Kam Wah Chung State Heritage Site

The building went up around the late 1860s as a trading post on The Dalles Military Road. Its golden years began in the late 1880s, when two young men from Guangdong Province took over the lease. Ing Hay, known to everyone as Doc Hay, was a healer trained in traditional Chinese medicine. Lung On was a gifted merchant, linguist, and businessman. Together they turned Kam Wah Chung into the heart of the local Chinese community.

Doc Hay practiced pulse diagnosis and treated patients with hundreds of herbal remedies, some of them rare. His reputation spread far beyond John Day, and his patients included not only Chinese miners and laborers but white ranchers and townspeople from across the region, especially during the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919. Lung On, fluent in English and Chinese, acted as an interpreter and go-between, ran the store, invested widely, and is often credited with opening one of eastern Oregon's early automobile dealerships.

They lived and worked here through decades when Chinese immigrants faced open hostility and exclusion laws meant to keep them out of the country and out of public life. That the two men not only survived but became trusted, even essential, to the whole community is a large part of what makes this place matter.

Lung On died in 1940. Doc Hay kept the doors open until 1948, when failing health and a broken hip forced him to leave for care in Portland, where he died in 1952. The building was simply locked, its contents left in place.

The property passed to the City of John Day in the 1950s with the wish that it become a museum, but for years it sat closed, all but forgotten. When the doors were finally opened again, people found the interior almost perfectly intact, a time capsule of an entire life and business. It opened to the public as a museum in the mid-1970s, was named a National Historic Landmark, and after a major restoration reopened in 2008.

Cataloging what was inside took years. More than thirty thousand objects were recorded, including the apothecary's stock of herbs, some of which are difficult or impossible to find in the wild today. Few historic sites anywhere preserve so complete a picture of ordinary daily life.

In the gold-rush decades of the late 1800s, eastern Oregon drew thousands of Chinese miners and laborers, and John Day was home to one of the largest Chinese communities in the state. Kam Wah Chung, a name often translated as Golden Flower of Prosperity, was its center: a store, a pharmacy, a place of worship, a bunkhouse for travelers, and a gathering place all at once.

That community shrank as the mines played out and exclusion laws took their toll, and much of its physical trace is gone. Kam Wah Chung is the rare survivor, which is why it carries so much weight. It stands for a population that helped build the region and was too often written out of its story.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.