They never put it on a tourist map. While the cable cars and lantern-strung lanes of San Francisco drew the cameras across the bay, the Chinese in Chinatown, Oakland, were busy doing something quieter and harder: building a place to actually live. Walk down Webster Street on a weekday morning and you hear Taishanese over crates of bok choy, the slap of a butcher’s cleaver, an auntie counting change in Cantonese. This is one of the oldest Chinatowns in North America, and it has never stopped being a working neighbourhood.
Oakland Chinatown: The Place
Oakland Chinatown sits at the edge of downtown, bounded roughly by Broadway to the west, Interstate 880 to the south, Fallon Street and Laney College to the east, and somewhere between 12th and 14th Street to the north. Its historic commercial heart runs along Webster between 7th and 9th, and along 8th between Franklin and Harrison.
The Lake Merritt BART station drops you at its eastern doorstep, a detail that turns out to be loaded with history. The buildings are low and plain, mostly two and three storeys, brick and stucco, with shops at street level and apartments above. This is not a district dressed up for visitors. It is a neighbourhood that earns its keep.
How Oakland Chinatown Became Chinese
Before the Chinese
In the 1850s the land around the Oakland estuary was marsh and shoreline, a young American town of fewer than two thousand people clinging to the east shore of San Francisco Bay. The 1860 census counted just 1,543 residents in Oakland, of whom 96 were recorded as “Asiatics,” about six percent of the town.
The first Chinese arrivals did not settle in one tidy enclave. They scattered into shrimp camps and work sites wherever there was money to be made and tolerance to be found.
The Chinese Arrive
They came chasing gam saan, the Gold Mountain. When gold was discovered in 1848 and the Central Pacific Railroad began hiring in the 1860s, men from the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province crossed the Pacific by the thousand. The earliest Oakland Chinese set up shrimp camps on the estuary at 1st Street and Castro in the 1850s, and clustered at “Chinese Point” in West Oakland and around 4th and Clay.
Over the next two decades they founded at least five small communities along the east shore. There was a settlement at the foot of Castro Street, one on San Pablo Avenue between 19th and 22nd, one at Telegraph and 14th, one at Washington and 14th, and finally the one at Webster and 8th that would outlast them all.
None of these places was chosen freely. The Chinese were pushed from spot to spot by fire, by hostile ordinances, and by the white anxiety of the era that politicians cynically branded the “Yellow Peril.” When the Telegraph Avenue settlement between 16th and 17th burned in 1867, its people relocated to San Pablo Avenue, a site now remembered as Oakland’s Old Uptown Chinatown.
By the 1870s the community had consolidated around 8th Street and Webster Street, the location it still occupies today. Then came the law that froze it in place. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 severely cut off new arrivals, and by 1900 the population had fallen to fewer than a thousand.
Oakland Chinatown at Its Peak
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake sent roughly 2,500 refugees across the bay, and Oakland Chinatown absorbed them. The population grew to about 3,000 by 1940 and 5,500 by 1950. With immigration choked off for decades, the men who were already here built institutions that did the work families could not do from across an ocean.
Family and district associations became the connective tissue of the neighbourhood. They wired money home, shipped goods to the villages, found newcomers jobs, arranged marriages, and settled disputes. Most members traced their roots to the same handful of counties in Guangdong, so an association was less a club than an extension of the home village transplanted to Webster Street.
Daily life ran on produce stalls, laundries, herbal shops, and small restaurants. Chinese Community United Methodist Church opened at 321 8th Street in 1887, one of the spiritual anchors of the district. The corner of 8th and Franklin was so central to community life it was simply known as Bill Louie’s Corner.
This was always the contrast with San Francisco. Across the bay, Chinatown became a destination dressed for visitors. In Oakland it stayed a place where you bought your fish, did your banking, sent your kids to school, and buried your parents. The same instinct toward a lived-in, family-run district shows up in the story of the Chinese in Chinatown, San Francisco, but Oakland wore its everyday-ness more openly.
The Change
The hardest blows came not from immigration law but from bulldozers. In the late 1950s and 1960s the Nimitz Freeway, Interstate 880, was driven straight through the southern edge of the neighbourhood, taking blocks of housing with it. It severed Chinatown from the waterfront where its first settlers had landed.
Then came the 1960s and 1970s wave of “urban renewal.” BART acquired three blocks to build the Lake Merritt station, its agency headquarters, and parking lots, demolishing around 75 houses, forcing an Episcopal church to move and an orphanage to close. Laney College took eight blocks, the Oakland Museum took four. The Laney and BART projects together are estimated to have displaced some 10,000 people from the neighbourhood.
It is a grimly familiar pattern. Across the country, postwar planners routed freeways and “renewal” through exactly the immigrant and Black neighbourhoods that had the least political power to say no, as the displaced residents of Chinatown in Manhattan and countless others learned. Oakland Chinatown survived its dismemberment, smaller in footprint but intact in purpose.
The Landmarks of Chinese Oakland
Chinese Community United Methodist Church, 321 8th Street. Founded in 1887, with its current building dating to 1952, this congregation is one of the oldest continuously serving Chinese institutions in the city. It held the community together through the exclusion decades when family reunification was nearly impossible.
Pacific Renaissance Plaza, 388 9th Street. Built in 1993, this mixed-use complex is the modern civic heart of Chinatown. It houses the Asian Branch of the Oakland Public Library, which holds materials in eight Asian languages, alongside the cultural centre below.
