[Chinese in Chinatown, San Francisco]: Pigtail parade

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The caption card for this Arnold Genthe photoprint, numbered 192, gives the title "Pigtail parade," which points to the queues, the long braided hair that Chinese men wore as a marker of identity and Qing-era custom. Genthe, a German-born photographer who settled in San Francisco in the 1890s, made many street pictures of Chinatown that were later gathered in his book *Pictures of Old Chinatown*. The record gives no date, so the occasion is uncertain, but the scene belongs to the period of his Chinatown work, which largely predates the 1906 earthquake and fire. Queues drew both curiosity and hostility from outside observers at the time, so the picture also records how the neighborhood's residents presented themselves to a city that often viewed them with suspicion.

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