There is a quiet street in San Marino where the lawns are clipped to within an inch of their lives, the homes set back behind mature oaks, and the only sound on a weekday morning is a gardener’s blower. It looks like the old California of railroad fortunes and country clubs. It is, in fact, one of the most thoroughly Chinese cities in America. The story of the Chinese in San Marino is a story of how the wealthiest corner of the San Gabriel Valley quietly changed hands, family by family, school catchment by school catchment, over four decades.
The Place
San Marino sits just south of Pasadena, a compact city of roughly 3.77 square miles and around 13,000 residents. It was incorporated in 1913, the oldest of the San Gabriel Valley’s incorporated cities, and built up around the lush estate of railroad magnate Henry Huntington.
It is, by almost any measure, rich. San Marino is the wealthiest city in the San Gabriel Valley, with a median home price that has long sat near or above 1.8 million dollars and household incomes many times those of poorer neighbours like El Monte.
The city is also almost defiantly residential. There are no big shopping streets, no strip of restaurants, barely any retail at all. What San Marino sells is space, schools and the borrowed prestige of the Huntington. For everything else, including most of its food, residents drive a few minutes north to Arcadia or south-west to San Gabriel.
How It Became Chinese
The old San Marino
For most of the twentieth century San Marino was a byword for conservative, white, old-money California. It was, for a time, the West Coast headquarters of the far-right John Birch Society, whose San Marino office did not close until 1989. This was not a place that imagined itself becoming an Asian-majority city.
And yet the change, when it came, was rapid. In the 1980s San Marino’s Asian population exploded. By 1986 the student body at San Marino High School was 36 percent Asian, up from 13.5 percent only five years earlier.
The Taiwanese wave
The first wave was overwhelmingly Taiwanese. It rode in on the broader transformation of the San Gabriel Valley, a transformation often traced to the realtor Frederic Hsieh, who in the 1970s began marketing nearby Monterey Park to Taiwanese and Hong Kong immigrants as a kind of Chinese Beverly Hills.
Monterey Park became the foothold. San Marino, a few miles north and far more expensive, became the aspiration. Families who had arrived with capital, or who had made money in the valley, moved up the hill to the city with the best schools. By 1990, 23.7 percent of San Marino’s households were Asian. A second Taiwanese wave pushed that figure to about 40 percent by 2000.
The mainland wave
The newer chapter is mainland Chinese. As wealth in the People’s Republic grew through the 2000s and 2010s, San Marino became a prized destination for affluent mainland families, many arriving through education or investor channels such as the EB-5 visa, which by the mid-2010s was dominated by Chinese applicants.
For some, the San Marino house was a primary home. For others it was a place to park capital, house a child at school, or hold as a foothold in America. Either way, the demand reshaped the local market. Today people of Asian descent, the great majority of them ethnic Chinese, make up a clear majority of San Marino’s residents.
The Landmarks
The Huntington, 1151 Oxford Road. The institution that gives San Marino its name in the wider world. Founded in 1919 on Henry Huntington’s estate, the library, art museum and botanical gardens sit on the eastern edge of the city and anchor its identity far more than any business district could.
Liu Fang Yuan, the Chinese Garden at the Huntington. Within the Huntington grounds lies Liu Fang Yuan, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance, one of the largest classical-style Chinese gardens outside China. Designed and built with artisans from Suzhou and completed in phases between 2004 and 2020, it grew from 3.5 acres to roughly 15, with a lake, pavilions, stone bridges and a tea house. For a Chinese-majority city, it is an almost uncanny mirror: a Ming-dynasty scholar’s garden, transplanted to the place its neighbours now call home.
Lacy Park, 1485 Virginia Road. Thirty-odd acres of open lawn, rose garden and walking loops at the centre of the city, opened in 1925 and named after a former mayor. On weekends it fills with multigenerational families, grandparents walking laps while children run on the grass, a scene that would look familiar in any well-off Chinese suburb.
El Molino Viejo, 1120 Old Mill Road. The Old Mill, a former grist mill built in 1816 by the fathers of Mission San Gabriel, is the oldest commercial building in Southern California and was among the first sites in Los Angeles County listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is a reminder that San Marino’s land has changed hands many times.
San Marino High School and the Michael White Adobe, 2701 Huntington Drive. The high school is the engine of the city’s reputation and the reason many Chinese families bought in. On its campus sits the Michael White Adobe, one of the area’s oldest structures. The student body has been majority Asian since the 1980s and is now overwhelmingly so.
