Beginning Again: Tracing Chinese Migration to Cincinnati

The new year is often associated with beginnings: a fresh start, new journeys, and the courage to move forward. For Cincinnati’s earliest Chinese migrants, beginnings were rarely clean or easy. Their arrival in the city in 1873 was not the start of a story, but another chapter in a long migration shaped by displacement, labor, and survival.

Cincinnati Enquirer, May 26, 1873

Most early Chinese migrants did not arrive in Cincinnati directly from China. Many came by way of San Francisco, St Louis, Chicago, and New York, after crossing the midwestern plains in search of opportunity during the latter half of the nineteenth century. What they encountered instead was exploitation, racial violence, and exclusion. As economic conditions worsened and hostility intensified on the West Coast, many Chinese migrants looked east, hoping Midwestern cities might offer safer ground.

Cincinnati’s location along the Ohio River made it an attractive destination. By the spring of 1873, a small group of Chinese men opened the city’s first Chinese-owned laundry on West Sixth Street. Newspaper accounts identified them by name, though inconsistently, revealing how fragile their historical footprint would become. These discrepancies remind us how easily marginalized lives slip through the cracks of the archive.

The laundry was more than a business. It was a lifeline. Sociologist Paul C. P. Siu described laundries as spaces of survival for Chinese migrants; places where work, home, and community blurred together. In Cincinnati, these entrepreneurs lived where they worked, often sleeping in back rooms. Their days stretched ten to sixteen hours, leaving little time for social integration.

First Chinese Laundry, 60 West Sixth Street (Contemporary Art Center), 1868 Sanborn Map

This pattern contributed to what Siu called the “sojourner mentality,” a focus on economic survival rather than permanent settlement. But this was not a rejection of American society; it was a response to exclusion. When you are unwelcome, survival becomes the priority.

Despite isolation, these early migrants laid the groundwork for future Asian and Pacific Islander American communities in the city. Over time, Chinese-owned businesses expanded beyond laundries to restaurants and tea houses, clustering along downtown corridors. These spaces quietly reshaped Cincinnati’s urban landscape, even if the city failed to acknowledge them.

As we mark a new year, it is worth remembering that Cincinnati’s story is one of movement, people arriving, adapting, and contributing under difficult conditions. The Chinese migrants who came here in the nineteenth century were not footnotes. They were builders of possibility, even when the city did not yet see them that way.