Shanghai tunnels

The phrase “Shanghai tunnels” describes a story Portland tells about its waterfront—and a history that needs separating from the legend. Sailors were forcibly recruited in nineteenth-century ports through a practice known as shanghaiing. Crimps supplied crews to captains, sometimes by incapacitating men and delivering them just before a ship sailed. Portland had crimping and shanghaiing, as did other ports on the West Coast. But historians have found no evidence for the vast underground network said to have carried kidnapped sailors beneath the city.

Portland’s port grew late in the nineteenth century, as wheat from the Columbia River basin moved through the city for export. Sailing ships arrived to load cargo, and their captains needed crews for the return voyage. That demand created an opening for crimps who profited from coercive labor. The work was often hidden in boarding houses, saloons, hiring halls, and waterfront businesses; the exploitation itself does not need an underground maze to be real.