Drive east out of Monterey Park along the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and the houses get bigger, the lawns get greener, and the bakery signs start carrying two scripts at once. This is Arcadia, the affluent Los Angeles suburb the property pages took to calling the “Chinese Beverly Hills.” But before the mainland money and the teardown mansions, the story of the Taiwanese in Arcadia, California began quietly in the early 1980s, with a handful of families chasing the same thing everyone here still chases: the schools.
The Place
Arcadia sits about 13 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, tucked against the base of the San Gabriel Mountains in the eastern San Gabriel Valley. It grew up around the Santa Anita Park racetrack, opened on Christmas Day 1934, and the 127-acre Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden at 301 North Baldwin Avenue, on land once owned by the silver baron Elias “Lucky” Baldwin.
For most of the twentieth century it was a comfortable, white, horse-and-golf town. Then, beginning in the 1980s, it became something else: one of the most heavily Asian cities in America, where today nearly three in five residents trace their roots to Asia and the median home runs past a million dollars.
How It Became Taiwanese
The roots run back to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which scrapped the national-origins quotas that had effectively barred Asian immigration for decades. The first large wave of Chinese arrivals to the San Gabriel Valley came not from the mainland but from Taiwan, and at first they did not come to Arcadia at all.
Little Taipei, and the man who sold it
They came to Monterey Park, a few miles to the south. The realtor Frederic Hsieh, himself a Taiwan-born immigrant who had landed in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, bought up plots there and marketed the city directly to buyers in Taipei and Hong Kong as the “Chinese Beverly Hills.” By the late 1980s Monterey Park had become the first suburban Chinatown in the United States, nicknamed “Little Taipei” for the Taiwanese and Hong Kong families who filled it.
Monterey Park was the beachhead. Arcadia was where the next generation of arrivals, with more money and school-age children, wanted to land.
The first wave, 1984
Sho Tay, who would one day become mayor of Arcadia, was part of that first wave. Born in Taiwan, he had moved with his family to Okinawa at fifteen, then to Alhambra at eighteen, before settling in Arcadia. He arrived as a businessman in 1984, the leading edge of the Taiwanese families who began buying into the city that decade.
What drew them was not the racetrack. It was the Arcadia Unified School District, then as now one of the highest-ranked public systems in California. For parents from Taipei or Kaohsiung who prized education above almost everything, a free public school that sent its graduates to the University of California was worth the price of a Southern California house.
The numbers moved fast. Arcadia’s Asian population was around 4 percent in 1980. By 1985 it had passed 9 percent, overtaking the city’s Latino population. The Taiwanese families came first, and word travelled back across the Pacific through churches, family networks, and the simple arithmetic of a good school zone.
The wave that followed
The pattern set by the Taiwanese pioneers reshaped the whole town. After the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, a wave arrived from Hong Kong. Then, through the 1990s and 2000s, came the much larger and wealthier migration from mainland China, the families who found it cheaper to build a mansion in Arcadia than in Shanghai and who earned the city its “Chinese Beverly Hills” nickname.
By 2010 the census counted Arcadia at 59 percent Asian. The Taiwanese, who had opened the door, were by then a smaller share of a much bigger Chinese-speaking population. But the institutions they founded, the churches, the bakeries, the supermarket aisles, had already become the architecture of daily life. A separate story belongs to the broader Chinese community in Arcadia, and to neighbouring the Chinese in San Marino just over the city line. This one stays with the Taiwanese who were here first.
The Landmarks
Din Tai Fung, 400 South Baldwin Avenue. The Taiwanese soup-dumpling house chose Arcadia for its first North American restaurant, which opened in 2000. The xiao long bao, folded by hand behind glass, drew lines that wrapped around the block and turned a Taipei institution into a Southern California rite of passage. For many non-Asian Angelenos, Arcadia and Din Tai Fung became the same word.
Evangelical Formosan Church of Arcadia, 225 East Live Oak Avenue. The Evangelical Formosan Church movement began in 1970 as a Taiwanese-language congregation, and its Arcadia church became a spiritual and social anchor for immigrant families. For new arrivals, the church was where you found a job lead, a school recommendation, and a Sunday meal that tasted like home.
99 Ranch Market, 1300 South Golden West Avenue. The largest Asian supermarket chain in America was founded in 1984, the same year Sho Tay arrived, by Roger Chen, a Taiwanese immigrant who saw the gap between American grocery aisles and a Taiwanese kitchen. Its Arcadia store stocks the live fish, the bitter melon, and the brands that let a transplanted family cook the food of home.
Kee Wah Bakery, 1010 South Baldwin Avenue. One of the cluster of Chinese and Taiwanese bakeries along the Baldwin corridor, Kee Wah keeps the glass cases full of pineapple buns, egg tarts, and, every autumn, the moon cakes that mark the Mid-Autumn Festival. The Baldwin Avenue bakeries are where the community’s calendar is kept in pastry.
