![]() It is unclear how many photographers are represented in the collection. Yang explained that it was fashionable then, if you had money, to send such photographs home to China to show family members how well you were doing. ![]() In one of the many studio portraits, a young woman in elegant, traditional Chinese clothing holds a fan and sits before a painted backdrop. It is the only photo with a visibly printed date, 1902, the same year that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was made permanent and required Chinese residents to register and obtain a certificate of residence or face deportation. This, Yang said, would likely have been a photo necessary for immigration purposes. In another, a young Chinese American man gazes somberly into the camera. ![]() In one photograph, three men-a cook and two servers in long white aprons-stand among the tables of a restaurant. The See collection of photographs are divided between interior and street scenes in Old Chinatown and posed studio portraits of both Chinese and American men and women. The Hong papers include immigration files related to Fong See’s journey to China in the 1920s to visit relatives and purchase antiques for his business. Hong, one of the first Chinese American immigration attorneys in California and the United States. In fact, she visited The Huntington more than a decade ago to examine the archived Hong Family Papers, donated in 2006, which contain the legal files of Y. Of course, I didn’t want them destroyed, so I realized it was time to give them to The Huntington.”Īs a researcher herself, See said The Huntington serves as an important scholarly resource for studying regional Asian American history. ![]() “We have a list for what to grab when we are evacuated, and the box containing this collection was at the top of the list. “Glass plate negatives are very heavy and quite fragile,” See said. That year, 11 homes burned on her street. See was motivated to give the collection assembled by her family to The Huntington when her neighborhood, located in a high-fire risk area, was evacuated twice in 2020. This early, state-of-the-art form of photography, with both a wet and dry version, allowed for sharper, more detailed photos than paper negatives provided at the time. Though most images are not dated, the use of glass plate negatives sets them in the late 19th and early 20th century, when photographic emulsions were made on glass plate supports. We see people’s facial expressions and clothing, set against backgrounds of Old Chinatown.” These rare photographs reveal their daily lives. “In this period of California history, Chinese residents were actively excluded from mainstream activities, so there’s less documentation about them. “The history of Los Angeles’ Old Chinatown and its early Chinese residents is not a well-understood subject,” said Li Wei Yang, The Huntington’s curator of Pacific Rim collections. The gift deepens The Huntington’s array of materials for the study of the Pacific Rim, which has, among its many areas of collecting, an emphasis on Chinese American history in Southern California. The studio portraits and street scenes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries provide a rare view of the people and daily life in the city’s original Chinatown, which thrived mainly from 1890 to 1910, before it was largely cleared in the 1930s to make way for Union Station. The images were taken in and around Los Angeles’ Old Chinatown. SAN MARINO, Calif.-Author Lisa See has given a trove of more than 100 rare glass plate negatives and photographs, some dating back to the late 19th century, to The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, The Huntington announced today. The trove of images from the late 19th and early 20th centuries were found by her family during the vacating of Old Chinatown.
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