Early Joss Houses of Seattle Chinatown西雅图早期致公堂与协胜堂庙（已不存）

Type

Overseas Daoist Temples

Location

United States · Washington State · Seattle · Originally located in an alley between Washington Street and Fourth and Fifth Avenues, adjacent to the Wa Chong Building

First built

Already recorded in news reports by 1902; displaced in 1903 by the railway station construction

Overview

In 1902 the Seattle Post-Intelligencer recorded that Seattle had two joss houses, both housed on two floors of the same building in an alley off Washington Street: the lower floor belonged to Chee Kung Tong (which the reporter mistakenly recorded as "Chen Gong Tong" and translated as "free mission," actually a garbling of "free masons"), while the upper floor belonged to Hip Sing Tong, smaller in scale but more lavishly furnished, with rosewood furniture and precious ritual vessels. In 1903, when the Great Northern Railway built its station, the Wa Chong Building was demolished; the Hip Sing Tong temple moved to Main Street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues), and the Chee Kung Tong shrine survived a few more years at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Washington Street before both ultimately fell out of use. Hip Sing Tong later moved to Eighth Avenue near King Street; its shrine area was destroyed by fire some years ago, and the surviving fragments were donated to the Wing Luke Museum. CINARC's research points out that no one in Seattle today remembers that the city once had public Chinese temples, yet the historical record proves they did indeed exist — a striking example of the rupture in historical memory concerning Chinese religion in North America.

Highlights

• Two joss houses recorded in an 1902 news report
• Belonging to Chee Kung Tong and Hip Sing Tong, on the upper and lower floors of the same building
• Displaced in 1903 by construction of the Great Northern Railway station
• A striking example of the rupture in Chinese religious memory in Seattle