The exotic sights, smells, and customs of San Francisco Chinatown drew visitors to its streets and establishments even before its reconstruction after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. Personal accounts, published pamphlets, and thousands of photographs and pictorial ephemera reveal an extensive fascination with the neighborhood and its people.

Among the greatest attractions to visitors to Chinatown was its "underworld", consisting of highbinders, opium dens, and prostitution. Tourists, their interest piqued by salacious political rhetoric, warnings from the pulpit, or sensationalized newspaper stories, clamored for guided tours of the narrow alleys and mysterious lairs of Chinese miscreants. Enterprising guides, Caucasian and Chinese, readily catered to the impulse of pleasured fear, oftentimes staging the arrest of a so-called highbinder conveniently in front of a group of sightseers or leading their charges through alleyways replete with employees trained to vanish mysteriously when tourists neared. More straightforward documentation of this "underworld" can be seen in the documentation produced by law enforcement personnel whose beat included Chinatown or whose job it was to prosecute alleged offenders.

Restaurants and merchant establishments offered visitors more conventional destinations. Surveying the surviving menus of early Chinatown, one gets a sense of an amalgamation of thoroughly mainstream tastes with those of the Chinese: almost every restaurant appealing to tourists offers Coca-Cola along with traditional and Americanized Cantonese dishes. Businesses stocked with imported wares beckoned spenders through elaborate window displays. Perhaps the two most well known merchant firms were the Sing Chong Co. & Chinese Bazaar and the Sing Fat Co., located next to each other at the intersection of California Street and Grant Avenue. Those who wanted to experience Chinese culture and religious practices firsthand headed for the theatres and the joss houses.

Tourism had always been an important element of Chinatown's economy, but after the rebuilding of the community during the early 1900s, even more sightseers flooded in. Its new architectural aesthetic made "Cathay by the Bay" seem a world apart from the rest of San Francisco, even though it was located just blocks away from Nob Hill's austere mansions and the early skyscrapers of the Financial District. This sentiment of Chinatown as a foreign colony within an American city echoes even into the Twenty-first century.

No visit to San Francisco was complete without a pictorial souvenir of Chinatown. Prominent cameramen Carleton Watkins, I.W. Taber, and Arnold Genthe were just three of the many outside photographers who catered to the public's desire to view the Chinese community. Other visitors, however, had ulterior motives for exploring Chinatown. City leaders, union organizers, journalists, and authors used "first-hand" descriptions of the enclave for their own purposes, whether it be to drum up political support or sell copy. Most of the time, achieving those goals involved portraying the Chinese quarter in an unflattering, oftentimes extremely derogatory, light. This negative attitude extended from sources as diverse as the San Francisco Board of Health to independent sensationalist writers. Municipal reports, political pamphlets, and other printed ephemeral literature reflect the widespread negativity regarding Chinatown that proved so useful in garnering votes or capturing the American urban imagination.