Chinese Joss House, San Francisco, California

The objectphotographed as held, uncropped

Catalogue description

A temple interior crowded with carved and gilded altar furniture: tiered offering tables, banners and hanging lanterns, ranked candlesticks and incense vessels, and an elaborately carved screen across the rear of the shrine. The exposure has been made in low light and the highlights on the gilding have burned out.

The card carries only a number and a caption — no publisher, no series, no address. It is the plainest object in the collection and one of the most common kinds: an unattributed view, probably copied from another publisher’s negative, circulating on its own.

The temple itself is the record here. What survives of nineteenth-century Chinese American religious life survives very largely in photographs like this one, made by outsiders for sale, because the buildings and most of their furnishings did not survive the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake.

Transcriptiontext on the object, as printed

No. 130.  Chinese Joss House, San Francisco, Cal.

Historical context

San Francisco’s Chinatown was destroyed by the fire following the earthquake of 18 April 1906. Commercial photographs made before that date are among the principal surviving visual sources for the district’s temples, shops and interiors.

What is not known

• No publisher is identified on the object as photographed; the verso was not photographed and may carry an imprint.
• Which temple is shown is not stated.
• The date range is inferred from mount style alone and is correspondingly wide.