Ottawa’s Chinese Canadian story reaches back more than a century.
The city’s first Chinatown developed around Albert Street in the early twentieth century, where Chinese-owned restaurants, laundries, grocery stores and other small businesses created an important foothold for a growing community.
As downtown Ottawa changed in the decades that followed, the original Chinatown gradually disappeared. By the 1960s and 1970s, Chinese families and businesses were increasingly establishing themselves along Somerset Street West, laying the foundations of the Chinatown we know today.
New waves of immigration continued to reshape the neighbourhood. People arriving from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and other parts of Asia brought new languages, traditions, cuisines, businesses and experiences.
Over time, Chinatown became something distinctly Ottawa: a centre of Chinese Canadian community life and, at the same time, one of the city’s most diverse and multicultural neighbourhoods.