San Francisco Chinatown Secret Tunnels (Part 2)

In 1854, patrolman police officer Isaiah Lees was patrolling Chinatown on his regular night beat. He stood next to the Palmer and Cook Bank on Clay Street and heard banging and clinging noise underneath him. Cook stayed at the corner until the noise stopped in daybreak. He returned to the same spot for the next few nights and heard the same noise. Is someone trying to dig a tunnel to rob this bank?

A few days later. A young miner brought his jewel to the Eldorado Gambling Hall at Washington and Kearny Streets to offset his gambling debt. A Chinese man standing nearby grabbed the jewel and ran out of the bank. Several police officers give chase after this thief to a restaurant basement off an alley. The police found 20 men in the basement kitchen but none of them was the man that they were looking for. Suspicious, the police asked why there are so many people in the kitchen. The head cook said they were all his cousins. Even more suspicious, the police searched and found an adjacent room with bags of rice stacked to the ceiling. Officer Less, who was also at the scene, immediately cut open one of the bags and found to be filled with soil. The police ordered the men to remove the bags and then placed them under arrest. What appeared in front of the police was the mouth of a tunnel that it was only big enough for someone to crawl. The thief who took the jewel and ran from the police was hiding inside; he was shot once and dragged out of the tunnel. As it turned out, about 20 Chinese men were involved in an attempted heist on a bank that is located across the street. They had been digging a tunnel for several weeks and had reached within several feet of the vaults of Palmer and Cook’s bank.

This attempted heist shows that Chinese in the past were certainly capable of digging “secret tunnels” in Chinatown. Are there anymore that still exist? A recent episode on History Channel’s Cities of Underworld revealed Donaldina Cameron House located at 920 Sacramento still have a underground tunnel that was used to hide young women who escaped from prostitute rings ran by the Tongs over a century ago.