Skip to content Skip to footer

Chinese Diaspora

HomeAll PostsChinese Diaspora

Chinese Diaspora

Crowds and red paper lanterns fill a street during a lunar new year celebration in Lima's Barrio Chino
Chinese Diaspora Coolie Trade Wuyi Diaspora

Peruvian Chinese: The Coolie Ships, Chifa, and Latin America’s Largest Chinese Community

Peruvian Chinese: The Coolie Ships, Chifa, and Latin America's Largest Chinese Community Between 1849 and 1874, somewhere between ninety thousand and one hundred and twenty thousand Chinese laborers — nearly all of them young men — were carried across the Pacific to Peru under eight-year contracts they signed in a language they could not read.…
September 1, 20260Comments

Read more

A vintage photograph of a Chinese restaurant storefront in a North American Chinatown, its proprietor posed outside — the overseas businesses that anchored diaspora community life.
Chinese Diaspora migration-history

Chinese Restaurant History: How Wuyi Immigrants Built America’s Chop Suey Houses

Chinese Restaurant History: How Wuyi Immigrants Built America's Chop Suey Houses The Storefront That Opened a Door The Siyi region of Guangdong sent more than two million people overseas between 1840 and 1940. Among the things they built in America — railroads, mines, laundries — the most enduring proved to be the corner restaurant. Chinese…
August 25, 20260Comments

Read more

Chinese residents of San Francisco's Old Chinatown, photographed by Arnold Genthe around 1900–1906 — the community that built the hand laundry trade
Chinese Diaspora migration-history

The Chinese Hand Laundry: How Wuyi Immigrants Built an American Icon (1850s–1940s)

The Chinese Hand Laundry: How Wuyi Immigrants Built an American Icon (1850s–1940s) The Signature Trade of Chinese America Of all the occupations that shaped Chinese America, none was more widespread — or more misunderstood — than the Chinese hand laundry (洗衣业, xǐyī yè). For a century it was the country's most iconic Chinese trade: born…
August 21, 20260Comments

Read more

Carved Chinese poems in vertical calligraphy on the dark wooden wall of the Angel Island Immigration Station detention barracks
Chinese Diaspora migration-history

Angel Island Chinese Immigration: The Wooden House and the Carved Poems of the Excluded (1910–1940)

Angel Island Chinese Immigration: The Wooden House and the Carved Poems of the Excluded (1910–1940) The Wooden House on the Pacific Gate Between January 21, 1910, and October 1940, a wooded island in San Francisco Bay served as the Pacific gate of the Chinese Exclusion Act (排華法案, Pái Huá Fǎ'àn). Angel Island Chinese immigration was…
August 20, 20260Comments

Read more