For a San Francisco community that had suffered indignity piled upon indignity, April 29, 1906, may have been an all-time low.

After all of Chinatown was burned to the ground by the 1906 earthquake and fire, the surviving population was moved by military order to a tent city on Van Ness Avenue, then told they couldn’t return to rebuild. Meanwhile, The Chronicle reported that more than 100 National Guard volunteers were found sifting through the rubble, stealing their few remaining possessions.

“They were not the only offenders, however,” Col. H.P. Moss told The Chronicle in 1906. “It would astonish you if I mentioned the names of high railroad officials, of society people in Oakland and San Francisco, and reputable businessmen who have been (looting in) Chinatown for the same reason. … I believe the men who have been found here digging out chinaware and other valuables did not fully realize the great injustice of depriving these poor sufferers of what little they have left.”

The history of Chinatown in San Francisco is filled with prejudice and disaster; the Chinese suffered attacks, a plague and xenophobic rioters — businesses were burned and citizens killed at the hands of the bigoted mob.

But the opposition underestimated the will of the Chinese, who fought through each obstacle for the right to be equal citizens in San Francisco and contribute to the city’s future. It’s an inspiration to all that Chinatown is still standing; a symbol of the resilience of a population of immigrants who refused to be silenced or removed.

The Chinese were among the first wave of immigrants to arrive during the Gold Rush, but they were treated as a lower class from the beginning. At best, the coverage in newspapers was filled with curiosity about Chinatown, centered on what is now Grant Avenue and Stockton Street in San Francisco. At the worst — and too many times it was the worst — a group of San Franciscans seemed to constantly be plotting their elimination.

An early article in The Chronicle, headlined “The Orient in America — A Stroll Through Chinatown by Day and by Night — Habits of the Heathen Chinese,” was actually one of the less inflammatory writings. Like many of the more “positive” articles about Chinatown, it treated the neighborhood — just a few blocks away from The Chronicle’s building — as if it was of a different planet altogether.

“Dupont street is the chief thoroughfare of Chinatown,” the June 13, 1875, article stated. “All day long the great stream of blue-shirted Celestial life flows along it, swelling at high tides up to Stockton Street, and trickling in rivers and rivulets down to Kearny. All along it are shops, in whose windows are shown for sale all varieties of wares that are suggestive of far Cathay — opium pipes, slippers of silk and velvet, the pale ultramarine jade stone … woven fabrics, grotesque idols and an infinite number of things nameless and valueless except to those with whom their ancient uses are traditional.”

Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, “Anti-Coolie Meetings” were also announced and covered in The Chronicle. Often led by nativist labor organizer Denis Kearney, the hate groups spread fear in every way imaginable, blaming the Chinese for joblessness, crime and diseases both real and invented.

This 1861 meeting featured a guest named Alfred Buetell, who suggested the Chinese were about to infect all of San Francisco with leprosy.

“Mr. Buetell’s doctrine was that the Chinese were a curse to all mankind, themselves included,” The Chronicle reported. “The speaker called China a ‘seething cauldron of infamy,’ a ‘foul sink of corruption,’ and an ‘incestuous hell.’”

The hatred arguably hit a peak in 1877, when joblessness in San Francisco was at a high, and the nation was in a depression.

Agitators called for a mass meeting at City Hall on July 23, 1877, planning to stop the latest Pacific Mail Steamship, reportedly filled with Chinese immigrants, from reaching the port. California Gov. William Irwin and San Francisco Mayor A.J. Bryant wrote proclamations urging citizens not to join the mob, and pledging troops to stop it.

But the anti-Chinese leaders set a waterfront lumberyard on fire to distract the militia, and the armed rioters — many reportedly in their teens — set out to destroy Chinatown with little resistance.

“The dregs of the crowd, numbering about 500, set out, evidently by previously carefully laid-plans, on a march of general destruction of Chinese shops and laundries,” The Chronicle reported. “Every Chinese house had evidently been carefully listed beforehand, for on the whole line of march and on either side of the streets there was not left a single one which was not utterly and completely sacked.”

The government and newspapers were generally sympathetic toward the Chinese during that 1877 violence. When the mob turned on a policeman during one arrest, reporters covering the action drew revolvers and backed the crowd off, according to press coverage. One unidentified Chinese merchant was hailed for fighting back, hammering boards across his laundry storefront, and then successfully fending off rioters who tried to pry off the lumber and then burn his business down.

“After a few blows upon the shutters, the stormers were greeted with a pistol bullet, fired through the door by the Celestial within,” The Chronicle reported two days later. “True to their cowardly instincts, the hoodlums fled like sheep; tumbling over one another in a haste to get away.”

The violence was quelled by the “citizen’s vigilance committee” — armed with pickax handles — but not before more than 30 businesses were burned down, several Chinese were killed and many more were injured.

Chronicle coverage suggests some sympathy toward the Chinese in the wake of the riots; the perpetrators who were caught were punished publicly and severely. The riots, and later the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, both contributed to the rise of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (also known as the Chinese Six Companies) a collection of Chinatown businessmen who helped build a strategy to work with the city leaders and make Chinatown less isolated.

