On a low ridge of the Puente Hills, above the strip malls and the swimming pools, sits a temple with sweeping tiled roofs that would not look out of place in the hills above Kaohsiung. It is the first thing many people learn about the Chinese in Hacienda Heights, and it is the right place to start. The community here did not arrive in a single wave. It seeped eastward across the San Gabriel Valley over four decades, and it built, on a quiet unincorporated hillside, one of the largest Buddhist temples in the Western hemisphere.
The Place
Hacienda Heights is an unincorporated community in eastern Los Angeles County, sitting on land carved out of the old Rancho La Puente. In 1913 developers Edwin Hart and Jet Torrance subdivided it as North Whittier Heights, a district of avocado, citrus and walnut groves. It was renamed Hacienda Heights in 1961, after the postwar tract-home boom turned the orchards into a bedroom suburb of some 54,000 people.
It borders the City of Industry to the north, Whittier to the west, La Habra Heights to the south, and Rowland Heights to the east. By the 2020 census, roughly 41 percent of residents identified as Asian and about 45 percent as Hispanic or Latino, a near-even split that makes it one of the more genuinely mixed communities in the region.
How It Became Chinese
To understand the Chinese in Hacienda Heights, you have to understand the slow eastward drift of an entire population across the San Gabriel Valley, a movement that began some fifteen miles to the west.
Little Taipei spills over
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Monterey Park became what the historian Timothy Fong famously called the first suburban Chinatown. Taiwanese immigrants, many of them affluent and professional, transformed the city so thoroughly that it earned the nickname Little Taipei. By the mid-1980s, Taiwanese residents made up close to half the city’s population.
Success bred pressure. Land prices climbed, the housing stock filled, and a new and larger wave of mainland Chinese arrivals competed for the same blocks. Settled Taiwanese families, looking for newer houses, bigger lots and good schools, began to move outward along the valley, into the older core they were leaving behind in Monterey Park and then well beyond it.
The eastern frontier
By the late 1980s that movement had reached the far eastern edge of the valley, into four communities that scholars now group together: Diamond Bar, Walnut, and the two unincorporated towns of Hacienda Heights and Rowland Heights. These were the frontier of suburban Chinese settlement, the places you reached after Monterey Park, Alhambra, San Gabriel and Rosemead had already filled.
What drew families to Hacienda Heights was ordinary and powerful: hillside houses with room to grow, a respected school district, and proximity to the dense commercial corridors of the City of Industry just to the north. These were not tenement immigrants squeezing into a downtown Chinatown. They were buyers, families with capital who wanted what every American suburb promised, and who could pay for it.
The newcomers were predominantly Taiwanese at first, joined steadily by mainland Chinese, and by ethnic Chinese who had passed through South Korea and Vietnam before reaching Southern California. A substantial Korean American population settled into the same streets, so the Chinese here have rarely lived in isolation. The strip malls that line the commercial roads tell the story plainly: a Cantonese cafe beside a Korean barbecue, a Taiwanese bakery a few doors from a taqueria. The eastern San Gabriel Valley grew layered rather than segregated.
The temple that announced them
If one event signalled that the Chinese had truly arrived, it was the building of Hsi Lai Temple. The Taiwanese Buddhist order Fo Guang Shan, founded by Venerable Master Hsing Yun, chose the Puente Hills for its first overseas branch and its North American headquarters. The plan was not welcomed quietly. The project survived six public hearings and more than a hundred community meetings before a building permit was granted in 1985.
Ground was broken the following year, and the temple was completed on 26 November 1988. At the time it was the largest Buddhist temple in the United States. Its arrival, after years of contentious meetings, was a marker of permanence: the community was not passing through.
A question of cityhood
As the Chinese and Asian share of the population grew through the 1990s, Hacienda Heights stayed unincorporated, governed by Los Angeles County rather than its own city hall. A cityhood movement gathered momentum in the early 2000s, and the politics of it ran straight through the area’s changing demographics. Voters ultimately rejected incorporation in 2003, and the community remains unincorporated to this day, a patch of suburbia that never became a city.
The Landmarks
Hsi Lai Temple, 3456 South Glenmark Drive. Built in the style of traditional Chinese Ming and Qing architecture, the temple practises Humanistic Buddhism and served as the founding site of the Buddha’s Light International Association in 1991. Its annual Lunar New Year Peace Lantern Festival draws crowds reported in the tens of thousands, with lion dances, lantern viewing and gallery exhibitions filling the courtyards.
Hsi Lai University, founded on the temple grounds. The temple established its own university in 1990, an extension of the Fo Guang Shan mission to bring Buddhist education west. It moved to Rosemead in 1996 and was renamed the University of the West in 2004, but its roots are on this hillside.
