Tacoma Chinese Reconciliation Park

By the 1880s some seven hundred Chinese residents lived in downtown Tacoma, many of them in a settlement on the waterfront near Old Town. In the fall of 1885, with anti-Chinese agitation running through Washington Territory, city leaders told them to be gone by November 1. On November 3 a crowd led by the mayor, the fire chief and other prominent men went through the Chinese quarter house by house and marched the people still living there out of the city in the rain, with a few hours' notice to gather what they could carry. Within days the Chinese buildings burned.

Twenty-seven men were indicted. They came home on bail nine days later to a cheering crowd, and none was ever convicted. Newspapers around the country called the roundup the Tacoma method, and town after town in the West took it up as a model for expelling its own Chinese residents. Tacoma kept anti-Chinese restrictions on its books until 1920.

The city set this stretch of shore aside for a park in 1993, within half a mile of the old settlement, and built it out over the next two decades with the Chinese Reconciliation Project Foundation: a path along Commencement Bay, a bridge called the String of Pearls, and the Fuzhou Ting, a pavilion made from materials donated by Tacoma's sister city in China and dedicated in September 2011. Panels along the path tell what happened here.