The Chinese Presence in California : Archeologist Digs for Artifacts in Early Chinatowns

I remember walking through Ventura’s Chinatown, back and forth in front of Peirano’s store. These Chinese people in their black pajama suits--they were very friendly. You didn’t have to be afraid to go through there. The buildings were these two-story places with the tops coming out a little bit; you’ve seen those in Chinatowns. They had quite a colony there.

--Mary J. Huning, a resident, describing Ventura around 1900. From the Ventura County Historical Society Quarterly, Spring 1984, by Margaret Jennings, editor.

History has yet to glean a precise date for the arrival of the Chinese in Southern California.

All that is known from world affairs, census figures, newspapers and city records is that the doors of immigration from China to the United States officially opened in 1844, and that Chinatowns were springing up almost overnight in California by the mid-1850s.

Every major city in the state today embraces a Chinatown. To walk down the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Ventura or Santa Barbara is to see the evidence, if token, of the Chinese presence in North America. Smaller cities as well--places such as Weaverville and many Mother Lode towns bear the traces of the overseas Chinese.

But what history has yet to uncover may lie buried in the archeological record. In recent months, excavations to the north and east of Los Angeles County have brought to light fresh clues about the timing of the Chinese arrival in this area and aspects of their culture that survived the 19th-Century exodus to America.

A Flurry of Activity

The focus of this flurry of activity lies 45 miles north of Los Angeles, in the once sleepy mission town of Ventura. There, archeologist Roberta Greenwood has spearheaded an effort to gather information from oral histories, city records and maps, and ongoing analyses of Chinese artifacts to document the rise and fall of the city’s three Chinatowns.

Greenwood is a specialist in Chinese culture and president of Greenwood & Associates, a private archeological consulting firm. She led one of the first systematic archeological investigations of Chinese culture in the nation at Ventura 10 years ago. Today, her work is providing historians with new insights into some previously untapped areas of local history.

“Very little was actually known about the material culture of the Chinese immigrant in America until a 1975 excavation in Ventura,” Greenwood said in an interview in her Pacific Palisades office.

“Nineteenth-Century Ventura was well suited to provide us not only with material evidence of the immigrant Chinese, but with information on the degree to which the Chinese adapted to life in an American community and what customs survived their journey here.”

That excavation was made possible through a series of environmental impact studies and field tests that the City of Ventura had undertaken in anticipation of a federally funded urban redevelopment project.

“We were asked to assess the area when local crews realized they had uncovered evidence of prior occupation,” Greenwood said. Indian beads, stone tools and broken ceramics were reportedly strewn about the site.

Greenwood attributes the ensuing excavation to a rare blend of circumstances. “This set of circumstances does not often prevail,” she said. In many cases, valuable data are destroyed because demolition crews do not recognize the importance of such artifacts.

“Similar evidence of Chinese occupation in downtown San Francisco was abandoned many years ago,” Greenwood said, “leaving valuable artifacts for looters, collectors, and construction people.” Federal environmental laws since then have prompted scientific studies in San Francisco in recent years.

From the combined data of Gold Rush Chinatowns that have been examined, immigrant Chinese initially fixed their sights on jobs in the gold mines. As more miners flooded into the state, and as most of the accessible placer gold was depleted, they turned to the railroads, to the canneries and to the fruit orchards. Increased competition for work in those industries, as well, swiftly turned the tables against them.

In Los Angeles, census figures show that a pocket of Chinese had settled here by 1860, although no official record can verify a founding date. It was only when the first Chinese woman arrived in town on Oct. 22, 1859, that the Los Angeles Star acknowledged the existence of a Chinese community at all.

Greenwood said all Chinatowns in California were overwhelmingly male during the Gold Rush era and into the early 20th Century. Los Angeles’ remained predominantly male until 1910.

The scarcity of Chinese women was partly because of discriminatory U.S. immigration practices barring Chinese women from entering the country. Greenwood said male Chinese immigrants believed they would stay in America only long enough to earn enough money for their families.

