Shanghai tunnels

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The Portland Underground, or the Shanghai Tunnels as they are more commonly known, are a group of passages running underneath Old Town/Chinatown down to the central downtown section of Portland, Oregon, United States. The tunnels originally connected the basements of many downtown hotels and bars, to the waterfront of the Willamette River. They were originally built to move goods from the ships docked on the Willamette to the basement storage areas. Around the end of the 19th century they were used to kidnap or "shanghai" unsuspecting laborers and sell them as slaves to waiting ships at the waterfront. At its peak, 1500 people per year were shanghaied out of Portland through the tunnels.^[1] The most active lout being "Shanghai Jack". Ship captains would contact Jack with their needs and he would arrange the "shanghai". Victims were drugged or knocked out, taken through one of the trap doors (or deadfalls), and held in a prison cell while they waited to be shipped off. This earned Portland the reputation as the most dangerous port on the West Coast, if not the world, in the early 1900s, as well as the nicknames "Unheavenly City" and "Forbidden City." Later, during Prohibition, the tunnels were inhabited by bars that literally went underground to sell alcohol.