Chinese Store — Chy Lung & Co., Sacramento Street, San Francisco

The objectphotographed as held, uncropped

Catalogue description

The storefront of Chy Lung & Co. on Sacramento Street, photographed straight on, with goods stacked in the windows under a deep awning and several figures standing in the shaded recess of the doorway. The building’s upper floor carries an ornamental iron balcony. The exposure is held for the street, so the interior of the shop reads as a dark mouth behind the display.

The copyright line dates the negative precisely: 1866, registered by Lawrence & Houseworth. The mount, however, is printed for Thomas Houseworth & Co. — the firm’s later name after George Lawrence left the partnership — so the card in hand is a reissue of an earlier negative, a routine practice in the stereograph trade and a useful reminder that a stereograph’s mount and its image can be years apart.

Chy Lung & Co. was one of the substantial Chinese import houses of San Francisco, bringing in food, medicine, textiles and household goods from Guangdong and supplying Chinese communities across the mining West. The iron balcony and plate glass in this view are the evidence of that standing. Merchant status later became a legal category as well as a commercial one: when the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred the entry of Chinese laborers, merchants were one of the narrow exempt classes, so documented commercial standing became a form of protection most Chinese immigrants did not have.

A note on the name, because it invites a confusion. The Supreme Court case Chy Lung v. Freeman (1876) — which struck down a California statute empowering a state commissioner to demand bonds from arriving passengers he judged undesirable, and held that regulating immigration belongs to Congress and not the states — is not connected to this firm. Chy Lung was a Chinese woman, one of twenty-two detained aboard the steamer Japan after it reached San Francisco in August 1874. The shared name is a coincidence.

Transcriptiontext on the object, as printed

SAN FRANCISCO.
By THOMAS HOUSEWORTH & CO.
391 Chinese Store—Chy Lung & Co., Sacramento Street, San Francisco.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by LAWRENCE & HOUSEWORTH, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Northern District of California.

Historical context

Lawrence & Houseworth built one of the largest commercial photographic view businesses on the Pacific Coast in the 1860s, selling stereographs of California scenery, mining, and city life to a national market. Their Chinatown views were made for that market: Chinese San Francisco packaged as one of the sights of the coast, alongside Yosemite and the Big Trees.

What is not known

• The printing date is inferred from the Houseworth imprint postdating the 1866 Lawrence & Houseworth copyright; no printing date appears on the object.
• The individuals in the doorway are not identified and cannot be identified from this image.