For the residents of the burned over district, the day had been almost unbelievably terrifying, and the great Chinatown fire would disrupt their lives to an extent they could only begin to imagine that evening. Most of the residents in the vicinity of Kaumakapili Church, where the original fire had broken out of control, were Japanese and Hawaiian. These "frantic and, at first, terror-stricken people ... rushed wildly up one street and down another." Even in the midst of this "tempest of excitement," however, they took great care to move the old and the infirm to safe places. Before the flames arrived, some attempted to lower furniture from secondstory windows, while others tried to drag goods to safe places. But their efforts merely cluttered the already chaotic streets. For most people, the fire spread too rapidly and the heat was too intense for an orderly evacuation. They simply ran for their lives, abandoning their material goods to the hissing flames. "The condition of general misery and pandemonium in the area," remembered one of the Japanese caught up in the action, "made it seem just like a war zone."9
A crowd of mostly Japanese residents eventually began to congregate near a bridge that carried Kukui Street across the stream that defined the western edge of Chinatown. Since the district was already under quarantine, guards had been routinely stationed at the Kukui Bridge for the past several weeks. The guards who were on duty when the fire went out of control quickly concluded that they would not be able to block the increasing numbers of panicky refugees by themselves and sent word requesting militia reinforcements.
The request for reinforcements along the quarantine lines, according to white reporters on the scene, "gave the impression downtown that a riot was in progress, and citizens and military guards went to the scene on the double-quick." The city police captain positioned his substantial force of Hawaiian officers along strategic Nuuanu Street, where they blocked access into Honolulu's downtown business center to the east. Those officers were "armed to the teeth." Ordinary citizens, mostly white, also joined in, spontaneously arming themselves "with sticks, pick handles and pickets torn hastily from fences." An eyewitness remembered men from all over the city gathering "fire arms of all kinds, axe-helves, pick-handles, base-ball bats, and pickets, anything at hand that might serve as a weapon." This "pickhandle brigade," something between a vigilante mob and an ad hoc posse defending the public health, assembled around the boundaries of the burning district, determined to prevent the dispersal of a potentially plague-carrying population throughout the city. As a result, the desperate residents of Chinatown found themselves facing an inferno behind them and a hostile civilian militia massing all around them."'
As a growing number of hastily armed citizens from around the city arrived to bolster the quarantine lines, the potential for lethal violence escalated rapidly. The press had reported only the previous day that "the sale of small arms to Asiatics" had been unprecedented since the plague crisis began. Hoping to prevent a disaster, Consul Saito and his associates from the Japanese Aid Society rushed to the tense and confused scene on Kukui Street. Saito's entourage was immediately allowed to pass through the guard lines into the upper end of the burning district, where the consul moved among his countryman calmly reassuring residents that the Board of Health was not out to exterminate them. Saito and his associates succeeded in preventing what could easily have become a deadly clash at the Kukui Bridge, then turned to restoring general order among Chinatown's stunned Japanese residents. They quickly established emergency relief and information stations, marked by "white flags with the red cross upon one and the Japanese flag symbol upon the other, [which] the people rallied to.""
Once the initial confrontations were defused, the residents of upper Chinatown were "allowed more liberty," and they settled down along the northern edge of the quarantined district to watch with resignation the relentless destruction of their homes and possessions. A large gathering of citizens from elsewhere around the city assembled above them on the slopes of the Punchbowl Hill to do the same. Most of the latter were women and children, since the vast majority of Honolulu's adult males had headed toward the fire to see what they might do.12
By the time the fire burned itself out that night, Chinatown's Japanese residents had lost all of their living quarters and seventy-six other establishments, including their neighborhood temples, churches, theaters, warehouses, factories, retail stores, grocery stores, offices, candy stores, and photography shops. Among the few things salvaged from the Japanese section of Chinatown that day were a printing press and a typesetting machine from the offices of the Hawaii Shimpo. With the help of the white sanitary inspector who had been monitoring that block under the quarantine, the Hawaii Shimpo's assistant editor managed to drag the two pieces of equipment across Nuuanu Street, where they were retrieved by Japanese outside the quarantined district and stored in a Japanese school until the editor could begin publishing again."
