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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Browse lynching records by date, place, and event details.
Read article images, transcriptions, and source citations.
Open charts, maps, timelines, and comparative views.
Access structured data used across the archive.
Ask questions and trace evidence across records.
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Do you know of an incident of lethal anti-Chinese violence that belongs in the archive, or do you have a question, suggestion, correction, or comment about the website? Use the options below to submit evidence for review or send feedback.
Featured Record
Lynching of an Unnamed Chinese Man
1885-00-00California • Lynching
This entry records a lynching of an unnamed Chinese man somewhere in California in 1885. No linked newspaper report has yet been located, and the surviving source does not preserve a precise place, month, or narrative beyond an association with murder. For now, the case remains in the archive as a possible lynching pending further evidence. </br></br>The incident is recorded in Ken Gonzales-Day’s *<i>Lynching in the West: 1850–1935</i> (2006) and the Monroe & Florence Work Today inventory (see https://monroeworktoday.org/).
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