The Hong Took Tong Chinese Dramatic Company (Chinese: 鴻福堂劇團; pinyin: Hóngfú Táng jùtuán) was an all-male San Francisco, California-based Chinese opera company who became the first major Asian American theatrical company in the country, inaugurating the first phase of the history of Chinese opera in the United States. They were originally from China's Guangdong province.
Their debut performance on October 18, 1852 with forty-two actors at the American Theater on Sansome Street in San Francisco, financed by a group of native Canton (modern day Guangzhou) merchants, was the first Cantonese opera ever shown in the country. It performed continuously between December 1852 and March 1853, "to the delight of both American and Chinese audiences," and at one point had 123 actors simultaneously.
After their success was noted by George N. Beach, he offered them a ten month contract in New York City to perform at the Crystal Palace Exhibition. When the troupe actually arrived in New York, however, Beach would no longer honor the contract. Without a sponsor or a venue they were soon left destitute, without the funds needed to return to California. In an attempt to raise money, they performed at Niblo's Garden for US$0.50 per ticket, but at the time New York had essentially no Chinese people living there who would properly appreciate the performance. After a lukewarm reception (one critic compared the traditional Cantonese music to "the sound of distressed cats" fused with "ungreased cart wheels", and opined that perhaps the singers were in communion with Satan), the show closed after only one week open, leaving the troupe unable to even pay its hotel bill and having had to pawn their costumes for money. According to Su Zheng's research, some were able to find employ in a workhouse on Roosevelt Island, one attempted suicide, and the rest wandered forlornly through the streets, selling cigars and fabrics. Zheng states that what became of them after that, and whether or not they were ever able to return to California or China, is a mystery.
John Kuo Wei Tchen would take the fate that the troupe suffered in New York as an extreme form of evidence that "authentic Chinese culture was too strange for New Yorkers' tastes" at the time. According to him, "faux Chinese" (yellowface actors and overwrought Oriental exoticism) was more profitable and less risky for theater producers and New York City investors throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.