Manilatown Archive presents: The Quest to build the Grace Quan

Please join Manilatown at the San Francisco Maritime Museum for a special talk with John Muir, Curator of Small Craft at SF Maritime, as he discusses the art of replica boatbuilding, and his own journey in building the Grace Quan Chinese shrimp junk currently docked at the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park.

The stories of our coasts and ocean cover many topics and include many cultures. There is little-known of Asian fishing history along California's long shoreline, and for this reason the Grace Quan has become an important interpretive and educational asset for the park that helps tell a more comprehensive story of who we are.

Please join us for our Talk with John...and then walk over and see the Grace Quan in person!

PLEASE NOTE: This event will be taking place at San Francisco's Maritime Museum, 900 Beach Street.

"Flipping the Boat" is made possible from the generous support of the Center for Cultural Power, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workplace Development and Grants for the Arts.

For more information about Flipping the Boat, the Manilatown Archive, or the Manilatown Heritage Foundation please vist us at: www.manilatown.org

John, in the foreground, at work with his crew on the construction of Grace Quan in 2003. Image: John Muir.

About John Muir and the Grace Quan

From: "The Quest to Build Grace Quan " by John Muir, Hans Van Tilburg, and Elizabeth Moore

When cultural resource specialist and curator John Muir started his career with San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park more than 30 years ago, he wasn’t planning on building a replica of a Chinese shrimp junk. Thirty to 40 of these vessels were in operation at the height of the fishery in the late 19th century, a multimillion-dollar business. While he was interested in the San Francisco Bay Chinese shrimp fishery and the archaeology of the Chinese fishing boats that were built there, it wasn’t until he stumbled upon a special photo while doing research in the archives of the park that sparked his imagination.

“Back then I was doing a survey of our archives at San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park, looking through all the historic photographs,” he describes. “Often, the history of smaller watercraft and fishing vessels is not well understood or well cataloged, sometimes the images of those watercraft just occupying the perimeters of photographs of larger ships. But those photographic archives hold a lot of jewels of the waterfront! I came across a stunning image of a Chinese shrimp junk sailing in the middle of the Bay with Angel Island or Alcatraz in the background. The boat seemed to emerge from another world. I was just stunned, a very different vessel from anything I’ve seen before, seeing it back in that day in a familiar setting, you know. And then there was just the pure beauty of the vessel itself, the type of sail…it was unbelievable to me.”

As a sailor and angler himself, John had a deep appreciation for both the craftsmanship of the vessel and the skill of the fishermen on board: “There is an attachment or a kind of brotherhood of the sea that made it easier to ‘know’ these fellows. We’re fishing and sailing in the very same waters they had been in, more than 100 years ago, and that made me more curious about their story. For me, that’s the kind of discovery and imagery that touches my sailor side, and my boatbuilding side, and I found the idea of actually sailing this very different craft from another side of the world fascinating.”

As he was contemplating the subject for his master’s thesis, he met Frank Quan, a descendant of some of the original Chinese fishermen and their families who first settled China Camp (once the site of one of the largest of the historic Chinese shrimp fishing villages in San Rafael and now China Camp State Park) and himself one of the last shrimpers of Chinese descent in the Bay Area. Frank helped John decide to study the junks and jump-started the idea of building a replica, an idea that took root during a hike together. John explains, “I remember he and I went out tromping through the mud. With a little probing from the surface, we were able to discern the outlines of a junk. And it dawned on me that here was a very central piece of San Francisco Bay history and the history of our fisheries. Here was the opportunity to actually uncover the remains of one, for there were none remaining, no artifacts left at all. I had a rare opportunity to piece together the historic photographs and the archaeological information, and ultimately to use this history to create a replica of a San Francisco Bay shrimp junk.” [read more]

About the Flipping the Boat project:

“Flipping the Boat'' is a community engagement project that speaks to the power and agency of Filipino and other Bay Area residents to navigate their boats, ships, communities and lives. This collaboration between the Manilatown Heritage Foundation and San Francisco’s Maritime Museum celebrates our sovereign ways of being and encourages us to take the helm of our community “ships” to direct our own destiny.

Each month, from April to July 2024 free intergenerational and family-friendly workshops will take place at the International Hotel Manilatown Center to teach people how to create their own miniature boats that will bear their dreams and wishes for themselves and for the city of San Francisco. Participants will be encouraged to let their boats stay at the Center as part of a growing exhibit of boats representing the voices of our community.

Also from April-July 2024, the Manilatown Heritage Foundation and the San Francisco Maritime Museum will provide workshops and lectures focusing on traditional Philippine ancestral music and dance related to the maritime world, the Filipino-American connection to San Francisco maritime history, celestial navigation and traditional boatmaking.

On Sunday, August 4th we will invite all workshop participants and the larger community to join us at San Francisco's Aquatic Park for a special launching of our community boats into Aquatic Cove to symbolically reclaim our ancestral connection to the waterways, releases our wishes, and bring our boats back to our Manilatown home. Participants will be invited to walk with us from Aquatic Park, through North Beach and to the International Hotel Manilatown Center in Chinatown to commmemorate the 1977 I-Hotel Eviction, the most dramatic housing rights battleground in America’s History. We will recall the names and stories of the I-Hotel tenants (many of whom were merchant seamen, longshoremen and fishermen), and transition from a Commemoration event to a Reclamation event in which participants will actively reclaim our connection to each other as one San Francisco Bay Area maritime community.