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.

Read the full thesis framing in About → Project & Thesis.

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Map showing location of Chicago, Illinois

Charles Sing Was Murdered in an Anti-Miscegenation Attack

1913-09-03

Chicago, Illinois • Lynching

On September 3, 1913, Charles Sing, a Chinese American restaurateur in Chicago, was fatally beaten and stabbed in his home, while his white wife, Alice Sing, was left unconscious with a fractured skull. <i>The Bamberg Herald</i> reported that police believed the couple “were attacked by white men living in the vicinity because of his marriage to an American woman.” The killing stands out in the archive as a northern lynching linked not to labor conflict or criminal accusation, but to hostility toward interracial marriage.

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