Pon Yam House

By 1870 nearly half the people left in the Boise Basin had been born in China, and more than a quarter of everyone in Idaho Territory was Chinese. Most had come for the gold, working claims white miners had given up on. They needed what any town provides: food they knew how to cook, medicine, letters, credit, a place to gather. In Idaho City much of that ran through one building at the corner of Montgomery and Commercial streets.

Pon Yam, a merchant and herbalist, kept his store here for some two decades from the 1870s, in a building leased from a Chinese company. People came for bean curd and bamboo shoots, dried oysters, cuttlefish and dried duck, Chinese books and clothing, incense and religious goods, gambling equipment and firecrackers. He prospered in spite of the prejudice and exclusion laws of his time, mined as well as traded, and wore what was said to be the largest diamond ring in the Boise Basin; the town called him the king merchant. His building became a center for the Chinese community around it.

That community has mostly slipped out of the written record, which is what makes the building matter. The Idaho City Historical Foundation and the Boise National Forest have been restoring it as a museum and research center, and Forest Service archaeologists and volunteers who dug under its floorboards found things that rarely survive anywhere — firecrackers, incense sticks, Chinese olives — along with thousands of glass fragments from the bottles its customers emptied. The building opens at set times; otherwise panels in the windows tell its story, and a marker on the corner tells the wider history of the Chinese in the basin.