Drive east on Colima Road as the light fails, and the signage starts to read like a second alphabet. Hangul glows above tofu houses and bakeries, neon stacked storey on storey in the strip malls that line the boulevard. This is the eastern reach of Korean Los Angeles, the place where a community that began in a downtown enclave kept moving until it found the hills. The Koreans in Rowland Heights came late to a town already famous as Little Taipei, and they made a quieter, more domestic home alongside it.
The Place
Rowland Heights sits in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, an unincorporated stretch of Los Angeles County tucked below the Puente Hills. It covers roughly thirteen square miles, bordered by Hacienda Heights, Diamond Bar, La Habra Heights and the City of Industry. The southern end climbs into green, rolling hills crowded with large hillside houses; the northern flatland holds the commerce.
That commerce runs along Colima Road and Nogales Street, an Asian shopping district of upscale strip malls, supermarkets and restaurants that draws people from across the region. The town never incorporated as a city, so it has no mayor and no city hall, only county services and a population that has hovered around 48,000 in recent counts.
How It Became Korean
The land carries an old American name. The area takes its title from John A. Rowland, who in 1842 received the Mexican land grant Rancho La Puente, some 18,000 acres that Governor Pio Pico later expanded to nearly 49,000, adding William Workman as co-owner. In 1868 the two men divided the rancho, and Rowland took the northern, southern and eastern sections that became most of Rowland Heights.
For more than a century it was orange groves and ranch land. Then the eastward sprawl from Los Angeles reached the Puente Hills, and the groves gave way first to working-class subdivisions and then, in the 1980s, to something nobody had planned.
Little Taipei comes first
Until the mid-1980s, Rowland Heights was predominantly Anglo and Latino. The change began with Taiwanese money. Wealthy immigrants from Taiwan, anxious about the island’s political future and drawn to American schools, bought up the new hillside houses and opened the first wave of restaurants and shops along Colima.
By the late 1980s the town had earned a nickname: Little Taipei, a centre for the Chinese and Taiwanese community of Rowland Heights whose markets and restaurants still define the corridor. The 99 Ranch Market that opened near Gale Avenue and Nogales Street was billed as the chain’s largest, an anchor for a commercial corridor that grew dense with Chinese and Taiwanese business. The Koreans arrived into a landscape someone else had already shaped.
The long move east from Koreatown
Korean Los Angeles had a centre, and it was not here. It was Koreatown, the dense mid-city district where the post-1965 wave of Korean immigrants opened their first churches, markets and businesses. From the 1970s onward that community grew around the heart of Korean Koreatown in Los Angeles, and from the 1990s onward it began, like every immigrant generation before it, to suburbanise.
The catalyst many remember is 1992. The unrest that followed the Rodney King verdict fell hardest on Korean-owned shops in and around Koreatown, and the experience pushed many families to look for somewhere quieter to raise children. They scattered outward: to the San Fernando Valley, to Orange County, to the Inland Empire, and to the eastern San Gabriel Valley. Some landed in the gridded streets of the Korean community in Cerritos to the southwest; others followed the freeways east toward the hills.
Rowland Heights and neighbouring Diamond Bar offered what the suburbs always offer: newer houses, good public schools and space. The same logic drew Korean families to the Korean community in Diamond Bar, just up the freeway, and further west to the Koreans of La Crescenta in the foothills. Korean families who had built up businesses in Koreatown could keep the shop in the city and buy the home in the hills. The commute east on the 60 freeway became a familiar ritual.
What they found in Rowland Heights was a town already wired for Asian immigrant life. The supermarkets were here, the bakeries, the late-opening restaurants, the strip-mall economy that did not require fluent English. A Korean family could slot into that infrastructure and add to it, opening a tofu house beside the Taiwanese teahouse, a Korean bakery two doors from the boba shop.
A community in the margins of another
The Korean presence in Rowland Heights has always been the smaller story beside the Chinese and Taiwanese one. The census does not break Rowland Heights into Korean figures, but the broad Asian share is overwhelming: at the 2020 count, 29,583 residents, just over 61 percent of the town, were Asian and non-Hispanic, against 28 percent Hispanic and barely 7 percent non-Hispanic White.
Within that Asian majority, Koreans formed a distinct strand, visible in the Hangul signage and the cluster of Korean churches more than in any single dominant block. They did not need their own Koreatown here. They had the real one a half-hour west, and they had this town’s shared Asian commercial spine to lean on.
The Landmarks
Galleria Market, 18317 Colima Road. A Korean supermarket on the main commercial strip, the kind of full-service market that signals a community has settled in for good. Banchan counters, hot prepared food, kimchi by the tub and aisles of Korean groceries make it a weekend anchor for families across the eastern valley.
Tofu Bean Korean BBQ, 18409 Colima Road. A few doors along the same boulevard, a Korean barbecue and soft-tofu restaurant that sits squarely in the Colima Road dining row. It is the sort of place where the soondubu arrives still bubbling and the table fills with banchan before the order is finished.
