Advanced | Help | Encyclopedia   Alternative meanings: Chinatown
(disambiguation) The second-largest Chinatown in North America
is in San Francisco, California, where signs, storefronts,
proprietors, and even lamp posts bring the culture of China to
the United States.  A Chinatown is an urban region containing a
large population of Chinese people within a non-Chinese society.
Chinatowns are most common in Southeast Asia and North America,
but growing Chinatowns can be found in Europe and Australia.
Chinatowns were formed in the 19th century in many areas of the
United States and Canada as a result of discriminatory land laws
which forbade the sale of any land to Chinese or restricted the
land sales to a limited geographical area and which promoted the
segregation of people of different ethnicities. The location of
a Chinatown in a particular city may change or disappear over
time.  In the past, overcrowded Chinatowns in urban areas were
shunned by the general non-Chinese public as ethnic ghettoes,
and theref