The Chinese Immigration Made Easy Trick

I referred in the previous post to the fantastic book by Jim Steinmeyer called The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson aka the Marvelous Chinese Conjurer that I came across only recently. It really is a great read. One thing Steinmeyer mentions which perhaps shows how the immigration debate, western attitudes to the Chinese in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and entertainment all fuse sometimes is his description of an illusion that drew the crowds in New York and across America in a show put on by Alexander Herrmann, aka Herrmann the Great, entitled Ya Ko Yo, or the Chinese Immigration Made Easy trick.

Two large cabinets decorated as pagodas on the stage – one marked ‘Peking’ and the other marked ‘San Francisco’. Both are then suspended from ropes and attached to a large beam over the stage. Both boxes are empty. The one marked ‘Peking’ was pulled down by the magician and a Chinese man runs on stage and jumps in the box. The ‘Peking’ box rises, the ‘San Francisco’ box lowers and, to the audience’s amazement, the Chinese man pops out of the ‘San Francisco’ box.

With the Chinese Exclusion Act in full force, the crowd roared their approval. Not exactly politically correct these days, but a clever trick and an interesting combination of magicians using current events to put a show together!