The shopping centre at Greenville Avenue and Terrace Drive in Richardson went up in the early 1960s as the Richardson Terrace Shopping Center, an ordinary suburban strip. In the middle of the 1980s a group of Chinese investors bought into it and began turning it into the commercial centre of Chinese Dallas. It now trades as DFW China Town, and statues of Guan Yu and Sun Tzu stand among others at the heart of it. Why it sits in a suburb rather than downtown has a documented answer. Dallas did have a Chinese urban enclave, around Fitzhugh and Ross in east Dallas, and for decades it was the first address for Chinese immigrants to the city. D Magazine reported in 1986 that two groups were behind the new Chinese Richardson: merchants leaving the crime around Fitzhugh and Ross, and many other Chinese drawn by the Richardson school district and by jobs at Texas Instruments and Rockwell International.
The streets the merchants left did not stay empty. Refugees from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand settled in the same part of east Dallas through the early 1980s, about four thousand of them, in a neighbourhood that came to be called Little Asia. The same few blocks had been the first address for two separate migrations.
Getting there
32.9529, -96.7278
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