Essay completely revised 11/20/22, updated 3/9/23, 5/12/23
China Mary, Arizona’s most famous Chinese resident, is a very hard person to research because of the time and place she lived, because she was a woman, and because she was Chinese. Much of what we think we know about her probably is not true. I cannot locate the sources for many of the “facts” of her life stated in her biographies, but I have continued to research and have found more information about her life in Tombstone, A.T. If I find more information, I’ll revise this essay – I promise!
When working on this project I tried to do reasonably exhaustive research; give complete and accurate source citations or active links to resources; tried to be thorough in my analysis and correlation; to the best of my ability, I tried to resolve of conflicting evidence and wrote a sound conclusion based on the strongest evidence.
The Name
The name she was most referred to was China Mary. This was a generic name used for any Chinese woman in the American West. The other names she was known by are Mary Sing (article about funeral in the 12/23/1906 Tombstone Epitaph), Sing Choy (best choice for her real/ Chinese name), Ah Lum (used on death certificate), Ah Chum (variant of Ah Lum), Mrs. Ah Lum, Mary Ah Gue (used on marriage license) and Agio Lum (in the 1900 Census, line 98). A delinquent tax list in the Tombstone Epitaph (1/28/1888) gave her name as “Chinaman, Maey Sing Choy.”
Ben Traywick, in his in his 1989 booklet The Chinese Dragon of Tombstone, fell into the China Mary name trap. Both incidents, one in 1883 and one in 1885, were from George Hand’s diary. The 1883 incident is about Mary leaving Tombstone with a blacksmith. In Paul Lawton’s Guns and Gavels: George Hand’s Diary, 1882-1887 – The Court House Years (2016) Lawton correctly flags this entry as “not the same as the China Mary from Tombstone.” He didn’t catch the incorrect reference to the 1885 entry referring to China Mary and “two tramps” being put in jail for theft. The theft occurred in Tucson not Tombstone and was reported in the Arizona Citizen, April 4, 1885, “A Robbery Successfully Traced and the Culprits Jailed.”
What about the other names she was known by? The file “China Mary” (261196) at the Tombstone Court House State Historic Park in Tombstone was researched by Larry L. McFall. Mr. McFall believed the name she used in Tombstone was “Mary Sing Choy” which he used to research property and census records. He came to interesting and well based conclusions. First, and most importantly, he believes she was not married to Ah Lum. In the 1900 census there are two separate entries, one on Supervisor District 011/Enumeration District 9/Page 4/Dwelling 104/Line 49 for “Joy, Mary Sing” , housekeeper, age 50, widow, date of immigration 1870. This entry is the one McFall believes, and I do too, is the true China Mary. The other on Supervisor District 011/Enumeration District 9/Page 5/Dwelling 146/Line 98 for “Lum Agio,” wife, age unreadable, married for 8 years, immigrated in 1872. This is the census entry everyone else cites as China Mary’s. They are two distinct women. Looking at the Ah Lum/ “Mary Ah Gue” marriage license from March 14, 1906, it occurred to me how similar “Agio” and “Ah Gue” are. Both begin with an “a” sound, contain a “g” in the middle and end in a vowel. I believe it was a problem in the English/Chinese language interface when the documents were written. I think, like McFall, that Ah Lum did not marry our China Mary in 1906. I believe he married or re-married the woman he was living with in 1900. Why he would have re-married her in 1906, I don’t know. It might be related to a legal issue that arose because they were living in the age of Chinese exclusion and legal documents were very important to keep you from being deported.
So, why was the name “Ah Lum” used on Mary Sing Choy’s original death record and her much later death certificate? I think it might be another English/Chinese language interface problem. Based on newspaper articles mentioning Ah Lum between 1895 and 1919, he was well known in both the Chinese and American community. It’s possible that he was the informant who reported her death and that’s when a language issue arose. The article on the December 23, 1906, “The Funeral of China Mary,” in the Tombstone Epitaph states “The funeral of Mrs. Mary Sing, the Chinese lady who died yesterday, took place from the Undertaking Parlors of C B Tarbell today. China Mary, as she was known in Tombstone, . . . “Although the date of death is off, the article links the name Mary Sing to China Mary. Her age varies from 70 in the article, to 65 on her death records. The 1900 census gives her age as 50, six years later it would have been 56. How old she really was when she died is not known.
