Denver's Historic Chinatown

The tour below highlights and provides detailed information about seven important sites from Denver's Historic Chinatown. In addition, the tour includes locations and descriptions of installations of historical markers and murals sponsored by Colorado Asian Pacific United (CAPU) to commemorate and revitalize Denver's Historic Chinatown and to support the celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander cultures in general across Colorado. These installations represent CAPU's vision for the future of the area that was once Denver's Chinatown.

The future sites listed in this map represent CAPU's preferred design and location for each proposed art installation. If you have ideas for other sites or designs for installations to commemorate and revitalize Denver's Historic Chinatown, please reach out to CAPU's Steering Committee directly at contact@coloradoasianpacificunited.org.

Hover over each location listed below to highlight them on the map. All commemorative and revitalizing art installations are indicated by stating "Installation" in the location's title. Click any location on the map or list on the left to view specific information about that location. After clicking on a site, continue scrolling to automatically move to the next location in the tour. Zoom in and out of the current map view by using the plus and minus symbols or by using your fingers on mobile and touchscreen devices. After clicking a location, hit the "X" at the bottom of the screen to return to the tour overview map. Those viewing the tour on mobile devices are encouraged to activate the "find my location" icon on the map and take a walking tour of each of the tour points in Downtown Denver.

If you are interested learning more about CAPU's current efforts to commemorate and revitalize Denver's Historic Chinatown,  click here .

For every town, there is a cemetery, and for every Chinatown there was a Chinese cemetery. Originally, Cheesman Park, then known as Prospect Hill, was the main burial grounds for the city of Denver. First sited in 1859, this park was the burial ground for many of the early Asian pioneers in Denver. During the early and mid-1870s, when Denver needed labor to support its growth, the city actively encouraged the labor force of Asians to come here to aid in putting Denver “on the map”.

In this cooperative stance, the city consulted the Asian community concerning where to relocate the shrinking, overused, and obsolete cemetery at Prospect Hill. Their solution was a place we now know as Riverside Cemetery. Riverside boasts many historical figures, both Asian and European, but it also has features of other Chinese burial grounds. The most striking of these features is a creek dug by the early Asian pioneers that forms the northern border of the Cemetery. This Creek was dug to facilitate the flow of “Qi” into the area.

Early maps show that there was a gate opening to this flow of water that would allow the vital force to flow into the cemetery and reach the necessary graves and prayer sites.

One site that lies right where the gate opens to the water flow is labeled as Chinese Row in the cemetery history maps. This section houses famous names from Denver’s old Wazee Row, namely Quong Wah (who is labeled as “Chief”) and his son, who owned a store on the alley between Wazee and Blake, likely starting in the late 1860s.

The current state of this cemetery has wholly forgotten its history, and the creek has been filled and a gate separates Chinese Row from the main cemetery. But even with these brutal changes to the landscape, the cemetery still stands as symbol for the Asian pioneers that gave their blood, sweat, and tears to help build Denver into what it is today.

Wazee is a Chinese name. So says the footnote in Gerald Rudolph’s doctoral thesis “The Chinese in Colorado” on page 91. The street Wazee was named at the founding of Denver in 1858 by William McGaa. If Wazee is in fact a Chinese name then the Chinese had to be present at the founding of Denver. Although the first record of a Chinese person in Denver is generally agreed to be a Denver Tribune newspaper article written in 1869 in which a “John Chinaman” arrives by himself, Chinese miners being here in 1858 is not out of the question and there is evidence of their presence at that time.

Rose Hum Lee states that in 1858, a group of Chinese dug a waterway from a river to the Carson City mines in Nevada, showing they were engaged in labor between here and California. In her book Denver’s Chinatown: Gone but not Forgotten Jinyi Song acknowledges that Chinese miners were among the many that flocked to the Pikes Peak area by the discovery of gold but also points out the 1869 Denver Tribune article.

Like Rose Hum Lee, she writes that Chinese miners were in Idaho and Montana for their gold rushes in the 1860s. With the Chinese being active in mining in areas other than California and as far as Montana so early, it lends credibility that they would have been active in the Pikes Peak Gold Rush as well. Physical evidence starts with Gerald Rudolph’s statement that “few people know” that the Chinese were the ones to clear the creeks and rivers of their gold in the area that would become Denver.