The situation was less calm in the central and lower sections of the district, where the fire moved faster and destroyed property more quickly than it had farther up-slope. As the fire encompassed block after block, thousands of predominantly Chinese residents of the area poured out into the streets to escape. They were, in the words of a spectator that day, "more or less terror-stricken, not knowing where they might go, what they should do, or what, in fact, was coming next." Even those with advanced warning barely had time to gather precious items; those taken by surprise left with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing. A few residents reentered buildings whose roofs were already on fire in desperate attempts to reclaim valuables, but they were largely unsuccessful. For lack of a safe place to store anything, most goods pulled from burning buildings had to be abandoned in the streets, only to be consumed there by the superheated fireballs bowling toward the harbor.14
According to an eyewitness reporter, "The frenzy of the Chinese and Japanese residents was pitiful to observe. They fled to the streets, lugging away at bundles too heavy for a man to ordinarily carry, but the keen excitement of the moment gave them the strength of two men. Women with strained eyes and tears rolling down their cheeks clung to little children and babes, in wild excitement, searching everywhere to find a place of safety. Few carried more than a change of clothing for their babies.... Every one was making a supreme effort to flee from the fire-fiend that destroyed their homes and household goods."15
Kong Tai Heong, Li Khai Fai's wife, who from the outset of the plague crisis had sided with her husband and the bacteriologists on the Board of Health, remembered the day of the fire in vivid metaphors. "The trees became live torches of flames!" she told her daughter decades later. "The roofs of the homes flashed red with flames and blazed crackling into the streets with hellfire! The streets crackled with the blaze and seethed with the hellfire ... and shrieking cries, cries of people in terror!" She also recalled a darker side of the chaotic situation: "Some there were [among the Chinese themselves] who remembered only to loot and steal." Several press reports corroborated her memory of looting, which left a legacy of ill will within Honolulu's Chinese community for decades."
Some wealthy Chinese merchants were reported to have lost thousands of dollars in gold to robbers who knew where it was hidden and took advantage of the chaos to move it. Residents caught one Chinese man setting fire to a building near the corner of Maunakea Street and King Street, where a store owned by Sing Chang was rumored to contain over eight thousand dollars in coins. The man was turned over to the quarantine guards and escaped mobbing by his fellow countrymen only because he was so "crazed with excitement" that his actions could plausibly be attributed to "temporary insanity." Several observers independently reported seeing Chinese residents deliberately igniting their own homes "in expectation of obtaining heavy damages from the Government." Though some of those incendiary efforts were temporarily extinguished by other people, the larger fire soon engulfed them anyway."
Most of the district's Chinese residents congregated on King Street, which became "a dense mass of humanity" in the blocks beyond
reach of the fire. Deeply and legitimately suspicious of the Dole administration from the early days of the Hawaiian Republic, and well aware of the public pressure to burn Chinatown in its entirety as quickly as possible, many Chinese believed that the day's fire was intentional, "that the Board of Health had purposely burnt their houses over their heads." The combination of fear and rage they experienced would be difficult to imagine. According to one eyewitness, "rebellious spirits among them urged a rush on the guards." Some Chinese were armed with handguns, and others nearly launched a full-scale riot by suggesting that the sound of exploding kerosene and oil containers elsewhere in the burning district was actually the sound of militiamen shooting people who were trying to escape the flames. "At this juncture," in the words of a Chinese resident in the midst of the crowd, "excitement was high and there was imminent danger of bloodshed.""
