A century ago, the Inland Valley was home to at least a half-dozen Chinatowns - small villages in Cucamonga, Alta Loma, Upland, Claremont and Pomona housing the Chinese men who labored in local vineyards and citrus groves.  The villages and the men who populated them are long gone.  All that's left is a simple, clay-tile building in Rancho Cucamonga, fenced off because its rotting state poses a danger to anyone entering.

Some Chinese workers in the Inland Valley  picked citrus fruit, while others picked  grapes or dug tunnels.

"Just about every town in California would have had some kind of Chinese community," said Don Clucas, who wrote a history of Rancho Cucamonga titled "Light Over the Mountain." 

"One of the interesting things about the village in Cucamonga," Clucas added, "is that the building still exists, so people know exactly where it was." 

The villages' very existence is a testament to the casual racism of the times. 

In California, Chinese were forced to live in undesirable parts of town separate from whites. Exclusion laws barred most Chinese immigration from 1882 until 1943. Anti-miscegenation laws condemned most unmarried men to bachelorhood. 

They lived under the threat of harassment and violence. Riverside's Chinese village was destroyed by arson in 1893. Around the same time, the National Guard had to be called into Redlands when 400 whites rioted against the Chinese there. 

Life in the Inland Valley's Chinese villages was also punctuated by fire, although there is no evidence of arson. A fire broke out in Upland's Chinatown in 1914 but was extinguished quickly. An accidental fire in Cucamonga's village in 1919, however, destroyed the community. 

Chinese workers arrived in the valley around 1870 with the completion of the major railroads. Needing work, they dug water tunnels in the San Gabriel Mountains, picked grapes in Cucamonga and worked as servants in private homes and hotels. 

As elsewhere, Chinese were subject to harassment by anti-immigrant forces. 

"It was felt they were taking jobs away from white men," Clucas said. 

In 1893, two anti-Chinese meetings aimed at boosting employment of whites were reported in the Ontario Observer, according to Maricarmen Ruiz-Torres, registrar of the Ontario Museum of History and Art. 

That November, the Observer reported that the Ontario Hotel fired its Chinese cooks in favor of white labor. 

Pomona went even further. Spurred on by an editorial campaign by the Pomona Progress, residents raised money to build and operate a steam laundry, with the goal of driving small Chinese hand laundries out of business - and the Chinese out of town. 

It worked. By the 1890s, most of the city's Chinese population was gone. Some became citrus pickers in more-hospitable La Verne and San Dimas. 

Perhaps the local Chinese population had small victories to savor. In at least one recorded instance, racism was deftly put down by a Cucamonga villager. 

On a sweltering summer day, a bookkeeper named Smith took some visiting friends from Boston around Cucamonga in his new Model T. Finding a group of Chinese relaxing in the shade on stools, Smith decided to show off for his friends, greeting one villager by saying in mock-Chinese, "Heapy hot day." 

The man looked up and replied in perfect English, "Yes, it is a very warm day indeed, sir." 

Some people welcomed the Chinese, if nothing else because the cheap labor was appreciated. 

Most Chinese in Cucamonga worked for Newell Milliken on his 260-acre ranch, located near modern-day Haven Avenue and Arrow Highway. 

They cleared land and picked up to 1,000 pounds of grapes a day for a wage of 90 cents. The late Ruth Milliken, who was a girl at the time, told historian Clucas that the Chinese were treated well and considered like family. 

When one worker, a man named Puy, had managed to save $3,000 to finance a return by boat to China, the Millikens threw a party for him the night before his departure and took his photo with various family members. 

The next morning, though, Newell Milliken found Puy in the fields, sitting dejectedly on the tongue of a wagon. 

"Me one big fool," Puy told him. "I lose $3,000 gambling last night." 

Puy went back to work, swore off any more Fan-Tan card games and eventually returned to China. 

Many Chinese dreamed of going back home. Some returned voluntarily when they'd saved enough money; others, at least elsewhere in the state, were deported illegally. The numbers of Chinese in the Inland Valley dwindled in the 1910s. 

Perhaps the final blow came in 1919. Fire destroyed Cucamonga's Chinatown when a villager, using gasoline to stoke a stove, accidentally caused an explosion that set the village ablaze. He died, and the 20 remaining laborers were housed in a winery while new dwellings were built. 

These new houses, among them the China House that still stands today, didn't feel as much like home to the Chinese. Within a few years, most of them had left - either for China or other Chinatowns - or died of old age. 

In 1935, a man named Loy Wong returned to China and received a warm send-off in the Upland News, which reported that the famed trees in the Euclid Avenue median might owe their existence to his volunteer care, which included hauling water there in barrels. 

By 1939, there was reportedly just one elderly Chinese man left. Most histories give his name as Mah Wong, although a photo in the Upland Library collection captioned "last Chinaman in Cucamonga" bears the name Lee Lung. 

His neighbor, Louella Wangler, told Clucas that the 87-year-old Wong would stop by her home each day to ask if he could help. He would wash clothes, cook, run errands and even baby sit. 

One day, he brought over a paper bag containing pieces of newspaper torn like confetti. "Please, when I die, sprinkle these pieces of paper around me to keep the devil away," he asked her. 

A few days later, he died. Wangler and a friend took his body to potters' field in San Bernardino, and there, around his coffin, they sprinkled the confetti to carry out his last wish. 

The China House continued to be used as a dwelling. Its history was unearthed in 1985 when students digging on the property found rice wine bottles, soy sauce jugs, medicine bottles and pots used in opium pipes. 

In 1988, the Cucamonga County Water District, whose offices are across the street, bought the property with an eye toward expansion.  Because of earthquake concerns, however, the building is fenced off. District officials aren't sure what to do with it.

1930s Photo from Upland Library (last wav of 1880s immigrants)