Chinatown

San Francisco Chinatown is the largest Chinese community on the West Coast, and the second largest in the United States next to New York City's settlement. Historically, it was the port of entry for early Taishanese and Zhongshanese Chinese immigrants from the southern Guangdong province of China from the 1850s to the 1900s. The area was the one geographical region deeded by the city government and private property owners which allowed Chinese persons to inherit and inhabit dwellings within the city. The majority of these Chinese shopkeepers, restaurant owners, and hired workers in San Francisco Chinatown were predominantly Taishanese and male. Many Chinese found jobs working for large companies seeking a source of cheap labor, most famously as part of Central Pacific on the Transcontinental Railroad. Other early immigrants worked as mine workers or independent prospectors hoping to strike it rich during the 1849 Gold Rush.

In recent years, other Chinatown areas have been established within the city of San Francisco proper, including the Richmond and Sunset districts. These areas have been settled largely by Chinese from Southeast Asia. There are also many suburban Chinese communities in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially in Silicon Valley, such as Cupertino, Fremont, and Milpitas, where Taiwanese Americans are dominant. Despite these developments, many continue to commute in from these outer neighborhoods and cities to shop in Chinatown - and the location itself draws more visitors annually than the Golden Gate Bridge.

The official entrance to Chinatown is a symbolic and literal transition from standard downtown scenes to what sometimes seems like another country altogether - a dragon-crested gate at Grant Avenue and Bush Street - a gift from the Republic of China in 1969. Stone lions flank the base of the pagoda-topped gate. The male lion's right front paw rests playfully on a ball; the female's left front paw tickles a cub lying on its back. The lions and the glazed clay dragons atop the largest of the gate's three pagodas symbolize, among other things, wealth and prosperity. The fish whose mouths wrap tightly around the crest of this pagoda also symbolize prosperity. The four Chinese characters immediately beneath the pagoda represent the philosophy of Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), the leader who unified China in the early 20th century. Sun Yat-sen, who lived in exile in San Francisco for a few years, promoted the notion of friendship and peace among all nations based on equality, justice, and goodwill. The vertical characters under the left pagoda read "peace" and "trust," the ones under the right pagoda "respect" and "love."

Here I am with Max in front of part of the gate where you can see the male lion to our right

San Francisco’s oldest street - Grant Avenue - runs eight blocks through the center of America’s ethnic capital to over 1.5 million people of Chinese descent.

Many examples of Chinese architecture can be spotted throughout along Stockton Street, but one of the most noteworthy is the headquarters of The Chinese Six Companies. With its curved roof tiles and elaborate cornices, the imposing structure's oversize pagoda cheerfully calls attention to itself. The business leaders who run the six companies, which still exist, dominated Chinatown's political and economic life for decades.

Walk down Ross Alley and you'll chance upon Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory - which has been supplying fortune cookies since 1962. Here's how they do it - the workers sit at circular motorized griddles and wait for dollops of batter to drop onto a tiny metal plate, which rotates into an oven. A few moments later out comes a cookie that's pliable and ready for folding. Then, a fortune is placed on one side of the hot, flat dough. Next, each soft, hot cookie is shaped over a steel rod into the shape of a fortune cookie. This process must be done very quickly, otherwise the cookie will harden before it has the right fortune cookie shape.

Most of Chinatown burned down after the 1906 earthquake, and this building -- today the Bank of Canton -- set the style for the new Chinatown. The intricate three-tier pagoda was built in 1909. The exchange's operators were renowned for their prodigious memories, about which the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce boasted in 1914: "These girls respond all day with hardly a mistake to calls that are given (in English or one of five Chinese dialects) by the name of the subscriber instead of by his number..."

Portsmouth Square - a former potato patch - was the plaza for Yerba Buena, the Mexican settlement that was renamed San Francisco. Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, lived on the edge of Chinatown in the late 19th century and often visited the square, chatting up the sailors who hung out here. Some of the information he gleaned about life at sea found its way into his fiction. Bruce Porter designed the bronze galleon that sits atop a 9-foot-tall granite shaft in the square's northwestern corner in honor of the writer. With its pagoda-shape structures, Portsmouth Square is a favorite spot for morning tai chi. By noon dozens of men huddle around Chinese chess tables, and children can play on one of the two playgrounds.