Baltimore. With the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, many southern states such as Arkansas, Louisiana and Georgia began to hire Chinese for work in place of slave labor. The history of Chinatowns was not always peaceful, especially when labor disputes arose. Racial tensions flared when lower-paid Chinese workers replaced white miners in many mountain-area Chinatowns, such as in Wyoming with the Rock Springs Massacre. Many of these frontier Chinatowns became extinct as American racism surged and the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. In Australia, the Victorian gold rush, which began in 1851, attracted Chinese prospectors from the Guangdong area. A community began to form in the eastern end of Little Bourke Street, Melbourne by the mid-1850s; the area is still the center of the Melbourne Chinatown, making it the oldest continuously occupied Chinatown in a western city (since the San Francisco one was destroyed and rebuilt). Gradually expanding, it reached a peak in the early 20th century, with Chinese business, mainly furniture workshops, occupying a block wide swath of the city, overlapping into the adjacent 'Little Lon' red light district. With restricted immigration it shrunk again, becoming a strip of Chinese restaurants by the late 1970s, when it was celebrated with decorative arches. However, with a recent huge influx of students from mainland China, it is now the center of a much larger area of noodle shops, travel agents, restaurants, and groceries. The Australian gold rushes also saw the development of a Chinatown in Sydney, at first around The Rocks, near the docks, but it has moved twice, first in the 1890s to the east side of the Haymarket area, near the new markets, then in the 1920s concentrating on the west side. Nowadays, Sydney's Chinatown is centered on Dixon Street. Other Chinatowns in European capitals, including Paris and London, were established at the turn of the 20th century. The first Chinatown in London was located in the Limehouse area of the East End of London at the start of the 20th century. The Chinese population engaged in business which catered to the Chinese sailors who frequented the Docklands. The area acquired a bad reputation from exaggerated reports of opium dens and slum housing. France received a large settlement of Chinese immigrant laborers, mostly from the city of Wenzhou, in the Zhejiang province of China. Significant Chinatowns sprung up in Belleville and the 13th arrondissement of Paris. 1970s to the