The threat of bloodshed was heightened by the presence of thousands of citizens now forming a thick human fence between the residents of the quarantined zone and downtown Honolulu. Mostly "men and boys," they were continuing to run from all parts of the city toward the great fire, and they were continuing to "arm themselves with every imaginable kind of weapon. Baseball bats and pick-helves were notably conspicuous, but in the volunteer army could [also] be seen ... iron bars, hatchets, an occasional meat axe." The Chinese residents of Chinatown, already traumatized and furious, faced "a strong military guard ... and ... a line of citizens standing in reserve," determined to shield the city center.'`'
Chinese consul Yang moved among the crowds on King Street urging calm, but he was less effective with his politically and socially divided constituency than the Japanese consul had been with his more united constituency at the upper end of Chinatown. Early reports gave Yang some credit for maintaining order, but later reports accused him of spending most of his energy harassing government representatives on the scene and trying unsuccessfully to exact terms and concessions on behalf of Chinese businessmen from Emerson, Day, and Wood, who had neither the time nor the inclination to address such things in the middle of such an emergency. The three physicians were livid with the Chinese consul.
Fortunately, Yang was soon joined by Vice-Consul Gu, who had been visiting displaced Chinese in the Kalihi detention camp that Saturday morning when something from the direction of Chinatown caught his eye. Seeing flames above the steeples of Kaumakapili and "fire reaching the sky," Gu immediately bolted from the camp and joined thousands of others rushing toward the suddenly towering clouds of smoke. "There were crowds everywhere in town," he remembered. "Every street was packed." When he reached the guard line, Gu found a friend among the officers who recognized him and granted him permission to enter the quarantined zone. Once inside, Gu met hastily with various officials from the Dole administration who were also arriving on the scene, then began efforts to prevent mob violence. His first step was perhaps his most crucial: he persuaded the line of outside guards to pull back, in order to convince the desperate refugees that they would not be attacked. Gu then persuaded Yang to begin preparing for an orderly evacuation while he remained among the crowds for reassurance.20
The Chinese Aid Society came forward with food, water, and reassurances that helped Gu and others begin to defuse the situation. Members of the Board of Health, President Dole, and many of the leading members of the American elite also moved among the crowds, making clear through translators that everyone would be cared for if they maintained order. The refugees would have to remain under quarantine, but the government would find accommodations for them and provide everything they needed at public expense. Several authorities, including Dole himself, also repeatedly assured the victims that they would be compensated for their losses. As a result, according to one of the Chinese refugees, "the people of Chinatown subdued their rising tendency to do violence" and accepted "the representations of the authorities.""
Emerson, Day, and Wood, meeting in emergency session, ordered the release of anyone already in a quarantine camp who had not been exposed to a case of plague since January i i, freeing up nearly a thousand spaces for what the three physicians initially estimated to be approximately six thousand refugees. The Board physicians commandeered boxcars and public grounds, and empowered ad hoc citizen committees with the task of finding secure and habitable spaces around the city. The volunteer committees quickly obtained use of the capacious Kawaiahao Church, where the physicians started sending the first refugees by midafternoon. By late afternoon, while the fire burned itself out behind them, processions of Chinese, Japanese, and Hawaiians began to make their way from the quarantined zone down King Street through the city, where guardsmen and armed volunteers formed a human corridor that funneled the newly homeless toward makeshift lodgings.22
The evacuation and relocation of the fire victims went far more smoothly than anyone dared hope. A few of the refugees still urged an attack on the citizen guards who lined the route of exodus from Chinatown to the Kawaiahao Church and the nearby Iolani Palace grounds, but none was made and no one tried to escape the cordon of troopers and citizens. A few of the citizen guards "brandished clubs" at the frightened refugees, but apparently no blows were delivered. In the apt phrasing of the Friend, "the situation was most critical and dangerous, as well as moving to sympathy and compassion." Even an openly racist observer-he did not like the "hordes of filthy Japanese and Chinese" who brought to Hawaii their "peculiarly Eastern sins, crimes, vices, disease, and deaths"-noted that "A good many of these people were not coolies but of a better class, and in the haste and pressure were rather roughly handled, I fear; but no deeds of wanton cruelty were seen." "Where there are carriages without horses," noticed another eyewitness, "white men are taking the places of animals and pulling along small footed Chinese women and their babes or old and infirm people of all nationalities."23
