This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Pan Pacific Expo in San Francisco.
The city has commemorated the occasion with various celebrations and remembrances.
One of those is being held at the Chinese Historical Society museum in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports the museum has recreated one of the dark moments from the Expo, the Underground Chinatown exhibition which supposedly showed the secret life of San Francisco’s Chinese neighborhood and all its vices. It included opium dens, secret underground tunnels, and White women being forced into prostitution by the Chinese criminal element.
“We had no clout,” said Sue Lee, the executive director of the Chinese Historical Society of America, about the Chinese American response to the exhibition. Nothing the community could do could stop it, but the government of China had a bit more influence.
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The official Chinese representative called it a “disgrace to the exposition and a slander on the Chinese people.” The promoter relented and renamed the exhibition “underground slumming,” but there was really no getting around that this was about the Chinese community.
You can read about other racist exhibitions at the Expo in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Underground Chinatown will be on display at the Chinese Historical Society Museum through Spring of next year.
RE: The underground Chinatown in San Francisco that China halted: More disgraceful and dishonest behaving disgusting white rednecks posing your racism as history. Remember how many white rapists, murders and prostitutes have conducted such illicit activities compare with frequently blaming minority groups for degenerate white behaviour!