Cape Town Lens: Late 1880s Shrimp Processing Shed …

A Cape Town Camps Bay tagged image from photographer – sswj as published on Flickr.

Late 1880s Shrimp Processing Shed …

Image by sswj

China Camp State Park, San Rafael, Marin County, San Pablo Bay, Northern California, USA
( Please View Full Screen … )
By the 1880s, Chinese Americans had established a village at China Camp of approximately 500 people, many of whom were originally from Canton, China. They supported themselves by shrimp fishing in San Pablo Bay and/or working at local businesses. In its heyday, the village had three general stores, a marine supply store and a barber shop. China Camp was one of approximately 26 such shrimp-fishing villages established along the coast by Chinese Americans, many of whom had moved from San Francisco to escape racial prejudice and persecution. For a brief time following the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and fire, China Camp’s population increased to 10,000 as residents of San Francisco’s Chinatown fled from the destruction.

In the late 1800s, the Chinese American fishermen of China Camp would catch 3 million pounds of shrimp per year, much of which was exported to China and Hawaii. However, the economy of the village was severely harmed by the passage of restrictive anti-Chinese laws in the early 1900s that outlawed the export of shrimp, closed the height of the shrimping season, and prohibited shrimping with bag nets which were the main method of catching shrimp. As a result, the population of China Camp greatly declined, leaving only one family — the Quans — carrying on shrimp fishing.