Oakland Asian Cultural Center. Founded in 1984 by a coalition of volunteers and housed in Pacific Renaissance Plaza since the mid-1990s, the OACC is the district’s stage for lion dance, calligraphy, music, and the festivals that mark the year. It made room for Chinese art and memory inside a neighbourhood that had lost so much physical ground.
The Shoong Family Chinese Cultural Center, 9th and Harrison. Established in 1953, named for merchant Joe Shoong, it long served as a Chinese school and community hall where second-generation children learned the language their parents feared they would lose.
Wanto Company, 8th and Franklin. This grocery is where Dorothea Lange photographed the famous “I Am An American” sign in 1942, posted by a Japanese American owner on the eve of wartime incarceration. It is a reminder that Chinatown’s blocks held more than one community’s history, even as the Chinese remained its backbone.
Lincoln Elementary School. For roughly 150 years Lincoln has educated downtown Oakland’s immigrant children, and today it enrols just over 700 students, around 70 percent of them Asian. Generations of Chinatown families have passed through its doors, making it as much a community landmark as any temple or hall.
The produce blocks of Webster and 8th. The sidewalk markets between 8th and 10th, around Franklin and Webster, are the everyday landmark that defines the place: open crates of greens, tanks of live fish, dried goods, herbalists, and bakeries selling egg tarts and barbecue pork buns.
Where the Oakland Chinese Came From
Almost everyone who built Oakland Chinatown came from one corner of the world: the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province in southern China. Within that delta, the heaviest migration came from the Sze Yup, the “four counties” of Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, and Enping, with Taishan, also written Toisan, sending the largest share by far.
That is why Taishanese, not standard Cantonese or Mandarin, was the street language of the early American Chinatowns, Oakland included. Poverty, crowded farmland, and the lure of railroad and gold-rush wages pushed young men out of these villages, and word of mouth from those who had already gone pulled the next ones after them.
This is the same Cantonese heartland that seeded Chinese communities up and down California. The later move of established families toward the San Gabriel Valley, traced in the story of the Chinese in Monterey Park, is a continuation of a journey that began in places like Taishan and ran through Webster Street first.
Oakland Chinatown Today
Oakland Chinatown today is pan-Asian on its surface and deeply Cantonese at its core. You will hear Vietnamese, Tagalog, Korean, and Mandarin alongside Cantonese and Taishanese, the legacy of Southeast Asian refugees who arrived from the 1970s onward. Newer immigrants have built a “New Chinatown” along International Boulevard and around Eastlake, while the historic district remains the cultural anchor.
The neighbourhood has had a hard few years. The pandemic gutted foot traffic, and a wave of anti-Asian attacks shook the community, including a widely shared video of a 91-year-old man shoved to the ground that drew national attention. The response came from the inside.
Volunteer patrols in bright orange and blue vests now walk the blocks, organised through groups like the Toishan Benevolent Association, the Blue Angel Volunteer Patrol Team, and Compassion in Oakland, which escorts elders on errands. The Asian Pacific Environmental Network runs a “Community Strolling” program where volunteers clean streets and hand out red envelopes at Lunar New Year. Many of these efforts grew out of the same energy as Stop AAPI Hate, and the multiethnic patrols echo the mutual-aid instincts of nearby communities such as the Eritreans in Oakland.
The calendar still fills with the old observances. The Lunar New Year Bazaar, run by the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, marked its 33rd year in January 2025, and the Chinatown StreetFest held its 36th edition in August 2025, drawing tens of thousands to 9th and Franklin. After a century and a half of being moved, cut through, and counted out, the Chinese in Chinatown, Oakland, are still on Webster Street, still selling fish, still here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Chinese immigrants settle in Oakland Chinatown?
Chinese immigrants first came to Oakland in the 1850s for gold-rush and railroad work, settling in shrimp camps and small enclaves along the estuary. Hostile local laws and repeated fires pushed them from site to site until the community consolidated at 8th and Webster Street in the 1870s. That spot, near the waterfront and downtown jobs, became the permanent Oakland Chinatown.
Is Oakland Chinatown still Chinese today?
Yes. The Chinese in Chinatown, Oakland, remain the cultural and commercial backbone of the district, even as Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, and other Asian communities have joined it since the 1970s. Cantonese and Taishanese are still spoken on the produce blocks, and the neighbourhood stays a working everyday Chinatown rather than a tourist showpiece.
What are the most famous landmarks in Oakland Chinatown?
Key landmarks include Pacific Renaissance Plaza at 388 9th Street, home to the Oakland Asian Cultural Center and the Asian Branch Library, and the Chinese Community United Methodist Church at 321 8th Street, founded in 1887. The produce markets along Webster and 8th Street and Lincoln Elementary School are everyday landmarks central to community life.
Where in China did Oakland Chinatown’s Chinese come from?
The vast majority came from the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province in southern China. Within that region, most traced their roots to the Sze Yup, the four counties of Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, and Enping, with Taishan sending the largest share. This is why Taishanese was the dominant street language of early Oakland Chinatown.
What damaged Oakland Chinatown in the 20th century?
The biggest losses came from infrastructure projects in the mid-20th century. The Interstate 880 Nimitz Freeway cut through the southern edge in the 1950s and 1960s, and BART construction, Laney College expansion, and the Oakland Museum took many blocks in the 1960s and 1970s. The BART and Laney projects alone are estimated to have displaced around 10,000 residents.
If your family’s story passed through Oakland Chinatown, or any of the places the Chinese made home across California and beyond, Atlas of Home can help you trace that journey. From a village in the Taishan countryside to a fish stall on Webster Street to wherever you are now, every chapter belongs to you. Explore your story →
Sources and further reading: Chinatown, Oakland, California (Wikipedia) and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center.