Delicious Food Corner, 17170 Colima Road. A Hong Kong style cafe of the kind that anchors any serious Chinese suburb, known for its congee and its long, generous menu. Colima Road is the spine of Chinese Hacienda Heights, lined with the eateries, bakeries and cafes that fill its strip malls.
The Colima Road corridor. Running east to west through the community, Colima is where the everyday life of the Chinese suburb plays out: Cantonese cafes, Sichuan kitchens, boba shops, herbal pharmacies and immigrant-run banks and offices occupying one plaza after another.
Glen A. Wilson High School. One of the two comprehensive high schools run by the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District, with a student body that is close to half Asian. It ranks in the top tier of California public high schools, the kind of academic record that has long pulled Chinese families to these particular streets.
Puente Hills Mall and the City of Industry corridor. Just north of the residential hills, the commercial sprawl of the City of Industry and the Puente Hills Mall gave Chinese-owned businesses room to expand into strip malls and office space, knitting Hacienda Heights into the broader San Gabriel Valley economy.
Where They Came From
The first significant wave was Taiwanese, the same population that had remade Monterey Park and then moved east as it filled. They tended to be educated and middle class, the families of engineers, business owners and professionals who valued schools above almost anything. For many, the move to Hacienda Heights was a second migration within America rather than a fresh arrival from abroad: from Little Taipei to the eastern hills, in search of a quieter street and a better catchment.
Behind them came mainland Chinese immigrants, in growing numbers from the 1990s onward, alongside ethnic Chinese who had lived for a generation in South Korea or in Vietnam before reaching California. Each group brought its own dialects, its own cooking and its own institutions, and the supermarkets and restaurants of Colima Road quietly absorbed them all. The result is a community that is Chinese in the broad sense rather than from any single province: Taipei and Guangdong and the Chinese diaspora of Southeast Asia, gathered on one ridge.
Hacienda Heights Today
Hacienda Heights today is a settled, middle-aged suburb rather than a frontier. The median age sits in the low forties, most households are married couples, and the Chinese presence is woven into the ordinary texture of the place rather than concentrated in a single visible district. You see it in the bilingual signage on Colima Road, in the supermarkets stocked for Lunar New Year, and in the classrooms of the local high schools, where children of the first arrivals are now raising children of their own.
It shares its character with its neighbours. The Chinese communities of Rowland Heights, just to the east, and Diamond Bar and Walnut nearby formed in the same late-1980s wave, and the four function almost as one extended suburb of dining, schooling and family life. To trace any one of them is to trace all four.
What remains singular about Hacienda Heights is the temple. On a clear day the golden roofs of Hsi Lai catch the light above the hills, a Taiwanese order’s first home in the West, built by an immigrant community that had to win a hundred meetings before it could lay a single stone. It is, more than any statistic, the proof that the Chinese here came to stay.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did so many Chinese settle in Hacienda Heights?
The Chinese in Hacienda Heights largely arrived through an eastward migration across the San Gabriel Valley that began in Monterey Park in the 1970s. As that city filled and land prices rose, Taiwanese and later mainland Chinese families moved east in search of newer homes, larger lots and strong schools, reaching Hacienda Heights in the late 1980s.
What is Hsi Lai Temple?
Hsi Lai Temple, at 3456 South Glenmark Drive, is a Buddhist temple completed in 1988 by the Taiwanese order Fo Guang Shan. It was its first overseas branch and North American headquarters, and at the time the largest Buddhist temple in the United States.
What percentage of Hacienda Heights is Asian?
As of the 2020 census, about 41 percent of Hacienda Heights residents identified as Asian and roughly 45 percent as Hispanic or Latino, making it one of the more evenly mixed communities in the San Gabriel Valley.
Are the Chinese in Hacienda Heights mostly Taiwanese or mainland Chinese?
The community began as predominantly Taiwanese, part of the same wave that remade Monterey Park, and was later joined by growing numbers of mainland Chinese as well as ethnic Chinese who had lived in South Korea and Vietnam. Today it is Chinese in the broad sense rather than from any single origin.
Is Hacienda Heights its own city?
No. Hacienda Heights is an unincorporated community governed by Los Angeles County. A cityhood movement in the early 2000s, shaped in part by the area’s changing demographics, ended when voters rejected incorporation in 2003.
Where do you find Chinese food and shopping in Hacienda Heights?
Colima Road is the main commercial spine for the Chinese in Hacienda Heights, lined with Hong Kong style cafes, Sichuan and Cantonese restaurants, bakeries and Asian markets. Spots like Delicious Food Corner at 17170 Colima Road sit among one plaza after another of immigrant-run businesses.
If your family’s story passed through Hacienda Heights, or any of the places Chinese families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Taipei or Guangdong to a hillside in the Puente Hills, to wherever you are now.