Gung Hay Fat Choy, Chinese New Years In San Francisco - Part I

Gung Hay Fat Choy, The Chinese New Year In San Francisco -  Part I

The Chinese community has been synonymous with the development of San Francisco since the Gold Rush of 1849.  It was mostly Chinese laborers who built the western portion of the Trans Continental Railroad, and whose port of entry was San Francisco.  No subway station in San Francisco is named for a person only a location, except one: The Rose Pak/Chinatown Station. 

The Rose Pak Subway Station

From Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1958 Chinatown-set musical, Flower Drum Song, to Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club, there could be no San Francisco without the Chinese community.  Chinatown is also one the most popular tourist attractions in San Francisco and to this day, is still the first stop for many Chinese immigrants coming to the United States for the first time.

However, for the first hundred years of San Francisco’s existence, and more than most ethnic groups, the Chinese were the first minority group to be Ghettoized and discriminated against in the great city by the bay. Yet the Chinese New Year’s Parade has been a standard in the Chinese community, since the earliest days of San Francisco.

In my upcoming book Service is the Business (about life behind a real hotel concierge desk), I write about how the shortest parade in San Francisco happens during the coldest, rainiest month and regularly draws 150,000 people a year.   In an otherwise dead part of the year for tourism, hotels are giddy when the parade rolls into town.  The Chinese New Year of 2025 falls on January 29th. (Wednesday) and will last to February 2nd. 

It is the Year of Snake, but the 2025 parade does not take place until February 15th.  And unlike other parades, this one occurs at night.  But like other parades, the Chinese New Year’s Parade began as an opportunity to introduce their culture in a festive setting. 

Nothing like this had been done in China, but the new immigrants from the Sleeping Giant incorporated it with the most American form for cultural gatherings - the parade.  As we enter into this great holiday, I thought it was worth examining this unique and special San Francisco tradition.

The first known celebration of the Chinese New Year happened in 1851, just a year after the city was founded.  It was a private affair for local businessmen, but four short years later it was already a public event.  By 1860, the parade had become so popular that the signature dragon dance was introduced.  The dragon is and was a powerful symbol in Chinese culture.  It's kind of like how Santa Clause usually wraps up most Christmas parades.  Imagine a Christmas parade without Santa Clause.  That is how important the dragon symbol is to Chinese culture. 

The Chinese New Year’s Parade Dragon Float

Though more a half-a-block long marionette than a traditional parade float, it is powered by people and not cars like you would see in the Rose Parade or the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.   2024 saw the longest dragon so far.  It was 288 feet long and took more than 180 volunteers working in sync to coordinate its intricate choreography.  It is a pretty amazing spectacle if you've never seen it.

By 1871 even Harpers Weekly, they very establishment chronicle for the upper middle class had taken notice, and not only included a lengthy article about it, but also many illustrations.  This must have appeared to be quite exotic to east coast readers, and help establish Chinatown specifically, but San Francisco in general as an exotic and distant vacation destination.  As well as one within the United States of America.

Over the following decades the Chinese New Year’s Parade grew in popularity, while animosity towards the Chinese increased as well.  In the 1870s, Dennis Kearny's Working Man’s Party was created as a reaction to Chinese immigration.  In 1877 he spoke to over two thousand people who supported his anti-Chinese agenda, then came the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act by the US Congress.

It mandated a ten-year ban on all Chinese laborers coming to the United States, and once it passed immigration from China into San Francisco's Chinatown slowed to a trickle.  This was the only act of congress to single out a specific ethnic group by name, by the way.  If that wasn’t bad enough, then came the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, and the Chinatown we know and love today could have been lost forever.