Today, perhaps more than any other time in its nearly 150-year history, Hanford’s China Alley feels like it’s on the precipice of something. Should things go in the right direction, one of the country’s oldest and most notable Chinatowns could become a forever landmark and a bustling street that anchors a rejuvenated Central Valley corridor. 

But China Alley’s mere existence is fragile; its current condition is fatigued. Set foot onto the narrow street, and it takes but a few seconds to see that the place could be wiped from the face of the Earth with a single bad break: a fire, an earthquake, even a violent storm. Blight and lack of use have defined its existence the past few decades. And yet, China Alley remains and stands, perhaps as it always has, defiant, if not underestimated.

China Alley got its start in 1877, when the Southern Pacific Railway laid down a track between the growing Central Valley towns of Goshen and Coalinga. The tracks traversed a Chinese shepherd camp and this, in turn, became the origin of the town of Hanford.

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A historic photo of China Alley in Hanford, Calif.  

As quickly as stakes could be driven into the ground, Hanford became a focal point of travel and a main stopover through the valley. And while the city of Hanford grew up to eventually incorporate in 1891, its first epicenter also rose up in 1877: the neighborhood that housed the majority of the immigrant workers who built the railroads. 

Known for its historically buzzy main drag and referred to then, as today, as China Alley, it was a place where an entire ecosystem of families spun up grocery stores, housing, restaurants, herb shops, laundries, herbal doctors, gambling halls, a school and a Taoist temple. “It soon became known as a ‘city within a city’ with buildings lining both sides of the alley made from bricks formed and fired on site,” the China Alley Preservation Society’s website reads. 

China Alley is one of California’s original Chinatowns, many of which are gone. Starting in the late 1800s, a wave of anti-Chinese racism tore through the state. In 1886, an anti-Chinese convention was held in San Jose, with the mayor declaring Market Street, a main thoroughfare through that city’s Chinatown, a public nuisance. Soon after, arsonists burned Chinatown to the ground, displacing more than 1,400 people and incinerating hundreds of homes and businesses. 

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One of the many intact facades at China Alley in Hanford, Calif., pictured on Jan. 31, 2025. 

Sue Chung Kee, seated, and his son Y.T. Sue, standing, in Sue Chung Kee in Hanford, Calif., 1890.

During that era, a rash of similar ghoulish activities took hold up and down the state. In 1877, an anti-Chinese labor group killed six Chinese workers at Butte County’s Lemm Ranch and the next day, Chico’s Chinatown burned down. Redding’s Chinatown was also destroyed about a decade later. The Santa Ana Board of Trustees voted to burn down their Chinatown, and in May 1906, did just that. 

Even the Chinatowns that remained intact through the decades have faced difficulties. In 2022, Fresno lost Bow On Tong, one of the city’s oldest buildings in its Chinatown, to a fire. In San Luis Obispo,

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