A Fire Spread Across the Entire Town

Honolulu Chinatown 2011

Honolulu's Chinatown is colorful in more ways than one. The historical buildings were probably built in the early 1900's after it was burnt down starting at the boarder of Iolani Palace on King Street all the way to City Mill in Iwilei. Many of the people who lived in the area were infected with the Bubonic plague. Doctors and politicians believed that it was a disease of poor people and their remedy for it was to burn down the buildings that they thought carried the disease. Little did they know, people were infected with the disease by means of flea bites and because the lower class lived in highly soiled and littered areas (manily in Chinatown) where the fleas thrived, they were targeted as the inferior who were susceptible to the disease. There were high winds on that day that it was decided to set some of the buildings on fire for cleansing and unexpectedly the fire went out of control and it spread across the entire town. This same remedy was also used in Maui's Chinatown and in South East Asia. Click here to view a local vendor in Chinatown.