La Playa Trail offers a peek into region’s fishing past

Will Bowen | Noticias del Centro

There is a little known, quaint and colorful dirt-packed walking trail that winds around the northwest part of San Diego Bay behind Shelter Island called the La Playa Trail. It’s a unique place which makes you think you might be somewhere in Europe, with sailboats bobbing in the sunlit bay below and houses perched merrily high on the hill above.

At the foot of the trail there is a memorial bench made of boulders and metal dedicated to the Chinese fishing community that existed here from 1860 – 1890. On these sandy shores, where Chinese fishermen lived in redwood shanties and dried fish out in the sun, the Sun Yun Lee – considered to be the finest Chinese “junk” boat in all of California – was built and launched in 1884.

The bench was installed in 2012 due to the efforts of Murray Lee, a former Merchant Marine and author of “In Search of Gold Mountain: A History of the Chinese in San Diego.” Lee worked alongside the La Playa Trail Association, the Port District, and the local Chinese community, to bring the monument into being – quite an accomplishment given the City’s hesitancy to construct and maintain memorials of any sort these days.

On June 25, Lee gave a talk at the Point Loma Assembly building at 3035 Talbot St., commemorating the one-year anniversary of the memorial. Linda Benz, a graduate student in the history department at San Diego State University, also spoke about the history of Chinese fishing on the Channel Islands.

“The erection of the Chinese Fishermen’s Memorial here in Point Loma, in the area where they had a fishing village and a ship building facility, as well as having a fishing village in the harbor at the foot of Chinatown, is a long overdue recognition of this important part of San Diego history,” Lee said at the ceremony.

Roy Ashley, the president and CEO of the Maritime Museum of San Diego agrees. “[It is] a worthy effort that speaks to the diverse origins of our community,” he said at a previous engagement.

The significance of the Chinese fishermen’s presence in San Diego was first noted years ago by San Diego historian John Davidson, who once wrote, ‘The Chinese were the first to take fishing vessels out of the harbor, thus founding the great fishing business now flourishing thereabouts!”

According to Lee, Chinese fishing began in California in the San Francisco/Monterey region the early 1850s when Chinese junks, which sailed all the way from the Canton area of South China, arrived in California. They called their new home “Gold Mountain” and had come here to seek their fortune. Within ten years, the fishermen had moved their base of operations south to San Diego because of the better quality of fishing.

From 1860-1890, Chinese fishing was an important part of the San Diego economy. The Chinese supplied all of the marine resources for the entire city. They peddled fish door to door and sold them at fish stands at Ballast Point, Roseville, and Chinatown. When in 1880, the Chinese shut down their fishing operations for a time, the San Diego Union newspaper lamented, “A fresh fish cannot be had in this town for love or money!”

The Chinese fished for rock cod, sheephead and yellowtail. They trolled abalone lures for barracuda and seined for bait fish, such as anchovies and sardines, inside San Diego Bay. But their most important fishing was for black abalone (Haliotis cracherodii), which they pried off the rocks at low tide, then boiled in salt water and dried on flat rocks or platforms in the sun.

Typically, the junks fished in pairs when they went after abalone. One boat was used for sleeping, the other for holding cargo. Small row boat-like sampans, launched from the anchored mother ship, were rowed in toward shore to maneuver around in the intertidal zone exposed at low tide – which is the habitat of the black abalone.

The Chinese had the abalone (a staple food in China) all to themselves because no one else wanted them. At first they gathered only the meat and threw away the shells, as research has indicated.

“We found many Chinese sites on the south side of San Clemente Island, characterized by large piles of abalone shells, as well as cooking hearths,” Benz said.

Eventually, the fishermen also began collecting the shells, once they recognized there was a worldwide demand for them in the jewelry trade.

They bundled up their dried fish, abalone meat, and shells, then shipped them out of San Diego Bay on the steamship Oriziba to San Francisco, where the fish and abalone were then distributed to Chinese settlers working in the mining camps and railroads, or back to mainland China. The shells, in turn, were shipped throughout the United States and Europe.

The wooden junks that the Chinese fished in measured from 40 to 50 feet in length, were 10 to 16 feet wide, had two to three masts, and had eyes painted on the bow, which helped them “see their way.” They sailed as far north as the Channel Islands and some 400 miles south down the coast of Baja, California.

The Chinese fishermen lived at two sites along San Diego Bay. One village, composed of 12 redwood shanties, some built on stilts in the water, was located in New Town at the foot of the Stingaree District and Chinatown, approximately where the modern day Convention Center sits. Another, consisting of 10 shacks, plus numerous pens for chickens, which were fed fish scraps, was at La Playa Beach in Roseville. At the height of Chinese fishing in 1880, there were 53 Chinese fishermen (some with families), 22 shacks, and 18 junks working out of San Diego Bay.

Then came the discriminatory Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Scott Act of 1888, and the Geary Act of 1892, which shut down the Chinese presence in the fishing industry. The fishermen were forced to sell their junks to Anglos, who used them for hauling guano up from the islands of Baja for fertilizer.

Some days, you will find Lee down at the fishing memorial. He sweeps it, keeps it clean, and heads off any canines that might view it as a pit stop. Recently he anchored some of the memorial’s cobblestones with earth because he feared people were throwing them into the water.

Often he looks out onto the Bay.

“The Maritime Museum has promised to build a replica of a Chinese junk after they have finished construction of the San Salvador sailing ship,” he said with a gleam in his eye. “Some day soon we will again see a Chinese junk sailing these waters.”

Murray Lee can be reached at [email protected].

Will Bowen writes about arts and culture. You can reach him at [email protected].