 年赛会悠悠百年龙舞
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 07/30/09]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 (on Bainbridge Island) belonged to a wealthy Japanese-American, Masajiro Furuya. It served as a summer resort for many Seattle Japanese and as a private agricultural experiment station. Some of thetrees he planted survive. They may be the oldest living Asian-American plants in the region [07/15/09]Historians often depict early woman immigrants to is region as powerless victims of a rigid patriarchy and anAmerican society that was both racist and sexist. The historians are right about the patriarchy and thesociety but not, necessarily, about the women. Many were neither slave-girl prostitutes nor submissivehousewivesOpium 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 See above: 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.
HOME PAGE 主页
1909 AYPE TOPICS
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|5| Fishing 渔业
Opium Trade & Use Anti-ChineseViolence A-Y-P Exposition Detention Fishing Emperor
Smuggling Chinese PlaceNames First Chinese Why Chinese Died Secret Society Prince Tsai Comes
Shrines, Temples Laundries Chop Suey Herbal Medicine Women Cemeteries
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|14| Laundries 洗衣馆
|16| Herbal Medicine 中医草药
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In fact, the term is not even Ameican. It was being used in Singapore by 1844. well before the Gold Rushand the immigration of Chinese miners to California [07/2/10]
This page was last updated: May 19, 2013
(UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED ALL DATA ON THIS PAGE COMES FROM THE EDITORS' OWN RESEARCH ON PRIMARY SOURCES & ARTIFACTS)
The dire effects of miscegenation:
Mary Der Wingson, 7 years old, 1924, Chicago. Polish mother, Chinese father.
