Barbary Coast Trail (6) -- Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory

San Francisco Chinatown is the largest Chinatown outside of Asia. Even though I'm Chinese, I have never really walked around Chinatown. So it's a great opportunity for me to explore the oldest and one of the most historic Chinatowns this time. Established in the 1850s, SF Chinatown has been featured in popular culture, such as in film, music, photography, and literature. To me, the Chinatown doesn't look like anywhere in modernized China, it only looks similar to those scenes I've seen in the movie which talks about China at the beginning of the 20th century. I guess there is not much change to Chinatown after it's built at the gold rush time, amazing!

There are all kinds of shops in Chinatown, I think you can get whatever you want here, from small daily use stuff like bowls or hair product to expensive watches or jewelries. What attracts people to shop here is that most of the stuff sold here are very cheap comparing to other stores' price. Since everything is made in China, I guess those store owners have their exclusive sources to import the goodies with a very cheap price. H bought a nice wooden Samurai sword for only 10 bucks. He carried it in his backpack with the sword head sticking out of the backpack. He looked like a Ninja to me for the rest of the day. :P

SF Chinatown History Timeline



In Chinatown, beside the Barbary Coast Trail bronze medallion, there is also this kind of Chinatown bronze sign embedded in the sidewalk. (My feet are not included with the sign. :P) Following this sign, we arrived at Rose Alley.



Here, tucked inside a storefront on tiny Ross Alley, some 20,000 fortune cookies a day are handmade by two women, each manning a conveyor belt of what look like miniature waffle irons. The factory opened in August 1962, and though there are other fortune cookie bakeries in the city, this is the only one where the cookies are still made by hand, the old-fashioned way.



>>next