Timecapsule podcast: San Francisco, October 27-November 2

A weekly handful of weird, wonderful and wacky happenings dredged up from the kaleidoscopic depths of San Francisco history. October 28, 1881: A murder in Chinatown A murder in Chinatown. Newspapers, particularly the often very nasty San Francisco Chronicle, were full of anti-Chinese propaganda in the last decades before the turn of the century. Stories dealing with Chinese people were usually over-heated, pretty racist, and sometimes hard to even get through. This item was short and straightforward, though, and I might have even skipped over it if I hadn't noticed an article about the very same case in a legal journal. The tiny bit of testimony from the victim in that piece helps capture the flavour of the parallel world of 1880s Chinatown. CHINESE CRIMEShooting of a Courtesan in Kum Cook Alley Between 7:30 and 8 o'clock last evening, while Choy Gum, a Chinese courtesan, was bargaining with a fruitdealer in her room on Kum Cook Alley, a Chinaman named Fong Ah Sing walked up to her door and fired a shot at her ... " rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to ">read on ...