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
A White Mob Massacred at Least 18 Chinese Residents
1871-10-24Los Angeles, California • Mass lynching
On October 24, 1871, a white mob in Los Angeles attacked the Chinese quarter, looted businesses, and killed at least 18 Chinese residents in one of the deadliest anti-Chinese massacres in United States history. Early telegrams reprinted in <i>The Deseret News</i> announced that “fifteen Chinamen have been hung,” while later reports in the <i>Chicago Tribune</i> described victims stripped, robbed, shot, and hanged amid “wholesale pillaging” of Chinese homes and stores. Trial testimony published in the <i>Los Angeles Daily News</i> showed how prisoners were dragged from custody and hanged as armed crowds surged through Negro Alley and the Coronel building. The violence left the Chinese community dead, wounded, dispossessed, and terrorized.
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