The Chee Kung Tong: A Chinese Secret Society in Tucson, 1880–1940

Chinese secret societies (or "tongs") dominated most American Chinatowns until well into the twentieth century. Certain Chinese communities, especially those in California and Oregon, had several such societies. From the 1890s to the 1920s a number of them, the so-called fighting tongs, became violent and engaged in crimes and "tong wars" that were widely reported in English-language newspapers. However, the only tong with a presence in Arizona was nonviolent: the Chee Kung Tong (Zhigongtang or CKT), also known as the Chinese Masons. Beginning earlier under names such as Hongmen, Hongshuntang, and Yixingtang and headquartered in San Francisco, the CKT became the most powerful Chinese secret society in the United States. Both peace-loving and warlike tongs deferred to it. Sometimes claimed by American police to be the fount of all Chinese criminality, the CKT seems rarely to have engaged in crime or violence itself, although it accepted (and indeed required) contributions from gambling and perhaps other illicit operations.

At the back is a gilded shrine, originally made for Tucson's CKT in 1909. In the front on top of an altar table shows two sets of altar utensils for censers and candles, one of brass and the other of silvery pewter. The lid on the central censer of the pewter set bears a crouching lion. Behind the lion in the shrine niche is a spirit tablet for Guandi, the God of War. Each of the wings of the shrine shows a vertical line of characters. The carver's name is visible at the bottom of the left wing, between the two candlesticks; he also carved the altar façade. Currently housed at the Ying On Association, Tucson.

Courtesy Ying On Benevolent Association. Photo by authors.

Many historians of Chinese America accept as a given that the San Francisco-based Six Companies, later known as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), was the most important Chinese organization in the United States throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹ The CCBA's reach, however, was limited. Although the CCBA played a leading role in San Francisco and a few other big cities, elsewhere it had little influence in comparison with the CKT. The latter was a continentwide organization with hundreds of branches, called "lodges" in English-language newspapers, and thousands of dedicated members for whom the CKT's word was, virtually and often in practice, law.² Membership was open to Chinese from all districts, linguistic subgroups, and clans. Even non-Chinese sometimes were allowed to join. Once they had taken the requisite oaths and undergone the initiation rituals, which required a specific kind of shrine, members could expect support from all other members and were obliged to offer unstinting support in return.³

An altar façade used as a hanging. The date, yiyou, equivalent to 1909, appears on the right. The names of donors appear on the left. The black vertical couplets and the red embroidery are later additions. Currently housed at the Ying On Association, Tucson.

Courtesy Ying On Benevolent Association. Photo by authors.

The organization was a direct descendant of the renowned—and, by some, much feared—Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandihui), which had existed in China since the early eighteenth century and had come to California in the early 1850s. Because that society advocated the overthrow of the Manchu emperors and hence was targeted by the Chinese imperial security services, its branches in China had to be truly secret. Membership meant death for individuals and, in all probability, their entire families. But in America the society and its affiliates could dare to be more open. In San Francisco, the name "Hong Society" was used without much subterfuge as early as 1853. In the 1860s, local branches started to call themselves Chinese Masons.⁴ In 1879, some of those branches adopted yet another name, Chee (sometimes Gee or Ghee) Kung Tong—in Mandarin Chinese, Zhigongtang, or "Hall of Universal Justice." The new...