“78.  Chinese Women in Sutro Heights. San Francisco, Cal.” (a.ka. “Chinese Noble Women in Sutro Heights”) – circa 1896  (Photograph by W.C. Billington from the Marilyn Blaisdell Collection)

When Chinese women ventured out into San Francisco’s Outside Lands

The presence of what appears to be unescorted Chinese women would have been unthinkable in the San Francisco of the two decades prior to when this extraordinary photograph was taken.  Racial hostility by whites against Chinese throughout the American West, California, and San Francisco during 1870s and 1880s was stoked by dramatic population growth, economic depressions, the struggles of the organized labor movement against capital, and resulting high unemployment. 

By the late 19th century, however, the Chinese Question had been resolved – unfavorably to the Chinese – after the passage of national legislation in the form of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.  The evil genius of exclusion, anti-miscegenation, alien land ownership prohibition, and other laws assured that the Chinese population would, in effect, simply die out by legislative genocide; violence to persons and property, while never technically legal, was no longer necessary. 

In the meantime, money from the vast fortunes made in gold and silver mining and the benefits of railroad-driven technological and infrastructure development flowed into San Francisco of the Gilded Age.  When the private economy and construction faltered, public works projects would help bridge economic recessions, including greater attention to the development of public amenities such as parks.

The engineer, politician and philanthropist Adolph Heinrich Joseph Sutro (April 29, 1830 – August 8, 1898) served as the 24th mayor of San Francisco from 1895 until 1897.  After his German-Jewish family immigrated to the US in 1850 and San Francisco in 1851, Sutro moved to Virginia City, Nevada.  He made a fortune from mining operations in the Comstock Lode after obtaining financing and constructing a “Sutro Tunnel” to drain water from the silver mines and eliminate the threat of flooding.

Sutro increased his wealth by real estate investments back in San Francisco, including Mount Sutro, Land’s End (the area where Lincoln Park and the Cliff House are located today), and Mount Davidson.  In 1881, Sutro purchased 22 acres of undeveloped land south of Point Lobos (San Francisco) and north of Ocean Beach at the western edge of the city.  It included a promontory overlooking the Pacific, with scenic views of the Marin Headlands, Mount Tamalpais, and the Golden Gate.  Sutro built his mansion on a rocky ledge there, above the first Cliff House.

“In 1885,” according to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area history, “self-made millionaire Adolph Sutro created the Sutro Heights Park, an elegant and formal public garden that covered over twenty acres in the area now known as Land’s End. Inspired by the rugged beauty and incredible scenery, Sutro intentionally designed the grounds to capture the views of the Pacific Ocean, the Golden Gate and the Marin Headlands.”  Admission was open to the public for a donation of ten cents to defray the costs of maintain the grounds.
For more information see:  https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/historyculture/sutro-heights.htm

Sutro’s opening his park to all, including Chinese, calls attention to the unusual presence recorded by the above photo, taken on the grounds of his Sutro Heights park, circa 1896.  

The photo depicts the view north beside Palm Drive of five women in traditional Chinese dress.  Sutro’s statuary of “Venus de Milo” and a Gryphon, planters, and palm trees can be seen, along with the main gate in the background.  Less obvious (in the left third of the photo) is the presence of a man staring at the five women while standing next to a ladder in the background.  The onlooker probably worked as one of the 17 full-time gardeners, machinist and drivers whom Sutro employed to maintain a collection of flower beds, forests, elegant wide walkways, hedge mazes and “parterres” (a popular Victorian landscape feature where flowers and bushes were carefully trimmed into shapes of names or designs).  See:  https://www.nps.gov/goga/learn/historyculture/sutro-heights.htm

However, no Chinese workers would have been present on the grounds that day – or ever.  Sutro bragged that, although he employed fourteen thousand men, he had never engaged a “Chinaman.”  He wrote, “The very worst emigrants from Europe are a hundred times more desirable than these Asiatics.”  

Of the five women shown in the photograph, not all of them may have qualified for Chinatown’s noble” class.  The relatively plain dress and slippers worn by the two women at the left indicate that they may have been house servants.  The other three young women wear more elaborate, and expensive, attire and footwear.  The photograph notably captures smiles on the faces of at least two of the women, from which one can infer that they were enjoying the outing on the far western side of the City.  Based on what is known about the lives of Chinese America’s first women, a walk through Sutro’s gardens probably represented a welcome change from their everyday routine.  

