San Francisco’s Chinatown is filled with exotic-looking buildings, decorated with pagodas, curved roofs, ornamental ironwork and bright colors. At first sight, it looks authentically Chinese. But it isn’t.

Chinatown is essentially a Potemkin village. Its architecture is a stage set, created by white architects in collaboration with Chinatown leaders after the 1906 earthquake and fire. Their goal was to create a magical, exotic destination that would placate the city’s hostile establishment, rid the neighborhood of its unsavory old associations and entice tourists.

As a neighborhood, Chinatown is almost as old as San Francisco itself. The first Chinese arrived in 1848, at the start of the Gold Rush, and settled around Sacramento Street and DuPont Street (now Grant Avenue). Although the “China boys” were initially welcomed, relations between the immigrants and white San Franciscans soon deteriorated.

White xenophobia was exacerbated by the fact that most Chinese immigrants made no attempt to assimilate. They had left their families behind and planned to make a fortune here, then return to China.

As Erica Y.Z. Pan writes in “The Impact of the 1906 Earthquake on San Francisco’s Chinatown,” the newcomers were convinced “that China was a more civilized country than the United States. There was no incentive to acquaint themselves with a ‘barbarian’ culture or language.”

Chinatown soon became a ghetto, one created both by white racism and by Chinese separatism. But anti-Chinese feelings did not explode until the depression of the 1870s, when working-class whites rioted over job competition from low-paid Chinese. In 1882, Congress passed the notorious Chinese Exclusion Act, which froze almost all Chinese immigration for decades.

City officials had long regarded Chinatown as “the shame of the city,” a disease- and vice-ridden blight in the very heart of San Francisco. After the anti-Chinese riots, calls to get rid of the district altogether grew louder. One supervisor demanded that the Chinese either be moved to reservations or “be separated under police guard in a tent city near the city cemetery.”

In 1890, the city declared Chinatown a health menace and ordered its residents to relocate to a special site out of the city. A federal court struck down the ordinance as unconstitutional.

After the 1906 fire destroyed Chinatown, city officials were determined that the old district would never be rebuilt. Chinese merchants, however, used white landlords’ greed to their advantage, signing long-term leases in their old neighborhood at high rates.

Trivia time Previous question: What year did the first car appear in San Francisco? Answer: 1896. This week’s trivia question: Where and when were the first fortune cookies served in the U.S.? Editor’s note Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya’s Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco’s extraordinary history — from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday, alternating with Peter Hartlaub’s OurSF.

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In just two years, the entire district was not only rebuilt, but greatly improved. Its streets were wider, many of its alleys were removed, and buildings were constructed to code.

The biggest change was to its architecture. The pre-quake Chinatown resembled other San Francisco neighborhoods, with mostly drab and conventional buildings. The post-quake Chinatown was self-consciously exotic, filled with buildings that evoked an Asian never-never land.

Chinese business and community leaders, along with white architects, were responsible. They knew how close the San Francisco establishment had come to removing the quarter altogether. As long as Chinatown was seen as an unhealthy, sin-filled district, it would remain under political threat.

Equally pressing were economic motives. Although Chinatown’s reputation for vice had brought in visitors eager to see dope fiends lolling about with their white slaves, there was far more money to be made by presenting the neighborhood as an exotic but family-friendly destination.

As Philip P. Choy notes in “San Francisco Chinatown: A Guide to Its History and Architecture,” even before the earthquake, Chinese American notables argued that Chinatown should be rebranded as an “Oriental city” filled with “veritable fairy palaces filled with the choicest treasures of the Orient.”

The centerpieces of the exoticized Chinatown would be two imposing buildings, Sing Fat and Sing Chong, which stand at the most important intersection in the district, California Street and Grant Avenue. The buildings, executed by the firm of Ross and Burgren, “demonstrate the pseudo-Oriental style with the curved eaves of a pagoda tower,” Choy writes.

The new Chinatown’s architectural style is not authentically Chinese — its design elements are decorative, not functional. “American architects at the turn of the 20th century were trained in the Beaux Arts tradition; they knew little and cared less about the architecture of Asia,” Choy writes. “Their exposure to Chinese architecture was limited to images of pagodas and temples with massive curved roofs with eaves curled at corners, forms and expressions already centuries old. Their challenge was to transform these ancient forms into a new Sino-architectural vocabulary using Western methods of construction and local building materials in conformance with local building codes.”

The white architects in effect created facades like those built on movie sets. Roofs were extended to create an illusion of massiveness. Corbels, dentils and columns were sprinkled about — forms that in traditional Chinese architecture serve structural functions were used as decorations. Only the bright colors the architects used — red, green and yellow — are authentically Chinese.

The new Chinatown’s pseudo-Orientalism reaches its fullest expression on Waverly Place, in the Tin Hau Temple and its adjoining buildings. As Choy notes, “The illusion created is a masterful design solution, unique and indigenous, for it is neither East nor West but decidedly San Francisco.”

The neighborhood’s makeover worked. Cash registers in the new, exotic Chinatown jingled, and never again did city officials try to raze the district. To this day, the neighborhood whose hallmark is pseudo-Oriental fairy palaces created after the 1906 fire is one of San Francisco’s biggest tourist attractions.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to www.sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to www.sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com