The Photo
Even the often-used photo reputed to be of her is not her. One copy is from the Bancroft Library (above), University of California, Berkeley is titled “Chinese Woman” and is from the collection “Chinese in California.” I sent an email to the Bancroft asking about the photo. The Bancroft’s lead pictorial archivist responded that it was a collodion photo, probably taken before 1890 for the then popular tourist trade of photos of “exotic” subjects. The number on the photo, 234, was a numbering technique used by photographers selling these exotic photos. He referred me to the USC Library who also owns a copy of the photo titled “Young Chinese Woman in Chinese Dress”. The Bancroft archivist disagrees with USC’s date of 1920, as well as the attribution to the photographer, C.C. Pierce. The response to my email to USC was: “I’m afraid that we have even less information about this image than the Bancroft. We have both a print and a glass negative, but the only description accompanying each is the handwritten word “woman” on the back of the print and “Chinese woman” on the glass negative. There is no other information provided about date, location, or name of photographer. C.C. Pierce is the Los Angeles photography studio archive to which this image belongs. This collection is in fact owned not by USC Libraries, but by the California Historical Society. When the CHS’s History Center closed in Los Angeles in the 1980s, they deposited some of their collections from this location with USC.”
To make this whole photo identification even more interesting, while doing a Google Image search using the photo I found it used on numerous websites some of which correctly identified it as an unknown Chinese woman. I found an interesting essay by Noel C. Cilker, “The ‘Strangely Alluring’ Ah Toy: What did the famous Gold Rush madam look like?” The essay is about a 2010 article in the San Francisco Examiner concerning Ah Toy, and they used the same photo that is found at the Bancroft Library. Mr. Cilker is as dubious about the identification of the photo as Ah Toy as I am of it being China Mary.
The photo was identified as China Mary even before the internet became popular in the mid-1990s. In Ben Traywick’s The Residents of Tombstone’s Boothill, 1971 one of the resident’s profiled is China Mary. He says of her appearance “A fat, healthy Chinese woman, who wore heavy silks and rare jewelry . . .” This sounds very much like the above photo. In his 1989 booklet The Chinese Dragon of Tombstone, the photo is included (pg. 36) and is identified as China Mary. The Tombstone Court House State Historic Park DOES NOT have this supposed photo of China Mary in their collection, so it is unknown where Mr. Traywick obtained it or how it was identified as China Mary. On the next page there is an unnamed photo of a young Chinese man in traditional costume holding a fan from Fly’s Gallery, Tombstone, with a handwritten note that states “THE KING OF TOMBSTONE’S CHINATOWN BACK IN THE 80’S.” This same photo appears in Jane Eppinga’s 2009 Images of America: Around Tombstone. . . This photo is in the collection of the Tombstone Court House State Historic Park (TC75-01-08/not the original photo). The label in the 1989 Traywick booklet does not appear on the Eppinga photo of the man in Chinese dress. The caption of this photo identifies him as “Challie” “king of Tombstone’s Chinatown” and partner to China Mary in her labor contracting business. The other photo, supposedly of the same man but dressed in western style clothes refers to him as “Challie Young.” I did a quick check of the 1880 and 1900 censuses, 3 newspaper databases and the 1883/4 Tucson/Tombstone city directory I did not find any references to a Charlie or Challie Young living in Tombstone.
Her Life . . . Or So the Myths Go
The story goes that she was born in 1839 in Guangdong Province, China and that her father was a gold miner in California. She reportedly arrived in Tombstone in about 1879 with Ah Lum giving the appearance they were man and wife. (Some essays incorrectly refer to Quong Gu Kee as her husband.) Mary and Ah Lum ran the Can Can Restaurant, established in 1879 by Kwong/Quong Gu/Gee Kee, Ah Lum’s partner.
China Mary was supposed to have been a labor contractor who found Chinese domestic servants for the residents of Tombstone. As a labor contractor she would supply the servant, collect money from the client for the servant’s work then pay the servant after taking her share. In Eppinga’s book (mentioned above) she refers to Challie Young as China Mary’s partner in this business. This is the only place I’ve seen this claim made. In addition to the money she earned, Mary would be privy to private information about what was going on in the client’s house through the servant. The information she got could be as benign as knowing what whiskey someone liked to drink or she could have gotten access to information that could have been used for blackmail. This would have been very similar to what Marie Laveau was reputed to have done with her hairdressing business among the wealthy white women of New Orleans.
