This is an entrance to Chinatown in London.
Its features might look familiar:
an elaborate gate,
colorful detailing,
and a pagoda-style roof.
Features that help make up the iconic look of Chinatown,
no matter what city you're in:
from DC, to Manila, to Melbourne.
There's a reason that all these Chinatowns look so similar.
But it's not because they're what real Chinese cities once looked like.
"The Chinese are well aware of what their architecture was like.
They knew that this is not representing their real culture.
This is a strategy they used to protect their land."
That story actually starts in the US:
here, in San Francisco,
where a brutally targeted community kept their culture alive
by inventing a new one.
"Not quite Chinese, but on the other hand, not quite American."
In the mid 1800s, a wave of Chinese immigrants arrived to the US,
many through the port of San Francisco, seeking economic opportunity.
They found work in industries -- from gold mining, to the transcontinental railroad, to factories --
that exploited them for cheap labor.
Then, when an economic depression arrived in the 1870s,
they were blamed for taking jobs away from white people.
The idea spread that Chinese people were a threat: a "yellow peril."
It showed up in racist cartoons, political rhetoric,
and, eventually, into laws.
In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act,
which explicitly banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US.
It also labeled any Chinese immigrant already in the US a permanent alien,
stripping them of a path to citizenship and of basic rights.
"The Chinese couldn't buy property, couldn't form corporations,
we couldn't even testify in court competently."
That anti-Asian sentiment also led to a surge of violence against Chinese Americans.
I tried to get a sense of just how widespread this kind of violence was during this period,
and just a quick search for newspaper reports led me to:
A mass lynching of 18 Chinese American men in Los Angeles.
A massacre of 28 Chinese miners in Wyoming.
White mobs forcing an entire Chinese settlement out of Eureka, California.
Towns across the country did the same exact thing.
And in California alone, there are records of over 200 incidents like this.
Together, it paints a picture of a period of expulsion and mass murder.
Many trying to escape this violence headed to San Francisco,
the city with the largest Chinese American population in the US at the time.
But even within San Francisco, there was a constant threat to safety,
and restrictions on where Chinese people could rent property.
So, much of its Chinese American population found a place of refuge here:
an area that came to be known as Chinatown.
As Chinatown became more established, the community had its own thriving economy too.
Merchants conducted key import and export trade with China,
and there were over a thousand shops and businesses.
But you might notice that, during this period,
it didn't actually look like the Chinatown you might imagine today.
"San Francisco's Chinatown looked nothing oriental. Nothing Chinese.
Just standard western architecture, classical architectural motifs.
The Chinese expressions were mostly expressed through the decorations."
Many outsiders labeled the area as mysterious and forbidden,
but it was also located just next to the expanding central business district.
And, as San Francisco grew, urban planners started to see Chinatown as prime real estate.
They believed that if they could get rid of Chinatown, and make it suitable to Caucasian merchants,
they could increase the value of the real estate 400 to 500 percent.
In newspapers from around the same time,
exaggerated reports gave Chinatown a reputation as "filthy."
Take this 1885 map. It shows one way to look at San Francisco's Chinatown:
color-coded to show gambling dens, opium dens, and prostitution.
If you take a closer look, you can see it was prepared by a group of city representatives
called the "Special Committee of the Board of Supervisors."
The same committee that came out with this report on Chinatown,
where they're pretty clear about their goal:
"to expose the general evil qualities which the race possesses."
By 1906, proposals were drawn up that would move Chinatown
miles away from the center of the city.
An option was secured for a new location. Everything pointed to "ultimate success."
And that was almost the end of the story.
On the morning of April 18, 1906,
an earthquake ripped through San Francisco.
"As my grandmother described it for me,
on April 18th, when the great earthquake occurred,
she and the rest of her family who were living down here
were literally shaken out of their beds."
The earthquake was devastating, and caused fires that raged for days.
Thousands of people died. Half of the city became homeless.
And thirty thousand buildings were destroyed.
In Chinatown, nearly everything was in ruins.
