Boise Chinatown: Chinden, the Anti-Chinese Convention, and Who Built This City
Near Boise, Idaho
There's a street running along the northern edge of the Boise metro that most residents use without thinking about its name: Chinden Boulevard. The name is a compression of two words: Chinese garden. The gardens grew there because Chinese immigrants were pushed to the margins of the city and made their living farming land that Anglo settlers hadn't claimed.
Chinese immigrants began arriving in the Boise Basin after the eighteen sixty-two gold rush. Within a decade they made up a significant portion of Idaho's population, a federal count in eighteen seventy found that more than one in four people in the territory was Chinese. They mined claims that had been abandoned, operated laundries, restaurants, and herbal medicine shops, and built an entire commercial district in downtown Boise along Idaho Street and Front Street.
The hostility they faced was systematic and documented. In eighteen sixty-four, the Idaho Territorial Legislature levied a Foreign Miners Tax on Chinese residents, which historians put at somewhere between four and six dollars a month. Chinese people could not testify against white people in territorial courts. They could not become citizens under federal law.
The anti-Chinese convention held in Boise in February of eighteen eighty-six produced formal resolutions calling for the expulsion of Chinese residents from the territory. This context matters: the gardens on what is now Chinden Boulevard were not a choice of preference but a result of being excluded from the civic and economic life that Chinese labor helped create.
By nineteen ten, the Chinese population of Idaho had collapsed to under nine hundred people, from tens of thousands at the peak. Most had returned to China. Some had moved on. The community that built significant portions of Idaho's early economy left almost no institutional trace, the Chinatown was later demolished, and the boulevard name is the quietest possible acknowledgment of who once lived and worked on this ground.
Note: comprehensive records on individual Chinese residents from this period are sparse, lost, or were never kept by territorial authorities.
