Red Bluff underground tunnels

Red Bluff / Chinatown tunnel folklore

Red Bluff, the county seat of Tehama County, sits on the upper Sacramento River at what was once the head of navigation, the last steamboat stop, where miners landed for the Trinity County gold fields. A Chinatown grew up there as early as 1852, four years after the first contingent of Chinese arrived in California for the Gold Rush, to serve the people coming off the boats, and the town's tunnel stories belong to it. The railroad reached Red Bluff in 1872 and for a few years ended there, and the town grew rich.

Hostility came with the growth. The town's first anti-Chinese organization, the Working Men's Union, formed in 1876, and the town trustees passed two ordinances aimed at the Chinese, a licence fee on laundries and a fee on anyone carrying vegetables across town. In February 1886 the working men formed the Anti Coolie League, and its president led at least 2,000 people in a march on Chinatown, going from house to house and ordering the occupants to leave within ten days. Accounts of what followed disagree. The sundown-town database kept at Tougaloo College records that Red Bluff drove out its Chinese population that year and later burned the Chinatown; another account says the community refused, calling on prominent white merchants who backed their labour and their stores, and treats the expulsion and the burning as rumour.

The tunnels are the other half of that folklore, passages said to run beneath the old Chinatown and downtown. Experts on Chinese American history note that Chinatowns across the country, in many California cities among them, have always been rumoured to have tunnels, with no proof that they were more than connected basements. When the original Chinatown of Los Angeles was dug up for subway construction in 1990, it yielded artifacts and no tunnels. Some historians trace the tales to misunderstanding and plain prejudice. Phil Choy, a past president of the Chinese Historical Society of America, put it bluntly: "The more mysterious they make us, the better."

On 29 October 2022 a Historic Chinatown District was established in Red Bluff, by the river where the steamboats once tied up.