Melbourne’s Chinatown is the oldest in the Western world. Established by miners from Guangdong province in the 1870s, it has been Chinese ever since. Today, the area has a cool historic vibe, especially in the bluestone alleyways that snake off it at either side, lined by old Victorian warehouses. The district is now exploding again, bursting out of its boundaries and flowing out of its tacky Chinese-y gates, to swallow up half the city. Its has almost digested the formerly Greek neighborhood on Lonsdale Street and its tentacles spread up Swanston Street (the city’s main street) as far as the Melbourne Central Shopping Centre, which these days (in the evenings especially) may as well be in Hong Kong.
Chinatown and its alleyways now boast a full four branches of the porn emporium “Club X” (plus the porno shop above Chinatown Aquarium and Reptile), several excellent places to buy heroin, a cinema that offers the increasingly rare chance to see Asian movies on the big screen, a really dodgy pool-parlor, a couple of arcades of Chinese-y fashion and shops selling Hello Kitties, and the big Midtown Place which has a Chinese video shop, a Korean fashion store selling those shitty “sporty casual” brands everyone wears in Korea like “SMEX” and “COAX”, a Korean lunch place and some apartments where I once had a really bad date with a Singaporean international student, whose wealthy daddy had bought him a deluxe pad there.
Other fun places in Chinatown:
Tea and Coffee
Easy Cafe Bubble tea and internet, where you can get bubbletea and sit on swings covered with fake plastic vines. This is a hopping Asian date spot on Friday and Saturday nights.
Ten Ren Pearl tea – actually not in Chinatown itself, but down the block on Swanston Street. This is a branch of a Taiwanese chain. Its slogan is “Where there is Chinese, there is Ten Ren’s Tea”. The drinks here are sooo good, but they are always way understaffed so the service is insanely slow. You just have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re getting a delicious drink…in about 20 minutes. They also have a food menu heavy on items like “pork cooked in tea”, “tea-chicken” etc, and lots of jelly desserts.
Korean convenience stores – there are two Korean konbinis on the fringes of Chinatown, one on Bourke Street and one on Lonsdale, both proudly advertising their Japanese-style coffee vending machines (in a city where you can get fresh, expertly-made coffee on just about any street corner). Why bother?
Restaurants
There are so many restaurants here. “Flower Drum” and “Shark Fin Inn” are widely regarded to be among the top Chinese restaurants in the world, (I have a Malaysian friend whose relatives fly in to eat there) but I have never been.
When I was a student I always ate at Grand Asia Buffet, because I could get enough for lunch and dinner for just $6.50. Its in the arcade next to Target. The staff here offer totally authentic Chinese customer service: really mean and cheap. They have a sign saying “please don’t take more than you can actually eat!”. Isn’t that the whole buffet concept?
Supper Inn, an iconic latenight eatery holed up in a little corner of an alleyway ( though its called “Celestial Avenue”!) Its always busy, with a fake wooden-panel interior untouched since the 1970s. THE place to come for ducks tongue and congee at 3am.
The Mao Tse Tung’s favorite dishes restaurant
The Deng Xiaping’s Favorite Dishes restaurant, Post-Deng Cafe
Shanghai Village Dumpling Inn, also hidden off in one of the little laneways. Lots of people got sick here from food poisoning last year, but I notice its still open.
Conceptual art
The surrealist poetry alleyway. There also used to be an art installation in another alleyway where if you looked up, there was a giant safe about to fall down on your head, just like in a cartoon. Pretty cool! I tried to find it the other day but couldn’t. Not sure if its gone now, or i just got lost.
Bars
These days there are lots of funky little bars tucked away in Chinatown , like Manchuria in the Chinese Masonic Society’s Headquarters (take a peek up the stairs for their creepy-looking meeting room), Double Happiness and New Gold Moutain.
There are also non-Chinese themed bars like Section 8 , an outdoor bar where people sit on crates in a converted carpark with prerequisite loud music and graffiti. It opened last year as a “Berlin-style” temporary bar, that was supposed to be around for a few months then pack up and move, but as its still here it has kind of blown its whole concept.
Also Croft institute which is located down the dingiest, most rubbish-strewn alleyway in the city (double points!) in a previously derelict medical laboratory and decorated with creepy old school medical paraphenalia.
