Little was really known about China Jim, whose elegant decor items decorated early North End mansions.
When people decorated their homes along Colorado Springs’ North End “Millionaires Row” of the 1880s and early 1900s, the coveted Chinese and Japanese porcelain, cloisonné, silk, ivory, screens, sculptures and Japanese chochin lamps came from one shop in the new city.
The owner was known in history accounts as China Jim, possible real name Leu Bo Foo aka James Bofonda.
As the historians at Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum discovered, there were some people who had arrived here whose stories seem “lost to history.” The owner of China Jim’s Fancy Goods store downtown was one of them.
He was apparently born in Guangzhou, China, between 1861 and 1865. In official immigration paperwork from Beijing in May 1882, a ship manifest lists a James Bo Fonda traveling to San Francisco and destined for Colorado Springs. There’s a chance he worked in Wyoming before living here by September 1898 when the City Directory at Penrose Library said: “Attention is called to the advertisement of the new curio store on Huerfano Street to be opened by China Jim & Co.” Huerfano Street was later renamed Colorado Avenue to continue that street name from Colorado City when it was annexed in 1917.
When there was an opening downtown, he moved his shop to a more prestigious Pikes Peak Avenue at number 21. Other ads list this as 9 Pikes Peak Ave.
Local authors and historians Inez Hunt and Wanetta Draper said China Jim’s customers “had grown to respect the exquisite quality of the art objects in his store. They appreciated his good taste, his discrimination in matters of beauty and his honesty. He did not deal in cheap imitations and his smile was as genuine as his merchandise.”
An anecdotal China Jim memory by Hunt and Draper shared an intriguing story: “The Hayes family remembered him with affection and recalled a certain incident when he had taken a photograph of Mrs. Hayes (Margaret Davis Hayes) to China with him and had a Chinese artist paint a portrait from it. He brought the portrait back as a gift to the Hayes family.” It should be noted that this Mrs. Hayes was the daughter of Jefferson Davis, former acting president of the Confederacy. Margaret Davis Hayes and her husband, banker Joel Addison Hayes, lived in Colorado Springs for health reasons.
City founder Gen. William Jackson Palmer had been commander of the Union troops that chased down Jefferson Davis at the end of the Civil War, but the men actually became social acquaintances here.
China Jim had secured the portrait gift during one of the times he traveled back to China, as the Pioneers Museum says, “to visit family, check on business interests there and/or to secure products for his store in Colorado Springs.”
The Pioneers Museum learned that Bofonda “was a savvy businessman who took advantage of the vogue for Asian goods in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chinese and Japanese arts and crafts were all the rage among elite and aspiring middle class residents who filled their homes with an eclectic blend of decorative arts.”
The charming businessman apparently had a bit of a checkered past. A story in a San Francisco newspaper in 1904 referred to him as “Leo James Bofonda,” who faced a forced wedding to Lew Wong Shee when they arrived by steamer from a China trip. According to the newspaper account, the “wealthy merchant” was questioned about the woman he was with and he said they had married two years earlier. Immigration officials said records showed he had been married then to a different woman. She died, he said. Get married now or Lew Wong Shee couldn’t even get off the boat, the newspaper reported. And if they found anything about that first woman still being alive he would be charged with bigamy. He and Lew married immediately in San Francisco.
Various reports say he had five children, at least two born in Colorado Springs: James Leo Bofonda and Henry Bofonda. A newspaper story was printed that his sons weren’t christened as Buddhists, instead it was Episcopalian at Grace Episcopal Church in Colorado Springs.
The Pioneers Museum reported about Bofonda, “It was widely believed that he had significant business interests in Guangzhou, China and perhaps in San Francisco as well. He returned to China in 1912 when Sun Yat-Sen became the provisional president of the Republic of China,” leading the 1911 Revolution. There were unanswered questions about Bofonda possibly having close connections to the new government. The museum’s historians learned he made large donations to Guangzhou Christian College, soliciting money from American friends.
According to several histories, discounted in others, back in Colorado Springs in December 1915 he was busy during the shop’s Christmas season and ignored serious tooth pain. Too late, he was reportedly admitted to Glockner Hospital with an infection, blood poisoning and then pneumonia. His wife and children were in China and he died alone on Dec. 30, 1915.
According to the Pioneers Museum, he had said that his body should be sent back to China. Reports said the ship with his coffin aboard went down off “Lerma Islands” on March 31, 1915 and all cargo disappeared. But there’s no record of a Lerma Island, instead the Lerma River in Mexico and no record of any shipwreck in 1915 or a floating coffin. Instead, archivists at PPLD Digital Collections have a 1916 newspaper story saying “the ship carrying his body was grounded on one of the Lema Islands off of Hong Kong and broke apart. Research indicates that Lamma (no doubt transliterated as Lema) Island, is the third largest island in Hong Kong.”
Another interesting question by historians over the years was how the man reported to be named Bofonda or Bo Fonda was allowed out of and into the United States many times during the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 restricting all Chinese immigration. One potential answer could be that it restricted all laborers and he was a higher class with Chinese government connections. It was also curious that it was reported he made numerous trips back and forth to China during a time of extremely strong anti-Chinese prejudice, restrictions and a political revolution. The National Archives say that non-laborers who tried to enter the U.S. had to be certified by the Chinese government that they qualified to immigrate. It wasn’t until 1943 that Congress repealed exclusion acts.
So who exactly was Colorado Springs’ China Jim Bofonda?
