Earlier this year, the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco got a remarkable present from New York — a gift of its own history.

The gift is a museum show called “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion,” an exhibition of art, artifacts and stories that ran in New York last year. When the show closed in spring of 2015, the sponsoring New-YorkHistorical Society gave it to the San Francisco group.

The show is big league. It’s interactive, with films, family histories, art and all the modern museum tricks.

“Stories at the push of a button,” said Sue Lee, executive director of the San Francisco group. It opens at 10 a.m. Saturday for an open-ended run at the Chinese Historical Society’s headquarters in Chinatown.

And it’s welcome as a gracious gift. “Our story is overlooked in this country,” Lee said. “People don’t know it.”

One reason for that, Lee said, is that the Chinese immigrant story has been overwhelmed by other stories. “It hasn’t been told that well,” she said.

Her organization was founded in 1963 and remains small. “We don’t have the resources to do a show like this ourselves,” Lee said.

The exhibition cost $2.5million to mount when it opened in Manhattan in fall of 2014. The show was a hit. The New York Times called it “vigorous and imaginative.”

The theme of the show is how the Chinese went from being kept out of the United States by racist laws to becoming part of the country. “We are a chapter in American history,” Lee said.

The story begins with trade — the tea the American patriots dumped in Boston Harbor came from China, and so did George Washington’s table china. The first U.S. trade mission to China dates from an 1784 voyage, by the sailing ship Empress of China, from New York to Canton. The Americans exported furs, lead, wine and ginseng and imported silk, tea and china goods.

These days, of course, American stores are full of Chinese imports.

But the big impact came with the Gold Rush in 1849, an event that transformed California. Like other immigrants fleeing poverty and war, Chinese came in the thousands. Though they provided the labor that helped build the first railroad across the country, they were not welcomed.

This is the story that is most familiar to other Americans. Much of it is centered around San Francisco — Denis Kearney, the sandlot orator and his battle cry “The Chinese must go!,” the anti-Chinese views of California Gov. Henry Haight (as in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury), San Francisco magazines and newspapers showing Chinese as disease-ridden menaces to white Americans.

This all led to the passage by Congress of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which lasted in effect until 1943. Under that law, Chinese Americans had to prove they had a right to be in this county and to carry identification at all times.

The show also has a creditable replica of the immigration station on Angel Island, where Chinese were interrogated by government officers.

Many prospective immigrants used false identities to get into the country in that period, claiming to be the children of Chinese immigrants who had become U.S. citizens. They were called “paper sons,” and their descendants live in this country now. Lee’s grandfather was a paper son.

But around a corner of the exhibition, the story shifts to the growth of an American Chinese community. Here, Lee said, “The exhibit is not so much about Chinese as it is about America.”

This part of the show is a bit New York-centric, telling family stories that begin in China, continue to a one-room apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and wind up where an immigrant’s grandson is a federal judge. There is also a graphic novel by Bronx-born Amy Chin tracing her family back to a Chinese village.

To add a bit of California flavor, the Chinese Historical Society included a dozen watercolors by Jake Lee that show 19th century Chinese American life in the West. The paintings, which once graced the wall of Johnny Kan’s San Francisco restaurant, are treasures of the historical society collection.

Still the history of Chinese America is not well known. “People still don’t know the story. They sometimes tell me I speak excellent English,” said Pam Wong, who was born in San Diego and is deputy director of the Chinese Historical Society. “They think we are all new immigrants. We are not.”

Carl Nolte is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His column appears every Sunday. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carlnoltesf

Art, artifacts

Where: Chinese Historical Society of America, 965 Clay St., S.F.

Open: Noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekends.

Admission: $15 adults; $10 seniors and students; free under 2.