Tong Wars

A hall could mean protection. A rivalry could close a street.

A tong was an association, not a synonym for a criminal gang. San Francisco Planning’s historical study describes fraternal institutions offering employment connections, pooled resources and burial assistance, alongside protection businesses and, in some cases, criminal enterprises. Membership could overlap with family and district associations. These organizations inhabited the same neighborhood without being the same kind of institution.

The phrase ‘tong wars’ gathers many separate conflicts under one dramatic label. To read their history responsibly, ask four questions: Which society? Which year? Which place? Which evidence? An accusation against one member cannot establish the conduct of an entire lodge. A truce between two societies cannot prove that every conflict in Chinatown ended. The stories below keep those distinctions visible.

Shared roots, distinct societies

Chee Kung Tong belongs within the wider Hongmen fraternal tradition. Historian L. Eve Armentrout Ma describes a federation containing different kinds of lodges, many of which were not fighting societies; some were organized around occupations. Her account cautions against imagining a single organization controlling every association in Chinatown.

There are three different relationships to trace: a shared tradition, membership in a federation, and a documented split that created a new society. None automatically proves the others. This collection therefore does not label Hop Sing, Suey Sing, Bing Kong, Hip Sing or On Yick as branches founded by the San Francisco Chee Kung Tong lodge. A convincing institutional family tree needs founding records, constitutions or dated testimony identifying the relationship.

Hop Sing and Suey Sing: a rivalry with a long memory

Research tracing early temple records places Hop Sing and Suey Sing in conflict by 1881. The newspaper illustrations reproduced here show how raids on society halls and the fate of their altars became public spectacles in the 1890s. These are press illustrations, not photographs of combat. Their composition reveals how editors presented Chinatown to readers as well as what they claimed had happened.

A dramatic drawing is an invitation to investigate, not a verdict. Weapons, figures and gestures may be the artist’s reconstruction. Read the caption and publication date before using an image as evidence. The same discipline applies to identifying the society involved: Hop Sing and Hip Sing are different names, and neither should silently replace the other in a timeline.

Little Pete: a killing at 817 Washington Street

On the evening of January 23, 1897, Fong Ching—known as Little Pete—was killed in a barber shop at 817 Washington Street. The next day’s San Francisco Call placed him in a chair near the door, facing Ross Alley. Its account described two men entering, four shots, and two fatal wounds to the head. The report located his residence above the shoe business at 819½ Washington Street. These addresses bring the story down from legend to a particular doorway and block.

The Call framed the murder through the opposition of Sam Yup and See Yup interests. Those district identities must not be mistaken for two single gangs, or for a complete description of everyone from those regions. The article’s account of a bounty and political backing was reporting about alleged motives. It was not a court finding identifying the men who ordered the killing.

The article moved freely between reporting the shooting and making sweeping accusations about the victim. It presented him as a merchant and manufacturer with powerful connections, while also alleging bribery, gambling and exploitation. Its language was openly racist. Those accusations must be read as claims made by that newspaper, not treated as a complete judicial record or a neutral biography.

The aftermath also produced trials. A November 7, 1897 Call report, preserved in the Maritime Heritage Project’s newspaper transcriptions, records Woon Sing’s acquittal. An acquittal is a crucial part of the story: suspicion, arrest and prosecution were not proof that the accused man committed the killing. Nor does this case establish that Little Pete was a Chee Kung Tong officer or that his killers acted on our lodge’s orders.

One death. Competing newspapers. Different memories.

Three days after the killing, the Call printed a page headed ‘Terror in Chinatown.’ It described mourning at Little Pete’s home and carried sharply different assessments of his life. Police criticism appeared beside an English rendering of a forthcoming Chinese Recorder editorial that emphasized his employment of workers and charitable assistance. A Chinese perspective survives here through an English newspaper’s selection and translation—not as an independently examined original Chinese editorial.

The page also challenged a rival newspaper’s story about a telegram to China and the arrest of relatives there. This disagreement matters. The news cycle was already producing competing claims while the investigation was fresh. A compelling history does not need to choose the most spectacular version; it can show readers how the versions were made.

Beyond the headlines: a lodge, its altar and political power

An 1891 Examiner illustration depicts the Chee Kong altar during a controversy over police destruction of religious objects. A different Call illustration, published in 1898, accompanied a reporter’s account of initiation. Together they show how the lodge entered the public imagination. They are historical representations of Chee Kung Tong, not documentary photographs of a ceremony or battle.

Ma’s study identifies a direct Chee Kung Tong connection in 1903: an alliance of lodges within the federation opposed the powerful translators’ lodge, whose members dealt with American officials. This makes access to language and government part of the story of rivalry. The account describes a particular political alignment, not a permanent list of our lodge’s enemies or supporters.

On Yick, the Yee family & an accusation involving a lodge leader

A San Francisco dispatch dated November 24, 1909, printed the following day in the Herald-Republican, reported a grand-jury indictment of Tong King Chong, identified as a Chinese Free Masons secretary and Chinese Free Press editor. It connected the charges to killings during the conflict between the On Yick tong and the Yee family. The report also named On Yick officers among those indicted. This is a documented newspaper report of an accusation—not a conviction.

