Chinatown

Chinatown in the city of Vancouver, BC is Canada's largest Chinatown. It is centered on Pender Street. To the west it is surrounded by Gastown and the Downtown Financial and Central Business Districts, the remnant of old Japantown to the northeast, the Downtown Eastside to the north and to the east, and the residential district of Strathcona.

The official area of Chinatown has approximate street borders as designated by the City of Vancouver include the alley between Hastings and Pender Street, Gore, Taylor and Georgia Streets. Chinatown's unofficial boundaries extend well into the rest of the Downtown Eastside. Pender, Keefer and Main Commercial activities take place mostly on the streets.

Chinatown is among the largest in North America and remains a well-known tourist spot. It went into decline as newer members of the Cantonese Chinese community dispersed into other places of the Vancouver metropolis in the 1980s. As old traditional businesses flourish and new investments arrive, Chinatown is becoming a lot more prosperous. Now the neighborhood is thriving with numerous traditional restaurants, tea shops, clinics and open markets with other shops catering to tourists and the local community alike. Amongst the city's four Chinese daily papers, As does the TV studio OMNI British Columbia, one of Vancouver's four Chinese daily papers, the Sing Tao Daily remains in Chinatown.

In recent years, there has been new growth in Chinatown as the building boom downtown extended into the Expo Lands. Around the old Expo 86 site, new high-rise towers have sprung up. Twelve years after Expo in 1998, the International village was constructed within this site. It is situated beside the SkyTrain station Stadium-Chinatown. This village consists of many restaurants, a shopping mall along with a variety of Asian oriented shops and Cinemark Tinseltown. International Village mall comprises residents and businesses which are non-Chinese. It was constructed to be the downtown's answer to the Asian malls located in the Golden Village, although it is not as racially exclusive.