Chinatown
ethnic enclave of expatriate Chinese people
Chinatown (Chinese: 唐人街) is a common term used to describe an ethnic enclave of Chinese people located outside of Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, typically situated in an urban area. Chinatowns can be found around the world, including in Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. The history of Chinatowns date back to the Tang dynasty in the 10th century, arising from the nation's important role in global trade.
Binondo in Manila, established in 1594, is recognized as the world's oldest standing Chinatown. Notable early examples outside Asia include San Francisco's Chinatown in the United States and Melbourne's Chinatown in Australia, which were founded in the early 1850s during the California and Victoria gold rushes, respectively. A more modern example, in Montville, Connecticut, was caused by the displacement of Chinese workers in New York's Manhattan Chinatown following the September 11th attacks in 2001.
Definition
Oxford Dictionaries defines "Chinatown" as "... a district of any non-Asian town, especially a city or seaport, in which the population is predominantly of Chinese origin". However, some Chinatowns may have little to do with China. Some "Vietnamese" enclaves are in fact a city's "second Chinatown", and some Chinatowns are in fact pan-Asian, meaning they could also be counted as a Koreatown or Little India.
“Chinatown” enters the record as ethnic enclave of expatriate Chinese people. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Chinatown, ethnic and enclave can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Chinatown” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Chinatown, ethnic and enclave provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q202509. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1594 and 2001.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chinatown” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.