History Minutes: Ing "Doc" Hay

      Ing 'Doc' Hay, c. 1890 // OrHi 26468

In the 1880s, Ing Hay, a Chinese teenager, settled in John Day where he opened a trading store on The Dalles Military Road with his lifelong friend Lung On.  The two entrepreneurs bought the Kam Wah Chung & Company building in 1887 to serve the growing Chinese community in the area.  The business was a success, but it was his skills as a master Chinese herbalist that earned him regional fame as “Doc Hay.” 

For sixty years, Doc Hay specialized in herbalism and pulsology, a technique that measures the pulse to diagnose medical problems.  He was known for his ability to cure diseases that baffled American-trained doctors, and both whites and Chinese came from a distance to visit the modest office of the “China doctor.” 

Lung On died in 1940 and Ing Hay continued to practice medicine until 1948, when he retired to a nursing home in Portland. He died in 1952 at the age of eighty-nine.

When the Kam Wah Chung building was reopened in the late 1960s, after being boarded up for more than a decade, over 500 herbs and other medicines were discovered, one of the largest collections of traditional Chinese medicine in the United States.  The building and its contents have been preserved and are part of the Kam Wah Chung & Company Museum.