Today Chinatown is frankly commercial. It is clean and new and clever. Architects have brought more of the Chinese spirit into its buildings than the old ever had. It does not lack color--by day, the treasures of its shops, the queer folk who walk its streets, even the bright red placards upon the door-lintels; by night the close slow-moving throngs through Grant avenue--its chief thoroughfare--the swinging lanterns above their heads, the radiance that comes out from brilliantly lighted and mysterious rooms along the way--the new Chinatown of San Francisco. But it is now frankly commercial. The paid guides and the "rubberneck wagons" have completed the ruin. If you are taken into an opium den, you may be fairly sure that the entire performance has been staged for the delectation of you and yours. For the real secrets even of the new Chinatown are not shown to the unappreciative eyes of white folk. At the edge of Chinatown slopes Portsmouth square and here the cosmopolitanism of San Francisco reaches its high apex. Around it chatters the babel of all tongues, beyond it stretches the "Barbary Coast,"[G] that collection of vile, if picturesque resorts that possesses a tremendous fascination for some San Franciscans and some tourists but which has no place within the covers of this book. To Portsmouth square come the representatives of all these little colonies of babbling foreigners, the men who sail the seven seas--the flotsam and the jetsam not alone of the Orient but of the whole wide world as well. There is a little man who sits on one side of the square and who for a very small sum will execute cubist art upon your cuticle. Among tattooers he acknowledges but two superiors--a one-legged veteran who plies his trade near the wharves of the Mersey, and a Hindu artist at Calcutta. The little shops that line Portsmouth square are the little shops of many peoples. Over their counters you can buy many things practical, and many, many more of the most impractical things in all the world. And the new Hall of Justice rises above the square in the precise site of the old. [G] As this goes to press a "vice crusade" has swept San Francisco and the "Barbary Coast" has been forced to close its doors. It is not unlikely that they may be opened once again. E. H. Portsmouth square has played its part in the history of San Francisco. From it the modern city dates. It was the plaza of the old Spanish town, and within this plaza Commodore Montgomery of the American sloop-of-war _Portsmouth_ first raised the Stars and Stripes--in the strenuous days of the Mexican war. After that the stirring days of gold-times with the vigilantes conducting hangings on the flat roofs of the neighboring houses of adobe. Portsmouth square indeed has played its part in the history of San Francisco. "Portsmouth square," you begin to say, "Portsmouth square--was it not Portsmouth square that Stevenson--"