It continues in a sketch from Frank Leslie’s illustrated paper of August 1859 in which a figure is shown to be carrying two single-bladed mining picks that were known to be solely used by the Chinese. But one person who was an eyewitness to a group of Chinese miners wrote about them in his diary. His name was Libius Barney and on June 1st of 1859, he wrote that he came across 15 old miners from California who “spent three weeks’ time sinking a canal, or perhaps more properly, a ditch” for the purpose of placer mining and sharing in the gross proceeds which were from five to fifteen dollars per day. The fact that they were from California, working as a group, and were pulling the most profit from a claim indicates that these were Chinese miners, but the fact that they dug a canal is the most telling mark. As mentioned, they were on record doing this in Nevada on a bigger scale, which was a hallmark of their mining technique. This process was employed for mining, but the Chinese were known to be hired as laborers for digging ditches in the U.S. and New Spain, which later became Mexico.

There is even an 1883 business card from the Sung Quong Wo Chinese goods company that advertises digging ditches as Chinese labor. This identification by mining technique and general labor is important because early Chinese communities would often be named according to the work the first settlers engaged in and Wazee (挖溪) translates into “Dug Creek.” Dug Creeks are what artificial canals were called before they were named. Some were never named and remained called “Dug Creek.” Town makers knew this and William McGaa knew this as well. It was a perfect name to represent the early Chinese pioneers, and to make sure that the street's name properly reflected the people it was named after, he named it the way it was pronounced in their language.

Evidence is starting to come to light as well that Chinese were present in early Denver who had emigrated from New Spain/Mexico, but with current findings, it can already be shown that the Chinese roots of Denver run deep.

The late Denver historian Dennis Martinez states that the community center in Denver’s old Chinatown was a landmark and testified to the early Asian presence in Denver. While the building has many beautiful spiritual features, the most pronounced was the swept roof that stretched the entire eastern portion winding its way from the back of the temple facing 15th street to the unobservable front facing Cherry Creek.

This swept roof represented the Azure Dragon of the East, and it was common for early Asian community centers to have a swept roof on the east side representing this important stellar deity. The Azure Dragon is one of the four symbols of the Chinese star map, along with the Red Phoenix of the South, the White Tiger of the West, and the Black Tortoise of the North, and incorporating these cosmic symbols into the architecture brought one closer to the heavens as the building below reflected that which is above.

However, this building’s roof goes a bit further with its symbolism, as can be seen in the only known photograph of this architectural feature. Instead of ending with an upwards slope like most Asian swept roofs, this roof continues to sweep up and over, forming a “frill” or wing along the entire stretch from the viewable back to the hidden front side. The feature deepens the symbolism of this roof. While the Azure Dragon was occasionally described as “winged,” it was rarely pictured that way, and the roofs representing this deity don’t bother focusing on this obscure aspect.

According to history buff Martinez, Denver’s did because it incorporated the symbolism of another dragon, which was always described as having wings and always depicted with them: the Ying Long, or “Responsive Dragon.” This dragon would have been very important to the early Asian pioneers of Denver as, in the legend, this dragon could control flood and drought, two things that people in Denver worried about – and still do.

This characteristic would have made this dragon a genius loci or local deity. Every Asian community had a local deity that represented specific aspects of the local environment or a deity that represented a larger identity of the local community. With this dragon having the ability to control flood and drought, it would have been natural for the early Asian community to adopt this deity as a local one and to represent this dragon in their community center, combining it with the symbolism of the Azure Dragon of the East.

There is an even deeper meaning to this choice of the Ying Long as a local deity in combination with the Azure Dragon, which draws an even more direct connection with the early Asian community in Denver. In the “Songs of the Chu,” circa first century B.C., it was written: “Where should the Dragon be drawn? What is the history of the river and sea?” In the second century A.D., Wang Yi states, “When (King) Yu controlled the flood, there was a dragon with a tail to draw the ground.” In the fourth century A.D., this story grew to incorporate the Azure Dragon of the East and Black Tortoise of the North as the Shiyiji, or Researchers into Lost Records, describes the Ying long as dragging its tail to channel water. At the same time, the Great Black tortoise followed with the mortar to construct the structure of the channels, turning the earthen channels into structured canals. These legends tie the Ying Long and Azure Dragon together, and the importance of this combination would not have been lost to the early Asian pioneers of Denver as they were the ones to “dig creeks” figuratively (for gold) and literally (for irrigation).

The name “Wazee” literally translates to “dug creek,” which is precisely what the Ying long did in legends and why the early Asian community would have respected and revered this deity and wanted its symbolism incorporated into their community center.

Over one hundred years after the community center roof was torn from the structure, other winged dragons appeared on Wazee Street in the form of streetlamps that dotted the front of the “Elephant Corral” business offices. Dragons on light posts in Chinatowns across the nation are a common sight, but sadly these light posts have since been taken down. Whether they were purposely placed, or it was the result of serendipity, they were a sight to behold and a reminder that the winged dragon, controller of flood and drought, the digger of creeks, was, and always will be, the embodiment of the spirit of Denver’s Chinatown.