Shanghai tunnels

Story

The Shanghai tunnels have one of the best origin myths in American urban history: a network of underground passages beneath Portland's Old Town Chinatown, used by criminal operators to kidnap drunken men, drag them through the dark, and deliver them to waiting ships as involuntary crew. The story has powered ghost tours since the 1970s and made the tunnels one of Portland's most-visited underground attractions. It is almost certainly not true.

Portland historian Barney Blalock, in his book The Oregon Shanghaiers, traced the shanghaiing-via-tunnel legend to a cluster of apocryphal stories published in The Oregonian in 1962 — invented decades after the fact, then repeated until they calcified into accepted history. The tunnels themselves are real. They connected the basements of hotels and taverns along Northwest Couch, Davis, and Everett streets to the waterfront of the Willamette River, built in the late 19th century to move goods from docked ships into storage without navigating streetcar and train traffic above. That is a mundane and entirely sensible purpose.

What makes the tunnels genuinely strange is the gap between what they were — a logistics workaround for a busy port city — and what they became in the popular imagination: a Gothic underworld of trapdoors and press gangs. The vault lights embedded in the sidewalks above, small glass prisms set into iron frames, were the tunnels' original source of daylight. They still catch the sun. The myth outlasted the ships, the crime bosses, and the entire economic system that built the passages. That a freight corridor became folklore this potent is, in its way, more interesting than the legend.