It grew to service Chinese tenant farmers in the Atherton area and peaked in importance in the early 1900s when there were over a hundred buildings on site.

Its decline began after the first world war when Chinese-held agricultural leases were revoked in favour of returned servicemen and most Chinese left the area.

For mutual support and to maintain contacts with their homeland, they lived and worked together, creating Chinatowns within, or on the fringes of, European settlements.

Because of this, and as alluvial gold began to peter out on the Palmer field, the Chinese moved away and looked for other ways to earn money.

It was originally heavily forested and a group of Chinese, working with European timbergetters, moved into the Atherton area in the early 1880s.

The newly cleared land could not be ploughed, but was well suited to the hand cultivation methods favoured by the Chinese, who became successful farmers.

They supplied the developing town of Herberton with fruit and vegetables and pioneering the growing of maize, which became an important commercial crop for the area.

By 1897, there were over 180 Chinese living on the site which developed as a short main street lined with small timber and iron shops and houses.

At the height of its development, around 1909, commercial premises located here included corn merchants, food and general goods stores, a herbalist, two gambling dens and a place of entertainment which employed musicians.

The National Trust of Queensland obtained a grant to carry out research on the site in 1975 and the temple was offered to them by the Fong On family in the following year to ensure its preservation.

A number of research projects have also been carried out on the town site by the Material Culture Unit of the James Cook University.

These included research and documentation of the settlement and temple by Latif Ibrahim in 1981, a 1986 project to map remaining surface relics and the original street, and excavations undertaken in 1991 and 1992.

[1] The location of the site appears to have been selected with the aid of geomancy as evidenced by its relationship to natural features such as the Herberton Range and the creek.

It has potential to yield information that will contribute to an understanding of Queensland's history by demonstrating the formation of, and life within, a large Chinese settlement in Australia.