Once the second-largest Chinatown on the West Coast filled these blocks, and you are in its historic core. Chinese immigrants began arriving in Portland in the 1850s and 60s, recruited to build the railroads and work in the canneries and mines of the Pacific Northwest. By the 1880s Portland's Chinatown occupied these blocks with a density of temples, clan associations, restaurants, laundries, and rooming houses that supported a community of several thousand people.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 stopped further immigration; anti-Chinese violence and economic discrimination pushed the community out over the following decades. By the mid-twentieth century the Chinatown commercial district had contracted to a fraction of its former extent. The ornate Chinatown Gate at 4th and West Burnside was constructed in 1986 as a symbol of the community's persistence.
The Lan Su Chinese Garden nearby, which you will visit on this tour, was built in 2000 as a collaboration between Portland and its sister city Suzhou, China, and represents the most significant investment in the neighborhood's Chinese cultural heritage since the original community. Today the Chinatown designation is partly aspirational — the Chinese American population has dispersed to other parts of the metro area — but the history encoded in these blocks is the history of the labor that built the Pacific Northwest.