The Auburn Chinese Joss House: An Analysis of an Artifact Collection through Descendant Community Collaboration
Author(s): Samantha Dunham
Year: 2025
Summary
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
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The Auburn Joss House Chinese History Museum is one of the few remaining structures from the mid-19<sup>th</sup> to 20<sup>th</sup>-century Chinatown in Auburn, California — a prominent gold rush town. A man named Charles Yue opened it as the Ling Ying Association building in the 1920s to be used as a temple, boardinghouse, Chinese language and culture school, and community center until it closed in 1968 when it became boarded up and subsequently fell into disrepair. In the 1990s, Richard Yue (Charles Yue’s grandson) restored it as a museum which is still managed by the Yue Family with items related to the Auburn Chinatown, Ling Ying Association, and the museum stored in the museum basement. This project collaborated with the Auburn Chinese descendent community to conduct historical research, an in-depth inventory of items in the basement, and collect oral history interviews from the Yue Family. This paper examines the nature of the items stored in the museum basement and the lives of people who lived in the Auburn Chinatown and interacted with the Ling Ying Association, as well as reflects on how in-depth collaboration with a descendent community can influence historical and archaeological research.
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Cite this Record
The Auburn Chinese Joss House: An Analysis of an Artifact Collection through Descendant Community Collaboration. Samantha Dunham. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 511092)
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Record Identifiers
Abstract Id(s): 53481