Kam Wah Chung: Doc Hay's Place

A stone building in John Day holds one of the most intact Chinese-American spaces in the entire American West. The Kam Wah Chung building, whose name means Golden Flower of Prosperity, was built in eighteen sixty-five as a supply depot on the Dalles Canyon City wagon road. By eighteen eighty-seven it belonged to two Chinese immigrants from Canton: Ing Hay, known as Doc Hay, a practitioner of traditional herbal medicine and pulse diagnosis, and his partner Lung On, a merchant and labor contractor.

For more than sixty years, the building functioned as a clinic, temple, unofficial post office, social club, and general store for Chinese miners and laborers scattered across the Blue Mountains. Doc Hay died in nineteen fifty-two. He asked that the building be given to the city of John Day to become a museum, its contents exactly as he left them.

It is now a National Historic Landmark and a state heritage site , a preserved world almost no one expected to survive.