There is a stretch of Valley Boulevard in San Gabriel, California where you can eat your way across half of China in an afternoon. Soup dumplings pleated by hand in one storefront, dry-fried Sichuan green beans in the next, a Cantonese seafood palace with live tanks down the block. The Chinese in San Gabriel did not just settle a town. They rebuilt a regional cuisine, mall by mall, along a single avenue that food writers now call the Golden Mile.
The Place
San Gabriel sits about nine miles east of downtown Los Angeles, in the western flatlands of the San Gabriel Valley. It is a small city, just under four square miles, hemmed in by Alhambra to the west, Rosemead to the east, and Monterey Park to the south.
It is also one of the oldest settlements in Southern California, the place the region’s first European mission claimed as its own. For most of the twentieth century it was a quiet, mostly working-class suburb. Then, over roughly four decades, it became one of the densest Chinese dining and shopping destinations in the United States.
How It Became Chinese
The story of the Chinese in San Gabriel does not begin in San Gabriel. It begins one city south, in Monterey Park, and it begins with one man’s sales pitch.
The mission town
San Gabriel’s identity was set in 1771, when Father Junipero Serra founded Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, the fourth of California’s twenty-one missions. The city still calls itself the “City With A Mission,” and locals describe it as the birthplace of the wider Los Angeles region. The town incorporated on 24 April 1913 with about 1,500 residents.
For decades it stayed small and largely white and Latino. As late as 1980, fewer than nine percent of San Gabriel’s residents were Asian. The transformation that followed was not gradual. It arrived as a wave that had already broken next door.
The Chinese Beverly Hills
The catalyst was a Hong Kong-born realtor named Frederic Hsieh, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1963. Through his firm, Mandarin Realty, Hsieh began buying up property in Monterey Park in the early 1970s and marketing it directly to buyers in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
His pitch was audacious. He called Monterey Park the “Chinese Beverly Hills,” drew comparisons to the green hills of Taipei, and leaned on the auspicious local 818 area code, eight being a number tied to prosperity. The message landed at exactly the right moment.
The waves, in order
The newcomers did not arrive all at once or from one place. The first and most affluent wave was Taiwanese, pushed out by the political tensions of the 1970s and pulled in by relaxed United States immigration rules. Hong Kong families followed, many uneasy about the 1997 handover. Mainland Chinese came last and in the greatest numbers, drawn by the simple gravity of a place where you could live your whole life in Mandarin.
Monterey Park became the first city in the continental United States with an Asian majority, recorded at 57 percent in the 1990 census. But success made it crowded and, for a time, politically fraught over signage and growth. So the families kept moving, this time east and north, into the next ring of towns.
The spillover north
San Gabriel sat directly in that path. As Monterey Park filled, Chinese buyers spread into Alhambra, Rosemead, San Gabriel, and Temple City, while wealthier families reached for the older estates of San Marino and Arcadia to the north. Later arrivals pushed further out still, to Rowland Heights and beyond.
San Gabriel’s appeal was its position. It was central, affordable relative to the foothill towns, and sat astride Valley Boulevard, the artery that ran east from Monterey Park through the heart of the valley. The avenue would become the spine of the whole enterprise.
The mall that changed everything
If one address marks the moment San Gabriel became a destination rather than a suburb, it is 140 West Valley Boulevard, at the corner of Del Mar Avenue, on the seam between San Gabriel and Monterey Park. There, on roughly twelve acres, developers built San Gabriel Square, some 220,000 square feet of Chinese retail across multiple levels.
It was anchored by a 99 Ranch Market, the Chinese-American supermarket chain known by its Mandarin name Tawa, and by a Focus department store. It was, by one account, the only Asian mall in the country anchored by both a department store and an Asian supermarket. Shoppers and food writers nicknamed it the “Great Mall of China,” and it became the template for the supermarket-anchored Chinese plazas that now line the boulevard.
The Golden Mile
From San Gabriel Square, the Chinese commercial corridor unspooled in both directions. Drive east on Valley Boulevard from Atlantic in Monterey Park into San Gabriel and you pass, by one count, more than two hundred restaurants within three miles. The strip earned its nickname, the Golden Mile, the densest concentration of Chinese dining in the country.
What made San Gabriel different from the old urban Chinatowns was regional range. This was not one Cantonese cuisine flattened for American palates. It was Shanghai soup dumplings, Sichuan heat, northern hand-pulled noodles, and Cantonese seafood, each with its own specialists, often within the same plaza.
The plazas themselves became the unit of city life. Where an older Chinatown grew on a grid of named streets, San Gabriel’s Chinese geography organised itself around strip malls, each anchored by a supermarket and ringed by a bakery, a tea shop, a herbalist, and four or five restaurants. The 99 Ranch and Hong Kong Supermarket chains, both born in this corner of California, supplied the gravitational centre. A family could park once and find a doctor, a banker, a barber, and dinner without speaking a word of English.
The Landmarks
San Gabriel Square, 140 West Valley Boulevard. The “Great Mall of China,” the plaza that set the pattern for the whole valley. Anchored by 99 Ranch Market and once topped by Sam Woo’s seafood dining room, it has begun a renovation that will rename it Tawa Gateway, after the supermarket’s parent company.
