Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown

The temples that were erected wherever Chinese were to be found served as important spiritual institutions that maintained a semblance of continuity with their homeland. Christian missionaries, however, viewed these institutions as pure, unadulterated “heathen paganism,” which had to be wiped out.

As the social fabric of nineteenth-century rural southern China frayed and then burst at the seams, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, were uprooted and pulled apart.