"Chinatown in San Francisco was mainly wooden structures.
So most of the buildings were burned down."
In the end, it's hard to say how many Chinese Americans lost their lives from the earthquake
because the residents of Chinatown weren't even included in the city's death toll.
But to the city, what happened to the Chinese community wasn't a tragedy.
It was an opportunity:
to move Chinatown away from the city center like they'd hoped to do before.
One reporter wrote that "the only gratifying feature of the San Francisco horror
is the fact that Chinatown has been destroyed.
That pestilential community is no more."
Because of exclusionary laws, Chinese immigrants were mostly renters, with no legal rights to properties.
But the community did have one piece of leverage:
The city didn't actually want to lose them completely.
In May 1906, this article ran,
describing how San Francisco now feared "that the Chinese may abandon the city."
That's because business in Chinatown was very good for San Francisco,
and for Chinese-American trade relations.
Import duties paid by the merchants for goods from China were a huge addition to city revenue.
Business was so good that several other cities along the west coast,
like Seattle and LA, had made offers to San Francisco's Chinese population to relocate.
This leverage provided an opening for the residents of Chinatown to organize.
The businessman Look Tin Eli and other Chinese American merchants came up with a new plan.
Their goal was to keep Chinatown exactly where it was, by transforming it:
shedding its reputation as a public nuisance, and making it a tourist attraction.
Six weeks after the earthquake, the city finally gave in,
and backed off the Chinatown relocation plan.
The Chinese businessmen hired white architects
to reimagine an exoticized "theme park" version of Chinatown.
"Those architects, they knew nothing about Chinese architecture.
So these architects, in their design, rebuilt Chinatown in the way that white architects,
what they perceived as Chinese architecture and Chinese culture."
The new buildings had curved eaves, detailed facades, and colorful tiled roofs.
One motif they used a lot were Chinese pagodas,
like the ones you see here, on top of the Sing Chong and Sing Fat buildings,
two of the first to be rebuilt after the earthquake.
"Chinese Pagodas, in China, typically they were religious structures. It's a place of worship.
None of that meaning was translated to North America or to San Francisco."
"Here at each corner.
The ornamentation serves no real structural purpose; it's simply that, ornamentation.
But it's to communicate to the viewer that Chinatown was a theme park worthy of visitation."
It didn't look like China, but it didn't have to.
The point was to make Chinatown a built-in feature of the city,
and a hub of not just trade, but tourism.
And it worked.
"This really set the template, and a new economic model,
not only for San Francisco Chinatown,
but for Chinese settlements across North America."
This template for Chinatown would formalize a place for Chinese Americans
in cities across the US.
And it also marked the beginning of a new kind of Chinese culture:
one that's uniquely Chinese and American.
Chinatown represents a community whose place was painstakingly carved out
amid lies, fear, and hate.
That history has never really gone away.
"If you're from China I need to know."
"Asian piece of s***"
"You know how many people can't stand you being here?"
"Asian American leaders say these attacks are a trend."
"Brutally shoved to the ground in Oakland, California's Chinatown."
"He never wake up again. I never see him again."
"A string of deadly shootings at massage parlors in the Atlanta area."
"21-year-old charged with killing eight people, six of them Asian women."
"We're here because we all know that our community deserves better.
We are here standing together because we are sad, we are angry, and we are exhausted."
"We've survived so many different incidents in our history.
Chinese Exclusion Act, Depression, World Wars, the earthquake...
But then this is probably one of the hardest ones."
"This community was stigmatized very early as being a source of Covid-19.
When in fact that's completely false."
"In this time, I think more than ever that the anti-Asian hate crimes,
I've seen an uptick, not just on the news. Basically all around me."
Today, Chinatown is still a community whose foreignness is embraced, until it's not.
It's also a community that embodies survival.
In a way, it was built for survival:
built to be a home that couldn't easily be taken away.
"If you look beneath the surface of those exoticized exterior facades,
you can look at, really, a strategic response
that the Chinese used to preserve their community."