Drive north through downtown San Jose on a spring morning and you pass a small park at Sixth and Jackson, in the heart of Japantown, that almost nobody outside the neighbourhood can name. It is called Heinlenville Park, and it sits on the ground where the largest of the Chinese in San Jose once built a town of four thousand people, only to watch the city raze it. A century later, the Chinese community here is among the largest in California, scattered across Evergreen hillsides and Almaden cul-de-sacs and the checkout queues at 99 Ranch. The story of how it got from one to the other is the story of San Jose itself.
The Place
San Jose is the tenth-largest city in the United States and the unofficial capital of Silicon Valley, sprawling across the southern end of the Santa Clara Valley between the Diablo and Santa Cruz mountain ranges. For most of its history it was farmland, the orchards that gave the area its old nickname, the Valley of Heart’s Delight, before chips replaced cherries.
Today it is one of the most Asian-majority big cities in America. Asians make up roughly 37 percent of San Jose’s residents, and in the metropolitan area Chinese Americans are the single largest Asian group, around 35 percent of the Asian population. They are concentrated not downtown but in the affluent edges: the rolling subdivisions of Evergreen in the east, where more than 60 percent of residents are Asian, and the wooded calm of Almaden Valley in the southwest. The same dynamic shaped neighbouring cities, from the Chinese community of Cupertino to the engineering families of Chinese Santa Clara just to the north.
How It Became Chinese
The Chinese presence in San Jose is not new. It is one of the oldest in the West, and for a long time it was one of the most brutally contested.
Orchards and gold, 1850s to 1880s
The Gold Rush drew Chinese immigrants to California in the 1850s, and when the gold ran thin many drifted into the Santa Clara Valley to work its farms and orchards. By 1880, Chinese labourers were providing an estimated 32.8 percent of the county’s workforce, picking fruit, digging ditches, and building the infrastructure of a valley that depended on them and resented them in equal measure. The history of San Jose’s lost Chinatowns is documented in detail by Wikipedia’s account of the city’s five Chinatowns.
San Jose grew five separate Chinatowns in succession. The first stood at Market and San Fernando streets by 1866. Others followed near Vine Street and the Guadalupe River, then a larger Plaza Chinatown on Market Street that reached some 1,400 residents by 1876.
The fire and Heinlenville, 1887
On 4 May 1887, the Market Street Chinatown burned to the ground in an arson fire while white residents looked on. The city council had declared the neighbourhood a public nuisance days earlier, and afterward it built a new City Hall on the cleared plaza, stipulating that no Chinese labour be used in the work.
What happened next is the part San Jose has slowly learned to be proud of. A German-American rancher named John Heinlen leased land to the displaced Chinese community near Sixth and Jackson streets, in an era when the Chinese were barred from owning property outright. White neighbours threatened to ostracise him and made threats on his life. He signed the contracts anyway, and the settlement was finished in 1888.
They called it Heinlenville. At its peak it held 4,000 people, more than any Chinatown in the city’s history, with merchants, barbers, herbalists, and a two-storey Taoist temple, the Ng Shing Gung, the Temple of the Five Gods, built in 1888. It survived the 1906 earthquake. It did not survive the Depression.
Demolition and a long silence, 1931 to 1949
In 1931 the Heinlen Company went bankrupt and sold the land to the city, which razed Heinlenville. Most remaining residents moved a few blocks into Japantown, which is why San Jose’s historic Japantown is today one of the last three in the country, and why a Chinese temple sat at its edge for decades. The Ng Shing Gung itself was demolished in 1949, though the altars and part of the facade were saved and put into storage.
For two generations after that, the Chinese story in San Jose went quiet. The Chinese Exclusion Act, on the books from 1882, had choked off new arrivals. The community endured rather than grew.
The valley turns to silicon, 1965 onward
Two things changed everything. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 reopened the door to Asian immigration, ending decades of exclusion. And the orchards of the Santa Clara Valley were paved over for the semiconductor and computer firms that would make it Silicon Valley.
The new Chinese arrivals were not orchard labourers. They were engineers and graduate students from Taiwan and Hong Kong, then from mainland China after reforms opened it in the 1980s and 1990s, drawn by Stanford, by the chip companies, and later by the internet boom. They settled where the schools were strong and the new houses were going up: the east San Jose foothills of Evergreen, and the southern reaches of Almaden Valley.
The wave kept coming with the H-1B visa programme and the rise of the Chinese technology sector, until Chinese Americans became the largest Asian group in the entire metro. They came as founders and venture capitalists as much as employees, building companies along the same valley floor their predecessors had once farmed under guard.
The Landmarks
Heinlenville Park, Sixth Street between Taylor and Jackson, San Jose. Opened with a ribbon-cutting in October 2023, this Japantown park is named for both John Heinlen and the Chinatown he protected. It is a quiet civic apology cast as a playground, on the exact ground where 4,000 people once lived.
Chinese American Historical Museum at the Ng Shing Gung, 635 Phelan Avenue, History Park. The Taoist temple demolished in 1949 was replicated and dedicated in 1991 by the Chinese Historical and Cultural Project. The reconstructed Ng Shing Gung now houses a museum of the valley’s Chinese past, including artefacts recovered from the burned Market Street Chinatown.