According to the Ventura County Historical Society Quarterly, a law prohibiting the intermarriage of Chinese and Caucasians prevented many single Chinese laborers from establishing roots. That law, in fact, was not repealed until 1948.

Meticulous examinations and technical studies of the artifacts at Ventura are now employing neutron activation dating techniques to pinpoint exact times of Chinese settlement there.

“Ventura’s first Chinatown thrived between the 1860s and 1905, although records only hint at its precise birth date,” Greenwood said.

In a 1984 issue of Gum Saan Journal, Greenwood speculated that “. . . it was probably before 1866, when Thomas Bard confided to his diary the presence of ‘Tartars’ in the Fourth of July celebrations.”

“By 1876, there were at least 200 Chinese living in a tight cluster of wood frame buildings on Figueroa Street, south of Main Street and just across from San Buenaventura Mission, in the old heart of the town,” she reported.

Greenwood says her work represents a relatively new field of study known as historical archeology, “. . . which interweaves archeology, and its concentration on material culture, with social and cultural data.”

By infusing investigations with more information on the customs and cultural values of a group, Greenwood maintains archeologists can fill in historical gaps and provide clearer pictures of the assimilation or displacement of people.

For instance, little was known of the social barriers faced by the Chinese in California. “That is why the Chinese settlement in Ventura was of prime interest,” Greenwood said. “Efforts to displace them were well under way just 10 years later.”

The first Ventura Chinatown was located on the east side of Figueroa Street, running perpendicular to Main Street and adjacent to Mission San Buenaventura. Greenwood said it contained some unanticipated discoveries at both ends of the time scale.

“We uncovered the stone foundations of four of the barracks built and occupied by Indian converts, and we found the first church of the mission itself,” Greenwood said.

Hearths and food remains were radiocarbon-dated to about 3,500 years old, revealing that an earlier Indian occupation had occurred. The work also revealed that the Chinese later reoccupied Mission-period adobes of the 1830s, using them for homes and businesses in the late 1800s.

For instance, the Latino adobe built by the Ortega family, of today’s Ortega chili fame, had been occupied by 1905 by a Chinese entrepreneur. Today, it stands as one of the few remaining Latino landmarks in Ventura, ironically preserved, Greenwood said, by the Chinese.

The first Chinese immigrants to California were “sojourners to the labor-hungry state of California,” Greenwood said, forced out of their homeland by the oppressive reign of the Manchu dynasty.

“We can decipher some of the customs that survived this overseas sojourn from the ceramic containers used for food storage,” she said. “We analyzed the everyday bowls and cups of these immigrant Chinese, and we found fragments of Cantonese ceramics, with the familiar willow pattern on blue- and white porcelain.”

But the elegantly hand-decorated porcelain wares that Americans know as Canton ceramics were not used by the Chinese themselves, Greenwood said. “They were made strictly for the export business and used by the Mission or early Hispanic families,” she said. “The Chinese immigrants used a very different kind of ceramic in their homes.”

Foodstuffs were shipped to the overseas Chinese in stoneware containers made of refined clay and covered with a brown glaze. According to Greenwood, the clay wares were hand-thrown on a pottery wheel.

“Those most frequently found were wine bottles with nearly spherical bodies and flared necks; soy sauce bottles with high-shouldered, squat bodies and small orifices; and shouldered food jars in several sizes with wide mouths and clay lids,” she said.

Huge globular shipping jars, straight-sided jars in two sizes with lids, and shallow braising pans in two sizes were also found.

“Comparisons indicate that these wares were made at least as early as 1860,” she said, “and, in fact, I have seen them being made in China today.

Through the years, the Chinese were increasingly shunned by the townspeople, and as downtown property values rose, each of the city’s Chinatowns was either torn down or shoved progressively west, Greenwood said. The land they were forced on to was neither fertile nor protected from severe flooding.

