![]() In 1905, the police staged a massive Easter Sunday raid on twelve Chinatown gambling establishments. Explosives were only used once or twice later in the game-about 1912-and they fortunately did more damage to property than to people.ĭid the tong wars break into mainstream consciousness with any massive battles or events? In the late 1800s, they were mostly using cleavers and knives by 1900, Chinatown saw a large influx of revolvers. ![]() It was a slow process, but it escalated as weapons got more sophisticated and capable of taking out more people at a time. How did the violence evolve from meat cleavers to pistols to bombs? Sometimes these stuck, and sometimes they didn't.įrom an NYPD report on the tongs in 1922. It usually took prolonged negotiations to get to a ceasefire. The commonality was that after each war broke out, it was hard to stop because not responding to a provocation was considered a loss of face. The third broke out over opium distribution, and the fourth was fought because of a defection from one tong to another. The first started over control of gambling the second was about the "ownership" and murder of a woman. New York saw four major tong wars of varying duration between the turn of the century and the 1930s, and each broke out for a different reason. What set off the tong wars in the first place? Many tong practices are said to derive from a tradition that got its start in China early in the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1911) as a sworn brotherhood/gang of outlaws committed to restoring the earlier Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644). One, the On Leong Tong, was formed in New York its chief antagonist, the Hip Sing Tong, was established on the West Coast and made beachheads in the East in the late 1880s. The organization of the American tongs owes something to Chinese tradition, but the two that accounted for most of the violence in New York until the 1930s were homegrown American organizations. How far back does the history of these groups go in China? These were secret societies, and although they, too, were ostensibly benevolent associations, in the early 1900s they came to be associated with a variety of underworld activities. The third category was sworn brotherhoods generally known by the term "tong," meaning "chamber," with no geographic or family requirements and generally with fewer members. These included regional societies-organizations set up by people from a specific district in China-and clan societies, open to Chinese from anywhere who happened to share a surname. To protect their interests, Chinese immigrants organized mutual aid societies, and most of these were not in any way criminal enterprises. VICE sat down with Seligman, who's fluent in Mandarin and also speaks Cantonese, to discuss what it was like for the Chinese underclass in the early 20th century, why the tong wars jumped off, and how they finally came to an end after 30 years of violence. With hatchets and meat cleavers, pistols and automatic weapons and even bombs, these men turned swaths of America's largest city into a killing zone. Secret brotherhoods-the On Leong and Hip Sing among them-fought a war as bloody as any in gangster lore. What began as community-based support groups turned, in some cases, into criminal syndicates that ran opium, prostitution, and gambling dens. From the 1890s through the 1930s, hit men, drug lords, gang leaders, crooked cops, city officials, and lawyers courted money, prestige, and influence in New York City's Chinatown in a deadly dance of underworld intrigue. Seligman's forthcoming book, Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money and Murder in New York's Chinatown, offers a mesmerizing and brutal look at the hidden world of Chinese tongs (or fraternal organizations).
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