Walk north off Seventh Street in downtown Hanford and the alley opens up fast: a half block of brick storefronts, a red temple facade set back from the sidewalk, a tea room with hand-lettered signage. Eleven historic buildings line both sides, built from bricks fired on site more than a century ago. Most days it is quiet enough that you can hear your own footsteps on the pavement.
If you've lived in Hanford for a while, you've probably heard some version of "China Alley is being restored" for years now. What most people haven't heard is what that restoration actually looks like up close in 2026, and it is smaller and more specific than the phrase suggests. The real progress this year isn't a ribbon cutting. It's a staircase.
Five Years Since the Fire, the Building Is Still Waiting on Stairs
On the night of May 12, 2021, an arson fire tore through the front stairwell of the Taoist Temple Museum at 12 China Alley, the building most people mean when they say "the temple." The fire started at the main entrance and burned upward, and while the structure itself held, the heat and smoke did serious damage to the temple room and artifacts on the second floor. Pewter items upstairs melted from the heat. Some pieces were destroyed outright.
The China Alley Preservation Society, known locally as CAPS, moved fast to save what it could. Conservators from RLA Conservation in Los Angeles cleaned and stabilized the most damaged artifacts before they were crated and shipped to climate-controlled facilities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Northern California for long-term conservation. An architect out of Fresno, Johnson Architecture, was brought in to draw up a reconstruction plan for the building itself.
Five years later, according to a June 2026 update from the Hanford Sentinel, that plan has reached a specific and unglamorous milestone: rebuilding the main staircase the fire destroyed. The rear stairs, the only other way up to the second floor, are no longer considered safe for the work ahead. Before conservators can bring artifacts back and before visitors can walk through the upstairs rooms again, CAPS needs a functional way to get people up there. As one CAPS column put it, after all the grant applications and inspection reports, "it comes down to something as ordinary as staircases."
That detail matters if you've been assuming the temple has been sitting untouched since 2021. It hasn't. It just hasn't been visible progress, because most of the real work has happened in conservation labs three hundred miles away and in architectural drawings, not on-site where anyone walking past would notice.
What's Already Open While the Temple Waits
You don't need the temple's second floor reopened to spend real time in China Alley this fall. The L.T. Sue Co. tea room, co-owned by CAPS president Arianne Wing, is one of the few businesses still operating in the alley, and it's open to visitors, with a share of proceeds going toward the restoration effort. The temple building's exterior, standing since the early 1880s (local histories put the construction date at either 1882 or 1893, depending on the source), is still visible from the street even while the interior work continues.
Tours of the temple itself have historically run on the first Saturday of the month, a pattern several longtime visitors have confirmed over the years. Given that active construction is now happening on the staircase, it's worth checking with CAPS directly before you plan a visit around that schedule, since access can shift while contractors are on site.
The Carnegie Museum of Kings County at 109 East Eighth Street has also become an informal second home for China Alley's programming during the rebuild. The museum has partnered with CAPS on exhibitions covering the history of Hanford's Asian communities, going back to the herbal shop once run by Dr. L.T. Sue and continuing through the internment-era experiences of local Japanese families.
The Moon Festival Is Back, but Not All the Way Back
Here's the part that's easy to get wrong if you're going off memory. Hanford's Moon Festival ran for more than 40 years as a China Alley event, staged right there in the alley itself, until 2019. Then COVID hit, then the fire hit two years later, and the festival stopped entirely. It did not simply move to a smaller version. It disappeared.
What's returned since is a substitute, not a resumption. CAPS and the Carnegie Museum have staged a "Tribute to the China Alley Moon Festival" at the museum itself, first on September 28, 2024, then again on October 4, 2025. Both were free events built around Lion Dance performances from Cal Poly's team and drumming from Fresno's Gumyo Taiko group, alongside mooncakes, origami demonstrations, and a Bonsai display. The 2025 edition also tied in a film screening at the Temple Theater on Visalia Street, staged by the Kings Players, of a new production about a Chinatown family with real ties to China Alley history.
As of this writing, CAPS's own site says the 2026 edition is "in the works" without a confirmed date. If the last two years are any guide, expect it to land in early October again, most likely the first Saturday of the month, but that's a pattern, not a promise, and CAPS hasn't published the exact day yet. Wing herself has said the full festival won't return to China Alley proper until the temple restoration is complete and the fire-damaged artifacts are back in place. That's the honest answer to "is the Moon Festival back": partially, at a different address, for now.
Small Signs the Alley Is Still Alive Between Festivals
The restoration story isn't only about grant applications and staircases. In early June 2026, artists Evelyn Hang Yin and Jeffrey Yoo Warren organized a hands-on workshop to recreate a wooden stool design that's been part of Chinese American daily life in Hanford since the 1880s. Volunteers gathered at Toti's Pupusería in Hanford and used only hand tools to build a dozen replicas, working alongside a parallel session in Los Angeles's Chinatown. It's a small event, easy to miss if you weren't following CAPS's newsletter, but it's the kind of thing that tells you the community around China Alley is still actively engaged with its own history, not just waiting on contractors.
CAPS has also been recognized nationally for that persistence. The National Trust for Historic Preservation gave the all-volunteer group its Trustees Emeritus Award for Historic Site Stewardship, honoring the work of keeping the Taoist Temple Museum and the rest of the alley intact through more than a decade of being listed among the country's most endangered historic places.
Seeing It for Yourself
If you want to walk China Alley this fall, the entrance is on Green Street just north of Seventh, easy walking distance from the Hanford Fox Theatre and downtown's other storefronts. Start at the tea room, look at the temple's exterior, and check the Carnegie Museum's calendar before you go, since that's where most of the alley's current public programming lives while the temple finishes its repairs. If you're planning around the Moon Festival specifically, watch CAPS's own updates rather than assuming a repeat of last year's date.
None of this is finished, and that's the point worth understanding. China Alley isn't a museum piece frozen in 2021. It's a slow, specific, ongoing project, currently measured in staircases and conservation reports rather than grand reopenings, and the people doing that work are still your neighbors.
If watching a neighborhood's history come back stair by stair has you thinking about what else is happening in Hanford's housing market, or you're simply curious what's actually for sale near a corner of town like this one, Golden Hills Real Estate is happy to talk it through. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready.
