Stand at the corner of Beretania and Smith Streets on a weekday morning and you get traffic, a crosswalk, and the side of a parking garage. Nothing there tells you a church with two steeples once stood on that lot, or that in 1900 those steeples caught fire and took most of Honolulu with them.
The Chinatown fire of 1900 was set on purpose. Honolulu’s own Board of Health lit it, in daylight, with the fire department standing by and a plan drawn on a map. What people still argue about, more than a century later, is whether anyone meant for it to run as far as it did. Medical historian James C. Mohr called what followed the “worst civic disaster in Hawaiian history.” Here is the story, plus how to walk the ground yourself.
Related: Chinatown Honolulu: History, Markets, and How to Visit · ʻIolani Palace: The 1893 Overthrow That Ended the Hawaiian Kingdom · Kawaiahaʻo Church: The Coral Church of the Aliʻi
📍 Chinatown Historic District, Honolulu, HI 96817, roughly bounded by Nuʻuanu Stream, Beretania Street, Nuʻuanu Avenue, and Honolulu Harbor. Free to walk, open every day.
The Neighborhood Before the Fire
Chinatown grew up in the 1840s and 1850s on the flat ground between Honolulu Harbor and Nuʻuanu Stream, which is exactly where you would put a neighborhood if you wanted your people close to the wharves and the work. Chinese laborers arrived for the sugar plantations from the early 1850s on five-year contracts, and when those contracts ran out many moved into town. The district’s shops became the second largest employer of Chinese immigrants in the islands, after the plantations themselves.
By 1884 there were 18,254 Chinese residents in Hawaiʻi, about 22.7 percent of the population, and most of the ones in Honolulu lived in Chinatown, a 14-block district covering roughly 35 acres (14 hectares). Counts at the turn of the century range from about 5,000 to 7,000 people, Chinese, Japanese, and Hawaiian, packed into wooden storefronts, tenements, and back-lot shacks with irregular garbage collection and a sewage system that was not keeping up.
The district had burned before. In 1886 a fire started in a restaurant and ran three days, taking eight blocks with it. Chinatown rebuilt fast, and the new construction quietly ignored the fire regulations written to prevent exactly that. Fourteen years later, that shortcut mattered.
The Ship Nobody Talked About
Plague reached Honolulu in June 1899 aboard the Japanese liner Nippon Maru, bound for San Francisco. A teenage passenger had already died at the ship’s first stop in Nagasaki, where Japanese medical officers diagnosed bubonic plague under a microscope. The ship sat a week in quarantine, was washed down with carbolic acid, and was cleared to sail on. Another passenger died on the approach to Hawaiʻi, and Honolulu’s government bacteriologist found a short bacillus in the samples, matching plague.
Passengers were held and cargo stayed aboard, but nobody did anything about the rats, and health authorities decided not to make the case public. Plague almost certainly came ashore that week, then spent six quiet months moving through the rat population near the harbor.
December 1899: You Chong
You Chong was a bookkeeper in Chinatown, twenty-two years old, working upstairs in a store on Nuʻuanu Avenue. He fell ill on December 9, 1899, developed the swollen lymph nodes that give bubonic plague its name, and died three days later. The Board of Health met that same day, ordered an autopsy, and announced that the Black Death had reached Honolulu. Four of his neighbors died soon after him.
Everything moved fast from there. Newspapers ran the announcement on December 13 and called for volunteer inspectors. The Board closed interisland shipping, shut the port, restricted travel in and out of the city, closed the schools, and sealed off Chinatown. The 1st Regiment of Infantry was called out, and a line of sentries more than a mile long (1.6 km) ringed the district for eight days.
Then no new cases appeared for a week, and on December 19 the Board lifted the quarantine. Five days later plague came back harder. In nineteen days, twelve cases were diagnosed and eleven of those people died. The Honolulu Advertiser of January 1, 1900, carried three of their names and ages: Ah Pow, twenty-four. Quong You Quan, twenty-five. Kou Wai, forty.
By three in the morning on December 28, National Guard troops were back, enforcing a cordon sanitaire, a literal rope strung across the streets, to keep roughly 10,000 people from leaving. Two days later, mainland newspapers told their readers that plague had been stamped out in Honolulu.
The Decision to Burn
The Board of Health was a small group led by attorney Henry E. Cooper, with physicians Nathaniel Emerson, Francis Day, and Clifford Wood among its members. They knew the bacillus had been identified in 1894 and that a researcher in Bombay had shown fleas carried it. They did not know how to kill it inside a building, and they had nothing to offer anyone who caught it. Trade was frozen, the local economy had stopped, and the pressure to act was enormous.
At the end of December they chose fire. Any building where someone had contracted plague would be burned, residents cleared out first, the flames held to the marked block.