Arcadia High School, 180 Campus Drive. The single biggest magnet for immigrant families, ranked for years among the top public high schools in California and the nation, with a student body that is roughly 90 percent students of colour and overwhelmingly Asian. It is the institution the Taiwanese families came for, and the reason so many of them stayed.
The Shops at Santa Anita, 400 South Baldwin Avenue. The super-regional mall, opened in 1974 next to the racetrack, has steadily reoriented itself around its Asian shoppers, anchored now by a 99 Ranch Market and lined with boba shops and Asian eateries. A mall built for postwar suburbia has become a Saturday gathering place for the San Gabriel Valley’s Chinese-speaking families.
The Downtown Arcadia Lunar New Year Festival, First Avenue. Each February the stretch of First Avenue between Huntington Drive and California Street closes for a lion dance, food stalls, and performances that turn the old downtown into a street party. It is the most visible sign of how thoroughly the city the Taiwanese helped open has embraced the calendar they brought with them.
Where They Came From
The first Arcadia families came overwhelmingly from Taiwan, and within Taiwan from the cities: Taipei in the north, Kaohsiung in the south, Taichung in between. Many were professionals and entrepreneurs, products of Taiwan’s economic miracle, who could afford to leave and who wanted, above almost everything else, to put their children inside an American school system.
They were also, by the 1970s and 1980s, families with reason to look outward. Political uncertainty over Taiwan’s status, compulsory military service for sons, and the lure of an undefined American future all pushed people toward the San Gabriel Valley, where a cousin or a church contact had already found a foothold.
The chain ran through the Pacific the way chains always do. One family bought in Arcadia for the schools, told a sibling, who told a colleague, and a Taipei suburb quietly reassembled itself at the foot of the San Gabriels. The same impulse carried other Taiwanese families south to Cerritos and on to Irvine in Orange County, two other suburbs chosen, like Arcadia, for their schools.
Arcadia Today
Arcadia is now one of the most Asian cities in the United States, with around 57 to 59 percent of residents identifying as Asian and close to half the city identifying specifically as Chinese-American. The Taiwanese who arrived in the 1980s are no longer the dominant strand; they have been folded into a larger, more recently arrived, and largely mainland-origin Chinese community. The “Chinese Beverly Hills” label, born of mansion teardowns and all-cash purchases, belongs mostly to that later wave.
The transformation has not been frictionless. The scale of foreign investment reshaped the housing market and the streetscape, and in 2024 the city’s politics drew national attention when a former mayor pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered agent of China, a case that unsettled residents and complicated easy stories about the community. Belonging in Arcadia, as in any place remade this quickly, is still being negotiated.
Yet the everyday texture the Taiwanese pioneers laid down remains. The bakeries on Baldwin, the church on Live Oak, the dumpling house that put the city on the culinary map, the high school that started it all: these are the durable things. Sho Tay, the businessman who arrived in 1984, went on to serve on the city council and as mayor, a measure of how far the first wave travelled from newcomer to civic leader.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did the Taiwanese first settle in Arcadia, California?
The Taiwanese in Arcadia, California began arriving in numbers in the early 1980s. Future mayor Sho Tay, born in Taiwan, settled in the city as a businessman in 1984, part of the first wave that pushed Arcadia’s Asian population from roughly 4 percent in 1980 past 9 percent by 1985.
Why did Taiwanese families choose Arcadia?
The decisive draw was the Arcadia Unified School District, consistently ranked among the best public school systems in California. Taiwanese parents who prized education, combined with large lots suited to multi-generational homes, made Arcadia a magnet once nearby Monterey Park filled up.
Why is Arcadia called the “Chinese Beverly Hills”?
The nickname grew from the city’s affluent Asian population and its expensive homes, where median values run past a million dollars. The phrase was first attached to Monterey Park by realtor Frederic Hsieh in the 1970s and migrated east to Arcadia as wealthier buyers arrived.
What is the difference between the Taiwanese and Chinese communities in Arcadia?
The Taiwanese in Arcadia, California were the earlier, 1980s pioneers who first established the city’s Asian institutions. The much larger mainland-Chinese wave came mostly in the 1990s and 2000s. Today the Taiwanese are a smaller share of a predominantly mainland-origin Chinese population.
What Taiwanese landmarks are in Arcadia?
Din Tai Fung at 400 South Baldwin Avenue opened its first North American restaurant in Arcadia in 2000. Other anchors include the Evangelical Formosan Church of Arcadia on Live Oak Avenue, the 99 Ranch Market founded by Taiwanese immigrant Roger Chen, and the bakeries lining Baldwin Avenue.
How Asian is Arcadia today?
Recent figures put Arcadia at roughly 57 to 59 percent Asian, with close to half the city identifying as Chinese-American. The 2010 census counted the city at about 59 percent Asian, a transformation from around 4 percent in 1980.
If your family’s story passed through Arcadia, or any of the places Taiwanese families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Taipei apartment to a house in the right school zone at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains, to wherever you are now.