News Release - Author Lisa See Gives Huntington Rare Glass Plate Negatives and Photos Depicting LA’s Original Chinatown

The trove of images from the late 19th and early 20th centuries were found by her family during the vacating of Old Chinatown.

SAN MARINO, Calif.—Author Lisa See has given a trove of more than 100 rare glass plate negatives and photographs, some dating back to the late 19th century, to The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, The Huntington announced today. The images were taken in and around Los Angeles’ Old Chinatown. The studio portraits and street scenes from the late 19th and early 20th centuries provide a rare view of the people and daily life in the city’s original Chinatown, which thrived mainly from 1890 to 1910, before it was largely cleared in the 1930s to make way for Union Station.

The gift deepens The Huntington’s array of materials for the study of the Pacific Rim, which has, among its many areas of collecting, an emphasis on Chinese American history in Southern California.

“The history of Los Angeles’ Old Chinatown and its early Chinese residents is not a well-understood subject,” said Li Wei Yang, The Huntington’s curator of Pacific Rim collections. “In this period of California history, Chinese residents were actively excluded from mainstream activities, so there’s less documentation about them. These rare photographs reveal their daily lives. We see people’s facial expressions and clothing, set against backgrounds of Old Chinatown.”

Though most images are not dated, the use of glass plate negatives sets them in the late 19th and early 20th century, when photographic emulsions were made on glass plate supports. This early, state-of-the-art form of photography, with both a wet and dry version, allowed for sharper, more detailed photos than paper negatives provided at the time.

See was motivated to give the collection assembled by her family to The Huntington when her neighborhood, located in a high-fire risk area, was evacuated twice in 2020. That year, 11 homes burned on her street.

“Glass plate negatives are very heavy and quite fragile,” See said. “We have a list for what to grab when we are evacuated, and the box containing this collection was at the top of the list. Of course, I didn’t want them destroyed, so I realized it was time to give them to The Huntington.”

As a researcher herself, See said The Huntington serves as an important scholarly resource for studying regional Asian American history. In fact, she visited The Huntington more than a decade ago to examine the archived Hong Family Papers, donated in 2006, which contain the legal files of Y. C. Hong, one of the first Chinese American immigration attorneys in California and the United States. The Hong papers include immigration files related to Fong See’s journey to China in the 1920s to visit relatives and purchase antiques for his business.