your free PDF travel guide for Chinatown New York City
Wikipedia says:
A Chinatown is a section of an urban area with a large number of Chinese outside the majority-Chinese countries of Greater China. Chinatowns occur all over the world, including those in East Asia, Southeast Asia, North America, Australia and Europe.
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 varying degrees, as centers of multiculturalism.
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 certain cases, this has led to gentrification and a reduction in the specifically Chinese character of the neighborhoods.
Some Chinatowns have a long history, such as the Chinatown in Nagasaki, Japan, or Yaowarat Road in Bangkok, both of which were founded by Chinese traders more than 200 years ago. Chinatown, San Francisco, California was the first Chinatown to be established outside Asia, during the California Gold Rush, which began in 1848. Other cities in North American where Chinatowns were established in the mid-nineteenth century include almost every major settlement along the West Coast from San Diego to Vancouver. By the second half of the nineteenth century, bustling Chinatowns were also established in New York and Chicago. The discovery of gold in Australia caused the establishment of relatively small Chinatowns in cities there, and similar migrations of Chinese resulted in tiny settlements termed "Chinatowns" being established in New Zealand and even South Africa. European Chinatowns, such as those in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, are for the most part smaller and more recent than North American Chinatowns. (...) more....
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