In addition to labor contracting, legend has it she was known and respected for her business acumen and ran legitimate businesses such as a grocery store and laundries.
Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Mary was a woman of extreme contradiction. On one hand, she was known for her jovial, generous nature. On the other, she was also a ruthless businesswoman and is reputed to have run the opium dens, gambling, and prostitution in Tombstone’s Chinatown (Hoptown – note the photo used of China Mary). The earliest depiction I’ve found of China Mary’s supposed life as the vice queen of Tombstone’s Chinatown was in television show The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Season 5 Episode 29, “China Mary.” The show depicts a fully formed vice queen persona for China Mary by 1960. I was pleasantly surprised to find the show was sympathetic to the Chinese situation in the 19th century American west. Mary, played by the amazing Anna May Wong, is also sympathetically portrayed. Ms. Wong died on February 3, 1961, less than a year after the show aired on March 15, 1960. It was one of her last roles.
Her Life . . . and maybe a little closer to the truth.
Abt. 1850: Mary Sing “Joy’s” 1900 census entry states that she was born in China in 1850. She was likely born in Guangdong Province because nearly all Chinese immigrants of this period were from there.
Abt. 1870: This is the date she said was her date of immigration in the 1900 census. A check on Ancestry using “Sing Choy” found a Chinese prostitute by the name of “Choy Sung” in Humboldt County, NV in the 1870 census (see line 11). She was 30 years old and could not read or write. 1870 is close to Mary Sing “Joy’s” immigration date of 1872 on the 1900 census. If she did run vice related businesses in Tombstone, I believe that she was involved in them before she came to Tombstone. She could have started out as a prostitute, eventually became a madam. This prior experience would have given her the managerial and people skills as well as the connections needed to successfully run multiple criminal and legitimate enterprises for years. However, to be clear, we have no documentation of her vice connections. Interestingly, Mary Sing “Joy’s” 1900 census entry states said she could read, write, and speak English – most unusual for a Chinese woman of this time. The 1870 Choy Sung’s census entry indicated she could not read or write, which leans against her being our China Mary. Who knows – could she have learned to read and write English in the 30 years between the censuses?
Date of arrival in Tombstone: Although she was supposed to have arrived with Ah Lum to help Quong/Kwong Kee run the Can Can restaurant I haven’t found any documentation to support this claim. I inquired into Quong Kee’s background to see if he could be found in association with Ah Lum before Tombstone. I found very interesting, but sadly unsourced article, written by Opie Rundel Burgess 11 years after Quong Kee’s death in 1938 in Arizona Highways (July 1949) titled “Kwong Kee: Pioneer of Tombstone.” (pg. 9)The author refers to Ah Lum as Quong Kee’s cousin, unproven, but it is certainly possible, and that Ah Lum helped him operate the Can Can Restaurant. Most interestingly, there is NO mention of China Mary in the article. Ah Lum does appear in the 1882 Arizona Territorial census (25 years old) but Sing Choy, or variant names, do not appear. McFall found the same thing in the 1882 census “No indication of Mary Sing Choy in any spelled form.” I checked the 1883-1884 Tucson and Tombstone General Business Directory but did not find an entry under any of her names nor did I find an entry for Ah Lum – not unusual for the Chinese of this period. By that time, the Can Can Restaurant and Chop House listed Walsh and Shanahan as it’s proprietors. So, the date of Mary’s arrival to Tombstone is not known. Her arrival with Ah Lum is not proven.
1888: McFall’s research shows Block 2, Lot 9 (valued at $300) as owned by Mary Sing Choy which he believed that she purchased from the San Pedro Mining Company between 1887 and 1888. I believe she owned the lot by at least, if not before, 1887 because she appeared as “Chinaman, Maey Sing Choy” in a delinquent tax list in the Tombstone Epitaph (1/28/1888) for “lot 9 blk2.” This newspaper article is the first documented evidence of her presence in Tombstone I’ve found. She continued to pay taxes on this lot from 1888-1893. It is likely this is where her reputation as a superior businesswoman originated. By 1890 Block 2, Lot 10 was owned by Tai Yon Chung, Juong On Chung and Ah Chung.