Starting January 1, 1900, the Honolulu Fire Department set 41 of these sanitary fires, and all 41 worked. Readers of the Advertiser could follow the demolition of their own city on maps printed daily, shaded to show which blocks had burned and which were marked next.
The Advertiser listed the Nuʻuanu Street businesses marked for destruction by name. Wing Koi Seong, a tailor. Wing Tai and Company, a shoe store. Young Wo, a dressmaker. Chun Hoy, a watchmaker. Eighty-five Chinese and Japanese people lived in and behind those four storefronts, and the paper reported that they met the news with a cry of dismay before being walked out with whatever they could carry.
Not everyone went quietly. On January 13 a group of Chinese merchants told the authorities the situation did not warrant such drastic measures, and Chinese Consul Yang Wei Pin called the Board’s method ruinous to the merchants and driven by racial animus toward Chinese people. Other Honolulu residents cheered the burnings in print. On January 19 The Independent opened a story by calling it the good work of destroying Chinatown.
January 20, 1900
The fire that morning targeted a block near Kaumakapili Church, between the church and Nuʻuanu Avenue. The block was big enough that the entire fire department turned out with all four of its engines. Crews lit it at nine in the morning.
For about an hour it behaved. Then the wind shifted.
Embers rode the gust onto the wooden steeples of Kaumakapili Church, tall enough to be a marker for ships coming into the harbor. The pumps of 1900 could not throw water that high. The steeples went, then the roof, then the block, and the fire started walking through Chinatown toward the water.
The heat grew intense enough to melt metal cookware. The guards held the quarantine line anyway. Residents running from the fire were driven back into the burning district by police, guardsmen, and armed citizens carrying axe handles, until the flames forced everyone to run at once. The Hawaiian Star put four words on its page that day: Chinatown is wiped out.
What It Cost
No one died in the fire itself, which given how it unfolded is close to a miracle. Everything else was loss.
The burn covered the ground bounded by Kukui Street, River Street, Queen Street (today’s Ala Moana Boulevard), and Nuʻuanu Avenue. Mohr and the National Park Service both put the area at about 38 acres (15 hectares), close to a fifth of the buildings in Honolulu, though contemporary estimates ran as high as 65 acres (26 hectares) and that range has never been settled. Somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 people lost their homes, their shops, their tools, and their savings in an afternoon.
They were not free to go stay with family, either. Survivors were moved into detention camps: a large one at Kalihi run by the National Guard, plus emergency camps on the grounds of Kawaiahaʻo Church and on the open ground behind ʻIolani Palace. The Kalihi camp took all six volunteer companies to staff, and the Guard had to borrow tents, blankets, and clothing from United States military authorities to house everyone. It took losses of its own, too. A corporal named Kanehoo caught plague and died in the barracks.
Fires kept burning in the emptied district after January 20, this time without getting away, and the Park Service records fire in the district over a span of 17 days. Chinatown was fenced off behind a high wooden wall. The epidemic ended on March 31, 1900, with 71 diagnosed cases and 61 deaths. The port reopened April 30, new building permits started May 17, and by June Honolulu was declared free of plague.
Compensation was its own long ordeal. Chinese and Japanese claimants fought for years to be paid for property their own government had burned, and Mohr’s judgment is that the mismanaged compensation schemes stretched their suffering well past the fire. Some were eventually made partly whole. Nobody got back the years of work that went up that afternoon.
Who Was Governing Hawaiʻi That Morning
The Hawaiian Kingdom had been overthrown in January 1893 by a small group of mostly American businessmen backed by United States troops, and the Republic of Hawaiʻi followed in 1894. Congress annexed the islands in July 1898, with the transfer ceremony at ʻIolani Palace that August 12, but the Organic Act that created the Territory of Hawaiʻi did not take effect until June 14, 1900.
So on the morning of January 20, 1900, Hawaiʻi sat in a strange in-between. The monarchy was seven years gone, annexation was finished on paper, and the territorial government did not exist yet. The men running the islands were still the Republic’s men, holding office under a government that Native Hawaiian, Chinese, and Japanese residents had never voted for.
None of that proves the Board of Health wanted Chinatown gone. Charles Richter, the historian who assembled the American Association of Immunologists exhibit on the outbreak, makes the case that officials were doing what they believed was necessary with the science they had. He also says that after going back through the newspapers, he would not be surprised if some of the men setting the fires were less careful than they should have been. Four days before the disaster, the Hawaiian Gazette had already urged the city to clear most of the Asiatic quarter and build a new Chinatown. That is the record as it stands. Read it and draw your own conclusion.
Kaumakapili Church, Before and After
Kaumakapili was organized on April 1, 1838, at the request of Honolulu’s makaʻāinana, the common people, who wanted a church where they would be treated as equals. Kawaiahaʻo served the aliʻi. Abner Pākī and his wife Kōnia, the parents of Bernice Pauahi Bishop, granted the lot at Smith and Beretania, and the congregation asked for the Reverend Lowell Smith by name and got him. The first building was adobe with a thatched roof, big enough for 2,500, and Honolulu used it as a town hall during political crises.
