ABSTRACT
San Francisco has the distinction of having the largest Chinatown in any non-Asian country and the oldest Chinatown in North America. It is one of San Francisco's main cultural attractions, and is generally full of tourists strolling along its two main thoroughfares, Grant Avenue and Stockton Street, window shopping and dining in one of the hundreds of Chinese restaurants that are scattered all through Chinatown. There are around 100,000 people living in Chinatown, an area of a little more than a square mile, making it the most densely populated section of the city. Many of the people who live there live below the poverty level, crowded into tiny rooms, so Chinatown can also be considered a slum. Chinatown started developing as an ethnic enclave around 1850 when Chinese immigrants, who had worked on the transcontinental railroads and participated in the Gold Rush, moved to San Francisco.