The same dispatch described a woman, Bo Gue, leaving a man connected to the tong and entering a mission home. Its language treated her as someone’s property. That wording exposes the coercion surrounding the story; it should not be repeated as a romantic adventure or as an acceptable claim of ownership. Women’s safety and agency belong in the history alongside the names of male leaders.

The sources presented here do not establish the final disposition of Tong King Chong’s case. They therefore cannot support a claim that Chee Kung Tong as an institution ordered the killings. They do demonstrate why lodge history must be read together with court proceedings, press coverage and the wider politics of Chinatown.

Twenty shots in Ross Alley. Then a peace table.

The Call of November 6, 1912 reported that Hop Sing and Suey Sing had signed a peace agreement after an exchange of twenty shots in Ross Alley on Monday evening. It traced the immediate confrontation to an exchange of insults outside Yee May’s gambling establishment. A longstanding rivalry could turn a small encounter into a neighborhood emergency.

Consul General Li Yeung Yew led the mediation, according to the report, and the meeting took place at the Chinese Six Companies headquarters. Representatives of both sides signed an agreement against further shooting. Other tongs were reported to have agreed to remain neutral. That last detail is essential: being part of Chinatown’s association world did not automatically mean joining either side.

Even the optimistic headline was followed by caution: the paper said confidence in the agreement remained fragile and police vigilance would continue. Peace was an undertaking that had to be maintained, not simply a dramatic final scene. The source does not name Chee Kung Tong as a combatant in this particular exchange.

A different war—and another effort at peace

In March 1913, newspapers reported fighting between Bing Kong and Suey Sing extending beyond San Francisco to other California communities. An April 9 San Francisco dispatch printed in the Victoria Daily Times described an Oakland killing and grand-jury indictments in the Bay Area conflict. The places matter: a California-wide story should not be turned into a list of deaths that all occurred on San Francisco streets.

A photograph preserved by UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library records a February 1921 peace meeting in San Francisco. The meeting brought together Hip Sing and Bing Kong (秉公堂). The photograph preserves a moment of negotiation, not proof that every earlier rivalry had been settled. Here the historical camera gives us something the gunfight headline rarely does: people assembled to stop a conflict.

Reading the streets, without inventing borders

Washington Street and Ross Alley anchor the Little Pete story. The Library of Congress identifies the camera position of the 1897 film Arrest in Chinatown at Washington and Stout’s Alley, now Ross Alley. Its catalog describes gambling houses and nearby pawnbrokers, while explicitly leaving the arrested man’s charge uncertain. The film is a street record; it is not an identified portrait of a tong assassin.

An address can establish where a hall, shop or reported incident stood. It cannot by itself establish exclusive territorial control over a block. Buildings changed occupants, street names changed, and residents moved through overlapping business and social networks. For that reason, this section uses a place guide rather than coloring Chinatown into supposedly permanent gang territories.

The room behind the doorway

Gambling establishments appear in contemporary accounts as places of business, encounter and confrontation. The 1912 report supplies a named example in Ross Alley. But it does not establish that the premises belonged to Chee Kung Tong, nor does it identify the game being played. A historian should not fill those gaps with an atmospheric mahjong scene.

Fan-tan appears by name in the period material. A report reproduced in the Maritime Heritage newspaper collection listed three fan-tan games among the businesses said to have belonged to Little Pete. The wording was a contemporary claim about his interests, not an inventory proving ownership by every associated society. It gives us a more precise historical lead than calling every gambling room a mahjong parlor.

Mahjong deserves its own social history. A museum account of the game documents its popularity in the United States in the 1920s. That later enthusiasm should not be projected backward onto every nineteenth-century gambling report. Nor does a mahjong table prove organized crime: the evidence must establish who operated a room, when, and for what purpose. Social recreation, wagering and coercive protection are different activities.

Chinese voices belong at the center

English newspapers are only one side of this archive. UC Berkeley preserves the Chung Sai Yat Po newspaper collection, with digitized issues from 1900–1904. Chinese-language reporting can illuminate the arguments, priorities and vocabulary of people living within the community. It is a vital companion to police statements and English-language headlines.

This collection distinguishes direct examination of a period report, a later scholar’s interpretation, and a catalog description of a photograph. The Chinese Recorder perspective discussed above survives here through the Call’s English rendering. The Chung Sai Yat Po collection is linked for further reading; this page does not claim that every Chinese issue has been examined or that an untranslated page proves a particular allegation.

The story that outlasted the conflict

For Chee Kung Tong, this history belongs beside the lodge’s wider record of brotherhood, community life and support for Sun Yat-sen. The 1911 fundraising photographs preserve another form of collective power: organizing people and resources across the Pacific. They are not photographs of tong combatants, and they should not be captioned as such.

A strong heritage can face difficult history without turning suffering into spectacle. The enduring questions are who received protection, who paid the price of conflict, and how a community recovered the ability to live together. Preserving the documents keeps those questions open to evidence—and keeps the people of Chinatown larger than the headlines written about them.