Los Angeles, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, was an isolated and rough-hewn town, known for its lawlessness and disorder. A small population of Chinese immigrants from Guangdong Province made their way there, working as laundrymen, or as household cooks and servants; some leased small plots of land to farm vegetables that they then peddled from one-horse wagons. Most settled on a squalid stub of a street, near the former city center, called Calle de los Negros. The name originated during the period when the city was still governed by Mexico, apparently a reference to the dark-skinned inhabitants of the thoroughfare. American settlers who came later referred to it as “Nigger Alley.” It was a narrow dirt byway, no more than five hundred feet long, notorious for violence and vice, populated by gambling halls, brothels, and saloons that sold beer for five cents. A newspaper account described the neighborhood as “the chosen abode of the pariahs of society.”
At the street’s southern end was a crumbling, low-slung adobe building that belonged to Antonio Francisco Coronel, a Mexican settler who became the city’s fourth mayor, in 1853. Coronel divided the one-story building into separate storefronts, from which various Chinese merchants ran their businesses, and where many also lived. It was here that Chee Long Tong, a popular herbal-medicine doctor who was known as Dr. Gene Tong, maintained an office, with a signboard hanging outside. Census records and contemporaneous accounts suggest that Tong was in his twenties or thirties. He spoke good English and was an unusually enterprising businessman. He had previously operated a store on Main Street, in a house belonging to William Abbott, a furniture dealer. Tong advertised his services to white clientele, in the Los Angeles Daily News, as a “Chinese physician” and as an employment agent who could furnish “farmers, gardeners, cooks, etc.” Chinese immigrants at the time were overwhelmingly male, but Tong lived in the Coronel building with his wife and a boarder named Chang Wan. A pet poodle also shared the quarters.
On the evening of October 24, 1871, a dispute occurred between rival factions in the Chinese quarter. A gunfight erupted in front of the Coronel building. When a police officer arrived on horseback to investigate, he was shot in the shoulder. He managed to stumble to safety and blow his police whistle; another white man, attempting to help with his pistol drawn, was also shot. Men who had converged on the scene dragged him to a nearby drugstore, where he died shortly afterward. A restive crowd gathered in front of the Coronel building. Men streamed in packs toward the quarter, bearing knives, pistols, iron pipes, and clubs. “The whole city seemed moved by one grim and tacit purpose,” a magazine later recounted. A line of men encircled the neighborhood. Some began chanting, “Hang them! Hang them!”