While there are many Chinatowns across the United States and around the globe, San Francisco's Chinese community holds a special place as the oldest, largest, and most visually recognizable urban Chinese American enclave in the world. As more and more Chinese immigrants — mostly from Guangdong province in southern China — migrated to northern California in search of fortune and work, San Francisco's Chinatown served as their home away from home, a comfortingly familiar place in an alien and often hostile land.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinatown was a vibrant and resilient community. Everything that a Chinese person could possibly need or want was available within its dozen or so square blocks. Work, food, benevolent associations, entertainment, newspapers, education, and religious houses, for example, were all close at hand. The streets teemed with life as residents went about their daily business and outside visitors came to experience San Francisco's "Little Shanghai." Chinatown continued to thrive, despite the Chinese Exclusion Act, attempts by city leaders to relocate it after the earthquake of 1906, and even the demographic effects of a "bachelor society" created by an early dearth of Chinese women. To this day, Chinatown remains one of the treasures of San Francisco.