The hamlet of Locke in the California Delta looks more like an old-time movie set than a town steeped in Chinese history and legend. At weekends, packs of leather-clad bikers converge on a saloon-style pub and diner, Al the Wop's, which for years has been Locke's best-known attraction.
But the former frontier outpost holds a special place in the hearts of the Californian Chinese community. The town is on the US register of historic places, thanks to its unique status as the only town in the country built exclusively by Chinese, for Chinese.
Eight years ago, bad plumbing and the dilapidated state of many of the buildings prompted California county officials to condemn Locke, pushing the settlement to the brink of extinction.
But last month, thanks to the efforts of Connie King, an 84-year-old activist of Chinese descent, Locke's future as a heritage site was assured when a monument was unveiled in a specially created park honouring the generations of Chinese pioneers whose grit and toil helped build California.
'Martin Luther King had a dream and I, Connie King, also had a dream,' said the great-grandmother, who was born in California and named Tom Yuet-ho. 'My dream was to have a park and a monument in Locke in memory of the Chinese men who worked on the railroad, worked on the levee, started the agricultural industry in California and built the town of Locke.'
The town was founded after a fire in 1915 devastated the Chinatown in the village of Walnut Grove. A group of Chinese men approached landowner George Locke for permission to build on property he had inherited near Walnut Grove. The Chinese in the area were mainly from the Sze Yap region of mainland China, but the founders of Locke were from Zhongshan.
Soon, Locke was a bustling and bawdy town. The immigration restrictions of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 meant it shared a bachelor culture with other US Chinatowns. In the 1920s there were gambling parlours, speakeasies, bordellos and opium dens. The Locke Garden Chinese Restaurant, now run by the town's newest Chinese family, recent arrivals from Hong Kong, was built as a beer parlour. What is now Locke Art Centre, a street-level store filled with Chinese arts and crafts imported by Guangdong-born entrepreneur Clarence Chu, was a pool hall until the 1950s. Mrs King's story has a lot in common with the struggle of the early Chinese.