Where it is, and the one street that matters
Grant Avenue is the spine, running north from the Dragon Gate at Bush Street up towards Broadway and North Beach. The neighbourhood occupies roughly the blocks between Bush and Broadway, and between Kearny and Powell — it does not extend west to Larkin Street, which is a different part of the city altogether.
Grant is the street visitors are funnelled along: lanterns, souvenirs, English menus, and a good deal of merchandise that could have come from anywhere. Stockton Street, one block west, is where the neighbourhood actually shops — fishmongers with the catch still moving, greengrocers stacked out onto the pavement, herbalists, bakeries, and very little English on the signage. It is crowded, loud and unceremonious. Anyone who walks only Grant Avenue has not seen Chinatown.
The architecture is a survival strategy
The 1906 earthquake and the fire that followed destroyed Chinatown completely. City officials treated this as an opportunity: the neighbourhood sat on valuable ground close to the financial district, and there was a serious proposal to move the Chinese community out to Hunters Point at the city's southern edge and redevelop the land.
The response was led by Look Tin Eli, general manager of the Sing Chong bazaar. He raised capital through partners in Hong Kong and Canton, helped found the Canton Bank in 1907 to finance the rebuilding, and persuaded Chinatown's merchants to rebuild fast — and to hire Western architects, T. Paterson Ross and A.W. Burgren, to design something unmistakably and theatrically Chinese to a Western eye.
The calculation was that a Chinatown valuable as an attraction could not be removed. So the new buildings were given pagoda towers, upturned eaves, dragon motifs and strong colour, none of which reflects the building traditions of southern China. Historians call it strategic orientalism: a community performing an outsider's idea of itself in order to keep its ground. The Sing Chong and Sing Fat buildings at Grant Avenue and California Street are the surviving originals, and they are the reason every Chinatown in the English-speaking world looks faintly like this one.
It worked. The community kept the land, and the picturesqueness that looks like kitsch is in fact the monument to a successful act of resistance.
Look Tin Eli is worth a further sentence. Born in California, he was refused re-entry to his own country in 1884, aged fourteen, for want of a certificate under the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Chinese Six Companies took up his case as a test of whether an American-born Chinese person could be excluded, and he won. The 1884 ruling in his favour was cited in United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898, the Supreme Court decision that settled birthright citizenship in the United States.
The Exclusion Act, accurately
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first law in American history to bar a specific nationality from immigrating. It was extended and tightened repeatedly over sixty years.
It was repealed by the Magnuson Act in 1943, when China was a wartime ally — but repeal is not the same as admission. The Act was replaced by an annual quota of around a hundred and five Chinese immigrants, and that quota system was only dismantled by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Accounts that give 1965 as the single date skip the 1943 repeal; accounts that give 1943 skip the twenty-two years of quota that followed it.
What to see
- The Dragon Gate, Grant at Bush. Also not ancient: Clayton Lee won a 1967 design competition open to architects of Chinese descent, construction ran through 1968 and 1969, and it was dedicated on 18 October 1970, with the tiles, roofing and guardian lions given by the Republic of China. The characters over the central portal, 天下為公, are Sun Yat-sen's — roughly, all under heaven is for the good of the people.
- Waverly Place, known as the Street of Painted Balconies, and the cultural centre of the neighbourhood. The Tin How Temple at number 125 was founded in 1852 and is the oldest continuously operating Chinese temple in the country. It is several flights up, it is small, it is free, and it is in use — photography inside is not permitted, and it should be treated as a place of worship rather than an exhibit.
- Portsmouth Square, at Clay and Kearny. This is Chinatown's living room: chess, cards, newspapers and tai chi from early in the morning. It is also where the discovery of gold was publicly announced in 1848. It says more about how the neighbourhood actually lives than Grant Avenue manages in six blocks.
- The Chinese Historical Society of America, 965 Clay Street, in a building designed by Julia Morgan. The oldest and largest archive of Chinese American history in the country, and the place to go for the Exclusion-era material.
- Ross Alley, reputedly the city's oldest alley, and the fortune cookie factory in it, where the cookies are still folded by hand as they come off the griddle.
The fortune cookie, which is not Chinese
Several Chinatown bakeries have been credited over the years with inventing the fortune cookie. None of those claims survives scrutiny, and the cookie is not Chinese in origin at all.
It most likely descends from a cookie made by Japanese immigrants to the United States, with nineteenth-century antecedents near Kyoto. In San Francisco the first person reported to have served the modern version was Makoto Hagiwara, at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park in the early 1900s, with the cookies baked for him by Benkyodo, a Japanese bakery.
In 1983 San Francisco's Court of Historical Review — a mock court presided over by real judges — heard the city's claim against Los Angeles, where the Hong Kong Noodle Company maintained that David Jung had invented the cookie in 1918. San Francisco won. The evidence included a cookie bearing the message "S.F. Judge who rules for L.A. Not Very Smart Cookie". Los Angeles has never accepted the verdict.
Eating
Restaurant names are the fastest-rotting part of any guide, so the pattern is more use than a list. Grant Avenue has the English menus and the tourist pricing. Stockton Street and the side alleys off it have the rest, and a queue of local people outside a place with no English signage is the most reliable indicator available anywhere in the city.
Dim sum is a mid-morning to mid-afternoon affair rather than an evening one, which catches out visitors who turn up at seven expecting trolleys. Bakeries sell egg tarts, pork buns and sponge cake all day and are the cheapest decent breakfast in central San Francisco. Many of the smaller places still prefer cash.
Getting there
Chinatown had no railway at all until recently. The Central Subway changed that: Chinatown–Rose Pak station opened in November 2022 and has been served by the T Third line since January 2023, running directly to Union Square and on south. It is the single most useful recent change to getting round the city, and no guidebook written before 2023 mentions it.
Otherwise, the California Street cable car crosses Grant Avenue at the southern edge of the neighbourhood, and the 30 Stockton bus runs through it — slowly, and packed, which is part of the experience.
North Beach begins where Chinatown ends at Broadway, so the two are naturally walked together. General practicalities for the city are on the San Francisco page.