Block 2 Lot 9 was in the heart of Tombstone’s Chinatown just 1 Lot from the corner of Allen and 3rd. The lot appears on the 1881 Map of the City of Tombstone, Cochise County.
Once I was sure of the property’s location, I went to the 1889 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map (pg. 3) to find more information. The section is labeled “Chinese Stores & Tenements” and it contains Chinese owned businesses and Mary is reputed to have had a variety of businesses. It’s possible she rented some of the other properties in Chinatown in addition to owning Lot 9. There is now an historic marker for Hoptown on 3rd street near the entrance to the Four Deuces Saloon which now occupies both Lots 9 & 10.
1894: According to McFall, “Tai Yon Chung shows ownership of Block 2, Lots 8, 9, & 10.” (Also visible on the above maps.)
1900: Mary was enumerated in the 1900 census as the housekeeper for Wong Tun Bon in Tombstone. McFall believed “It is assumed that Mary sold her property to Tai Yon Ching in 1895/1896 and moved into a household as domestic help as shown in the 1900 census.” (Note, there is a date discrepancy in McFall’s text with his date in the 1894 entry above. Mary would have sold the property in or before 1894 not 1895/1896.) How ironic that one of the persistent stories about Mary is that she was a labor contractor for Chinese servants to American employers in Tombstone and she ends her life employed as a domestic servant. She was a widow and mother of one child that was not living with her. Most unusually for the time is that she said she could read, write, and speak English. As to the one child, on December 13, 1893, the Tombstone Daily Prospector ran a brief article about the “daughter of China Mary,” referred to as an infant, having a “spaem,” (i.e., spasm) that afternoon. A check of the birth records for 1892 and 1893 do not show a woman with any of Mary’s known name variants having a child. The woman in the article could have been another Chinese woman referred to as China Mary, as was common then, it could have been our China Mary with an unregistered child who died later, or it could have been our China Mary with a child she had taken in because the mother could not care for it, or the “child” in the census was now an adult living on their own. Yet another China Mary mystery to ponder.
December 16, 1906: Mary dies but, because of unknown reasons, her death is recorded is under the name of “Ah Lum.” Mary is buried in Boothill, Tombstone’s famous cemetery. The real Ah Lum died in 1931 and is buried in the Tombstone Cemetery.
The Chinese Opinion
I found an article from China about China Mary which I translated using Google Translate. It has a very different take on her story. Just the title of the article says it all: “A fictional Chinese heroine has been hailed by Americans for a hundred years.” The author relates the most popular stories about Mary and concludes the stories were “just stories made up by Americans…” because “Tourism is a good way to make money. . .” and “The United States is a country that especially likes to ‘make heroes.’” The author correctly states that the photo purported to be of her is fake. They include the photo of Ah Lum used in the 1949 Burgess article. The author reviewed and discussed the 1900 census entry for Agio Lum not Mary Sing “Joy.” He concluded that China Mary was “just an ordinary Chinese woman. However, in her ordinary life, there is also an admirable and true heroic brilliance.”
Resources
Hung, Louise. “AAPI Women in History: China Mary,” Global Comment, March 13, 2018, viewed on 10/12/2022 https://globalcomment.com/aapi-women-in-history-china-mary/
Lear, Amanda. “Queen of Chinatown (Starparade 10.11.1977),” amandalearVEVO, YouTube, viewed on 10/12/2022 https://youtu.be/o50V_tJIpR8 (The song mentioned in “A fictional heroine. . .”)
Tombstone Oral Histories. Arizona Memory Project, viewed 5/8/2023, https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/nodes/view/252827 Several of the oral histories contain references to China Mary. I don’t believe they are to our China Mary but to a China Mary. Diligent researchers should read them and come to their own conclusions.
Zhang Zhaohong. “Chinese in Tombstone,” Desert Pearl: History of Chinese in Arizona, USA (3), May 16, 2021, viewed on 10/12/2022: https://www.sunbirdarizona.com/2021/05/16/%E6%B2%99%E6%BC%A0%E6%98%8E%E7%8F%A0-%E7%BE%8E%E5%9B%BD%E4%BA%9A%E5%88%A9%E6%A1%91%E9%82%A3%E5%B7%9E%E5%8D%8E%E4%BA%BA%E5%8E%86%E5%8F%B2%EF%BC%88%E4%B8%89%EF%BC%89/ I used Google Translate to read this article in English.