for: List of Chinatowns

In the past, crowded Chinatowns in urban areas were seen as places of cultural insularity. Nowadays, many old and new Chinatowns are considered significant centers of commercialism and tourism. Some of them also serve, to varying degrees, as centers of multiculturalism.

Many Chinatowns are focused on commercial tourism, whereas others are actual living and working communities; some are a synthesis of both. Chinatowns also range from rundown ghettos to modern sites of recent development. In some, recent investments have revitalized run-down and blighted areas and turned them into centers of economic and social activity. In certain cases, this has led to gentrification and a reduction in the specifically Chinese character of the neighborhoods.

Some Chinatowns have a long history, such as the Chinatown in Nagasaki, Japan, or Yaowarat Road in Bangkok, both of which were founded by Chinese traders more than 200 years ago. Honolulu's Chinatown is the first Chinatown to be established outside Asia. Chinatown, San Francisco is the largest Chinatown to be established in the United States. Other cities in North America where Chinatowns were established in the mid-nineteenth century include almost every major settlement along the West Coast from San Diego to Victoria, BC and Vancouver, BC. By the second half of the nineteenth century, bustling Chinatowns were also established in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Detroit. The discovery of gold in Australia caused the establishment of relatively small Chinatowns in cities there, and similar migrations of Chinese resulted in tiny settlements termed "Chinatowns" being established in New Zealand and even South Africa. European Chinatowns, such as those in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, are for the most part smaller and more recent than North American Chinatowns. Other Chinatowns are newer, such as in Chinatown, Las Vegas in 1995, Dubai, and Santo Domingo and have received official recognition.

In the past, Chinatown has also been used to refer to the Chinese sections of

History of the earliest Chinatowns by region

Taishanese and Cantonese settled in the first North American (United States, Canada), Australian, and Latin American Chinatowns (Cuba, Mexico, Peru)Fact: date=May 2009. Most of them were brought as coolies to build the railroad, but many had come originally in pursuit of gold. As a group, the Cantonese are linguistically and ethnically distinct from other groups in China with migrants especially coming mostly from the Siyi and Sanyi regions (with various variations of spoken Cantonese) of GuangdongFact: date=May 2009; Cantonese remained the dominant language and heritage of many Chinatowns in Western countries until the 1970sFact: date=May 2009. Due to laws in some countries barring the importation of Chinese wives Fact: date=November 2007 (for fear of the perceived Yellow Peril), some Chinatowns emerged as bachelor's societies where males dominated and the male-to-female ratio population was generally skewed. In Latin America, many Cantonese-speaking migrants arrived as indentured labourers particularly in Peru (to work in the deadly guano fields) and Cuba (to labor in sugar plantations) giving those countries substantial ChinatownsFact: date=May 2009.