Butte's Chinese Community, Its Historic Chinatown, and the Mai Wah Museum
Chinese immigrants were part of Montana from its earliest mining days. Chinese people began coming to Butte in 1868, with its first placer gold mines, and the census of 1870 counted almost 2,000 Chinese residents in Montana, ten percent of the territory's population. Many had come from Guangdong province in southern China, driven by famine and unrest, to dig for gold and help build railroads. In Butte, Chinese miners were gradually forced out of mining and settled at the edge of the growing city, where they built a community of their own.