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A Chinese Peruvian, also known as tusán, a loanword from ?? (pinyin: t? sh?ng, jyutping: tou2 saang1, “local born”), is a person of Chinese ancestry born in Peru, or who has made Peru his or her adopted homeland.

Most Chinese Peruvians are multilingual. In addition to Spanish, Quechua, and English, many of them speak one or more Chinese dialects that may include Cantonese, Hakka, Mandarin, and Taiwanese. Since the first Chinese immigrants came from Macao, some of them also speak Portuguese. In Peru, Asian Peruvians are estimated at 3% of the population, but one source places the number of citizens with some Chinese ancestry at 4.2 million, which equates to 15% of the country’s total population

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 Chinese immigrants in the 19th century, who took a four-month trip from Macao (then a Portuguese territory), settled Peru as contract laborers or “coolies”. Other Chinese coolies from Guangdong followed. One hundred thousand Chinese contract laborers, almost all male, were sent mostly to the sugar plantations from 1849 to 1874, for the termination of slavery and continuous labor for the coastal guano mines and especially for the coastal plantations where they became a major labor force until the end of the century. While the coolies were believed to be reduced to virtual slaves, they also represented a historical transition from slave to free labor.

Another group of Chinese settlers came after the founding of Sun Yat-sen’s republic in 1912, World War II, and the establishment of Communist rule in 1949.

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 Recent Chinese immigrants settled in Peru from Hong Kong and, again, Macao because of fear of their return to Communist rule in 1997 and 1999, while others have come from other places in mainland China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asian Chinese communities, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines. Many Chinese Indonesians and Chinese Filipinos came to Peru after anti-Chinese riots and massacres in those countries the 1960s, 1970s, and late 1990s. These recent Chinese immigrants make Peru the home of the largest ethnic Chinese community in Latin America.

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 Many Chinese Peruvians left Peru in the 1960s and 1970s to escape the dictatorial government of Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado, worsening poverty, and earthquake. Most of them headed to the United States, where they were called Chinese Americans or Peruvian Americans of Chinese descent, while others went to Canada, mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Australia, or New Zealand.

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 After their contracts ended, many of them adopted the last name of their patrons (one of the reasons that many Chinese Peruvians carry Spanish last names). Some freed coolies (and later immigrants) established many small businesses. These included chifas (Chinese-Peruvian restaurants - the word is derived from ch? fàn, or “eat rice” in Mandarin). Calle Capón, Lima’s Chinatown, also known as Barrio Chino de Lima, became one of the Western Hemisphere’s earliest Chinatowns. The Chinese coolies married Peruvian women, and many Chinese Peruvians today are of mixed Chinese, Spanish, and African or Native American descent. Chinese Peruvians also assisted in the building of railroad and development of the Amazon Rainforest, where they tapped rubber trees, washed gold, cultivated rice, and traded with the Indians. They even became the largest foreign colony in the Amazon capital of Iquitos by the end of the century.

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 Eugenio Chang Rodríguez, writer, linguist, university professor (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos/City University of New York)

Juan Pablo Chang Navarro-Lévano (1930 - 1967) communist student leader and guerrilla, died alongside Che Guevara

Rosa Fung Pineda, archaeologist

Efraín Wong, Operations Manager of the Corporación Wong and founder of Las Falcas, S.A. distillery

Erasmo Wong, founder and owner of the Wong supermarket chain

Patty Wong, TV host

Walter Wong, anthropologist, late Ayacucho Regional Director of the Instituto Nacional de Cultura

Pedro S. Zulen (1889 - 1925), philosopher, university professor (Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos), poet, writer UNMSM Pedro Zulen

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The most important book about the Chinese immigration to Peru is “En el País de las Colinas de Arena”, by Fernando de Trazegnies, published by the Editorial Press of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. This book has been translated into Chinese as Sá Gu Zhi Meng. Pekín, China. 1999.

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