The keeper of the Chinese-American experience in Chicago reopened its doors following a two-year hiatus after a devastating fire that burned some of the Chinese-American Museum of Chicago’s collection and tried to destroy the rest.

As Chicago’s Chinatown readies to celebrate its centennial next fall, the collection representing Chinese culture and influence in the city is regenerating. The museum reopened with three exhibits detailing the history of Chinese migration to the Great Lakes region, Chinese culture at play and one exhibit on the museum fire itself.

Two delicate silk paintings, whose lantern frames had burned from around them, lay unmolested next to charred papier-mâché doll heads and U.S. Army uniform as surviving artifacts in an exhibit about the 2008 fire and its aftermath.

Hanging on a nearby wall, a restored adoption document of calligraphy on delicate handmade paper hangs as a tribute to those in the city’s museum community at large that helped the Chinese-American Museum recover.

“Some silks burned. Others didn’t,” said Grace Chun, museum volunteer and co-curator of “Chinese at Play.”

Rebuilding the collection connected several Chicago museums and communities with Chinatown and its people, Chun said. First, a gift to rebuild the collection — a map of a mountainous region in China carried by American aviators during World War II — came from the Polish Museum, she said. The second was a silk robe that came from New York.

“It meant a lot,” Chun said.

“Chinese at Play” includes a collection of mostly traditional items Chinese use to play and pass time together. Most fascinating are the cricket cages of wood and ivory. Previously homes to “pet” fighting crickets carried about by Chinese breeders, the museum’s trio of cages are high-end gear for a sport which began in 10th century during the Song Dynasty and continues in China and other parts of the world today.

One striking detail in the “Great Wall to the Great Lakes” exhibit is a small map showing hundreds of laundries throughout Chicago and only three in modern Chinatown.

Soo Lon Moy is a museum volunteer and one of the co-curators at the museum. Her father, Fook John Moy, 87, ran a Chinese laundry in a North Side neighborhood. While no traditional laundries are known to exist today, equipment from Moy’s family shop is on display in the museum, including a customary canary cage.

“The darning machine was used until last year,” Moy said.

According to Paul Chan Pang Siu and John Kuo Wei Tchen, co-authors of The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation, the first Chinese laundry in Chicago opened in the rear of 167 W. Madison St. one year after the Chicago Fire and had no name. From the original 18 laundries to nearly 600 by 1942 and their spread north, west, and south, Chicago’s socioeconomic history is tied to their rise and eventual fall by the late 1970s.

From first Chinese laundry, which followed the Great Chicago Fire to the 2008 fire, which nearly destroyed the museum, more than 100 years passed.

From the single brick of the Great Wall to the collection of traditional musical instruments to the collection of advertisements for Chinese restaurants, each piece is rebuilding a collection of artifacts and stories that make up part of the Chinese-American experience in Chicago and the greater Midwest.