On January 20, 1900, the ground you are walking on in Chinatown was burned to ash in one of the most catastrophic urban fires in Hawaii's history, a fire deliberately set by the government that then lost all control. In December 1899, bubonic plague arrived in Honolulu aboard a rat-infested ship from Asia. The Board of Health, determined to contain the outbreak, decided to burn plague-infected buildings in Chinatown one by one in controlled fires.
The controlled burns proceeded nervously through December and early January. Then, on January 20, 1900, a fire set in a building at Beretania and Nu'uanu streets escaped its firebreaks. A shift in the wind carried burning embers across the neighborhood, and within hours a conflagration had consumed thirty-eight acres of the densest part of Chinatown.
Approximately four thousand people — Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, and some native Hawaiian residents — were left homeless in a matter of hours. Their belongings, their businesses, their homes, their community records — all gone. Many contemporaries believed the fire was intentional, a convenient way to destroy the Chinese community's hold on the district.
The survivors were quarantined in detention camps for weeks. When they were finally permitted to return, they rebuilt — and what they built became the Chinatown that still exists today.