Chinatown

Chinatown within the city of Vancouver, BC is Canada's biggest 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 towards the north and towards the east, and the residential district of Strathcona.

The official area of Chinatown has approximate street borders as designated by Vancouver City comprise the alley between Hastings and Pender Street, Taylor, Georgia and Gore Streets. The unofficial boundaries of Chinatown extend well into the rest of Eastside Downtown. Keefer, Main and Pender Streets are the main places where commercial activity happen.

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 during the 1980s. Because old traditional businesses flourish and new investments arrive, Chinatown is becoming a lot more prosperous. Presently the district is thriving with a lot of conventional restaurants, tea shops, open markets and clinics in addition to various shops catering to tourists and the local community alike. Amongst Vancouver's four Chinese daily papers, As does the TV studio OMNI British Columbia, among the city's four Chinese daily papers, the Sing Tao Daily remains in Chinatown.

In recent years, there has been new development in Chinatown as the building boom downtown extended into the Expo Lands. Around the old Expo 86 place, new high-rise towers have sprung up. Twelve years after Expo in 1998, the International village was built within this particular spot. It is located next to the SkyTrain station Stadium-Chinatown. This particular village comprises numerous restaurants, a shopping mall complete with a variety of Asian oriented shops and Cinemark Tinseltown. International Village mall consists of people and companies which are non-Chinese. It was built to be the downtown's answer to the Asian malls located in the Golden Village, even though it is not as racially exclusive.