The scam worked like this: The majority of the world's maritime trade was on British vessels. Be forewarned, the article is filled with disgusting racial slurs that have become unacceptable today (thank God!). Copyright laws prevent me from copying this into my article, but for anyone interested enough to look it up for themselves, the article is a feature in the Sunday Oregonian, Novemcalled, "John Chinaman's Jack-in-the-Box. As late as 1935 the Oregonian ran a feature article describing the secret passageways of Chinatown, complete with diagrams. In 1913 the city government created a "secret passages ordinance." This law was hotly contested as being discriminatory against Chinese. The unfolding story of these raids, by officers with varying degrees of zeal, continued up into the twentieth century. By the late 1890s this system started to unravel, and Chinatown entered into an era when policemen would bring sledge hammers and start battering down walls, busting the secret world open.
I confess to having believed the story myself, until the fall of 1992 when the Oregon Historical Society Quarterlypublished an excellent article by Denise Alborn called: 'Crimping and Shanghaiing on the Columbia River.” "Hey!" I asked myself, "Where's the tunnels?" From then on I searched in vain-through old books, maps, magazines, and newspapers-but I could not find the tiniest little rabbit hole of a shanghai tunnel in real life.įor quite a few years the authorities left the north end underworld alone, as long as the "special police," who were paid a mere dollar a month salary by the city, were kept well-oiled in a sort of city sanctioned protection racket. Historians have known all along that this was an erroneous tale, but since, for some inexplicable reason, no one had ever written a book about the Portland waterfront, a refutation of the tale had never been put forward (in book form, anyway). I expected my treatment of this subject to raise some eyebrows, but it was about time someone mentioned the facts on the tunnel business. It would seem, from the attention given to it, that this is the book's main subject. In my book, Portland's Lost Waterfront, there are 3 short paragraphs dealing with the "shanghai tunnel" fakelore (manufactured mythology)that has become popular in Portland.
0 kommentar(er)
