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
Ah He Died After Boys Stoned Him
1871-06-01San Francisco, California • Lynching
On the evening of May 31, 1871, Ah He, the proprietor of a small cigar factory at Fourth and Freelon Streets in San Francisco, was attacked by a gang of boys and struck with stones. <i>The San Francisco Call Bulletin</i> reported that one of the stones hit him with such force that it “knocked him down and rendered him insensible,” and that he died the next morning at the City and County Hospital. Other papers emphasized that bystanders watched without intervening. For example, <i>The Greenville Journal</i> said that “dozens of people” witnessed the assault and “did not interfere until the murder was completed.” Later reports noted that even when two boys were held to bail, Chinese testimony about the incident had been excluded.
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