WHAT'S NEW
04/20/s022. New Book: Chinese Traditional Religion & Temples in North America, 1849-1920: California. Ca. 530 pages, 351 illustrations, lots of Chinese-language refs and terms.
08/10/2017. Just released! Detailed new map of Chinatown in San Francisco just before the Earthquake, with tongs and temples. The economic and spiritual heart of Chinese America, wiped out in two terrible days. What it was like before. Part of the editors' research on Chinese religion in early North America.
03/24/2017. Found in the records of San Francisco's Sam Yup [Three Counties] Association: The Chinese Names of the Deep Creek Massacre Victims. Now Perhaps Their Families Can Be Traced.
The records may be the only Chinese-language documents in San Francisco that
survived the 1906 Earthquake and Fire.
11/29/2016. New data on wholesale market prices for opium in the U.S. between the 1850s and 1909, from Chinese-language newspapers. The prices were surprisingly steady over the years.
11/29/2016. What the landmark "Chinese Opium Exclusion Act" of 1909 really prohibited. Most authorities on the subject, including Wikipedia, are wrong. It dd not prohibit possession or use.
12-7-2015 (Updated 2/29/2016) Announcing the first-ever HISTORIC CHINESE TEMPLE CONFERENCE. March 12-13, 2016. Marysville, CA. To be held during Marysville's famous Bok Kai Festival and "Bomb Day." Here are the updated program, registration information, bios of speakers and abstracts of presentations. As of February 29, 63 people have registered. The capacity of the venue is 70.
For July 2016: A major conference on Chinese outside China will take place in Vancouver, organized by ISSCO, the INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF CHINESE OVERSEAS, and hosted by the University of British Columbia, This is only the second time that an ISSCO conference has been held in North America. The event will be held in Richmond, a suburb with a large Chinese-speaking population and many excellent Chinese restaurants, at the Sheraton Vancouver Airport Hotel from July 6-8, 2016. Numerous historians and social scientists from Asia and Europe as well as the Americas will attend. For more information go to the UBC's ISSCO website.
10/27/2015 Yet another iron bell, in San Jose's Ng Shing Gong Temple. Dated 1889. We keep thinking we have seen every North American example still in existence, but then someone shows us another one. A nice bell
10/26/2015 The earliest of all surviving Chinese North American objects! That is, objects made for and used by Chinese on this continent. A simple flag rack on the altar of Weaverville's Won LimTemple. With a Xian Feng (咸豐 or 咸丰) date: 1861! It may not look like much, but . . .
10/19/2015 A 1864 date for "Chinese Masons"! Two years before Gustave Schlegel popularized the idea that Chinese secret societies and the Euro-American Freemasons might be connected, and long before the term began to be used by the Chee Kung Tong and Bing Kung Tong. And in, for goodness' sake, Weaverville, way off in the Trinity Alps of Northern California. Amazing!
9/4/2015 "The Gods of Chinese North America," an illustrated list of the principal deities, almost all of them Daoist, as worshiped by early Chinese in the United States and Canada. Of the many hundred gods and goddesses featured in the traditional folk and formal religions of China, only a handful made it across the Pacific to the New World. They are listed here as a convenience to temple fanciers and scholars, some of whom may not be too familiar with Chinese folk beliefs, and as an advertisement for the editors' next books, on (1) the three best-preserved early Chinese temples in North America (in Marysville, Oroville, and Weaverville, not San Francisco) and on (2) historic Chinese temples in the western United States.
4/15/2015 A new page: historical Chinese land ownership in the U.S. and Canada. A first article introduces the subject with a fine example of legal boilerplate from the Yuba County deed books in Marysville, California, recording Ah Fee's and Quong Hop's purchase of land from E. W. Sawtelle in 1890.
4/11/2015 Updated list of historic opium brand names, as stamped on the lids of opium cans in historical and archaeological collections, in North America and Australia. Such cans contained ready-to-smoke opium refined in Hong Kong, Macao, Victoria BC, or Vancouver.
4/7/2015 Chapter 1 of Coming Home in Gold Brocade, "Through Chinese Eyes," has been added to this website. It offers what we think is a novel perspective on early Chinese immigration.
4/6/2015 Already in 1855, Chinese "coarse" ceramics were used (and valued) by the U.S. Mint in San Francisco, according to the first issue of The Oriental, the second oldest printed Chinese newspaper in America and one of the oldest anywhere.
3/31/2015 CINARC's first book is in print. Coming Home in Gold Brocade: Chinese in Early Northwest America, by Bennet Bronson and Chuimei Ho. With lots of new data and conclusions about how and why Chinese came to the Northwest between 1788 and 1911. It is for sale at Amazon.com. Paperback. Price: US$12.75. Canadian$15.96. ISBN-13: 978-1505228021, ISBN-10: 1505228026.
8/28/2014. The Fusang Question: Was this mysterious ancient kingdom (AD 599) located in the Pacific Northwest? Did early Chinese travelers visit it? No and no. The idea that Chinese of that period visited North America is based on an 18th century mistranslation.
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, and Alaska,with much of California. - 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.
美洲西北角 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 > Should the subject be taboo? 秘密社会可谈不可谈? [10/01/09]
The visit by an Imperial Commission led by an actual prince, Tsai Tseh (or Tai Ze), improved relations
between 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]
1852 Found! The oldest temple inscription in the Americas [NEW 10/19/10]
1866 The oldest surviving Chinese temple in North America: not in San Fancisco but (perhaps) the
temple in Marysville! [01/25/10] 1866-1892 The North God in North America. [10/26/10]
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 a
mini-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 immigrants
sounds 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.
舍路保皇会注册文件
As it turned out, China needed revolution, not reformation. Before that, however, the Baohuanghui, the
Preserve-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 an
American 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 submissivehousewives"Retarded mental development" [10/30/10]
A high-status courtesan flees via Portland [11/21/10]
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
"A pretty smuggler and her pathetic story" [Posted 11/01/09]
Using opium 吸烟
North American opium lamps [Posted 11/3/09]
The opium addicts of Albany, NY [Posted 12/21/09]
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 Chinese
immigrants 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.
April 21, 2022. After several years of neglect, this site is being revived. Please be patient until updating is complete
Copyright information. Nonprofit users are free to use text and original or out-of-copyright images from these web pages as long as they credit CINARC and ask subsequent users to do the same. Images that are credited to other individuals or institutions, however, should not be reproduced without first consulting the owners. For-profit users should get the permission of CINARC's editors before publication, in print or electronic form.
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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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|13| |14| |15| |16| |17| |18|
|1| |2| |3| |4| |5| |6|
|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: April 21, 2022
(UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED ALL DATA ON THIS PAGE COMES FROM THE EDITORS' OWN RESEARCH ON PRIMARY SOURCES & ARTIFACTS)
For a detailed index to Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition features, click here
In 1887 Lewiston (ID) Chinese donated $170 in gold dust to help the Deep Creek Massacre victims' families back in China.
New Book! By the web editors, Chuimei Ho and Bennet Bronson, with 500+ pages. Available from Amazon.com Click here for details.
San Francisco's Chinatown on the eve of the Earthquake. Newly redrawn by the editors as part of their research on early North American Chinese temples. Click here to see the maps.
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