When the photographer snapped this studio photo of Chin Wing in 1890, Washington had been a state just one year, and the Chinese population reached 3,260. Twenty years earlier, the census found 234 Chinese in the Washington Territory, and by 1880, the number reached 3,186.
Chinese people first arrived in the Washington Territory in the 1850s. While Chinese never flooded Clark County, systemic anti-Chinese stereotyping did. From the 1870s on, the Vancouver Independent is filled with articles about Chinese immigration ships landing in San Francisco, Seattle or Portland and reprinted articles on immigration policy, anti-Chinese legislation and carried stories and jokes belittling “celestial heathens.”
The Independent mentions several woodcutters and two Chinese “wash-houses” in town in the 1880s. An 1883 article in the newspaper suggests other Chinese worked at the barracks like Chin. The brief notes only one Chinese person was home at the garrison on Sunday, for the rest had been arrested in an opium den Saturday night. All but three were released on Monday.
The county commissioners and the Camas Mill employed Chinese people as cheap labor to dig ditches. In 1884, 30 Chinese immigrants cut down trees and dug a ditch from Lacamas Lake to the Camas Paper Mill to provide power. Between 1893-94, more than 100 Chinese dug a trench, known as China Ditch, to drain mucky farmland along what is now 172nd Avenue. The workers filled wicker baskets with dirt and passed them along a human conveyor as they sang songs from home. As the gully was about to consume Mud Creek, farmers filed a court claim to stop the digging and won.
