On a Saturday morning the queue at the 99 Ranch Market in Redmond Town Center reaches back past the live tanks and the bakery counter, and most of the conversation in it is in Mandarin. A few miles west, the cafeteria badges at Microsoft’s campus carry names like Zhang, Chen and Li in numbers that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. The story of the Chinese in Redmond, Washington is, more than anything, the story of a software company that grew large enough to reshape a small farming town around the people it hired.
The Place
Redmond sits on the east side of Lake Washington, about fifteen miles from downtown Seattle, in the cluster of King County suburbs that locals call the Eastside. It was founded in 1871 as a logging, fishing and farming settlement, and named for Luke McRedmond, an early homesteader and its first postmaster.
For nearly a century it stayed small. The completion of the Evergreen Point bridge across Lake Washington in the early 1960s opened the Sammamish valley to commuters, but the change that defined modern Redmond came in 1986, when Microsoft moved onto a new campus here. Today the city has roughly 86,000 residents, and about forty per cent of them are Asian, the highest Asian share of any city in Washington state.
How It Became Chinese
Redmond did not draw its Chinese residents through the older channels of Chinatown, railroad labour or family laundries. It drew them through a payroll.
Before the software
Washington has a long Chinese history, most of it grim in its early chapters. Chinese labourers helped build the Northern Pacific Railroad and worked the canneries and mills of Puget Sound in the nineteenth century, only to be driven out of Seattle and Tacoma by anti-Chinese mobs in 1885 and 1886. For decades afterward the state’s Chinese population was concentrated in Seattle’s Chinatown, south of downtown, and the Eastside was farmland with almost no Chinese presence at all.
Redmond through the mid-twentieth century was berry fields, dairy pasture and the occasional bicycle race. The transformation that would eventually bring thousands of Chinese families across the lake had nothing to do with the old Chinatown economy and everything to do with a single industry that did not yet exist.
Microsoft and the H-1B decades
Microsoft incorporated in 1981 and moved to its purpose-built Redmond campus in February 1986, one month before its initial public offering. The campus grew from a handful of buildings to more than 125, and the company’s local headcount climbed into the tens of thousands.
That growth coincided with the expansion of the H-1B skilled-worker visa programme in the 1990s, and with the steady stream of Chinese students earning graduate degrees in computer science and engineering at American universities. Many of them, having finished masters and doctoral programmes, went to work for Microsoft and the cloud of companies that grew up around it.
They needed somewhere to live within reach of the campus. Redmond, and neighbouring Bellevue and Sammamish, offered new housing, safe streets and, above all, schools with strong reputations. Engineers who arrived on temporary visas stayed, won green cards, bought homes and sponsored parents and siblings. A workplace community slowly became a residential one.
From mainland and from Taiwan
The Chinese who settled in Redmond came from two main directions. The larger and more recent wave came from mainland China, much of it through graduate schools and tech hiring from the 1990s onward. An earlier, smaller current came from Taiwan, often arriving in the 1980s and 1990s as families with engineering backgrounds, part of the same Taiwanese professional migration that built communities in California’s Silicon Valley.
Both groups gravitated to the same Eastside corridor. By the 2010s the Chinese were the second-largest Asian ancestry group in Redmond after Indians, with several thousand residents claiming Chinese ancestry and a smaller but distinct Taiwanese contingent. The pattern echoed places like the Chinese community in Cupertino, California, where a tech anchor and good schools produced an almost identical demography.
A community spread across three cities
Redmond’s Chinese story cannot be told as if the city’s borders were a wall. Redmond, Bellevue and Sammamish function as one Eastside Chinese community, sharing supermarkets, restaurants, weekend Chinese schools and tutoring centres. Families compare notes on the Chinese community in Bellevue, Washington and the Chinese community in Sammamish, Washington as if they were neighbourhoods rather than separate municipalities, and many households move between them as careers and school assignments shift.
That spread also reflects how the Eastside’s tech immigration layered together. Redmond’s other great professional community, its Indians, settled the same suburb for the same reasons, and the two groups share campuses, schools and shopping centres without occupying quite the same institutions. The Indian community in Redmond, Washington is the larger of the two, and the comparison between them says a great deal about how Microsoft remade the town.
The Landmarks
99 Ranch Market, Redmond Town Center, 7525 166th Avenue NE. The 99 Ranch in Redmond Town Center is the practical heart of the local Chinese community, an outpost of the California-born Asian supermarket chain. Its live seafood tanks, Chinese bakery counter and aisles of regional pantry staples draw shoppers from across the Eastside, and on weekends its food court functions as an informal community hall.
Microsoft campus, One Microsoft Way. The 500-acre campus is the reason most Chinese families are here at all. Begun in 1986 and now spanning more than 125 buildings, it employs tens of thousands of people, a large share of them engineers recruited from China and from American graduate programmes, and its hiring set the rhythm of Chinese settlement across the Eastside.
