The Tarnished Gold Mountain: Vice and Tourism in America’s Chinatowns

Article and additional research by Jon Park. Edited by Tom Hercock.

When the average editor of the average travel magazine decides which destination he is going to publicise this week, there are certain images he will look for. A beach sunset, a bustling market place or a city skyline are prominent types he will consider. Less prominent in his mind, however, would be a poverty stricken street in the middle of a dense urban area, filled with the most despised immigrant group.

Yet one of the more surprising tourist destinations in America’s nineteenth century was a place like this. Chinatowns are now considered top tourist attractions, boasting world-class restaurants and theatres. They were anything but in the late nineteenth century. Chinatowns were largely residential, but what business there was split into two categories. The small businesses of laundries, restaurants and shops attracted very few tourists. Catering largely to other Chinese Americans, they formed a strong internal economy, so tight-knit that historian Judy Yung attributed to it the Chinese Americans’ relative success in withstanding the Great Depression.

The other side of Chinatown’s business was less promising. Poverty, disease and deprivation provided breeding grounds for the usual suspects of drugs and prostitution. Yet it was this side of Chinatowns which attracted white Americans. Ignoring advice, they travelled from their rich and wealthy suburbs to the poorest districts of America’s Chinatowns. Few travelled further than from the outskirts to the city centre to visit this tourist destination, but then few needed too. Throughout the nineteenth century unrecorded numbers travelled to visit the Chinatown districts. There were lots of individual reasons why, but broadly we can break into two categories – the vice tourist and the voyeur.

Early visitors went to the opium dens and the brothels for the simple attraction of opium and prostitutes. A common saying went that if you wanted the best opiates and the dirtiest sex, Chinatown was the place to go. Many Chinese Americans, especially in the Tong gangs, catered almost exclusively to this white clientele searching for cheap thrills. The opium trade was strong, and actually formed a strand in a larger transnational network, linking the Chinese American community to China. Opium was cheap and addictive, and lured many white Americans.

Prostitution was also strong, and Chinatown’s brothels gained a reputation for a libertine attitude to sexual norms. This was unsurprising, considering the desperately precarious lives of Chinese American prostitutes. In 1860 around 85% of Chinese American women were prostitutes and while that number had subsided to around 50% in 1880, it was still the dominant trade for Chinese American women. The vast majority were little more than indentured servants, working for the brothels to repay their sponsors who gave them the money to sail to the mythic ‘Golden Mountain’ of the United States of America. As the Pacific port, San Francisco obviously was a hub for this trade, and so it is not surprising that in 1885 there were at least 70 brothels in San Francisco’s Chinatown district alone.

Vice tourism was a large reason for the slum tourists of nineteenth century America to delve deep into darkest Chinatown, but it was far from the only one. In fact, the existence of this vice tourism attracted another tourist – the voyeur.

The voyeur tourists tended to come from a wealthy suburb, and travelled to see just how depraved these districts of poverty and sin truly were. They marvelled at the filth, gasped at the poverty and always kept their possessions very close, for fear of the dangerous criminals they had been warned so strongly against. They travelled in groups, often with tour guides, and saw with their own eyes the extent of poverty in their own nation.

Journalists gathering eye-witness evidence for reports on the extent of sin and poverty in their nation, missionaries eyeing up new hunting grounds for converts, prohibitionists charting the true consequences of drink and drugs and city reformers viewing just what sort of depravity the Other Party had caused all rocked up. All were, of course, horrified, and most left with a comforting sense of superiority, whether in their race, their class, their religion or just in themselves.

This voyeur tourism opened up a surprising niche job opportunity for young Chinese American men; the tour guide. These young men would guide crowds of white Americans safely round the Chinatown, showing groups of white middle class Americans the depths of depravity they so desperately wanted to see, while keeping them safe.

These tour guides were need not just for safety. They were necessary to steer the tourists towards the crime and away from the normality of everyday life. Chinatowns in American cities certainly had great poverty and serious problems with prostitution, gambling and drugs. But that is only part of the picture. Chinatowns had within them strong businesses, particularly that of laundry services, which became very successful in most Chinatowns. Chinese Americans found in the Chinatowns both a stable economy and a cultural network linking them to each other and back to China, through Chinese language newspapers. Tour guides who could keep white middle class tourists away from images that might confront the stereotypes were needed.

And tour guides who could guarantee their audience a real show were valued even higher. If waiting for crime to naturally happen would take too long, and the tourists were getting impatient, it was easier to fake crime. Historian Ivan Light describes many situations where the guides of New York’s Chinatown, worried that their paying customers wouldn’t see much of a show, hired Chinese Americans to ‘put on shows,’ such as a ‘knife-wielding scuffle between opium crazed Chinese in dispute over a slave girl.’

These voyeuristic tourists came to watch sin, not to partake in it. They came to observe, to be thrilled by the spectacle of the otherness of the Orient, and to react in gasps of horror. They did not come to patronise the opium dens or the brothels, but to condemn them in hushed tones. The tongs controlling these places became no richer because of them.

It did, however, open up business opportunities for the other side of the Chinatowns. Restaurants in particular found themselves frequented by these white middle class Americans. These restaurateurs did quite well out of the tourists, but were aware that the dark reputation of Chinatowns drove away many other potential customers. By the turn of the century, they had begun to act against their reputation. Working with newly formed Chinatown Chambers of Commerce and with white middle class reformers they remade Chinatowns reputation. They started to attract a different class of tourists – middle class tourists who had come for a show and a meal, not for sex and drugs. These tourists proved richer and more numerous than the vice tourists of earlier ages, and by the 1950s a new Chinatown tourism had prospered, built on the reputable pursuit of theatre and food. The traffic of drugs and prostitutes, and the white American pilgrimage to these vices, had long been forgotten by all but the pulp fiction writers. Chinatowns were prosperous.

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