Toronto Guide
Toronto
Chinatown
Toronto's Chinatown is a bustling and immensely appealing neighbourhood cluttered with shops, restaurants and street stalls selling any and every type of Asian delicacy. The boundaries of Chinatown are somewhat blurred, but its focus, since the 1960s, when the original Chinatown was demolished to make way for the new City Hall, has been Dundas Street W between Bay and Spadina. The first Chinese to migrate to Canada arrived in the mid-nineteenth century to work in British Columbia's gold fields. Subsequently, a portion of this population migrated east, and a sizeable Chinese community sprang up in Toronto in the early twentieth century. Several more waves of migration – the last influx following the handing over of Hong Kong to mainland China by the British in 1997 – have greatly increased the number of Toronto's Chinese, bringing the population to approximately 300,000.