The oldest continuously operated Chinese restaurant in America is not in San Francisco or New York, but in Butte, Montana, where 47-year-old Jerry Tam, the great-great-grandson of the original owner, presides over the Pekin Noodle Parlor. Standing on South Main Street outside the weathered two-story brick building, with its display window of antique Chinese cooking equipment, Tam describes the Pekin as a “walk back in time”—one that illuminates the often-overlooked history of the Chinese population in Montana.
The first Chinese immigrants came to Montana in the 1860s, working in the territory’s gold fields and helping build the railroads. Following close behind them were Chinese businessmen and their families, many of whom settled in Butte, the economic hub for mining activity. They established a thriving six-block Chinatown adjacent to downtown, with laundries, tailors, general stores, herbal medicine shops, noodle parlors, gambling parlors and opium dens. It was the primary source of supplies and entertainment for the Chinese miners who lived in nearby camps. The 1870 census counted nearly 2,000 Chinese residents in Montana, or 10 percent of the territory’s population. By comparison, the same census counted a mere 500 or so Chinese immigrants in New York City.
Tam’s great-great-grandfather, Tam Kwong Yee, who founded the restaurant, was born in Guangzhou, China, and immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s via San Francisco. He moved to Butte in 1909 with a business partner named Hum Yow and Yow’s wife, Bessie. “They were well-to-do people with family ties in the same village in China,” Tam says, and they came to Butte because by then it was a booming city of 100,000 people, ripe with economic opportunity. A gigantic deposit of copper was being mined right outside the city limits, in what locals called the “Richest Hill on Earth.”
Yee and the Yows arrived to find a town riven by anti-Chinese prejudice. Chinese people were barred from working in the copper mines, and there had even been campaigns to evict them from Butte, including an aggressive union-organized boycott of Chinese American businesses in 1896 and 1897. A group of Chinese businessmen won a court injunction against the boycott, so Butte remained attractive to Chinese entrepreneurs, despite such obstacles as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—the first race-based immigration law in U.S. history, which suspended Chinese immigration and made Chinese immigrants ineligible for naturalization. The law was not repealed until 1943.
Yee and Yow used their capital in 1909 to build the two-story brick building that still houses the Pekin today. Next door, they opened a successful general store and tobacco shop, and two years later, in 1911, they added an upstairs noodle parlor. It served the newly invented Chinese American dishes of chop suey, chow mein and lo mein to Butte’s predominantly white mining community, along with beer and liquor. The restaurant was open 24 hours a day—but the real action, Tam says, took place in the basement.