The Lawrence Chinese Camp was established during the Otago gold rush of the 1860s and was occupied by a Chinese community servicing the goldfields. By the 1870s the Camp had numerous stores, a hotel, boarding houses, physicians, a butchery, gambling facilities and opium dens.
Since 2005 we have carried out four large, areal excavations on the site. The research at Lawrence aims at understanding the social history of this overseas-Chinese community living on the fringes of a developing province.
Read more from the Southland Times article:
Lawrence Chinese Camp gets Joss House back (stuff.co.nz)
