The Shanghai tunnels

The tunnels are real. The kidnappings underneath them are not.

The Old Portland Underground, known locally as the Shanghai tunnels, is a group of passages under Portland, Oregon, mostly beneath the Old Town Chinatown neighbourhood and connecting through to the main business section. They joined the basements of hotels and taverns to the Willamette River waterfront, and they were built for an unglamorous reason: moving goods from ships docked on the river into basement storage without fighting streetcar and train traffic on the streets above.

Nineteenth-century newspapers do document tunnels and secret passages, and organised crime runs through a lot of those stories. Shanghaiing, kidnapping men to serve as sailors, was genuinely practised in Portland as it was in other ports. What historians have never found is evidence connecting the two.

The Oregon Historical Society is blunt about it. The article in its own encyclopedia is titled Shanghaiing in Portland and the Shanghai Tunnels Myth, and it states that the myth of a secret network built to supply crews to outbound sailing ships has persisted since the 1970s while no evidence substantiates it.

The Portland historian Barney Blalock traced how the story took hold. In The Oregon Shanghaiers he follows the notion back to a series of apocryphal pieces by the writer Stewart Holbrook, published in The Oregonian in 1962, and then to the Shanghai tunnel tours started in the 1970s by Michael P. Jones. Blalock's verdict is that the tours were popular and misled visitors.

So what is actually down there is worth the trip on its own terms. Real passages, under a real city, dug for the dull work of moving freight, in a port where men genuinely were taken and put aboard ships against their will. The invented version has been repeated so long it has crowded out a history that never needed improving.