The Columbia herald. [volume] (Columbia, Tenn.) 18??-1935, 1906-04-27
CHINATOWN
DUNGEONS
WHITE SLAVE GIRLS NET DEATHS
OF TRAPPED RATS.
Underground Wcrld Revealed in san
Franchises Most Noisesome Quar-
ter.-colIapssd Burrows.


cial to the Dispatch from San Fran
cisco says: One Of the weirdest
sights and most spectacular or ell the
sights attending the twin ho1rcrs was
that of the mad exodus Of the $4,000
Orlentals CT San Francisco's China
town.
For years the Chinese quarter, DC
cupying ten square blocks, only hal,
a dozen squares north of Newspaper
Corner, has been the cancer spot OF
the city. Packed Ike sardines in q
box, the yellow men lived life far
removed from American ideals They
had converted the brick and frame
buildings into beehive-like structures,
full Of tiny rooms and dark and wind
ing stairways and blind halls with
mysterious trap doors for gliding the
police.
Cutting through these blocks were
dark alleys, barely wide enough for
three to walk abreast. made darker
by jutting Oriental balconies, strung
with lanterns. and sending out little
spirals of pungent blue punk smoke
Thus they kept the devils away.
Behind heavily grated windows rale
girl faces peered-faces Of slave maids
who. through the long months and
years never set foot on the street be
low In half a dozen carved and ri i
ed Joss houses priests and acolytes
end gamblers kotowed before papier
mache josscs and tossed their boom
erang like prayer sticks before Kawn-
Yoom, the goddess OF mercy and foc1r-
dity.
Deep in the bowels of the earth the
highbinders and gamblers, haunted by
fear of The police and of rival tong
men, had worked for years, tunneling
out underground passages and rooms,
one below another. Here the secret
meetings of the tongs and the never
ending game of pigow and fan-tan
were held. Here also consignments
of slave girls from Canton and Nan
king and Shankhai were penned ur
and sold like cattle, and here. ant,
sweet, sitting fumes of opium smoke
they lived the lives of troSlodytes and
died the death Of rats.
Not even the police and professional
guides, who thought they knew the
plague spot from top to bottom, had
i anyadeQuate idea of the depth and ex
tent Of San Francisco's underground
city. The earthquake and the fire
have at last laid bare the skeleton
Today in hundred places the surface
has fallen, as if into great cayorns
4 carrying the blackened debris OF the
burned buildings with It.
The willy Chinese, duplicating the
conditions to be found in the mos
crowded coolie districts of Canton an(
Crifu, had burrowad into the earth, il
places SO feet below the street level
subterranean gallery under gallery
leading from damp prison room Il
reeking opium joint, where hundreds
of human beings lived and died witt
scarce one look in a lifetime at the
sun and the sky.
Unlike the rest Of San Francisco
the site Of Chinatown, so far from
presenting a series of heaps Of debris
is marked by acres of deep cayerns
checked by twisted iron and smokins
embers. From these caverns, blacl
tunnels open on every side. These
tunnels, once the home or the prisons
of men and women, have become theil
tombs. 1t is doubtful if many of the
bodies will ever be recovered.
Not a stick of the Chinatown of the
upper world remains. When the thou
sands of crazed Mongolians stagger
ing under loads of silks, carved and
fantastic furniture, opium layouts
money bags and children and followed
by women in silk trousers hobbling on
their golden lil1es," poured out OF
ISpoffard, Ross and Bartletts alleys
1.-THE pork ovens and the noisome mar
Fkets and cellars they took little
Thought for the slave girls down in the
under world of the eatacombs, beating
their fists against the bars or gasping
out their lives under the debris shal-
en- from above.
How many hundreds of Orientals
had their strange lives snuffed out far
below the ruins of jos house and
! theatre and mission schools, opium
dens and gambling ciub-houses will
never be known.
But one thing is certain. When San
Francisco rises from her ashes, more
beautiful than ever, the Chinatown
skeleton will not be in her closet. The
mysterious, noisome, transplanted
Asiatic city WEI be relegated to the
sand hills or fats below Butchertown
to the south, far from the business
and residential part of San Francisco.