ABSTRACT
For visitors to Melbourne in the 1880s, no tour of the city was complete without an excursion through Chinatown. Standard calling spots for the intrepid traveller included rooms where Chinamen and Caucasians puffed opium pipes. In similar vein, an earlier visitor had glimpsed in Chinatown ‘a more hideous spot’, than existed in any other ‘fair city’. The threat of uncontrolled migration seemed to be insignificant, especially after 1880 when Chinatown raised the greatest fear among Melburnians. Chinese arrivals in Melbourne appear as outsiders in nineteenth-century China as well as in land-boom Melbourne. Melbourne reacted to changes within Chinatown itself, rather than to the broader contours of international migration. By 1892 Chinatown had both expanded and at the same time grown more segregated. By the end of the 1880s the island of Chinatown had itself grown threefold and Chinese settled in a more exclusive cluster along Little Bourke Street.
