Chinese Peruvian is a Chinese person born in Peru.

Chinese immigrants, 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. 100,000 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 the very own labor force until the end of the century. While the coolies were believed to be reduced to virtual slaves, this history also makes us think how they got the cycle from slave to free labor.

Another group of Chinese settlers came after Sun Yat Sen’s republic in 1912, World War II, and the Communist rule in 1949. Recent Chinese immigrants settled 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 settled Peru after anti-Chinese riots and massacres in the 60s, 70s, and late 90s. These recent Chinese immigrants make Peru the largest Chinese Latino community outside China.

After they worked, freed coolies and later immigrants established small businesses, one of their businesses are chifas (name of Chinese Peruvian restaurants which derived from qifan, the Cantonese of "eat rice"), and Lima's Chinatown, known as Barrio Chino de Lima, becomes one of the two of the Western hemisphere's earliest Chinatowns. The other one is in Havana. The Chinese coolies married Peruvian women, and many Chinese-Peruvians today are of mixed Chinese, Spanish, and African or Native American descent. Chinese also attended in the opening of the development of Amazon, where they tapped the rubber trees, washed gold, cultivated rice, and shared trade with the Indians. They even became the largest foreign colony in the Amazon capital of Iquitos by the end of the century. Many Chinese-Peruvians left Peru because of dictatorial government by 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 to Canada, mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand.

Most Chinese-Peruvians speak two Chinese dialects, Cantonese and Mandarin, mix of Chinese and Spanish, Spanish, and English. Since the first Chinese immigrants came from Macau, some of these also speak a Portuguese creole, Macaista or Patuá.

See also:

• Overseas Chinese