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Made to Order 2.2-mile loop, Las Vegas Chinatown
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A self-guided walking loop through Las Vegas's Chinatown, along Spring Mountain Road two miles west of the Strip. Unlike every other Chinatown in America, this one wasn't left behind by a 19th-century immigrant quarter — it was designed, financed and named in a real-estate office in 1994, opened as a single Tang-dynasty-style plaza in 1995, and grew into a mile and a half of markets, temples of food, bookshops and kung-fu schools. Ten stops, about ninety minutes, one idea: what happens when a community is handed a Chinatown made to order, and then makes it its own.

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The route, in order

  1. Chinatown Plaza gate & Journey to the West America's self-declared first master-planned Chinatown — a Tang-dynasty gate over a car park, built from nothing in 1995.
  2. 99 Ranch Market The first 99 Ranch in Nevada — the supermarket that made a Chinatown out of a parking lot.
  3. Plaza shops — Great Wall Bookstore, T&T Ginseng, Diamond Bakery, Lohan School of Shaolin The infrastructure a community needs besides dinner — Nevada's only Chinese bookshop, an herbalist, a bakery, and a Shaolin school older than the plaza.
  4. Center at Spring Mountain + Golden Tiki Who Spring Mountain serves, and how it flipped — from local families to the Strip's own night-shift crowd.
  5. Kung Fu Plaza corner The corridor's oldest business — which chose this corner in 1993, two years before there was a Chinatown to join.
  6. Shanghai Plaza + the ruby-red crossing The county's first smart crosswalk — two ruby-red poles and a flashing beacon — on the arterial with the Metro area's worst crash count.
  7. The food street (Raku / Kabuto / Monta block) How one late-night robata grill in 2008 turned a strip-mall road into the best food in the valley.
  8. SF Supermarket + the Pho So 1 → Pho Concept site The valley's second Asian supermarket, the Vietnamese layer of the corridor — and next door, a pot of pho that outlived its restaurant.
  9. Arville corner — "Chinatown by decree" The only Chinatown in America that was named by a governor — after a freeway sign a senator put up was ordered down.
  10. Chinatown Plaza courtyard — the finale Twenty-five years as the valley's Lunar New Year stage — a civic square in a city that has no old Chinese quarter.

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