Climb the switchback road into the northern Puente Hills, past the ranch houses and the lemon trees that survived the orchards, and the rooflines change. Glazed tile, upturned eaves, a mountain gate the colour of old gold. The Taiwanese in Hacienda Heights built the largest Buddhist monastery in the Western Hemisphere on a hillside above the San Gabriel Valley, and in doing so they announced that this quiet bedroom suburb had become something it was never planned to be.
The Place
Hacienda Heights is an unincorporated community of roughly 54,000 people in eastern Los Angeles County, tucked into the southern edge of the San Gabriel Valley. It sits on land that was once Rancho La Puente, a Mexican land grant, and for decades it grew avocados, citrus and walnuts rather than houses.
The town as we know it dates to 1913, when developers subdivided the hills and called the tract North Whittier Heights. Suburban tract housing arrived in the 1950s, the area was renamed Hacienda Heights in 1961, and it settled into the role of a comfortable, leafy commuter suburb.
What it became after that no planner foresaw. Today Hacienda Heights is more than 41 per cent Asian, a figure built almost entirely in the span of a single generation, and the heart of that story is Taiwanese.
How It Became Taiwanese
To understand the Taiwanese in Hacienda Heights you have to start a few miles to the west, in Monterey Park, and a few decades earlier.
The Chinese Beverly Hills
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act reopened the United States to Asian migration after four decades of near-total exclusion. Among the first to come in numbers were the Taiwanese: students, engineers and professionals leaving an island then under martial law, many of them anxious about the long shadow of mainland China.
In the 1970s a Taiwanese American realtor named Frederic Hsieh began buying property in Monterey Park and advertising it across Taiwan and Hong Kong as the “Chinese Beverly Hills”. The pitch worked. Monterey Park became the first suburb in America with an Asian majority, and the first place many Taiwanese families landed when they stepped off the plane at LAX.
The eastward drift
Monterey Park filled quickly, and it grew expensive. As prices rose through the 1980s, the families with money to spend looked east along the 60 freeway for newer houses, bigger lots and quieter streets. They found them in Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights, Diamond Bar and Walnut.
Hacienda Heights had what these buyers wanted. Hillside homes with views, good public schools, and the hush of a suburb that had been built for a different population entirely. Taiwanese realtors, developers and small business owners followed the families, and the strip malls along Colima Road and Hacienda Boulevard began to change hands.
The migration here was different in character from the earlier Cantonese-speaking arrivals to the older Chinatowns of central Los Angeles. These were Mandarin-speaking, often Taiwan-educated, frequently professional households who skipped the urban core entirely and went straight to suburbia. The academic term is “ethnoburb”, and Hacienda Heights is one of its clearest examples.
Building the temple
The defining act of the community came in 1988, when the Taiwanese Buddhist order Fo Guang Shan completed Hsi Lai Temple on fifteen acres in the hills above the town. The name means “Coming West”, and the order, founded in Taiwan in 1967 by the Venerable Master Hsing Yun, intended the temple as its first overseas branch and its North American headquarters.
It had taken ten years to plan and build, and the planning had not been smooth. When the project was announced in 1981, some longtime residents objected, raising fears about pre-dawn gongs, loud chanting and the conversion of local children. The temple went up anyway, in the style of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and when it opened it was the largest traditional Chinese Buddhist monastery in the Western Hemisphere.
For a Taiwanese community still finding its footing in a foreign suburb, the temple was both a spiritual anchor and a statement. The faith had crossed the Pacific, and it had chosen Hacienda Heights.
The fundraiser that made the news
The temple also gave Hacienda Heights its brush with national notoriety. On 29 April 1996, Vice President Al Gore attended a luncheon at Hsi Lai that raised some 166,000 dollars for the Democratic National Committee.
The event became a centrepiece of the campaign-finance scandals that followed. Investigators found that the temple had illegally reimbursed donors, funnelling money through “straw” contributors, and that records had been altered or destroyed afterwards. Maria Hsia, a fundraiser and co-chair of the event, was later convicted of causing false statements to be filed with federal election officials. For years afterwards, “the Buddhist temple fundraiser” was political shorthand for the era’s money troubles, and a suburb most Americans had never heard of was suddenly in the headlines.
The Landmarks
Hsi Lai Temple, 3456 South Glenmark Drive. The community’s beating heart and its most famous address. Built by Fo Guang Shan in 1988 across fifteen hillside acres, it draws worshippers and visitors from across Southern California. A modest museum charges a dollar, and the vegetarian dining hall serves a buffet lunch on weekdays and weekends for those who climb the hill to eat among the courtyards.
99 Ranch Market, 1625 Azusa Avenue. The Taiwanese-American supermarket chain, founded in Southern California, anchors a shopping centre at Azusa Avenue and Colima Road. For many local families it is the weekly ritual: live seafood, Taiwanese baked goods, and a food court that does the work of a town square. It sits directly across from the old mall site.
The Colima Road corridor. Not a single building but a long ribbon of strip malls running east-west through the community. Over three decades its signage shifted from English to Chinese, filling with Taiwanese bakeries, tea shops, herbalists, banks and accountants serving the immigrant economy. It is where the everyday life of the community actually happens.
