About the Chinese Historical Society of America
The Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA) was conceived in the fall of 1962 and incorporated on January 5, 1963, by five San Francisco founders: Thomas W. Chinn, C.H. Kwock, Chingwah Lee, H.K. Wong, and Thomas W.S. Wu. At the time fewer than 250,000 people of Chinese descent lived in the United States, and the society set out to document a community whose role in building the American West had largely been left out of the written record. Today it describes itself as the oldest and largest archive and history center documenting the Chinese American experience, and it has published two long-running scholarly series, the CHSA Bulletin and the annual journal Chinese America: History and Perspectives.
Since November 2001 the society's museum and learning center has occupied the former Chinatown YWCA at 965 Clay Street, a 1932 building designed by architect Julia Morgan that incorporates Chinese design elements. The building was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and sold to CHSA in 1996; its restoration and seismic retrofit earned the National Trust for Historic Preservation's National Preservation Honor Award in 2004 and a California Heritage Council award in 2005.
Permanent galleries cover the people, places, and movements of Chinese American history, while rotating exhibits take on single subjects in depth. Recent and current shows include We Are Bruce Lee: Under the Sky, One Family (Lee was born in San Francisco Chinatown in 1940), an exhibit on the 1898 citizenship case of Wong Kim Ark, and Chinese Laundries in the U.S. Signature works on view include Jake Lee's twelve "Gum Shan" watercolors, originally commissioned for Johnny Kan's restaurant in 1959, James Leong's mural One Hundred Years' History of the Chinese in America, and Frank Wong's miniature dioramas of 1940s Chinatown life, Living in Chinatown: Memories in Miniature. CHSA also runs traveling pop-up exhibits at libraries, farmers markets, and community centers.
Collections and Research Services
The society's collection holds nearly 22,000 Chinese and Chinese American historical artifacts, organized into named holdings such as the Jake Lee Collection, the Daniel K.E. Ching Collection, the Kublai Khan Collection, and the Work of Giants Chinese Railroad Worker Project. A CHSA Collection Database is being built online. Be aware that, as of this writing, the society is investing more than $1,000,000 in overhauling its archive rooms and digitizing files and objects, and it has paused all research requests and in-person collection viewing until that modernization project is complete. It is also not accepting donations of personal artifacts. If you are tracing Chinese American ancestors, check the society's events calendar for genealogy programs (a recent example was a seminar on finding Taiwanese and Chinese roots) and see our guides to free family history research and finding old photographs of a neighborhood for alternatives while the archive is closed.
Planning Your Visit
The museum is at 965 Clay Street in San Francisco's Chinatown. Current public hours are Wednesdays and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; the museum is closed Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. Tickets are sold online, and the society offers an annual free admission day in late November marking Bruce Lee's birthday. Tours for schools and groups can be reserved in advance, and a gift shop stocks CHSA's own publications and work by local artists. Check chsa.org for admission prices, exhibit status, and accessibility details before you go, or call (415) 391-1188 x109. Elsewhere in California, the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California in Los Angeles covers the same story in the south of the state, and the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento interprets the transcontinental railroad that Chinese laborers built.
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