Linda Lung put the call out to her parents, cousins, aunts, uncles. It was time to finally go into their closets, basements and attics to dig out those old photos, dresses, shoes, coins, lottery tickets, restaurant menus, tea sets and other items from their family’s history of living and working in Denver’s former Chinatown, going back more than 100 years.

“We’re such hoarders,” says Lung, her family’s official unofficial historian. “My dad had a lot of it. My grandfather, Charlie Lung, ran the Chinese lottery. He would take his sons out on their bikes, collect money and distribute tickets.”

Like other Chinese-American families in Denver and across the country, the Lung family had learned over time to keep their histories to themselves. Myths and stereotypes around immigrants, illegal gambling, gangs, drug dens or sex work might have been enough to shame them into silence. On top of all that, Denver’s record of racist, xenophobic, anti-Asian violence goes back to the late 19th century. Best to keep all that history a secret.

As a result, the fact that Denver once had a Chinatown at all is still a surprise to many residents, including more recent Asian immigrants to the area.

“My great grandmother, Ahmoy Lung, was actually won in a gambling bet when she was 14 years old in Auburn, Oregon,” Lung says. “Her husband Sam Lung was 35 years old. Those were the kind of stories. She would always say times were different back then. So they really weren’t very open to talking about some of their stories, but that’s our family’s history, you know, the good, bad and the ugly.”

Ahmoy Lung eventually acquired a building at 2019 Market Street in Denver’s Chinatown, in which she ran a store, lived with her family and rented out rooms to boarders.

“We have to accept that that is the history of our family,” Lung says. “And from the meager background of her being won as a gambling bet, our family became very successful.”

For the past year, that history has been on display at the downtown Denver’s History Colorado Center. The exhibit, “Where is Denver’s Chinatown? Stories Remembered, Reclaimed, Reimagined,” features photos and items on loan from the Lung family and others who were prominent business owners and community leaders in Denver’s former Chinatown, which once took up a large portion of what is now Denver’s LoDo area.

If you’re in or around Denver this weekend, this is your last chance to visit: Sept. 1 is the exhibit’s last day.

The exhibit was curated and designed in partnership with University of Colorado Denver’s College of Architecture and Planning and the community organizers at Colorado Asian Pacific United. The curators hope it will help lead to more permanent changes — namely, establishing the first museum in the Rocky Mountain region to celebrate its Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander history and culture, as well as a shift in thinking about the importance of sharing histories that have long been buried in basements and closets.

“People are starting to bring forward more items and stories because they are seeing how our story is exhibited, that it’s not in a way that is degrading, that it’s about telling a story and keeping that dialogue going so when something comes up like COVID-19, we’re not going to go do the same thing,” Lung says. “We need to understand that. We need to make sure that people understand the history and everything and then we won’t become a target anymore.”

Grappling with a city’s past

In late March, more than 100 urban planners from across the country gathered at the entry to an alleyway off of Denver’s 16th Street, between Wazee and Blake Streets, for a tour of the city’s lost Chinatown, led by Colorado Asian Pacific United’s executive director Joie Ha.

As Ha told the group of planners (who were all in town for the American Planning Association’s national conference), the first recorded mention of a Chinese immigrant residing in Denver was a newspaper article in 1869. While his real name still isn’t known, the timing of his mention makes historical sense. Migrant laborers from China were a significant part of the workforce that built the first transcontinental railroad in the U.S., which was completed that same year. Some of those workers were drawn to Denver by the city’s growing mining industry.

But they weren’t always welcomed, Ha told the group. In a story that is repeating itself today, white leaders blamed non-white immigrants for stealing people’s jobs. Chinese migrants, who were predominantly men, faced discrimination that pushed them into jobs considered “feminine,” like laundromats and restaurants. These establishments began clustering between 14th Street and 21st Street along Wazee, Blake and Market Streets in what is now Denver’s LoDo district.

Between 1870 and 1880, Denver went from four Chinese residents in a city of 4,759 to 238 Chinatown residents in a city of 36,000.

On Oct. 31, 1880, Denver saw its first race riot. It started after several intoxicated white men picked a fight with two Chinese men at a pool hall located at what is now 1620 Wazee Street — the second stop on Ha’s tour. The brawl spilled out onto the street. After word spread around the city, at least 3,000 white rioters descended upon Chinatown, busting up buildings and assaulting residents. They caused an estimated $1.2 million in property damage, adjusted for inflation.

The race rioters went as far as beating and lynching Look Young, a laundromat worker who had nothing to do with the original brawl. He was only 28 years old at his time of death. While four white men were later arrested and brought to trial for the killing, with multiple eyewitnesses testifying to their brutality, the jury found them all innocent. The race riot contributed to the political momentum behind the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first significant law restricting immigration into the U.S.

But it didn’t stop Chinese migrants from moving to Denver. At its peak in the 1890s, Denver’s Chinatown was home to over a thousand residents of Chinese descent, out of 1,400 total across all of Colorado. Lung’s family wouldn’t arrive in Denver until the early 20th century, fleeing anti-Chinese sentiment further west.