Dong Ting Chun, 7425 166th Avenue NE, Redmond Town Center. A Hunan restaurant in the same shopping complex as the 99 Ranch, Dong Ting Chun serves the chilli-and-smoke cooking of central China rather than the Americanised chop suey of an older era. It is the kind of regional, homeland-specific kitchen that only opens where a critical mass of mainland customers already lives.
Sichuanese Cuisine, 2010 148th Avenue NE. Long a fixture of the Eastside’s Sichuan dining, this restaurant trades in mapo tofu, dry-fried beans and mouth-numbing peppercorn dishes for a clientele that knows exactly how spicy it wants its food. Its longevity is a marker of how settled the community has become.
Regent Bakery and Cafe, 15159 NE 24th Street. Established around 2000, Regent is a Hong Kong-style bakery and cafe known across the region for its egg-custard cakes and birthday cakes, a stop for families marking weddings, full-month celebrations for newborns and Lunar New Year. It is a place that measures out the calendar of immigrant family life.
Redmond Town Center, 7525 166th Avenue NE. Opened in 1997 on the site of a former golf course beside State Route 520, the open-air centre has become, with its anchor Asian grocer and clutch of Chinese and pan-Asian restaurants, the everyday gathering place for the surrounding Chinese households.
Northwest Chinese School, classes at Newport High School, Bellevue. The Eastside’s Chinese families lean on weekend Chinese schools to keep Mandarin alive in the next generation, and Northwest Chinese School is among the largest, running dozens of classes from preschool through adult. Redmond children fill its Saturday classrooms alongside those from Bellevue and Sammamish.
Where They Came From
The mainland Chinese who make up the bulk of Redmond’s community come disproportionately from China’s own technology and university heartlands: the major coastal and inland cities that send students abroad in large numbers. Many passed through American graduate schools in computer science and engineering before being hired onto the Eastside.
The Taiwanese minority traces a slightly different path, often arriving earlier and as intact families, part of the broad professional emigration from Taiwan that also populated Silicon Valley. Both streams share a common profile of high educational attainment and technical work, which is why they cluster so tightly around Microsoft and the schools that serve its employees.
The pull factors were consistent across the decades: skilled-worker visas, a hiring machine that valued exactly their training, and the chance to raise children in one of the country’s most highly rated public school systems.
Redmond Today
Redmond today is a city where being Chinese is unremarkable. Mandarin is a common sound in the supermarket and the school pickup line, real-estate listings are marketed to Chinese buyers, and the area’s restaurants run from Hunan and Sichuan to Hong Kong bakeries and bubble-tea counters.
The Lake Washington School District, which serves much of Redmond, draws families precisely for its academic strength, and its schools enrol large numbers of Chinese students whose parents treat education as the central project of family life. Weekend Chinese schools, music lessons and maths tutoring fill out a Saturday economy built around the next generation.
It is not a Chinatown, and it never will be. There is no single Chinese main street, no historic district of family associations. What Redmond has instead is a dispersed, prosperous, professional community woven through an ordinary American suburb, anchored by a software campus and held together by a supermarket, a handful of restaurants and a shared insistence that the children keep their Chinese.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Chinese community in Redmond, Washington?
Several thousand Redmond residents report Chinese ancestry, making the Chinese the second-largest Asian group in the city after Indians. Redmond’s overall Asian population is about forty per cent, the highest share of any city in Washington state.
Why did so many Chinese families settle in Redmond?
The principal reason is Microsoft, whose Redmond campus has employed tens of thousands of engineers since 1986, many recruited from China and from American graduate programmes. The Chinese in Redmond, Washington are overwhelmingly a tech-era professional community drawn by jobs and by strong public schools.
Where do Chinese residents in Redmond shop for groceries?
The 99 Ranch Market at Redmond Town Center is the main Asian supermarket, with live seafood, a Chinese bakery counter and regional pantry goods. Families also shop at other Asian grocers across the Eastside in Bellevue and Sammamish.
Are Redmond’s Chinese residents from mainland China or Taiwan?
Both, though the larger and more recent wave is from mainland China, arriving from the 1990s onward through graduate schools and tech hiring. A smaller, often earlier Taiwanese community settled the same Eastside corridor.
How does Redmond compare with Bellevue and Sammamish for Chinese families?
The three cities function as one Eastside Chinese community, sharing supermarkets, restaurants and weekend Chinese schools. Many families move between them as jobs and school assignments change, treating the cluster as a single neighbourhood.
Is there a Chinese language school for children in the Redmond area?
Yes. The Eastside has several weekend Chinese schools, including the large Northwest Chinese School, which runs Mandarin classes from preschool to adult. Redmond children attend alongside students from Bellevue and Sammamish.
If your family’s story passed through Redmond, or any of the places Chinese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a coastal city in China or a town in Taiwan, to a campus on the east side of Lake Washington, to wherever you are now.