Other entertainment:
Real Asian-style internet cafes. Meaning; dirt cheap, gruff staff, decorated with camouflage netting, open all night and full of dudes with sunken eyes playing network shoot ‘em up games. None of this “just checking my email” shit!
A nightclub where my friend was in the bathroom when someone got shot once.
On Bourke Street; a huge new Korean/Chinese/Japanese DVD store just up from RMIT University’s “Brain Cancer building” – there is a radio transmitter on the roof and a bizarrely high incidence of brain cancer among the staff. Next to that is a shop selling bongs with a pet galah ( those pink and grey cockatoos) sitting on a perch at the door, and around the corner hidden away in a nondescript period office block an Asian magazine store and a Thai DVD place. The alleyway decorated with different cartoon characters runs down the back.
Chinese Museum
The Chinese Museum is, again, tucked into a little alleyway. It is a dusty, quiet, little institution, spread over four floors of an atmospheric former warehouse. The exhibits aren’t really that great – lots of old photos, and a few Chinese wedding dresses and stuff. In the basement is a charmingly dated “diorama”-style recreation of 19th Century Chinese miners’ life . But the highlights are a) the photos of every year’s Melbourne Young Chinese Association Gala Dance from the 1930s to now (check out the ballgowns worn in the ’80s!)
b) Dai Loong – the world’s longest ceremonial dragon, who comes out to dance through the streets every Lunar New year. The fact that Melbourne has the world’s longest dragon is actually quite cool (and even odder that the second-biggest is said to be in the Victorian provincial city of Bendigo, another former Gold Rush boomtown).
There are also a whole bunch of other, newer Asian neighborhoods around town:
1) Victoria Street Richmond.
In the shadow of public housing blocks, this heavily Vietnamese/Chinese strip is still scruffy and unglamorous. There are blocks of same-looking pho places and dingy karaoke bars, shops selling weird vegetables (you can get Okinawan goya here!), styrofoam crates of live crabs on ice, durians, and pirated CDs. Also, one of those trick-vegetarian restaurants where everything looks and tastes exactly like meat, but is made from tofu. The corner nearest the train station is a down-at-heel mini-Thai district with five or six grocery and video shops and Thai restaurants, remarkably dowdy-looking compared to how glamorous Bangkok is these days. But the first signs of gentrification are creeping in – the best-known restaurants Thy Thy and Tho Tho are almost all-white these days, and a couple of latenight pubs and bars have opened up.
2) Springvale
Outer suburban Springvale is another working class Chinese/Vietnamese neighborhood, and home to the Victorian Cambodian Association’s temple, with its pitched roof and sweeping yellow horns ( a relatively rare for Melbourne Theravada-school Buddhist place of worship).
3) Doncaster
Where wealthy, suburban Chinese desperate housewives live. During the SARS crisis shops in Doncaster all sod out of those Asian-style face masks.
4) Box HIll
Once known for its junkies and charmless shopping centre “Whitehorse Plaza”, Box Hill is these days totally Chinese. Hong Kong star Cecilia Cheung – wife of Nicholas Tse and high profile victim of the recent Edison Chen sex-photo-scandal – used to work here in a karaoke parlor before she was famous.
5) The West
Footscray has morphed from an Italian industrial/residential neighborhood into a Vietnamese one, and is now in flux again, with the Africans coming in. St Albans is pretty Asian too. There are probably more places but I don’t know that side of town so well.
And finally, in seemingly very un-Chinese South Melbourne there is this; the See Yup temple, dating back to 1856 ( just twenty years after the first non-Aboriginal settlers arived in Melbourne!!!) Its quite amazing that Melbourne has such an old Chinese temple. The architecture is kinda interesting too; it looks more like a classic Victorian mansion than a usual temple, but with a few flamboyant pagoda-ish touches. Its still being used as a temple today, but you can go in and take a look if you donate two dollars, don’t take photos inside, don’t go up the stairs, and ignore the grumpy maintenace staff.
hi andrew, cool to read that stuff. just a little thing: there isn`t a province in china with that name (at least not now – maybe at that time there was – and now i`m talking nonsense). there`s the city of guangzhou and the province is called guangdong (these days).
OH cheers, thanks for that. You’re my editor!:)
This is a very informative post about Melbourne. I think I should head to its Chinatown for some food trip
I’ve been scouting for some of the best restaurants in Melbourne.