Photograph by Dorrill Photographers, 1964. Missouri Historical Society Photographs and Prints Collections. SS 378. Scan © 2007, Missouri Historical Society.
The east side of Eighth Street in the Chinatown district between Market and Walnut streets, during the summer 1964.
Chinese Americans have been active participants in St. Louis since the 1850s. While the population of Chinese Americans in the city numbered only in the hundreds for most of the 19th century, they faced intense prejudice and discrimination, much of which is now forgotten. Forced to live in a single block of downtown St. Louis, they endured decades of suspicion and misunderstanding that lasted into the mid-20th century and is well-documented in the pages of newspapers.
To understand the Chinese American immigrant story in St. Louis and the United States in general, we must look to the West Coast, and particularly California, where the twin economic engines of the Gold Rush and the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad encouraged immigration to the newly admitted state. China, then ruled by the Manchu Dynasty, was suffering a series of military and diplomatic defeats in the Opium Wars, which allowed for British and American merchants to import the drug into Chinese ports. The drug epidemic in China, coupled with the Manchu Dynasty’s flagging fortunes, encouraged emigration.
At first Chinese immigrants to California, mainly men, were greeted with curiosity, but as economic circumstances changed on the West Coast, they quickly became easy scapegoats for white Americans. A series of legal decisions and laws passed over the course of the late 19th century assured that Chinese Americans would not be relegated to second-class citizens, but to no citizenship at all. Bigotry can be cloaked in pseudo-intellectualism, as well, such as when the California Supreme Court ruled in 1854 in People v. Hall that a Chinese man could not testify against a white man in court. The ruling reasoned that because historians had posited that Native Americans had crossed over to the Americas via the Bering Straits Land Bridge, and thus were descended from Asians, and because Native Americans were lesser humans, by extension then Chinese were lesser humans as well. This was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, the Court assured, because the penalty for a conviction would still be the same.
Laws passed starting in 1882 restricted immigration and stripped Chinese immigrants of their rights as citizens; further laws continued this trend over several generations. While initially Chinese workers were lauded for their hard work, they were now characterized as being lazy and shifty, always looking to steal or swindle from white Americans. And of course, in a pattern seen throughout American history, drug abuse was blamed on a small minority: Opium addiction was blamed on Chinese drug dealers, ignoring the fact, of course, that the opium originally reached the United States from India or Turkey on American- and British-owned ships.
Then there were the massacres and lynching of innocent Chinese immigrants. Jean Pfaelzer, in Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans, has documented over 150 major incidents of violence in American history. Perhaps the most infamous was the Rock Springs Massacre on September 2, 1885, when a mob of white miners attacked a Chinese mining settlement, killing at least 28 people if not dozens more in Wyoming. Most of the bodies were burned or mutilated. While in many of the instances of anti-Chinese violence, federal troops were dispatched to the scene, little could be done when the entire white population of the town was behind the violence. In a scene that would be repeated throughout the West, the soldiers could do little more than escort the survivors to safety.
Months later, the ethnic cleansing of the entire Chinese population of Seattle ranks as one of the worst incidents of racial violence in America, following similar actions nearby in Tacoma, Washington, in 1885. On February 7, 1886, a huge mob invaded the homes of hundreds of Chinese residents, forcing them to hurriedly pack their belongings before beginning a march to the docks where a steamer waited to take them to San Francisco. Sheriff John McGraw responded in force, shots were fired, and both police officers and members of the mob fell in the streets of Seattle, seriously wounded. McGraw regained control of the city, but as had happened in Rock Springs, it was the sheriff against thousands of his citizens. Shortly thereafter, the Chinese community departed from the city, and McGraw was voted out of office in the next election.
Back in St. Louis, the plight of Chinese immigrants followed a similar path as their countrymen on the West Coast, though thankfully there was no outbreak of violence seen in the late 19th century. The first Chinese resident of St. Louis was Alla Lee in 1857, as Huping Ling in Chinese in St. Louis, 1857-2007 recounts, and he would marry an Irish immigrant. He was also viewed as a curiosity, was fluent in English, and assimilated to local European American culture. When hundreds of fellow Chinese laborers, who immigrated internally from other parts of the United States to work in mines, came to the city, he served as a sort of “go-to source” for information on his native culture.
But discrimination in employment forced most Chinese immigrants into the laundry business, which was hard, dirty work that required very little startup costs. Likewise, de facto housing discrimination forced the several hundred members of the Chinese community to live in one block of downtown, known as Hop Alley or Chinatown, surrounded by Market, 7th, Walnut, and 8th streets, which is now the location of noted architect Philip Johnson’s General Life Insurance Building (Spire Gas’ headquarters). The district was not, as frequently and erroneously stated, demolished for the construction of Busch Stadium, which was not even on the same block; an aerial photograph from 1955 reveals that most of the historic structures were already demolished for surface parking and other early 20th-century buildings long before the stadium was built in 1966.
Likewise, an examination of Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis from 1876, and fire insurance maps from 1874, 1892, 1897, and 1907, reveal that Hop Alley was far from some sort of Midwest version of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City, a densely packed multi-tired slum of Chinese people living in horrid conditions. In reality, those primary source maps reveal that the block containing Hop Alley was actually less dense than many blocks of low-income tenements surrounding downtown. There were even large swaths of open land throughout the backyards of many of the buildings. While there were small apartment buildings lining the alley bisecting the block, for the most part there were just the standard two-story commercial building typical of Soulard fronting the major streets. One begins to wonder if the tales of cramped conditions arose more out of newspaper accounts’ own prejudices than actual direct observation. There was, however, a giant lead smelter upwind from the block, which certainly was not a positive contributor to the health of the residents. Their houses also probably shook every time a train passed by in the tunnel under 8th Street heading to the Eads Bridge. Burials were restricted to Wesleyan Cemetery and later Valhalla.
Unfortunately, our main source of information of life in Hop Alley comes from racist and sensationalized accounts, mainly concerned with linking Chinese immigrants to drug dealing and miscegenation. The authors seemed most concerned with the white women who were married to Chinese men, as one Post-Dispatch author makes the assumption that since a “Chinaman knows his inferiority,” that he must treat his white wife better in order to keep her loyal. The description of Hop Alley in the article as far as density simply does not match up with contemporary documentation. Likewise, while there were certainly some opium dens in the neighborhood, the author chooses to only focus on those businesses, despite evidence that there were grocery stores, restaurants, carpenters, and other legitimate businesses. Another article’s headline from 1900 simply proclaims “Superstition Wields a Strong Influence Over All Chinamen,” before going into a bizarre explanation of feng-shui.
The fortunes of Chinese Americans in St. Louis and elsewhere changed in 1943 in the midst of World War II. While many Americans forget today, China was an ally of the United States, and had been fighting its own wars against Japan since the 1930s. The image of China changes again in the American conscience, as war propaganda now showed Chinese soldiers fighting bravely against Japanese imperialism. Along with aid, the anti-immigration laws that had been in effect throughout much of America were abolished in 1943 in tandem with the war effort. Anti-Asian bias of course shifted to Japanese Americans, 120,000 of whom were then forcefully expelled from their homes and interred in camps for the duration of World War II.
