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
Railroad Workers Hanged a Chinese Laborer near Tekoa
1889-02-00Tekoa, Washington • Lynching
A short notice in <i>The Daily Astorian</i> reported that a Chinese laborer seeking work on the railroad near Tekoa was “hanged to a limb” for defying the edict of white workers that “no Chinese need apply.” The sparse report links the killing directly to labor exclusion and racial animus. It shows how anti-Chinese labor violence in the Northwest could still culminate in lynching at the close of the 1880s.
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