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Within a year of California’s 1849 gold rush, Chinatown was established in San Francisco, with migrants flooding in hoping to make it rich. Better known in Cantonese as Gam Saan (‘Gold Mountain’), at first it wasn’t exclusively Chinese at all, but a bachelor community of Mexican, American, European, African American and Chinese miners who bunked, prospected and caroused side by side. Today, it houses the largest Chinese community outside Asia, and the oldest in the US – the 41 alleyways packed into the district’s 22 blocks have a lot of stories to tell.
PHOTOGRAPH: FRANK FELL/ROBERT HARDING. CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALISON BING, JOHN A VLAHIDES, SARA BENSON AND ASHLEY HARRELL