Exodus from Chinatown. Note the Chinese carrying bundles and the men on the left carrying axe handles. Hawaii State Archives
We "were not in the least bit unruly," recalled one of the refugees, "and properly obeyed the orders of authorities. The authorities for their part did their best to provide relief." Photographs of the forced march out of Chinatown depicted a stunned and resigned population of refugees, many of whom were undoubtedly in various degrees of shock. Most of the faces that looked up at the photographer as they passed were, in the photographer's words, "patient and submissive." Newspaper reporters noted that "[m]any a mother, as she led her children along between the throngs of people, had tear bedimmed eyes," and the refugees were seen "casting frequent glances back at the red tongues licking up their homes." Hungry, thirsty, afraid, the victims were confronted by armed strangers who did not speak their language and feared them as the agents of bubonic plague. They were completely destitute to a degree they could not have imagined when they awoke that morning, and their future prospects were grim indeed .14
Eyewitnesses watched the painful steps of older women with bound feet, the struggles of people trying to drag salvaged possessions or paralyzed companions along with them, the bewilderment of children clutching household pets they had rescued from the fire, and the weeping of Hawaiians who clung to their guitars for solace. One white matron described the shock that people like herself experienced when they saw the refugees, not fully realizing "that Honolulu had a population such as that which passed between guards to the church." She felt intense sympathy for "the sorry crowd of sufferers" and noted that they were "perfectly submissive. The clubs [in the hands of the ad hoc citizen guards] were quite useless." The English-language press universally described the refugees in somewhat exotic but genuinely sympathetic terms, and editors universally urged the other four-fifths of Honolulu's population to mobilize in support of the victims."
By late afternoon, observers estimated that 1,780 Chinese, 1,025 Japanese, and 1,ooo Hawaiians had been successfully transferred to the Kawaiahao Church grounds, and at least another 500 people, mostly women and children, were inside the church itself. Armed civilians patrolled the
perimeter of the churchyard, determined to prevent the "panic stricken mass of humanity" from "disseminat[ing] through the city the germs of plague from their unsanitary and infected abodes." Facing "perhaps the most distressing and dangerous condition with which the citizens of Honolulu have ever had to cope," Emerson, Day, and Wood requested help from the American military. The local commander, despite standing orders to keep his forces confined and away from any exposure to the plague, granted the Board's emergency request. Around 5:00 P.M. U.S. Army troops arrived at the church grounds and cleared the area of citizen guards, armed volunteers, and curious onlookers. This effectively ended the threat of civil unrest and freed the Board's relief committees to begin redirecting various refugee groups to other sites."
Ruins of Kaumakapili Church the morning after the fire. This photo was taken from a point just above the corner of Beretania and Nuuanu streets. Hawaii State Archives
Most of the Hawaiian refugees were sent to the empress dowager's property, to buildings controlled by Prince Kalanianaole, or to the Boys' Brigade headquarters behind Dole's executive office building. At all of those sites, the Hawaiian Aid Society dispersed poi and tried to restore morale. More than a thousand Japanese were sent to the Drill Shed grounds, also part of the executive office complex. A local businessman donated the use of a warehouse that accommodated 250 more people, and the Society for the Relief of the Destitute accommodated 500 others in buildings they had acquired along South Street. By nightfall, as the smoldering remains of Chinatown threw "a lurid glare" across Honolulu, "every quarantined person from the burned district had been provided with shelter and food." Miraculously, not one life had been lost during the fire. But for thousands of Chinatown residents, the day had been one of trauma and ruin, a day they would never forget, a day that would pass into Hawaiian lore.'-'
Plague and Fire Page 17