Auburn Joss House奥本华人庙（Auburn Joss House）

Type

Overseas Daoist Temples

Location

United States · California · Auburn · 200 Sacramento Street, within the Old Auburn Historic District

Coordinates

38.894787, -121.078208 Map ↗

First built

1909 · Destroyed by fire on 25 August 1921; rebuilt in 1930 by the Jung Yue (Charles Jung Yue) brothers

Heritage status

Located within the Old Auburn Historic District, listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places

Overview

Auburn lies within California's Mother Lode gold-mining region, where Chinese miners settled in the nineteenth century. The surviving temple was built in 1909, and was rebuilt in 1930 by the local Chinese merchant Jung Yue brothers after a fire in 1921; it is one of the few Chinese religious buildings still standing in the Nevada County–Placer County area. The temple preserves a Daoist-style altar and ritual vessels, and belongs to the category of a "temple" open to the entire Chinese community rather than a private shrine of a single association; because documentation is lacking, surviving materials cannot identify with certainty which deity was chiefly enshrined, and no conjecture is offered here. The English term "joss house" derives from a phonetic adaptation of the Portuguese word deus ("god"), and was a general term used in the nineteenth-century American West for Chinese temples. The building is today opened by a local historical society as a museum of cultural history, with limited opening hours. In 2005 the Native Sons of the Golden West erected a historical marker in front of it.

Highlights

• One of the few surviving Chinese temples in California's Mother Lode gold-mining region
• Rebuilt in 1930 by the Chinese merchant Jung Yue brothers
• Today open as a museum of cultural history