Boise to Chinese settlers: We love your gardens. We need your labor. We don’t want you
Boise historian Arthur Hart, who died Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020, at age 99, was the principal source for this brief story, which was first published on May 30, 2014, as part of a Statesman series on the newspaper’s Top 50 stories in its then 150-year history. Hart had a special interest in the history of Boise’s Chinese settlers. His books included “Chinatown: Boise, Idaho, 1870-1970.”
The few remaining Idaho descendants of the state’s 19th century Chinese immigrants can take pride in their forefathers. But the treatment of those immigrants by white Idahoans is nothing to be proud of.
When gold brought white settlers to Idaho City and other areas in the 1860s, Chinese immigrants soon followed. They also came to Boise, then a brand-new commercial center. They were miners, laborers, cooks, servants and launderers. Farmers in China’s Pearl River delta, they became gardeners here. Some sold vegetables door to door.
But anti-Chinese sentiment, always under the surface, later intensified — nationwide, not just in Idaho — when whites feared for their economic security as mining and other jobs grew scarcer and more competitive. In “How to Get Rid of the Chinese” in 1885, the Statesman spoke sympathetically of a drive to boycott local businesses that employed the immigrants.
Chinese people made up almost 30 percent of Idaho’s population in the 1870 census, but their share plunged as persecution spread, Congress restricted immigration, and immigrants moved on, returned to China or died.
Some immigrants and their gardens endured. Historian Arthur Hart has written that members of the Louie family maintained gardens on land leased from the Davis family, descendants of Tom and Julia Davis, until the mid-1940s.
Boise’s Chinese heritage suffered a blow when its second Chinatown was destroyed by urban renewal in the 1960s and early ‘70s. A new Chinese community has since emerged in the Treasure Valley, thanks in part to hiring by Micron Technology, Hewlett-Packard and Boise State University. The Boise Chinese Association claims more than 400 members. Members celebrate the lunar New Year, hold dragon parades and go on picnics.
Meanwhile, the gardens’ legacy endures in the names of Garden City and a local boulevard, Chinden — a contraction of Chinese Garden.
This story was originally published December 9, 2020 at 5:29 PM.
