Chinese Australians
As a whole, Australian residents identifying themselves as having Chinese ancestry made up 5.6% of those nominating their ancestry at the 2016 census and numbered 1,213,903. At the 2016 census, 509,555 people declared that they were born in Mainland China, 86,886 declared that they were born in Hong Kong, while 46,882 declared that they were born in Taiwan. There are also a large number of persons of Chinese ancestry among those born in Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Chinese Australians
The early history of Chinese Australians involved significant immigration from villages of the Pearl River Delta in Southern China. Less well-known are the kinds of society Chinese Australians came from, the families they left behind and what their intentions were in migrating. Gold rushes lured many Chinese to the Australian colonies. (From the mid-19th century, Chinese dubbed Australia the "New Gold Mountain" after the "Gold Mountain" of California in North America.) They typically sent money to their families in the villages, regularly visited their families, and retired to their home villages after many years working as a market gardeners, shopkeepers or cabinet-makers. As with many overseas Chinese groups the world over, early Chinese immigrants to Australia established Chinatowns in several major cities, such as Sydney (Chinatown, Sydney), Melbourne (Chinatown, Melbourne, since the 1850s) and Brisbane (Chinatown, Brisbane), as well as in regional towns associated with the goldfields such as Cairns (Cairns Chinatown).