Nearly all of the city’s records, newspaper accounts, and early photographs lend credence to this forced shroud of isolation.

“Unlike the Hispanic settlers who preceded them on Main Street and who chose to assimilate into the broader community of Ventura, and unlike the Indians who were forced to adapt to Western ways, the Chinese remained in isolation partially for their own reasons,” Greenwood said.

“The early welcome they received gradually turned into the same prejudice reflected elsewhere in California where mining laws drove the Chinese out of the gold fields and the Anti-Chinese Union formed by organized labor protected against competition,” Greenwood said in a 1978 Archaeology report.

Pushed Closer Together

“The persecution that they felt grew out of the fears and prejudices of the Anglo community, and actually pushed them closer together,” she said.

At the same time, America was tightening the reigns on Chinese immigrants. A series of restrictive laws--including the Exclusion Act of 1882, the Scott Act of 1888, and the Geary Act of 1892--reaffirmed the country’s unwillingness to accept Chinese laborers as immigrants or to acknowledge the wives and children of laborers already in America. Jennings reported in the Quarterly that by 1905, the government of China had launched a boycott of American goods.

Few Chinese families were made to feel welcome in Los Angeles either before the turn of the century. According to “Linking Our Lives: Chinese American Women of Los Angeles,” a new publication of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the 1890 census figures showed only two Chinese families in Los Angeles. By 1870, the number had risen to 18.

Louise Leung Larson, a veteran newspaper reporter born and raised in Los Angeles, was among the first Chinese families to live in Los Angeles. Now a resident of Topanga Canyon, she remembered what Los Angeles was like in the early 1900s.

“My father came over to America about the turn of the century to take over his cousin’s herb business while he was vacationing, and to see if he liked the business,” the 80-year-old mother of two recalled in a telephone interview.

“He decided to stay here and became a very successful herbalist. He returned to China in 1902 to bring my mother back,” Larson said. “She never spoke a word of English, so we children could never communicate with her since we never learned Chinese.”

Letters Being Translated

In 1900, 59 Chinese families were residing in Los Angeles, and by the end of the first decade of that century, 61 households had at least one Chinese woman.

Larson, who is having her father’s Chinese-written letters translated for an eventual family history, said her family--numbering eight children--never mingled with either Caucasian families or the few other Chinese families in Los Angeles during her youth.

“We didn’t live near Los Angeles’ Chinatown, although my father’s business was based near it. But even his clients were primarily Caucasians, not Chinese. Our family was pretty isolated.”

Her overriding childhood preoccupation, she recalled, was trying not to be Chinese.

While discriminatory actions against the Chinese were in play in Los Angeles, they seemed to pale by comparison to the full-scale efforts in Ventura. There, legal attempts were instituted to tax Chinese businesses out of existence. Later, the townspeople took blatant measures to banish the community.

“Residential building patterns bear this out,” Greenwood said. “The town’s sewers, for instance, did not connect with either the east side of Figueroa or West Main Street, where the Chinese houses and businesses stood. An abundance of Chinese bathhouses was not an uncommon sight.”

Greenwood said a Chinese fire brigade, established in 1876, was perhaps the result of Chinese fears that as outcasts, their highly inflammable wooden houses would not be protected from fire by the town’s municipal services. The brigade was a “two-wheeled cart with 100 feet of hose.”

First Chinatown Leveled

In 1905, Ventura’s first Chinatown was leveled. All but a few of the old buildings on Figueroa Street were either destroyed or relocated to the north side of Main Street. At least two structures were moved to an area behind the Latino Camarillo adobe, which became the center of Ventura’s second Chinatown.

“As was the case in both Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, Chinese ownership replaced the barrio, which had, in its time, displaced the original Native American residents,” Greenwood said.

By 1923, a second-generation Chinatown had all but disappeared, and by 1926, a third community had risen. Oral histories allude to an easing of the tensions between Anglos and the Chinese. Even so, by 1935, Ventura had witnessed the final passage of an ancient cultural tradition.