A Chinatown is a section of an urban area associated with a large number of Chinese within a city outside the majority-Chinese countries of China, Taiwan, and Singapore. Chinatowns are most common in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, North America and the United Kingdom.
In the past, overcrowded Chinatowns in urban areas were generally shunned by the non-Chinese public as ethnic ghettos, and seen as places of vice and cultural insularity where "unassimilable foreigners" congregated. Nowadays, many old and new Chinatowns are considered significant centers of commercialism and tourism.
Some of them also serve, to various degrees, as centers of multiculturalism if in a somewhat superficial manner.
Many Chinatowns are focused on commercial tourism whereas others are actual living and working communities; some are a synthesis of both. Chinatowns also range from rundown ghettos to modern sites of recent development. In some, recent investments have revitalized run-down and blighted areas and turned them into centers of economic and social activity. In some cases, this has led to gentrification and a reduction in the specifically Chinese character of the neighborhoods.
Many Chinatowns have a long history, such as Shinchimachi, the nearly three-century old Chinatown in Nagasaki, Japan, or Yaowarat Road in Bangkok, which was founded by Chinese traders more than 200 years ago.
Melbourne Chinatown, established in the Victorian gold rush in 1854, is the longest continuously running Chinatown outside of Asia (San Francisco Chinatown was built earlier during the California Gold Rush, but rebuilt after it was destroyed by earthquakes). Other Chinatowns are much newer, for example, the Chinatown in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. formed in the 1990s.
Most Chinatowns grew without any organized plans, while a very few (such as the one in Las Vegas and a new area outside the city limits of Seoul, South Korea to be completed by late 2005) were developed following deliberate plans (sometimes as part of redevelopment projects to better the location).
Indeed, many areas of the world promote the commercial development and redevelopment (or regeneration) of Chinatowns, such as Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. |
Chinatown, San Francisco, California, United States
As a port city, San Francisco's Chinatown formed in the 1850s and served as a gateway for incoming immigrants who arrived during the California gold rush and construction of the transcontinental railroads of the wild western United States.
Chinatown was later reconceptualized as a tourist attraction in the 1910s.
Once a community of predominantly Taishanese Chinese-speaking inhabitants, it has remained the preeminent Chinese center in the United States. |
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