“Chinese Women in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, Feb. 22, 1900.” Photographer unknown (from the Marilyn Blaisdell collection).  A rare shot of Chinese women visiting the park, apparently unaccompanied by any male.

The absence of any male in the frame of the first photo is telling and unusual outside of Chinatown.  Historian Jack Tchen, in his 1984 book, Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown, wrote about the lives of early Chinese American women on the urban frontier as follows:

“The women who came to America were limited to three primary occupational roles. They were usually either a merchant’s wife, a house servant, or a prostitute.  In the rural wilds of Idaho, Montana, and the Western frontier, local folklore has portrayed a few Chinese women as rugged and liberated frontier settlers; however, the women in San Francisco’s Tangrenbu [唐人埠] were closely guarded and highly valued commodities.  Merchants could freely bring their wives over and establish families.  Abiding by traditional customs, these women were seldom seen in the streets of Chinatown. The great majority of men did not have the right to have a family.  Before and after 1882, certain tongs specialized in smuggling young Chinese women past United States immigration agents. To enable them to pay their way to this country, exploitative contracts were drawn up similar to those many poor male workers came under. However, there was a significant difference:  where the men paid off their debts with their labor, women paid off their debts with their labor and their bodies… .

*   *   *
“Young girls would start off as house servants and occasionally work at odd jobs like stripping tobacco.  Upon reaching a certain age they would either marry a wealthy merchant or enter into several years of prostitution.  Some merchants considered experienced prostitutes ideal wives because they were attractive, sociable, and adept at entertaining guests. House servants were treated with varying degrees of respect and disrespect, depending on the individual character of the families they serve. Some young girls were brutally treated. They worked hard and were sometimes horribly beaten. Others were treated like members of the family… .
*   *   *
“The options available to Chinese children in the United States were severely limited both by the discriminatory laws of the larger society by the role expectations of the tradition-bound culture they came from.  It would take some 40 years after these photographs were made for the laws and cultural restraints send their hold sufficiently to allow them a wider range of possibilities.”

In 1896, the same year during which the photo of five Chinese women was supposedly taken, Sutro would build a new Cliff House below his estate on the bluffs of Sutro Heights and start construction of the famous Sutro Baths.  

As for the photographer, William Charles Billington, the National Park Service’s history recounts that he and his partner, Thomas Thomson, operated a photography studio at the Sutro Heights parapet, which they opened in 1894.  They would take tintype photos of visitors, usually with the Cliff House as a backdrop, and scenic Land’s End photos.  As evidenced by the card variant of first photo in this series, the images would be reproduced in postcard format for sale to tourists, an example of which appears below.

As evidenced by the above variant of first photo in this series (from the Bob Bragman Collection), the images would find their way into postcard formats for sale to tourists.

In 1896, Billington’s company opened a studio on Point Lobos, the Cliff Photo Gallery, also at San Francisco’s west end.  His brother, John, would join the business and continue it after William’s death until 1925.  

John Billington might have been the photographer of this photo of three Chinese women in traditional dress with a very poised girl in more modern apparel strolling down Palm Avenue, enjoying Sutro’s garden, in 1910 for a welcome break from Chinatown’s urban confines.  

Chinese women and a child on Palm Avenue in Sutro Heights, circa 1910.  Photographer Unknown (J. Billington?) 

As for the Sutro estate and park, the Sutro family donated the land to the City of San Francisco in 1938.  In 1939, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) demolished the residence which had fallen into decay.  The WPA crews removed the remaining statuary, with the exception of The Lions (copies of those in London’s Trafalgar Square at the entrance gate), and a statue of Diana the Huntress (Artemis), a concrete copy of the Louvre’s Diana.  An 18-acre city park then opened, eventually becoming part of the federal Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

For the Chinese, the photographs of women in Sutro Heights implicitly convey the relative security of the unequal peace of the 1890s – gained by Exclusion and a network of laws and policies that confined most of their opportunities to Chinatown; the resulting small population, with its dwindling labor force, no longer posed a threat to white dominance of the urban frontier, such that even the “noble” women of Chinese America could travel to San Francisco’s Outside Lands without fear of violence or other hindrance.

[updated 2023-8-4]