In January, a fire tore through an historic building in the heart of Manhattan's Chinatown, threatening to engulf decades of artifacts documenting Chinese life in the US.
The 130-year-old building, a former school turned community center, was home to the archives of the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) -- the world's largest archive of Chinese American history.
Some 85,000 items, dating from the late 1800s through the present, appeared doomed. Included in the varied archive was a Chinese typewriter from the 1920s, costumes used by the Cantonese opera clubs that proliferated in North American Chinatowns from the 1930s, and an 1883 document about the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first law to restrict a specific ethnic group from immigrating to America.
But through the years, as their efforts grew into the Chinatown History Project, and eventually MOCA, more people began recognizing the archive's historical importance. It has since served as a resource for individuals researching their family histories, academics writing scholarly tomes and even creative artists like the Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang. (Hwang wrote his 1981 play "The Dance and the Railroad" with the help of research conducted at the project.)
