![]() ![]() Some read about it in the newspapers others pieced together the story on their own after their servants, cooks, and porters failed to show up for work. Most San Franciscans learned of the quarantine the next morning. Chinese who tried to leave the area were blocked by officers carrying nightsticks and pistols. ![]() Only police and health officials were permitted to cross the barriers supplies to the quarter, at least at first, were passed under the ropes. They strung ropes across key intersections and blocked foot traffic and wagons from coming in or out. Under the cover of darkness, some 35 police officers spread out around 12 square blocks. ![]() That night, the Board of Health ordered a quarantine of Chinatown. It looked like bubonic plague.Ĭonfirming that suspicion would take days, but city officials leaped into action. With a stain that made the germs turn pink, they saw clusters of short, rod-shaped bacteria swimming under the lens. Piercing the skin, they drew blood and lymph fluids and placed drops of them under a microscope. The police surgeon, a city health official, and a young bacteriologist palpated the corpse’s swollen lymph glands and found a small sore on his thigh. Shortly before midnight on March 6, 1900, three men gathered at a coffin shop in Chinatown to examine the body of a 41-year-old Chinese man who had died earlier that day. ![]()
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