Chinatown Ash and Ember: A City Under Siege
A devastating fire levels the Chinese quarter in Tacoma, leaving the community in ruins and stoking the fires of anti-Chinese agitation.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Yesterday, about noon, fire was discovered issuing from one of the Chinese houses in the First Ward, situated in the deep gulch near Hanson's Mill. Soon after, it was found that the building was on fire within, and in a very few minutes, the entire mass of Chinese rookeries was enveloped in a sheet of flame. A space nearly 200 feet wide by 400 feet long was filled with houses, there being about fifteen in all, that were built compactly together. The heat from the burning structures was intense, and for an hour the stores and dwellings near by were in imminent danger. Had it not been for the prompt action of Tacoma fire cart No. 1, several houses and the public school building likely would have been destroyed. By 12 o'clock, Chinatown was a mass of smoking ruins, and it is hoped this city will know such a place no more. The four Chinese occupying the buildings at the time have been arrested for incendiarism. Pro-Chinese citizens lay the fire at the feet of agitators, while others whisper of arson. Like talk has been heard in Seattle, and the danger of civil unrest is palpable throughout the region.
“Chinatown a mass of smoking ruins, and this city, it is hoped, will know such a place no more.”
This 1885 report documents the violent anti-Chinese movement that defined the Pacific Northwest in the 1880s, culminating in the expulsion of Chinese residents from Tacoma and Seattle. The 'blaze' here is not merely a structural fire but a symptom of the systematic, racially motivated housing and labor exclusion that shaped the modern demographic landscape of Washington State.
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