Hanford's China Alley: Surviving Exclusion

The buildings along China Alley in Hanford are among the best-preserved remnants of nineteenth-century Chinese American commercial life in inland California. They are standing partly because of the people who built them, and partly because Hanford was never large enough or prosperous enough to attract the urban renewal programs that demolished most California Chinatowns in the twentieth century. Neglect and survival can arrive through the same door.

Chinese workers began settling in the Hanford area in the eighteen eighties, after completing work on the Southern Pacific Railroad lines that had crossed the Central Valley. They established businesses, homes, and the commercial district along what became known as China Alley. In eighteen eighty-two, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, making new Chinese immigration to the United States illegal. The law would remain in effect for sixty-one years, until nineteen forty-three. The community in Hanford had been established before the law took effect, and it survived the exclusion era through that prior residency and through the commercial relationships its members had built with non-Chinese neighbors over a decade of business.

The L'Imperatrice restaurant is cited in some accounts as having operated in China Alley continuously since the eighteen eighties, which would make it one of the oldest operating Chinese restaurants in California. The restaurant, long known as the Imperial Dynasty, has since closed after decades in operation.

What the sources do confirm is that China Alley is California Historic Landmark number six hundred seventy-one, that its buildings represent a physical record of a community that was legally prohibited from growing after eighteen eighty-two but refused to disappear, and that it exists in a county seat, Hanford is the seat of Kings County, that is not on the main tourist circuit. That obscurity is part of why it survived. It is one of the few places in the Central Valley where you can stand inside the architectural record of Chinese American life in the exclusion era and read the walls as the document they are.