Chinatown, San Francisco

In the 1850s, Chinese pioneers, mainly from villages in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong, began immigrating in large numbers to San Francisco, initially drawn by the California Gold Rush and the building of the first transcontinental railroad, and settling in Chinatown for refuge from the hostilities in the West. The main dialect spoken in Chinatown then was Hoisan-wa (aka Hoisanese; Toisanese in Cantonese and Taishanese in Mandarin), native to the emigrants from Hoisan (aka Toisan in Cantonese and Taishan in Mandarin), Sze Yup, in the Pearl River Delta. Surviving the ravages of the 1880s, Chinatown became a haven for later waves of emigrants from China in the 20th century.

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