The spit of land at the foot of the Napa River oxbow is all that’s left of the neighborhood hundreds of Chinese immigrants once called home.

Much of China Point,  underneath the First Street Bridge over Napa Creek, has been washed away over the years. Some was chopped away to make room for the Napa River Bypass, now under construction for when flood waters hit.

Napa’s Chinatown may be gone forever, but Napa businessman Ging Chan hopes to preserve the story of the Chinese who came to the Napa Valley in the 1850s to pick grapes and hops, mine quicksilver and mercury, build railroads and dig winery tunnels, all for very low wages.

“That’s part of the history of Napa,” said the lifelong resident, whose relatives followed news of the California Gold Rush and were among the first to arrive in Napa from Canton in search of a better life.

Now 76, Chan is the last known descendant of families from Napa’s Chinatown — a neighborhood of wooden structures built on stilts between the banks of Napa Creek and the Napa River. As many as 300 people lived there in the 1880s. By the end of the century, Chinese immigrants found work outside Chinatown at the nearby Sawyer Tanning Co., laundries or homes where they were employed as domestics and gardeners.

Chinatown’s population, which would swell with workers during harvest and during the annual Chinese Lunar New Year, declined after a second Chinatown fire of 1902, Chan said. By 1920, Napa’s Chinese population had dwindled to about 100.

Chan hopes to place a new marker on the First Street Bridge over Napa Creek telling of the story of Chinatown — next to two other markers honoring the Chinese community and Chan’s parents, Shuck Chan and Lee Kum, remembered as the “last merchants of Chinatown.” The plaque was originally unveiled in 1979. Both of Ging Chan’s parents died in the 1980s.

The Chans owned Lai Hing Co., a herbal store that disappeared in the 1950s to make room for the new Soscol Avenue.

The Chans had moved the store  from Chinatown to that location two decades earlier, after learning that city wanted to bulldoze Chinatown to build a yacht club, a project that never materialized.

Unmarked graves

Chan’s preservation work includes several projects.

Until a few months ago, the Napa Valley Museum in Yountville misidentified a Chinatown family in a photo as the Chans. Ging Chan spotted the error, bringing it to the attention of museum officials.

He recently gave the museum a picture of his grandparents, Chan Wah Jack and Kim Lim, and the 12 children they raised — including their own six children and the six children left as orphans after Chan’s great-uncle and great-aunt died at early ages.

Over the past two years, he has led tours at Tulocay Cemetery, where more than 100 Chinese immigrants lie underneath in an area set aside for the poor.

They are among 1,660 indigent men, women and children buried in what is called the County Section, according to the cemetery’s handwritten records. Also buried in the County Section are Russians, Italians, Swiss, French, Mexicans and other immigrants.

The graves of many poor residents had wooden crosses, but these have been lost over the years to fire, weather and time.

Burial records are sketchy, said Peter Manasse, general manager of Tulocay Cemetery, noting that Chinese families preferred to return their relatives to China for burial when they could.

The section still has a few stone markers, including those of Ging Chan’s relatives.