99 Ranch Market, Westfield Oakridge, Blossom Hill Road, South San Jose. When the Taiwanese-founded supermarket chain opened here in March 2022, its first mall location anywhere, shoppers said it ended the drive to Cupertino for Chinese groceries. The hall has a dim sum dining area, a tea bar, and a bakery, and on weekends the car park fills before noon.
San Jose Chinese School, 6677 Camden Avenue, Almaden Valley. Founded in 1974 and run as a parental mutual-aid cooperative, it has met on the Leland High School campus in Almaden since 2002. Saturday mornings here are a fixture of Chinese family life on the city’s southwest side.
Berryessa Chinese School, 1970 Morrill Avenue, San Jose. Founded in 1980 and known in Chinese as Bo Ai, the Berryessa school anchors the Chinese community in the city’s north-east, where engineering families have clustered for decades within reach of the Berryessa BART terminus. The Chinese community of Berryessa has its own distinct character, separate from the southern districts.
Evergreen Village Square, San Jose. The civic heart of Evergreen, with its branch library and community centre, sits in a neighbourhood that is now more than 60 percent Asian. The bubble-tea shops, hotpot restaurants, and Chinese bakeries strung along Aborn and Quimby roads are the everyday face of that majority.
Almaden Valley, southwest San Jose. Tucked against the foothills, Almaden is among the city’s most affluent districts, roughly 41 percent Asian, with a median age near 48. Its draw is the same as Evergreen’s: top-rated schools, big quiet lots, and an easy reverse commute to the chip campuses of north San Jose.
Where They Came From
The Chinese of San Jose did not arrive from one place. The earliest came from the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong, the same Cantonese-speaking heartland that built nearly every nineteenth-century Chinatown in America.
The modern community has deeper roots in Taiwan and Hong Kong, whose engineers and students filled the early Silicon Valley boom, and then increasingly in mainland China, especially the technical universities of Beijing, Shanghai, and the eastern coast. That layering is why a single San Jose street can hold a Cantonese herbalist, a Taiwanese beef-noodle house, and a Mandarin-only WeChat group for a school carpool. The Taiwanese strand of that story runs across the wider valley, from Chinese Milpitas next door to the larger Chinese community in Fremont across the bay’s southern lip.
What pulled them was specific: Stanford and the semiconductor firms, then the software and venture worlds, and finally the gravitational pull of a community large enough that newcomers could land into Chinese schools, churches, and grocers from week one.
San Jose Today
San Jose’s Chinese community is no longer a downtown enclave. It is a dispersed majority, threaded through the best school districts on the city’s eastern and southern flanks, prosperous and quietly powerful in the industry that defines the region.
It is also a community that has finally been allowed to remember out loud. In September 2021 the city formally apologised for its historical discrimination against the Chinese, more than a century after it cheered on the fire that destroyed the Market Street Chinatown. Heinlenville Park followed in 2023. The Ng Shing Gung sits restored in History Park.
The present is unmistakably comfortable and unmistakably Chinese: 99 Ranch at the mall, Saturday Chinese school, Lunar New Year that fills the strip-mall restaurants of Evergreen and Almaden. But the past is no longer buried under a City Hall. For the descendants of orchard labourers and the children of chip engineers alike, San Jose has become, after a very long argument, a place that admits it is partly theirs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do the Chinese in San Jose mostly live?
The largest concentrations of the Chinese in San Jose are in Evergreen, on the city’s east side, where Asians are more than 60 percent of residents, and in Almaden Valley in the southwest, which is around 41 percent Asian. Both areas are prized for strong schools and proximity to the technology campuses of northern San Jose and Santa Clara.
What was Heinlenville?
Heinlenville was San Jose’s last and largest historic Chinatown, built in 1887 to 1888 near Sixth and Jackson streets after the Market Street Chinatown was destroyed by arson. Named for John Heinlen, the rancher who leased land to the displaced Chinese, it held 4,000 people at its peak before being demolished in 1931.
How large is the Chinese community in San Jose?
Chinese Americans are the single largest Asian group in the San Jose metropolitan area, making up roughly 35 percent of an Asian population that is itself about 37 percent of the city. That makes the Chinese in San Jose one of the largest such communities in California.
Why are there so many Chinese tech professionals in San Jose?
After the 1965 Immigration Act reopened Asian immigration, engineers and graduate students from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and later mainland China came to Silicon Valley for Stanford, the semiconductor firms, and the software boom. Many stayed as founders and investors, and the community grew into the largest Asian group in the region.
Where can you buy Chinese groceries in San Jose?
The Taiwanese-founded 99 Ranch Market chain opened a large store at Westfield Oakridge mall on Blossom Hill Road in 2022, its first mall location, with a dim sum hall, tea bar, and bakery. Numerous Chinese and pan-Asian markets also serve the Evergreen and Berryessa neighbourhoods.
Is there still a Chinatown in San Jose?
Not as a living neighbourhood. All five of San Jose’s historic Chinatowns are gone, but the reconstructed Ng Shing Gung temple in History Park and Heinlenville Park in Japantown commemorate them, and the city issued a formal apology for its past discrimination in 2021.
If your family’s story passed through San Jose, or any of the places Chinese families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the orchards and Chinatowns of the Santa Clara Valley to the hillsides of Evergreen and Almaden, to wherever you are now.