Denver in the Gilded Age may have been an economic boomtown, but it was also a powder keg waiting to explode. When that inevitable eruption occurred—in the Anti-Chinese Riot of 1880—it was sparked by white resentment at the growing encroachment of Chinese immigrants. Liping Zhu's book provides the first detailed account of this conflagration and delineates the story of how anti-Chinese nativism in the nineteenth century grew from a regional political concern to a full-fledged national issue.