BCD Tofu House, 1731 Fullerton Road. An outpost of the well-known Korean chain built around sundubu jjigae, the spicy soft-tofu stew, just off Fullerton Road. Its presence in Rowland Heights is a small marker of how far the chain’s reach, and the community’s, has spread from central Koreatown.
St. Gabriel Korean Catholic Center, 2035 Otterbein Avenue. A Korean Catholic centre offering Korean-language Mass through the week, set on a residential street away from the commercial bustle. For Korean Catholic families in the eastern valley it is a parish home, conducting its sacraments and community life in the mother tongue.
Rowland Heights Korean Baptist Church, 1717 Otterbein Avenue. One of the town’s Korean Protestant congregations, the church anchors a faith life that for many first-generation immigrants is the centre of their week. Korean churches across Southern California have long doubled as social institutions, and the ones here are no exception.
Korean Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church, Rowland Heights. A Presbyterian congregation in the Korean tradition, part of the dense network of Korean Protestant churches that fans out from Koreatown into every suburb the community has reached. Presbyterianism is the dominant strand of Korean American Christianity, and its presence here marks an established population.
99 Ranch Market, near Gale Avenue and Nogales Street. Not a Korean institution but the keystone of the whole Asian commercial district, the pan-Asian supermarket that opened the corridor Koreans later joined. Its arrival signalled that Rowland Heights had become a destination, and the Korean businesses grew up in its orbit.
Where They Came From
The Koreans of Rowland Heights are, overwhelmingly, a community that came twice: once from South Korea to Los Angeles, and again from Los Angeles out to the hills. The first journey followed the 1965 reform of American immigration law, which reopened the door to Asian arrivals and brought a generation of Koreans to the United States in the decades that followed.
Many of those families settled first in Koreatown, building businesses and raising children in mid-city Los Angeles. The second journey, the one that brought them to the San Gabriel Valley, was the classic American story of immigrant success translated into suburban property: a better school district, a newer house, a quieter street.
That second move accelerated through the 1990s, with the 1992 unrest as a hard punctuation mark. By then Rowland Heights was no longer a frontier but a place with Asian markets already in business, which made it an easy landing for Korean families ready to leave the city behind.
Rowland Heights Today
Rowland Heights remains, first and foremost, a Chinese and Taiwanese town. The Korean community is real and visible but it is a thread within a larger weave, present in the supermarkets and tofu houses and churches rather than dominating any single stretch the way Korean business dominates Koreatown or the way Taiwanese capital once defined Little Taipei.
The town serves the wider region. Korean families from across the eastern valley and the Inland Empire drive in for the markets and restaurants, treating Colima Road as a shared pantry and dining room. The students fill John A. Rowland and Nogales high schools, part of a Rowland Unified School District that has long catered to an immigrant-heavy population.
What endures is the pattern these families set: keep faith with the church on Otterbein Avenue, buy groceries on Colima Road, send the children to the local schools, and live in the hills above a town that an earlier wave of immigrants built. The Koreans here did not need to found a neighbourhood. They joined one, and made it partly their own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there many Koreans in Rowland Heights, California?
Yes, though they are part of a much larger Asian majority. At the 2020 census, more than 61 percent of Rowland Heights residents were Asian, and Koreans form a distinct strand within that group, visible in the town’s Korean supermarkets, restaurants and churches.
Why did Koreans move to Rowland Heights?
Korean families moved east from Los Angeles, especially from Koreatown, seeking newer homes, good public schools and quieter suburban life. The 1992 Los Angeles unrest accelerated this suburbanisation, and Rowland Heights already had Asian markets and infrastructure that made it an easy place to settle.
Is Rowland Heights a Korean or a Chinese neighbourhood?
It is primarily Chinese and Taiwanese, having been nicknamed Little Taipei in the 1980s and 1990s. The Korean community is a smaller, distinct presence alongside it rather than the dominant group, which is why the Koreans in Rowland Heights are often described as sharing the town’s Asian commercial corridor.
Where do Koreans shop and eat in Rowland Heights?
The main Korean commercial strip runs along Colima Road. Galleria Market at 18317 Colima Road is a Korean supermarket, and restaurants such as Tofu Bean Korean BBQ at 18409 Colima Road and BCD Tofu House on Fullerton Road serve Korean barbecue and soft-tofu stew.
What Korean churches are in Rowland Heights?
The town has several, including St. Gabriel Korean Catholic Center on Otterbein Avenue, Rowland Heights Korean Baptist Church, and Korean Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church. These congregations conduct worship in Korean and serve as social as well as religious centres for the community.
How is Rowland Heights connected to Koreatown in Los Angeles?
Rowland Heights is one of the suburban destinations Korean families reached as they moved outward from Koreatown beginning in the 1990s. Many kept businesses in the city while buying homes in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, making the town part of Korean Los Angeles’s wider geography.
If your family’s story passed through Rowland Heights, or any of the places Koreans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Koreatown’s mid-city blocks to the strip malls and hillside houses of the eastern San Gabriel Valley, to wherever you are now.