San Francisco's Chinatown is the oldest in North America, established in 1848 and covering 24 blocks with a population density four times that of the city as a whole.
The 1906 earthquake flattened the neighbourhood, and city leaders saw their chance: they wanted Chinatown moved to the mudflats on the edge of town. The community refused. Its business leaders threatened to take their tax revenues to another port city. They won, rebuilt, and this time dressed the buildings in pagoda roofs, dragon motifs and curled eaves, a deliberate reinvention designed to attract tourists.

Bruce Lee was born here, at the Chinese Hospital on Jackson Street. Fortune cookies were invented here too, though the fortune cookie is American, not Chinese.

VoiceMap's tours trace the neighbourhood's history through food, architecture and people, connecting the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the community's repeated refusals to be displaced.