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
Chinese Laundryman Was Killed After Refusing to Leave Camp
1896-06-01Quigley, Montana • Lynching
In June 1896, white miners in Quigley targeted a Chinese laundryman who refused repeated demands to leave camp. Newspapers variously called him Big Hank, Sam Hing, Hing Ah, or “Yank,” and differed on the exact manner of death: some said masked men beat him with clubs, others that he was shot after an attempted arson attack on his cabin. The <i>Princeton Union</i> was particularly graphic in its report: the victim’s “head [was] beaten to a jelly with clubs” by the mob. But all reports linked the killing to efforts to drive him and any future Chinese arrivals out of Quigley. The murder formed part of a purge-era campaign to eliminate Chinese labor and business from the mining camp.
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