When the Empire Restaurant opened July 6, 1916, it was one of the swankiest places in Portland to have dinner.

Located upstairs at 573 Congress St., the main dining room featured a dozen mahogany booths upholstered in cream fabric. Each was outfitted with a modern electric fan and a button to summon a waiter. Smoking was prohibited.

The 200-seat restaurant also had a men-only dining room where smoking was allowed. Between the two rooms, a three-piece orchestra and a female soloist performed most days and every evening.

"It was a very spiffy place," said Gary Libby, a Portland resident who has studied the city's Chinese history in depth.

On Saturday at 2 p.m., the Chinese American Friendship Association of Maine will place a marker on the building at 573 Congress St., where Empire Dine and Dance is today.

It's the first of about 20 markers that the association plans to install in coming months to identify prominent sites in the development Portland's Chinese community. Dating back to the 1850s, the sites include long-gone Chinese hand laundries, restaurants, grocery stores and a gambling den, all of which help to paint a more diverse picture of the city's history.

"I thought it was important to broaden the understanding of our history beyond the idea that everybody was white and everybody was part of an ethnic group that had been here a long time," Libby said.

Saturday's events will begin with a walking tour, led by Libby, that will take in about one-third of the sites to be marked. The tour will start at 10:30 a.m. at the Maine Historical Society, 489 Congress St.

The marker project is largely Libby's initiative, an offshoot of his effort to help establish a Chinese archive at the historical society in 2002.

Libby, who is a lawyer, said he modeled the marker project after the Portland Freedom Trail, a walking tour of 13 historical sites that are important to the city's black community. Each site on that trail is marked by a granite pillar topped with a bronze plaque.

The Chinese sites will be marked by painted metal plaques featuring red writing on a white background. Each plaque will include the Chinese characters for "Chinese" and "Maine." Eventually, Libby hopes to mark important Chinese sites in Augusta, Bangor, Lewiston and Biddeford, too.

The first Portland site recently opened as Empire Dine and Dance, an upscale pub and music club. Owners Bill Umbel and Todd Doyle named the business after the Chinese eatery because they appreciate the building's history as a fine restaurant and music venue.

"I'm a history buff," Umbel said. "I kicked a bunch of names around and finally I thought, 'What the hell.'"

Portland's Chinese population has never been huge. It reached 71 in 1920 before declining to 25 in 1970, according to Census data provided by Libby. The city's Chinese population gradually grew again, rising to 200 -- out of 64,000 people overall -- in 2000. There were 640 Chinese in Cumberland County that year.

In the future, the association plans to put a marker at 1 Custom House Wharf, where Ar Tee Lam opened the city's first known Chinese restaurant in 1880.

Lam, who came to Portland around 1858, was one of the first Chinese residents in Maine to become a U.S. citizen and a registered voter, according to public records reviewed by Libby.

By 1880, there were only nine Chinese men among Portland's 33,810 residents, so Lam likely served mostly American food with some highly Americanized versions of Chinese dishes, such as chop suey and chow mein, Libby said.

Other future marker sites include 1 Monument Square, where a Chinese hand laundry opened in 1879 and became a social center for Chinese musicians, and 118 Center St., where police raided an opulent basement gambling den in 1917.

Acting on residents' complaints, the police chief and a police captain gained entry to the gambling den by pretending they were farmers in town to see the sights, Libby learned from newspaper accounts. They arrested four men; two from Lewiston, one from Portland and one from Boston.

The association also plans to put a marker at 522 Congress St., the site where 14-year-old Sam Lee opened Maine's first known Chinese hand laundry in 1877. Today, it's the Maine College of Art.

"It's hard for me to imagine how someone could have immigrated from China and opened a business, all by the age of 14," Libby said.

Through the early 1900s, Portland's Chinese population was largely male, with a few families mixed in, because of anti-Chinese immigration laws. Restaurant workers lived in nearby boarding houses. Laundry workers often lived in back rooms or upstairs.

In the years before World War I, Portland had nearly 30 Chinese laundries, including some that operated for decades. Their patrons were mostly middle- and upper-class residents who could afford the service, and boarding house residents who lacked facilities to do their own laundry.

The back-breaking business dwindled as home washing machine sales increased from the 1930s through the 1950s. Portland's last Chinese laundry closed in 1966, Libby said. While some Chinese men married local women, others moved back to China or to other U.S. cities with larger Chinese populations.

Among the Chinese people living in Portland today is Yan Lam, owner of the Oriental Table at 106 Exchange St. Lam said he's glad Libby is putting up the markers.

"I appreciate that they're letting people know about our Chinese heritage," he said.