Newport Seafood, 518 West Las Tunas Drive. A San Gabriel institution and a MICHELIN Guide listee, famous for its house special lobster. It is the kind of banquet-style Cantonese seafood restaurant that draws families from across the region for celebrations.
Mei Long Village, 301 West Valley Boulevard. A long-standing Shanghainese kitchen known for some of the best xiaolongbao, the soup-filled dumplings, in the valley. It helped establish San Gabriel as a Shanghai-dumpling pilgrimage.
Shanghai Dumpling House, 227 West Valley Boulevard. Another Shanghainese specialist on the boulevard, a reminder of how finely the avenue divides by region. A single block can hold two kitchens devoted to the same dumpling done differently.
Golden Deli, on Las Tunas Drive. A Vietnamese-Chinese mainstay whose egg rolls became legendary, anchoring a separate cluster of restaurants along Las Tunas that complements the Valley Boulevard strip a few blocks south.
Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, 428 South Mission Drive. The 1771 mission that gave the city its name and its motto. It is the historical bedrock beneath the modern Chinese city, a reminder that San Gabriel was a crossroads long before it became a Golden Mile.
Where They Came From
The Chinese of San Gabriel are not from one province, and that is the point. The earliest postwar arrivals to the valley were Cantonese, from Guangdong, the source of America’s original nineteenth-century Chinese immigration.
But the wave that built San Gabriel came first from Taiwan, families with capital and professional credentials fleeing political uncertainty in the 1970s. Hong Kong followed. Then, after China’s reforms opened emigration, came the mainland: Sichuanese, Shanghainese, and northerners from Beijing and the surrounding provinces.
You can read that geography off the menus. The Cantonese run the seafood palaces and dim sum halls. The Taiwanese brought beef noodle soup and bakeries. The Shanghainese brought the soup dumplings, the Sichuanese the chili oil and peppercorn, and the northerners the wheat: dumplings, hand-pulled noodles, sesame flatbread.
San Gabriel Today
By the 2020 census, San Gabriel was about 63 percent Asian, up from under nine percent in 1980. Across the wider San Gabriel Valley, roughly 30 percent of residents identify as Asian, up from two percent in 1970, and close to 58 percent of those are of Chinese or Taiwanese descent. It is among the largest concentrations of Asian Americans of any county in the United States.
The city today is bilingual in practice. Storefront signage runs in Chinese characters, real estate and banking are conducted in Mandarin, and the supermarkets stock the produce and seafood of a dozen Chinese regions. The Golden Mile remains a genuine destination, drawing diners from across Southern California and beyond, and the regional specificity that built it has only deepened, with kitchens devoted to Yunnan, Xinjiang, and Dongbei cuisines that would have been unimaginable in an American suburb a generation ago.
Change presses in, as it always does. San Gabriel Square’s planned renovation into Tawa Gateway has unsettled some longtime tenants, and rents and redevelopment shape who stays. But the boulevard endures, and the city wears its two histories at once: a Spanish mission older than the United States, and a Chinese food capital younger than many of the people who built it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Chinese in San Gabriel, California?
The Chinese in San Gabriel are the result of an eastward spillover from Monterey Park, which a realtor named Frederic Hsieh marketed to Taiwanese and Hong Kong buyers as the “Chinese Beverly Hills” in the 1970s. As Monterey Park filled, families moved into San Gabriel along Valley Boulevard, and the city is now about 63 percent Asian.
What is the Golden Mile in San Gabriel?
The Golden Mile is the stretch of Valley Boulevard running through San Gabriel and Monterey Park, lined with more than two hundred Chinese restaurants within roughly three miles. It is widely considered the densest concentration of Chinese dining in the United States.
What is San Gabriel Square?
San Gabriel Square is a roughly 220,000-square-foot Chinese shopping plaza at 140 West Valley Boulevard, anchored by a 99 Ranch Market. Nicknamed the “Great Mall of China,” it set the template for the supermarket-anchored plazas along the boulevard and is being renovated and renamed Tawa Gateway.
Where did the Chinese in San Gabriel come from?
They came in waves: Cantonese from Guangdong first, then an affluent Taiwanese wave in the 1970s, followed by Hong Kong families, and finally large numbers of mainland Chinese from Sichuan, Shanghai, and the north. This range is why San Gabriel offers so many distinct regional Chinese cuisines.
Is San Gabriel different from Monterey Park?
They are adjacent cities that share the same Chinese commercial corridor along Valley Boulevard, and the boundary between them runs right past San Gabriel Square. Monterey Park developed first as the original “suburban Chinatown,” while San Gabriel grew as part of the eastward spillover that followed.
What is the best Chinese food in San Gabriel?
It depends on the region you want. For Cantonese seafood, Newport Seafood on Las Tunas Drive is a MICHELIN-listed favourite; for Shanghainese soup dumplings, Mei Long Village on Valley Boulevard is a long-standing institution among the many specialists on the Golden Mile.
If your family’s story passed through San Gabriel, or any of the places Chinese families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Guangdong, Taipei, or a village in Sichuan, to a plaza on Valley Boulevard, to wherever you are now.