by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

The city is rife with jolly, wild stories, but tales from Chinatown are rare. Dirty Chinese laundry doesn't get aired in public.

If our Chinese seem shy about their massive cultural contribution to the city, we can only blame ourselves. Canada long excluded Chinese. The onerous $500 immigration tax of 1906 didn't work, so in 1923 we passed the Chinese Immigration Act. It banned all new Chinese immigrants. It was family apartheid, and left a legacy of sadness and bitterness. Chinatown was populated by men separated from wives and children marooned in China.

Yet for generations, the busy, exotic sounds and smells have filled the city within the city. Bruce Lee posters, quail eggs, shark fin soup, tit koon yum tea, pummelo peels, dried chicken feet, jackfruit, horn nuts, tinned abalone, black moss and dry white jelly fungus have long been peddled, and were rang up - at least until the '70s - on abacus.

Not to forget the Chinese laundry, once the dominant business. The city's last remaining Chinese laundry that I know of closed in the mid-'80s. It was in a basement on Crescent south of Ste-Catherine.

A Chinese Montreal directory from 1939 reveals the most common Chinese first name was Charlie. Not many Chinese Charlies around nowadays either.

Traditionally, four main clans led Chinatown: Lee, Tam, Chan and Wong. Nowadays the Vietnamese are fast encroaching, having taken over almost the entire eastern edge of the area.

Retired cop Claude Aubin learned Chinatown's secrets while on patrol. He knows of the small recess where dejected gambling losers would sometimes hang themselves. He tells of the restaurant owner who ended up waiting tables at the place he gambled away. He recalls the pig farmer who came to Chinatown every night to raid dumpsters to feed his pigs, and the Rodeo Café - renamed the Lodeo in honour of the local pronunciation, which eventually became a strip club that was shut down for obscenity in 1985, the seamy details of which were put in a provincial file and lost.

Chinatown was long run by Chinese Freemasons, who helped with elaborate burials. Bodies were buried on Mount Royal, then dug up after five years. The bones were dried and sent to China, where families would reattach them with string to form a skeleton. They were then sealed in an urn and buried. The tradition waned with World War II.

In the 1930s, a Chinese crook named George Hum took over Montreal's Chinese Freemasons, known as the Chee Kung Tong. Hum's election was disputed. His opponents took to arms. Knife and gunfights were rife, although nobody was killed. Gambling and opium dens were suddenly common and, in one 1936 raid, cops discovered stolen swag in 15 houses around Clarke and de la Gauchetière, all linked by a secret underground tunnel.

In the early '90s, violence resurged as unruly gangs ran rampant. One restaurant patron near St-Urbain asked gang members to be quiet and had his hand chopped off as a reward. The police launched a two-man Asian crime unit but found informants few. One ganglord named Trung was wanted throughout North America but managed to live for months in Chinatown, easily avoiding capture.

In 1966, Mayor Drapeau promised $40-million to redo Chinatown and make it a "walled city." Cars would be banned, oriental architecture would be added, as would an artificial lake and cultural centre, all in hopes of boosting the Chinese population. Alas, Chinatown's elders were disinterested in the proposal. Apparently, they were still distrustful of government notions due to the old anti-Chinese immigration law.

The most dominant Chinatown theme is the recurrent proposals to demolish it, such as those from 1970 and '81. Yet it has largely survived, except for the chunk killed by the Guy Favreau complex. In a 1942 plan, the north side of the strip along de la Gauchetière would have been demolished for a parking lot.

In 1962, city councillor Frank Hanley proposed Chinatown add rickshaws, a proposal that left some Chinese a bit miffed. One told a reporter, "You crazy, mister? You think Immigration men bring us boys to pull rickshaw?"

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