The Excerpta Reportage #092800
1906 EARTHQUAKE EXPOSES SECRET CHINATOWN

“Chinatown Secrets Laid Bare by Disaster

“Not until the earthquake shook the rickety houses to the earth to be destroyed by fire did the authorities of San Francisco realize what manner of place was the much advertised Chinatown, the Mecca of all tourists in California, the spot in which 25,000 Chinese lived like so many prairie dogs.

“When the high winds which came after the fire blew the ashes away the yawning mouths of tunnels, which the police had long suspected, were revealed. Entrance to these passages was so carefully hidden that only the leaders of the tonga, who used the damp dungeons for places of meeting or to plot the death of a victim--the same room often acting as the execution dungeon once the marked man was taken below the level of the street--knew and declared.

“One of San Francisco’s alert detectives, said to be the best posted man on Chinatown, stood at the corner of Bartlett Alley and declared:

“‘For years I have been trying to reach the tunnels which I knew to exist under this Chinese city. What goes on down there one can only conjecture, but it is a thousand times worse than the sins and vices which are practiced by these Mongolians in the streets and gambling houses you can see from this corner. Girls in the bloom of youth are smuggled over the Canadian border, brought here in the night, and confined in dungeons, perhaps never to look upon the light of the sun again, although they may live for years.’

“Very few white men have visited the underground passages, certainly none of San Francisco’s police force, for every man in the department was watched when he entered Chinatown and the surveillance did not cease while he remained there. Secretary Tsing, a prominent member of the Chinese aristocracy, stationed for political reasons in the Chinese Legation at the capital of Peru, was a member in high standing in a society of considerable political influence in China, with a powerful branch in San Francisco. He took two white men to the theater in Chinatown and boastfully declared that the real secret of Chinatown had never been revealed. He conducted the men to the rear of the stage, slid a secret door back and motioned for the men to follow him.

“For one hour, stooping until their backs were strained, the men silently followed a guide, to look upon a complete new Chinatown, the tunnel leading past scores of doors to dungeons, against the bars of which some unfortunates pressed their faces, to jump back from the flame of a flickering miner’s light which Tsing carried.

“Under this Chinese city were hundreds of women and children. Their voices mingled in glad refrain or echoed the gloomy murmurs of some who were suffering. Huddled in groups about a small fire, made from balls of coal dust which Chinese prepare, were merchants who had returned from their shops on the street level to these holes in the wall to plot and invent. The odor of opium was nauseating. The revulsion of feeling was overpowering. When the street was reached, after climbing a flight of stairs to the kitchen of a chop suey ‘joint’ the breath of foul air, even in this hole, was refreshing.

“Tragedies Underground

“Hundreds of men went to their deaths each year in Chinatown without an inkling of the tragedies being known to the police. It was easy to bury the dead under the tunnels, one hundred feet deep, in Chinatown. Members of the tongs marked for death left friends behind, men who refused to complain to the local authorities, but who, instead sought revenge themselves in the same fiendish manner that death had been meted out to their fellow-members.

“For years battles waged. Scores and scores were killed, even in the streets, until the citizens of San Francisco threatened to organize a vigilance committee and wipe Chinatown from the face of ’Frisco. This had its effect. The war was carried below the streets, where dying men could scream in agony and not be heard. The slave traffic has enriched many Chinese, suave merchants who led simple lives above the street, but who returned to the subterranean passages and their slave marts to put upon the block the newest arrivals from the slave market in Canton.

“Gambling has always existed here. The gamblers composed the bad element. They fought for one another’s gold, committed murder to obtain means with which to enter games of fantan and other Chinese devices of chance, and slept away their daylight hours in a bunk somewhere down below the street, steeped in the fumes of opium, a sordid mass of humanity until nature awoke the brain to life.

“There never will be such a Chinatown in San Francisco again. These people will be sent to a district far from the heart of the new city, where they will be under such close surveillance that practices of the past will be stopped when they begin. Provision will be made to suppress the tongs for all time, if this can be accomplished.

“No one will ever know how many lives were lost in Chinatown. It is a moral certainty that men overcome with opium, the slave women in their dungeons, and many a hapless wretch unconscious from morphine were killed when the tremor of the earth toppled the buildings down to be consumed in a short time by the fire.

“Citizens who have visited the remains of this plague spot were astonished at the catacombs which lay exposed. It is improbable that any attempt will be made to reach the bodies of Chinese victims. Earth will be thrown into the gaping abyss, burying for all time the victims of the disaster and blotting forever the sites of these dens of vice and horrible chambers of sin.”
--James Russel Wilson “San Francisco’s Horror of Earthquake and Fire” (Memorial Publishing Co. 1906)

“After a long wrangle, Chinatown remained where it was. The Chinese refugees had been herded like cattle from one area to another during the days of the fire. White citizens thought their smell offensive, perhaps the Chinese thought the same of the whites. But the moment Los Angeles offered to house them, San Francisco suddenly had a change of heart.”
--Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts “The San Francisco Earthquake” (Stein and Day 1971)

“Hell is under the ground for real
Repent, repent, repent
Judgment is based on the treatment of children
Repent, repent, repent...”
--Jana Janus “Repent, Repent, Repent” (1999)

Jana Janus
Reporter