Glen A. Wilson High School, on the eastern side of town. Founded in 1968 and part of the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District, Wilson has become one of the most academically competitive public schools in the region, ranking in the top tier of California schools. Its student body is now close to half Asian, a quiet measure of how thoroughly the demographics have turned over.
Puente Hills Mall, just over the northern line in City of Industry. Opened in 1974, it served the suburb for decades and earned a strange immortality as the “Twin Pines Mall” of the 1985 film Back to the Future. By 2026 it stood mostly empty, its parking lot a destination for film fans rather than shoppers, with demolition and redevelopment looming.
The Taiwanese restaurant cluster. Around Colima and Azusa, a dense run of Taiwanese kitchens turns out beef noodle soup, dumplings and small-plate snacks. Names come and go, but the genre endures, and for the Taiwanese families of the eastern San Gabriel Valley this stretch is reliable home cooking close to the doorstep.
Where They Came From
The Taiwanese of Hacienda Heights came overwhelmingly from the island of Taiwan, and within a particular slice of its society. Many were urban, educated and Mandarin-speaking, the children and grandchildren of the wave of mainlanders who had crossed to Taiwan around 1949, alongside long-settled Hoklo and Hakka families.
They left an island that, through the 1970s and 1980s, lived under one-party rule and the constant uncertainty of cross-strait politics. Emigration was an insurance policy as much as an ambition. The United States offered universities, professional careers and, crucially, a stable place to raise children.
Few of them came straight to Hacienda Heights. The typical path ran through a university town, then Monterey Park or another western valley suburb, then east as the family found its feet and outgrew its first house. Hacienda Heights was rarely the first stop in America. It was the place a family arrived once it had decided to stay.
Hacienda Heights Today
Hacienda Heights today is a genuinely shared place. Census figures put it at roughly 41 per cent Asian and about 45 per cent Hispanic, two communities living side by side in the same hillside tracts, often on the same streets. It is not a monocultural enclave so much as a suburb where Taiwanese life has become simply one of the ordinary ways of living there.
The texture of that life is everywhere once you look. Bilingual signage along Colima Road, the temple’s festival days drawing crowds up the hill, the SAT-prep storefronts and Mandarin weekend schools, the supermarket bakeries with their pineapple cakes and milk bread. The second and third generations have grown up here, gone to Wilson and to the University of California, and many have stayed within reach of their parents.
There are honest tensions too. The Puente Hills Mall has died the slow death of American retail and faces the wrecking ball. Some of the immigrant generation has aged, and some of their American-born children have moved on to newer suburbs further east or to the tech corridors of Taiwanese Cupertino and Fremont in the Bay Area. The story here is not frozen. But the temple still stands on its hill, the markets still fill on Saturday mornings, and the town that was built for one population has settled comfortably into being home for another. Just over the ridge, neighbouring Diamond Bar tells a parallel story, and the wider region’s Taiwanese and Chinese communities remain deeply interwoven.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did so many Taiwanese settle in Hacienda Heights?
The Taiwanese in Hacienda Heights arrived as part of an eastward spread from Monterey Park, which had been marketed across Taiwan in the 1970s as the “Chinese Beverly Hills”. As that suburb grew crowded and expensive in the 1980s, families moved east along the 60 freeway to Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights and Diamond Bar for newer homes, larger lots and strong public schools.
What is Hsi Lai Temple?
Hsi Lai Temple, at 3456 South Glenmark Drive, is a Buddhist monastery built in 1988 by the Taiwanese order Fo Guang Shan. Its name means “Coming West”, and when it opened it was the largest traditional Chinese Buddhist monastery in the Western Hemisphere. It serves as the order’s North American headquarters and remains the cultural anchor for the Taiwanese in Hacienda Heights.
What share of Hacienda Heights is Asian?
As of the 2020 Census, Hacienda Heights was roughly 41 per cent Asian and about 45 per cent Hispanic or Latino. Chinese and Taiwanese residents historically make up the largest portion of the Asian population, a demographic shift that took hold from the 1980s onward.
What was the 1996 Hsi Lai Temple controversy?
In April 1996, Vice President Al Gore attended a luncheon at Hsi Lai Temple that raised about 166,000 dollars for the Democratic National Committee. Investigators later found the temple had illegally reimbursed donors through “straw” contributors and altered records, and fundraiser Maria Hsia was convicted of causing false statements to be filed with federal regulators.
Where can you find Taiwanese food and groceries in Hacienda Heights?
The main hub is the area around Colima Road and Azusa Avenue, anchored by the 99 Ranch Market at 1625 Azusa Avenue. The surrounding strip malls hold a dense cluster of Taiwanese restaurants, bakeries and tea shops serving beef noodle soup, dumplings and small plates.
Is Hacienda Heights a Taiwanese-majority community?
No. Hacienda Heights is a shared suburb where Asian residents, who are roughly 41 per cent of the population, live alongside a slightly larger Hispanic or Latino population. Taiwanese life is woven through the town rather than concentrated in a single enclave, visible in its temple, schools, markets and commercial corridors.
If your family’s story passed through Hacienda Heights, or any of the places Taiwanese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a martial-law-era departure from Taipei or Kaohsiung, to a hillside house above the San Gabriel Valley, to wherever you are now.