The Mission Street dining district, San Gabriel. Because San Marino itself has almost no restaurants, the community’s real dining room sits just over the border. The Mission Street and Valley Boulevard corridors in San Gabriel and the restaurants of Arcadia, from dumpling houses to regional Chinese specialists, are where San Marino families actually eat, shop and gather.
Where They Came From
The Chinese of San Marino did not come from one place or arrive in one wave. The early movers were largely from Taiwan, often professionals and business owners who had first settled lower down the valley in Monterey Park, Alhambra or San Gabriel before moving up to San Marino’s larger lots and better schools.
Many had relatives or business ties that drew them on, the classic pattern of chain migration. One family’s success in San Marino became the next family’s reason to look there too.
The later arrivals came directly from mainland China, especially the prosperous coastal cities, and often skipped the intermediate steps entirely. For them San Marino was the destination from the start, chosen for its schools, its safety and its standing. The thread tying both groups together was rarely poverty and almost always education: the conviction that the right address bought the right classroom.
This is a very different diaspora from the one that built the older urban Chinatowns. To understand the contrast, it helps to look at the railroad-era settlement of Chinatown in San Francisco, or the postwar suburban breakthrough of the Chinese in Monterey Park, the city that first proved the San Gabriel Valley could become a Chinese heartland.
San Marino Today
Today San Marino is a Chinese-majority city that does not always look like one. There are no lantern-strung commercial streets, because there are barely any commercial streets at all. The Chinese character of the place lives in its homes, its school car parks, its Mandarin spoken at Lacy Park and the dual-language immersion programme in its public schools.
The San Marino Unified School District remains the central draw. It consistently ranks among California’s very best, with math and reading proficiency far above state averages, and its student body is now majority Asian. For many families, the school district is not a benefit of living in San Marino. It is the entire reason.
That demand has brought friction. The hottest local controversy of recent years has been mansionization, the tearing down of modest period homes to build much larger ones. Newer, often wealthier arrivals have been most associated with the trend, and the fights over it have exposed a gap between long-settled residents and recent buyers, sometimes within the same Chinese community.
It is a tension common to affluent immigrant suburbs across the region, from neighbouring Arcadia to the Taiwanese enclaves further south. The San Gabriel Valley’s transformation is not one event but a continuing negotiation over what these towns should look like and who gets to decide.
Still, the broad fact is settled. A city that once headquartered the John Birch Society is now home, school and garden to tens of thousands of Chinese Americans, and the Huntington’s Suzhou-style garden sits at its edge like a quiet confirmation of how completely the place has turned. For a sense of how varied the region’s Asian American suburbs can be, the very different story of the Japanese in Sawtelle on the city’s Westside makes a useful counterpoint.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is San Marino, California majority Chinese?
San Marino is majority Asian, and the great majority of its Asian residents are ethnic Chinese, including both Taiwanese Americans and more recent mainland Chinese arrivals. People of Asian descent make up a clear majority of the city’s roughly 13,000 residents.
Why did so many Chinese families move to San Marino?
The biggest single reason is the San Marino Unified School District, which ranks among the best in California. Families also valued the city’s safety, large lots and prestige. The first wave was largely Taiwanese, moving up from Monterey Park and other valley cities; later arrivals came directly from mainland China.
Is there a Chinatown or Chinese shopping district in San Marino?
No. San Marino is almost entirely residential and has very little retail or dining of any kind. The community’s restaurants and shops are in the adjacent cities of San Gabriel and Arcadia, especially along San Gabriel’s Mission Street and Valley Boulevard.
What is Liu Fang Yuan?
Liu Fang Yuan, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance, is the classical Chinese garden at the Huntington Library in San Marino. Built with artisans from Suzhou and completed in phases between 2004 and 2020, it covers about 15 acres and is one of the largest classical-style Chinese gardens outside China.
How did San Marino become an Asian-majority city?
It changed over roughly four decades. Asian enrolment at San Marino High School jumped from 13.5 percent in 1981 to 36 percent by 1986. Asian households rose from under 24 percent in 1990 to about 40 percent by 2000, first through Taiwanese immigration and later through mainland Chinese arrivals.
What is mansionization and why is it controversial in San Marino?
Mansionization is the demolition of smaller older homes to build much larger ones on the same lot. It has been the city’s leading local controversy because critics say it erodes neighbourhood character, and it has highlighted divisions between long-settled residents and newer, often recently arrived wealthy buyers.
If your family’s story passed through San Marino, or any of the places the Chinese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Taiwan or the coastal cities of China, to San Marino, to wherever you are now.
Further reading: the Huntington’s own history of Liu Fang Yuan and a profile of Frederic Hsieh, the realtor who reimagined the San Gabriel Valley.