Rebuilding Chinatown After the 1906 Quake

[yuiyoshida]

San Francisco's Chinatown has long been the bedrock of Chinese America. Its colorful shops and exotic restaurants attract hundreds of thousands of global tourists each year. Now, as San Francisco prepares to mark the centennial of the 1906 earthquake and fire, historians recall how Chinatown, destroyed along with much of the city, almost wasn't rebuilt.

City leaders at the time of the quake set the total death count at more than 400. Researchers now think that 3,000 or more people died and that the fatalities were intentionally minimized so investors, needed to rebuild the city, wouldn't be scared away.

But no one knows how many people died in the densely packed blocks of Chinatown, with an estimated population of 14,000.


Racism against the Chinese was rampant in that age. Chinese immigrants had come to work in the railroads and mines and were widely viewed as a competitive threat to the working class, says California historian Kevin Starr.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5337215