Chinese Museum

Chinese-Australian history from the gold rush to today, home to Dai Loong dragon

Address 22 Cohen Place
Phone +61 3 9662 2888

Located in the heart of Little Bourke Street's Chinatown — the oldest in the Southern Hemisphere — the Chinese Museum traces more than 170 years of Chinese-Australian history. The collection covers the gold rush era, when over 40,000 Chinese diggers arrived in Victoria and faced extraordinary discrimination, through to the waves of immigration that shaped modern Melbourne. The exhibits combine artefacts, personal stories, and archive photographs to paint a picture of a community that has profoundly influenced Australian food, business, and culture.

The centrepiece is Dai Loong, the world's longest processional dragon at 92 metres. Made in Hong Kong and brought to Melbourne in 1970, Dai Loong takes 120 people to carry and parades through the streets of Chinatown each Chinese New Year. Seeing it coiled in the museum gives little hint of the spectacle when it is fully extended. The museum is small but well curated, and its position in Chinatown makes it easy to combine with lunch in one of the surrounding restaurants.

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A story
During the gold rush of the 1850s, Victoria imposed a poll tax of £10 — equivalent to several months' wages — on every Chinese person who landed in the colony. In response, Chinese miners began landing at Robe in South Australia and walking overland to the Victorian goldfields, a journey of around 500 kilometres. An estimated 16,000 Chinese men made this walk between 1857 and 1858 alone. The museum's gold rush exhibitions cover this history with a directness that official histories often avoided.

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