When a plague reached San Francisco and Chinatown was quarantined, the Chinese Six Companies used attorneys to force the city to feed Chinatown’s residents, and pushed for the end of the isolation.

Progress was halted on April 18, 1906, when the earthquake hit and subsequent fires destroyed Chinatown. Fear was rampant, and anti-Chinese sentiments intensified again. While the Chinese were among the first to help clear rubble and search for survivors, others were gathered by the military and forced into a Van Ness Avenue tent city, while the city’s wealthier residents smashed Chinatown safes and picked through what remained of their belongings. The homeless Chinese were moved to the Presidio (residents of Pacific Heights said the Van Ness camp brought the Chinese too close to their homes) and Hunters Point was pitched as a new Chinatown.

In the days after the earthquake, the Chinese were told that their future was not in San Francisco.

“Beyond this is the question of the location of the new Chinatown, which is made more perplexing by the fact that hardly any of the richer Chinese have a dollar left,” The Chronicle reported. “Government relief will be necessary and the location of a Chinese village near Colma is now being considered.”

But the Chinese were organized now and had made inroads with the city government. Leaders emerged who made it clear that they would settle nowhere else except their longtime home.

The most effective of these assertive voices was arguably Look Tin Eli, a Chinatown resident who had been born and raised in Mendocino County. Eli spoke in fluent English with more intelligence than most of the politicians in office, and proved to be a savvy negotiator with one foot in both worlds.

Eli and fellow businessman Wong G. Yow worked with white architects to rebuild Chinatown, favoring tourist-friendly flourishes, including Pagoda-style buildings that weren’t there before, and narrow streets and alleys to accommodate a higher population density.

The Chinese New Year and Autumn Moon festivals became citywide events, anticipated by white residents as much as the Chinese. Among Eli’s accomplishments was winning a 1908 stare-down with San Francisco’s chief of police to allow a fireworks permit for Chinese New Year festivities, gaining more support from neighboring white merchants along the way.

“It is part of the Chinese religion to set off fireworks as the old year closes and the new year comes in,” Eli told The Chronicle. “On this ground alone I think we could demand our permits, for our treaty rights allow us to worship in our way in freedom and peace.”

Chinatown’s leaders in the first quarter of the 20th century were instrumental in striking a balance between independence and assimilation in Chinatown. The district added a YMCA and YWCA in the 1910s, and lobbied for a branch of the San Francisco public library that opened in 1921. The Stockton Street Tunnel in 1914 provided an even stronger link between Union Square and Chinatown tourism.

There were still great struggles. The U.S. had strengthened laws against Chinese immigrants, and Angel Island became an interrogation center from the 1910s to 1940s — detaining some Chinese for weeks or even months, when other immigrants were allowed access to the U.S. with little trouble.

Violence and organized crime at the hands of the Tongs — murderous gangs in Chinatown — were on the rise as well. Pursued by gangs, Look Tin Eli snuck out of San Francisco in 1919, taking a tugboat to his departing ship to China because he was convinced that he would be assassinated on the dock.

In 1921, policeman Jack Manion was sent to clean up Chinatown, and after three decades on the beat, his combination of toughness with the Tongs and tenderness with citizens was legendary.

“My fondest memory,” Herb Caen wrote, upon Manion’s death in 1959, is “the grizzled old officer walking slowly along Grant Ave. through an army of Chinese youngsters, all of them greeting him warmly with the same phrase: ‘Hello Daddy!’”

Stronger bonds forged with the Chinese during World War II helped changed attitudes. Chinese residents established more San Francisco communities in the Richmond and Sunset districts, and in the later half of the 20th century the Chinese in San Francisco started to rise as a political force.

San Francisco had elected its first Chinese supervisor, Gordon Lau, in 1977.

Activists had been pushing for Chinese-speaking precinct voters to help register adults in Chinatown, which traditionally had low voter turnout. Another Kearney — registrar of voters Thomas Kearney — was forced out of office when he protested the move, allegedly referring to the Chinese by a racial epithet.

“It was a display of influence by a community that until recently has been long on residence but very short on political power in the city,” a Chronicle article written by Evelyn Hsu started, reporting that the community “is rapidly achieving political strength in the city.”

By then another Chronicle reporter, Rose Pak, had quit her newspaper job and started on her path as one of the most influential power brokers in San Francisco history. Former Chinatown resident Fred Lau in 1996 became the first Asian American police chief in a major U.S. city other than Honolulu. And in 2011, Ed Lee, a former tenants rights lawyer who had fought for Chinatown tenement dwellers in the 1970s, became San Francisco’s first Asian American mayor.

The thought of moving Chinatown is in the distant past. It’s not just an important landmark in San Francisco, it’s a symbol of the city’s immigrant struggles, strength during adversity and inspiring successes.

Chronicle librarian Bill Van Niekerken contributed to the research of this chapter.

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle pop culture critic. E-mail: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub