Pull off the 60 Freeway at Nogales Street on a Saturday night and the signs change language before your eyes. Within a single mile, English gives way to Traditional Chinese characters glowing above bubble tea counters, beef noodle houses and twenty-four-hour bakeries. This is the world the Taiwanese in Rowland Heights, California built: a suburban valley town that locals have called Little Taipei for forty years.
The Place
Rowland Heights sits in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, tucked into the Puente Hills about twenty-five miles east of downtown Los Angeles. It is not a city. It is an unincorporated community of roughly thirteen square miles governed directly by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which means it has no mayor and no town hall of its own.
The two arteries that define it are Colima Road and Nogales Street, which cross near the centre of town and are lined with upscale strip malls rather than a traditional high street. At the 2020 census the population was 48,231, a figure that has stayed remarkably steady since the year 2000.
What makes the town distinctive is who lives here. By 2020, Asian residents made up 61.34 percent of the population, up from 50.06 percent in 2000, and the single largest group among them is Taiwanese.
How It Became Taiwanese
From land grant to orange groves
The land was Mexican before it was American. In April 1842, Governor Juan B. Alvarado granted Rancho La Puente, some 18,000 acres, to John Rowland. Three years later Governor Pio Pico enlarged it to nearly 49,000 acres and added William Workman as co-owner.
After the two men received their federal land patent in 1868, they divided the rancho, with Rowland taking the northern, southern and eastern sections that became most of what now bears his name. For nearly a century the hills here held little more than pig lots and, later, orange groves.
That changed after the Second World War. Postwar prosperity, the extension of the 60 Freeway and the great suburban push eastward out of Los Angeles drew Angelenos into the area. Until the mid-1980s, Rowland Heights remained a predominantly Anglo and Latino bedroom community of new tract homes on quiet hillsides.
The Monterey Park overflow
The Taiwanese story in the San Gabriel Valley did not begin in Rowland Heights. It began roughly fifteen miles west, in Monterey Park, the suburb that earned the original Little Taipei nickname in the 1970s.
The turning point was geopolitical. In 1979 the United States switched its formal recognition from Taipei to Beijing, recognising the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act that same year to preserve unofficial ties, and a separate immigration quota of up to 20,000 Taiwanese took effect from 1982.
Political uncertainty at home, combined with Taiwan liberalising its own emigration rules around 1980, gave relatively wealthy families in Taiwan the means and the motive to move. Many chose Southern California, and Monterey Park filled quickly.
Building the second Little Taipei
As Monterey Park became crowded and its local politics increasingly contentious over signage and language in the 1980s, Chinese and Taiwanese newcomers turned to neighbouring communities further east. Rowland Heights, with its newer homes and room to grow, became one of the principal destinations.
The newcomers were often affluent. They bought into the hillside subdivisions, opened businesses along Colima Road and Nogales Street, and built the strip-mall economy that still defines the town. By the late 1980s and 1990s, local Taiwanese had transferred the Little Taipei name to Rowland Heights, drawn by the high concentration of Taiwanese restaurants and shops.
The housing boom of the late 1990s produced the gaudy, multi-storey plazas that became landmarks in their own right. Many of the business owners also worked nearby in the City of Industry, the adjacent industrial hub that hosts large employers and gave the community a steady commercial backbone.
The result was an eclectic suburban Chinatown, Koreatown and Little Tokyo layered onto a single hillside town. But the dining, the bakeries and the night-market street food gave Rowland Heights its particular Taiwanese accent, a flavour distinct from the Cantonese and mainland enclaves elsewhere in the valley.
The community also built the quieter infrastructure of a settled middle class. Cram schools and weekend Chinese-language classes appeared alongside the restaurants, and the local public schools, John A. Rowland High School and Nogales High School among them, took on the bilingual character of the families they served. Education had been a central reason many parents emigrated in the first place, and the town’s institutions reflected that priority.
The Landmarks
Colima Road and Nogales Street intersection. This crossing is the symbolic heart of Little Taipei. The strip malls radiating from it hold the densest cluster of Taiwanese restaurants and businesses in the United States, and after dark the bilingual neon signage turns the junction into the town’s living room.
99 Ranch Market, 1015 S Nogales Street. The flagship of the Taiwanese-American supermarket chain anchors daily life here, stocking live seafood, dried goods and the imported brands that families grew up with. For many residents the weekly trip to 99 Ranch is the closest thing Rowland Heights has to a town square.
Hong Kong Plaza, Colima Road. A flamboyant shopping centre built during the late-1990s housing boom, Hong Kong Plaza packs everything from luxury watch shops to dried sea cucumber vendors above a warren of restaurants. The food court draws crowds from across the county for prices far gentler than the glitzy signage suggests.
Pacific Plaza, Colima Road. Among its best-known tenants is Speedy Shilin, named for Taipei’s famous Shilin Night Market, serving the fried chicken cutlets, oyster omelettes and street snacks of a Taiwanese night market. Four Seasons Steak House nearby specialises in the sizzling skillet steaks that became a San Gabriel Valley institution.
King of Mackerel and Shrimp, 18457 Colima Road. A specialist Taiwanese kitchen tucked into the plaza landscape, it built a following for exactly the kind of focused, single-minded cooking that defines the town’s food scene. Restaurants here tend to do one thing and do it relentlessly well.
Hsi Lai Temple, 3456 South Glenmark Drive, Hacienda Heights. Just over the hill from Rowland Heights stands the largest Buddhist temple in North America, the first overseas branch of Taiwan’s Fo Guang Shan order. Spread across fifteen acres of the Puente Hills, its golden roofs and courtyards are a spiritual anchor for the valley’s Taiwanese Buddhists, and its name means simply “coming west”.
Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park. The county park on the town’s edge holds 500 ume, or Japanese plum, trees, planted after Schabarum established a sister-park relationship with Kairaku-en in Mito, Japan, in 1992. Each late winter the blossoms draw families who treat the bloom as a local stand-in for a trip to Asia.
Where They Came From
The families who built Little Taipei came overwhelmingly from the island of Taiwan, and many traced their roots to Taipei and the densely populated cities of the north and west coast. A significant share were the children of mainlanders who had crossed the strait in 1949, giving the community a Mandarin-speaking character distinct from the Cantonese enclaves of older Chinatowns.
They arrived during the immigration waves that followed the 1979 break in formal US-Taiwan relations and the loosening of Taiwan’s own emigration rules. Crucially, these were not refugees but professionals, entrepreneurs and investors, people with capital who could buy hillside homes outright and open businesses within months of landing.
That affluence shaped everything. It is why Rowland Heights skipped the tenement phase of earlier immigrant neighbourhoods and arrived as a suburb of new houses, private cram schools and shopping plazas. Over time, mainland Chinese, Hong Kongers, Korean and Vietnamese families settled alongside, but the Taiwanese imprint set the template.
Rowland Heights Today
Rowland Heights remains one of the most concentrated Taiwanese-American communities in the country, and its food scene is arguably the best argument for visiting the San Gabriel Valley at all. The bakeries, hotpot houses, dessert cafes and night-market stalls along Colima and Nogales still pull diners from across Greater Los Angeles.
Yet the town has also matured and diversified. The early waves have aged, their children have scattered to Irvine, the Bay Area and beyond, and newer mainland Chinese arrivals have reshaped parts of the commercial landscape. The Latino and white populations that predate the Taiwanese era still account for a meaningful share of residents.
What endures is the texture of a place built by people who chose it deliberately. Rowland Heights is not a historic Chinatown frozen for tourists but a working suburb where the supermarket signs, the temple over the hill and the steam rising from a hundred kitchens tell a single, specific story about how a corner of Taiwan came to rest in the Puente Hills.
For families tracing their own paths, the town sits within a wider constellation of Taiwanese settlement. Many of the same families moved between here and Diamond Bar next door, or up to Arcadia and Cerritos, while a parallel migration carried others north to San Jose, Fremont and Cupertino in Silicon Valley.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Rowland Heights called Little Taipei?
Local Taiwanese began calling Rowland Heights Little Taipei in the 1980s and 1990s because of its exceptionally high concentration of Taiwanese restaurants and businesses. The Taiwanese in Rowland Heights, California inherited the nickname from Monterey Park, the original Little Taipei, as families moved east into the area.
How large is the Taiwanese community in Rowland Heights?
Asian residents made up 61.34 percent of the town’s 48,231 people at the 2020 census, and Taiwanese form the single largest group among them. The community is widely regarded as one of the most concentrated Taiwanese populations in the United States.
When did Taiwanese families first settle in Rowland Heights?
The major influx came in the late 1980s and 1990s, after immigration waves that followed the 1979 shift in US-Taiwan relations. As nearby Monterey Park grew crowded, affluent Taiwanese newcomers moved east to the newer hillside homes of Rowland Heights.
What is the best area for Taiwanese food in Rowland Heights?
The strip malls clustered around the intersection of Colima Road and Nogales Street hold the densest concentration of Taiwanese restaurants in the country. Plazas such as Hong Kong Plaza and Pacific Plaza on Colima Road are reliable starting points for night-market snacks and steak houses.
Is Hsi Lai Temple in Rowland Heights?
Hsi Lai Temple sits just over the hill in neighbouring Hacienda Heights at 3456 South Glenmark Drive. It is the largest Buddhist temple in North America and the first overseas branch of Taiwan’s Fo Guang Shan order, serving Taiwanese Buddhists across the eastern San Gabriel Valley including Rowland Heights.
Is Rowland Heights a city?
No. Rowland Heights is an unincorporated community in Los Angeles County, governed directly by the County Board of Supervisors rather than its own city council. It grew from Rancho La Puente, a Mexican land grant made to John Rowland in 1842.
If your family’s story passed through Rowland Heights, or any of the places Taiwanese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the night markets of Taipei to the neon plazas of Colima Road, to wherever you are now.