Butte Chinatown Joss House巴特华埠庙（已不存）

Type

Overseas Daoist Temples

Location

United States · Montana · Butte · Galena Street, Chinatown, between Main Street and Colorado Street.

First built

Built around the late 1880s.

Overview

Butte was the largest copper-mining city in Montana in the late nineteenth century, and its Chinese community ranked among the largest of the interior mountain states, with Chinatown concentrated around Galena Street. A temple was built there in the late 1880s, which also served as a social venue and was the center of religious and public life for the Chinatown community. No record survives of which deity it was dedicated to, and this entry does not speculate. The temple no longer stands, and no document records what became of it. It should be noted that the surviving Wah Chong Tai Building (1899) and Mai Wah Noodle Parlor (1909) in Butte, today operated as an Asian-heritage museum by the Mai Wah Society, are commercial buildings rather than a temple; neither the museum nor Wikipedia mentions a temple or shrine there, and this should not be confused with the present entry.

Highlights

• Built in the Chinatown of a copper-mining city around the late 1880s
• Served jointly as a temple and social venue
• No longer stands, and is not the same building as the Mai Wah Museum