Chinese Red Record
Documenting the history of anti-Chinese lynchings, riots, and massacres
in the American West (1850 – 1915)
What Is Chinese Red Record?
Chinese Red Record is a scholarly archive of anti-Chinese lynchings and related racial terror. It traces how lynchings, riots, massacres, expulsions, and exclusion worked together to drive Chinese communities from mining camps, railroad towns, river ports, and cities across the American West and beyond.
Drawing on a newly compiled dataset of documented lynchings, digitized newspaper archives, maps, and structured records, the archive reconstructs how violence spread across regions and how newspapers, law, and politics helped nationalize anti-Chinese racial terror.
The interactive maps, timelines, and charts presented here translate the dissertation's quantitative and spatial arguments into web form. Where possible, the visualizations correspond directly to the thesis, The Chinese Red Record: Western Lynch Law and the Nationalization of Racial Terror, 1853-1915.
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Featured Record
Anti-Chinese Rioters Killed Look Young
1880-10-31Denver, Colorado • Riot
On Halloween night in 1880, anti-Chinese rioters surged through Denver’s Chinese quarter, destroying laundries and homes, beating residents, and killing Look Young, a Chinese laundry worker. <i>St. Albans Daily Messenger</i> said Denver had been “in the hands of a mob for eight hours” and described 1,500 rioters attacking Chinese homes, while <i>St. Louis Post-Dispatch</i> reported that “one Chinaman was lynched.” The riot formed part of a larger anti-Chinese campaign of expulsion and terror fueled by labor conflict, racial politics, and calls to drive Chinese residents out of the city. Law enforcement tried to intervene but was unsuccessful. The mob operated openly, unafraid of prosecution.
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