When Santa Ana Burned Down Its Own Chinatown
Here stands the site of a former Chinatown that was burned down in one of the most brazen acts of officially sanctioned anti-Asian violence in Southern California until the World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans. This Chinatown once included lodging, drugstores, curio shops, two Chinese wash houses and a vegetable garden and barn. Chinese workers built most of the irrigation canals and railroad infrastructure of Orange County in the late 1800s. But in 1906, doctors declared that Wong Woh Ye was ill with leprosy and advised the Santa Ana City Council to eradicate all the buildings here.
On May 25, over 1,000 residents looked on and cheered as firefighters torched each building; a resident decades later said the event "was like a big picnic, or a Fourth of July." Nearby, Ye and his fellow Chinatown residents looked on, imprisoned in a pen ringed with barbed wire.
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"It was done maliciously and with malice aforethought," admitted then-mayor Arthur J. McFadden, in an interview archived at the Center for Oral and Public History at Cal State Fullerton. "[City leaders] wanted to get rid of Chinatown, and they just deliberately burned it down."
Asians wouldn't return to Santa Ana until the 1940s. In the decades since, the city's Asian American population has grown with Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian and Taiwanese communities. Few know of the burned-down Chinatown, mainly because what's there today are gentrified lofts, a parking lot and no plaque denoting what happened here over a century ago.
