From its beginning as a Spanish trading post to the present time there
has always been something essentially foreign about San Francisco.
Always there have been foreign elements, with well-marked colonies,
districts or haunts.

To visitors Chinatown appears to exercise the greatest appeal among the
foreign colonies. The Latin Quarter, the Spanish and Mexican districts
out toward the end of Powell street at the Bay, the Japanese streets
east of Fillmore, and the Greek settlement centering around Third and
Folsom are all, however, highly expressive of their habitants.

With its pagoda-like roofs, its bazaars, its restaurants of amazing
orchestration and stranger East-West decoration, it is easy to.
understand why Chinatown sways the imagination of wayfarers in San
Francisco. Every street and alley in it is obviously exotic. Life
appears here like a festival, and both the eye and the ear are beguiled
by fantastic nuances.

Silks, ivories, porcelains and bronzes peer from the shop windows at
hesitant purchasers like the articles of virtu flung before the
bewildered gaze of readers by Balzac in his Wild Ass's Skin.

You are diverted by the bizarre on all sides, Grant avenue, the main
artery of Chinatown, stretching before you in a many-hued arabesque of
shop fronts, no two quite alike in tone or in the stuff they have to
sell.

The shops of the jewelers, who perform miracles of craftsmanship in gold
fliagree and in jade, are especially interesting, the sensitive-fingered