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
Anti-Chinese Riots Burned Chinese Property and Killed Residents
1877-07-23San Francisco, California • Expulsion
On July 23, 1877, anti-Chinese rioters in San Francisco attacked Chinese neighborhoods, looted wash-houses, and set buildings on fire. The <i>San Francisco Examiner</i> said hoodlum gangs committed “wanton and atrocious deeds of violence, incendiarism—if not also of murder,” and reported that “the bodies of two Chinamen were found” in one burned structure. The <i>San Francisco Chronicle</i> described a broader “reign of riot” in which more than twenty Chinese wash-houses were sacked and burned; contemporary reports differ on the death toll, but the violence clearly left Chinese residents dead, wounded, and dispossessed. The same article stated that an Anti-Coolie meeting was “held at half-past 8 o’clock in Hamilton Hall, where inflammatory speeches were delivered. Banners read “White Labor Must Rule,” and shouts of “Down with the Coolies!” followed.
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