No one better than the Chink himself realizes the commercial value of
the taboo, the bizarre and the unclean. Nightly the rubber-neck car
swinging gayly with lanterns stops before the imitation joss house, the
spurious opium joint and tortuous passage to the fake fan-tan and faro
game, with a farewell call at Hong Joy Fah's Oriental restaurant and the
well-stocked novelty store of Wing, Hen & Co. The visitors see what they
expect to see, for the Chinaman always gives his public exactly what it
wants.

But a dollar does not show you Chinatown. To some the ivories will
always be but crudely carven bone, the jades the potter's sham, the musk
and aloes the product of a soap factory, the joss but a cigar-store
Indian, and the Oriental dainties of Hong Fah the scrappings of a Yankee
grocery store. Yet behind the shoddy tinsel of Doyers and Pell Streets,
as behind Alice's looking-glass, there is another Chinatown--a strange,
inhuman, Oriental world, not necessarily of trapdoors and stifled
screams, but one moved by influences undreamed of in our banal
philosophies. Hearken then to the story of the avenging of Wah Sing.

_'Tis a tale was undoubtedly true
In the reign of the Emperor Hwang_.

In the murky cellar of a Pell Street tenement seventeen Chinamen sat
cross-legged in a circle round an octagonal teakwood table. To an
Occidental they would have appeared to differ in no detail except that
of a varying degree of fatness. An oil lamp flickered before a joss near
by, and the place reeked with the odor of starch, sweat, tobacco, rice
whisky and the incense that rose ceilingward in thin, shaking columns
from two bowls of Tibetan soapstone. An obese Chinaman with a walnutlike
countenance in which cunning and melancholy were equally commingled was