So What Exactly Are the Tongs of Chinatown?

The Tongs of Chinatown started off as an attempt to do good, but ended up corrupted by greed and turned into a term of evil. But what are they really? 

Tong 堂 literally means the main room or a hall. It could be termed an "association", and they still exist today in San Francisco Chinatown. 

Hop Sing Tong, or 合勝縂堂 (lit: united victory main hall)
photo courtesy of Wikipedia / Wikicommons

The Tongs started as immigrant associations serving people with common former residency, common dialect, or common ancestry. The tongs will help people fresh off the boast to adapt to the new culture. If you can find a tong that is affiliated with your village or your clan or speak your dialect, you will be welcomed. You will be given a bed for the night, then help to find a job, and find proper housing. 

The tongs also offered both physical and legal protection. By 1854, the Chinese have been ruled to have no right to participate in the court system. In People vs. Hall, a Chinese witness' testimony was deemed inadmissible for the prosecution of murder. This means crimes committed against the Chinese will go unreported because very few whites would testify against other whites. And the police, knowing so, will often not even arrest the perpetrator. This has the result of turning many tong members into neighborhood patrols to make sure no other Chinese are being picked on by rowdy sailors and such. 

However, many tongs were not well organized, and since most members are poor, they were unable to collect dues to keep themselves going legally, and many turned to operating criminal enterprises to survive. 

It is also believed that many tongs were quickly infiltrated by various "secret societies" and sworn brotherhoods with their own agendas. It is even rumored that one of the generals of the Taiping Rebellion was able to escape China and ended up in the Los Angeles area. 

So now we have the overworld, with the "Six Companies", the proper benevolent associations, and the underworld tongs, the more criminal elements, somewhat co-existing with each other. 

With the passage of the Page Act of 1875 (which prohibited Chinese women from immigrating), and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (which also prohibited more Chinese laborers from immigrating), no further immigration from China is allowed, and the Chinese population in Chinatown is almost exclusively male. As a result, the more criminal tongs, with access to ports, turned to human trafficking and brothels to make their money. Many Chinese women were tricked or kidnapped for either marriage or prostitution to the US. And the fight over them and the supply line became known as the "Tong Wars", which lasted from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. 

It's worth noting that the Chinatown Squad, a special task force of the San Francisco Police Department, was formed in 1875, to specifically chase down crime in the area. But often they only have 16 members. 

The foot soldiers of the war are known either as hatchet men (斧頭仔) for their preferred weapon, or highbinders because they bind their Qing-style single long hair braids high on their heads. Those that are lucky or rich enough to acquire a pistol or revolver will use them for special assignments, such as assassinations. 

If you want to see a good TV series on this subject, Cinemax's "Warrior" covered this era very well, featuring some famously historical characters, but also many inventions for the show. 

During the Tong Wars, a woman by the name of Donaldina Cameron was considered the angry angel of Chinatown, as she often rescued Chinese girls forced into prostitution with help of San Francisco Police's Chinatown Squad. She is known to chase the girls being spirited away while accompanied by burly police through the alleyways and underground passages and so on. We will cover her later in her own article in Hidden Chinatown. 

In the heyday of the Tongs, there were as many as thirty different Tongs in SF Chinatown, and membership may reach into the thousands. While primarily Chinese, the Tongs do have non-Chinese members, primarily for their English skills. But they are very rare. Some groups splinter off, some rejoin, or got merged into another Tong after the death of its leader(s), and so on. 

By the 1880s, the power of the Six Companies was on the decline. Many of the city and state legislators don't seem to understand or do not care that the Six Companies do not control ALL of Chinatown, much less the Tongs. And the era of the Tong War started. 

In 1893, The Six Companies asked the citizens of Chinatown to refuse the registration requirements of the Geary Act, which passed anyway. This would require all Chinese residents of the US to carry a resident permit even if they entered the US legally. Many used this to discredit the Six Companies, as it both campaigned against the law and urged civil non-compliance, leading to a massive growth of the Tongs, and a civil war between two of the Six Companies. 

The assassination of Fung Jing Toy, also known as "Little Pete", in 1897, resulted in a temporary power vacuum, and a boycott against one of the Six Companies. The local Chinese Consul General attempted to negotiate peace but was unsuccessful, probably encouraged by agitators from the Tongs who wanted the Six Companies weak. The Tong Wars has entered its hot phase. During this time, many Chinese actually left Chinatown, or the US altogether, to get away from the violence. Wars between the Tongs are often fought over women, and sometimes, allies got involved or were dragged in. Then someone would negotiate a ceasefire, then something else flare-up. But no Tong ever claimed dominance. 

The membership of the Tongs gets really murky as well, as there was an instance of a man who was a member of no less than six Tongs, so his death ended up dragging in multiple Tongs. 

The Tongs were severely damaged by the 1906 Earthquake, which destroyed the entire Chinatown. The tongs that relied on brothels, gambling dens, and so on lost their profit centers and they were basically pushed out. By this time the hatchetmen are getting old, and most of the most militant ones were dead, deported back to China, or left for other cities. By this time, a new Chinatown Squad leader, Inspector Jack Manion, forced the six remaining tongs to form a peace committee in 1913, and the Tong War is finally over. 

However, Tong violence did continue, just much lower key. Inspector Manion was tough but very fair and his informers eventually gave him enough information to shut down the sex slave trade in the next ten or so years. The last raid was in 1927. And illegal gambling and drug activity were severely reduced. Indeed, Jack Manion was so beloved by the Chinatown community they petition the city to let him stay serving Chinatown until his retirement in 1946. 

Tongs still exist today, but as proper benevolent societies, and you can still see their signs on Waverly Pl and all over Chinatown.