The adobe came down in 1881, and Princess Liliʻuokalani laid the cornerstone of its replacement on September 2, 1881, which happened to be her birthday. Dr. C. M. Hyde designed the building with a single steeple. King Kalākaua wanted two, arguing that a man has two arms, two eyes, two ears, and two legs, so a church ought to have two steeples. The king won. Seven years and $65,000 later, the twin-steepled brick church was dedicated on June 10, 1888.
The basement did something else for the neighborhood. People who lived in Chinatown used it as a strongroom, storing jewelry and fabric they could not keep safe at home. When the steeples caught, all of it went. The fire left the brick walls standing and nothing else.
The congregation did not rebuild on the old lot. They sold the Smith and Beretania property, bought land at King Street and what was then Simerson Street in Pālama, and worshipped in a small wooden chapel on Austin Lane for about ten years while they raised money. The third Kaumakapili Church was dedicated on June 25, 1911. It is still standing, still holding services, still known as the queen of the Hawaiian churches.
Walking the Ground Today
You can see all of this in one morning, and you do not need a ticket for any of it. Chinatown is about 3 miles (4.8 km) west of Waikīkī, fifteen to twenty minutes by car when traffic cooperates, and TheBus runs several routes right down Hotel Street and King Street. Skip metered street parking. The limits are short, the stalls fill early, and a citation is a rough way to start a day off. Aim for a municipal garage inside the district instead: Chinatown Gateway, Smith-Beretania, Marin Tower, or Kekaulike Courtyard. Our guide to getting around Oʻahu has the routes and fares.
The corner of Beretania and Smith is where the twin steeples stood. We have never found a plaque there, so you have to build the picture yourself: the church on that lot, the trade wind swinging around at ten in the morning. Walk down toward Nuʻuanu Avenue and you are inside the burn zone.
A few buildings on that walk beat the fire. The Perry Block at Nuʻuanu Avenue and Hotel Street went up in 1889 for Anna Perry, and the stone pavers in front of it came from China as ship ballast. The Royal Saloon Building at 901 Nuʻuanu Avenue dates to 1890. The T. R. Foster Building across the way at 902 Nuʻuanu Avenue went up in 1891 for Thomas R. Foster, whose Inter-Island Steam Navigation Company became Hawaiian Airlines in 1941. And 25 North Hotel Street, later famous as Club Hubba Hubba, was barely a year old when the fire came through.
Everything else you see is the rebuild, which is why the streetscape feels so consistent. Brick, masonry, two stories, one architectural moment. The Mendoca Block at North Hotel and Maunakea Streets was among the first up, in 1901, built for Joseph Mendoca, who had sat on the Committee of Safety that helped overthrow the Kingdom in 1893. Oʻahu Market at North King and Kekaulike Streets followed in 1904 and still runs out of that same building. When Chinatown came back, the Chinese community rebuilt its businesses and largely did not rebuild its homes, so the district became a place people worked rather than a place people lived.
Then head up to Pālama and see the church that came back. Kaumakapili Church, 766 North King Street, Honolulu, HI 96817. Sunday worship is at 10:30 a.m. in the sanctuary and all are welcome. To see it on a weekday, the office keeps hours Monday to Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., and they ask that you call ahead at (808) 845-0908 to set a time. Be sure to do that, because this is a working congregation with its own schedule and its own kūpuna to care for. Park streetside or in the lots off Kanoa Street and North King Street. Their site is kaumakapilichurch.org.
If you have time downtown, walk over to Kawaiahaʻo Church at 957 Punchbowl Street, where refugee families camped on the grounds through the worst of it. Kawaiahaʻo has burials on the property, so keep to the walkways and keep your voice down the way you would anywhere people are laid to rest. Those are somebody’s kūpuna, and that same rule travels with you to every historic church, heiau, and cemetery in these islands.
Still Being Written About
Wing Tek Lum, a Honolulu businessman and poet, spent eight years on a collection called The Oldtimers about Chinatown life at the turn of the century, including a poem titled simply “The Fire.” His grandfather, Lum Kip Yee, lived through the quarantine and lost his store in the fire.
Walk Nuʻuanu Avenue today and you pass four buildings that were standing when the wind shifted, and dozens more that went up on the ashes within a few years of it. That is the whole story in a couple of blocks, once you know what you are looking at. Give yourself the time to look.
More from Wanderlustyle
Chinatown Honolulu: A Walking Food Tour You Can Do on Your Own
Kawaiahaʻo Church: The Coral Church of the Aliʻi
Aliʻiōlani Hale: The Palace That Became a Courthouse
Washington Place: Queen Liliʻuokalani’s Home for 55 Years
Punchbowl Cemetery: What to Know Before You Visit Pūowaina