The approximate location of Look Young’s lynching was the third stop on Ha’s tour. Today it’s the site of a fire station that features a mural celebrating Denver’s Chinese and Asian heritage, by local Denver artist Nalye Lor, who is of Hmong descent. The mural features silhouettes of railroad workers and laundry workers, along with a railroad track turning into a lo-mein noodle, representing hope and longevity. On the left hand side is a Chinese proverb. Written in Chinese characters, it translates to “Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid of stopping.”

The mural was completed in 2023 as part of Colorado Asian Pacific United’s growing body of work intended to surface and share Denver’s Chinese, Asian and Pacific Islander heritage. All three stops of Ha’s Chinatown tour featured a historical marker, erected by the group, sharing some of the history of Denver’s lost Chinatown.

Colorado Asian Pacific United previously advocated for the removal of another historical plaque that misleadingly labeled the race riot as the “Hop Alley/Chinese Riot of 1880,” and inaccurately implied the Chinese residents instigated it. For many years the errant plaque was the only visible hint of Denver’s former Chinatown.

The city took it down in 2022 — nearly 30 years since it was first installed, and four months after then-Mayor Michael Hancock issued a formal apology for the city’s role in allowing the 1880 race riot and failing to convict any of Look Young’s killers.

At the ceremony for the city’s apology, Mayor Hancock presented a coin and a signed copy of the apology to Lung. Both have been on loan to History Colorado as part of the “Where Is Denver’s Chinatown?” exhibit. The Lung and Chin families worked closely with Colorado Asian Pacific United and History Colorado for roughly a year to find and curate photos and historical items for the exhibit from the families’ basements, closets and attics.

“We work with [the Lung and Chin families] on everything,” Ha says. “We’re really proud to say a lot of our work is done in community. We understand how professionals have come into our communities and extracted our stories and not given back, and so we’re really cognizant of doing our work together.”

The road ahead

The “Where is Denver’s Chinatown?” exhibit has been a test run for Colorado Asian Pacific United’s vision of establishing a permanent museum celebrating the region’s Asian American, Pacific Islander and Native Hawaiian communities and heritage.

In addition to participating in the curation of photos and items for the exhibit, the families were also part of the design process, led by Molly Rose Merkert, a recent graduate of the CU Denver College of Architecture and Planning.

Merkert, who is Chinese American, moved to Colorado from Los Angeles at 11 years old. It came as a shock to her that Denver didn’t have a Chinatown.

“It really made me feel a bit like an outsider for many, many years until I discovered that there had been a Chinatown,” Merkert says. “Now all this work to bring back the memory of Chinatown makes me feel more at home here.”

The exhibit space isn’t very large, just a single small gallery on the first floor of the central atrium at the History Colorado Center. As part of the exhibit, Merkert created a small, scale model of the heart of Denver’s former Chinatown as it existed in 1887, using the famous fire insurance maps from the Sanborn Company as a guide.

Originally, organizers considered making the exhibit space feel like a restaurant back-of-house on one side and a living space on the other, to replicate the actual historic living and working situation for many residents of Denver’s former Chinatown. But that idea ultimately didn’t work out for physical accessibility reasons, given the desire to make the space welcoming to those with varying accessibility needs around the region, especially Chinese American elders.

Even the location of the exhibit has been part of the learning journey for Ha and Colorado Asian Pacific United. Would downtown Denver make sense as a location for the permanent museum they envision?

Several bus lines stop at the museum’s front door, but they don’t connect easily to where Denver’s Asian American and Pacific Islander communities now live — scattered across the region, with concentrations in suburbs like Aurora. Located downtown, the state-run History Colorado Center doesn’t have any dedicated or free parking, only metered street parking, a paid parking garage tied to an arts facility across the street and other paid parking lots nearby.

While it would be a powerful symbol to locate a permanent museum dedicated to Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities within the bounds of Denver’s former Chinatown, parking downtown remains a concern for a core audience still largely expected to drive to such a museum. It may also be cheaper to acquire space for a museum, with dedicated and free parking, in a less central location.

Still, the “Where Is Denver’s Chinatown?” exhibit also includes a scale model of such a museum envisioned within the footprint of where Denver’s Chinatown once was.

But now there’s also increasing concerns about overall funding for museums of any kind, especially new museums focused on non-white racial or ethnic groups. In March, the Trump administration issued an executive order targeting the federally-funded Smithsonian Institution for exhibits and activities that featured the country’s history of slavery and racial discrimination. In the same month, the administration also gutted the federal Institute for Museum and Library Services. Ha was planning to submit an application for funding from the agency to advance her group’s vision for a permanent museum.

“As the priorities shift from the federal level on what we consider to be history, what we consider to be culture, arts and knowledge, that absolutely impacts what we’re able to do and what appetite and interest and resources are available for it,” Ha says.

“Talking about our histories was just trendy for some folks. I think there’s even more of a threat nowadays for our history to be erased.”

This post was originally published on Next City.