| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 34.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco. By Anthony W. Lee. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xiv + 347 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00.)

Anthony W. Lee, a professor of art history, has produced a remarkable book on the changing perceptions of San Francisco's Chinatown from approximately 1850 to 1950. At the heart of the study are 155 black-and-white figures, mostly photographs from their respective eras, and eight plates, seven of which are paintings reproduced in color. As lavishly illustrated as this volume is, however, it would be a mistake to assume that it is a "picture book" with accompanying descriptions. Lee, in fact, has combined aspects of art history, social history, and cultural history to produce a powerful and stimulating narrative covering a century of America's most important "Chinatown." 1

The book contains six chapters, each of which serves as a case study illustrating particular themes for a given period (p. 7). Chapter one, "The Place of Chinatown," notes the importance of portraiture and survey photography in describing Chinatown and its inhabitants from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s. This chapter features the work of Isaiah West Tabor, "Chinatown's greatest early photographer" (p. 41). Lee makes the point that by the 1870s, many non-Chinese Americans had come to view Chinatown as a type of foreign colony within America's own national boundaries. . . .

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