Around 1417, Admiral Zheng He, an explorer in the pay of the emperors of the Ming dynasty, a sea dog to whom extraordinary feats are attributed, stated that it was possible to “traverse the world without leaving China.”
Zheng was referring to the existence on the routes of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and Southeast Asia of an increasingly dense network of colonies of Chinese emigrants, an incipient diaspora that was to subside in the first years of the Qing empire, from 1644 to forward, but which would be resumed with vigor in the 19th century.
At that time, large numbers of Han citizens from declining provinces such as Fujian or Guangzhou were forced to emigrate to various places in Asia, Oceania, North America, Western Europe, Southern Africa, Latin America or the Caribbean.
That mass exodus produced modern
Chinatowns
, a qualitative leap compared to the numerous, but generally sparsely populated, expatriate colonies of previous centuries.
Today, Zheng's phrase rings truer than ever.
You can visit the five continents, from Sydney to Paris, passing through Buenos Aires, New York, Johannesburg or Yokohama, without leaving China.
Or, at least, the peculiar version of China that the Han immigrants brought in their backpacks when they arrived at their new destinations.
Image of Chinatown in San Francisco taken in 1966.Getty
Just a few days ago, José-Luis Martínez Almeida announced that he intends to rescue an urban remodeling process outlined in his day by Manuel Carmena: converting a part of the Usera district into Madrid's Chinatown.
A peculiar Chinatown, with elements that “reinforce its identity and allow it to be identified as a Chinatown, but with peaceful streets, pedestrian services and green areas.
That is, something quite different from the intersection between a red light district, a port commercial colony and a large area of ethnic exclusion that historical Chinatowns have been to date.
As Ien Ang, a researcher at Western Sydney University, explains in her thesis
Chinatowns and the Rise of China
, the “Chinatowns” in Western societies were nothing more than ghettos, often precarious and unhealthy, in which “people concentrated and marginalized the members of a group perceived as completely alien” and, consequently, considered with “disdain or suspicion.”
Nothing to do with modern dynamics of cultural appreciation, assimilation or appropriation.
The Chinatowns were a flagrant case of social and urban segregation.
In his work, Ang examines how these human settlements, almost bicentennial in some cases, “still exist, but their role and meaning have been profoundly transformed.”
They are no longer the headquarters of the diaspora, but rather “neoliberal reinterpretations of the old idea, closely linked to the new strength of the People's Republic of China as a great global power, which is perceived as an opportunity and a threat.”
The new
Chinatowns
would respond, consequently, to the same logic.
They would be both new areas of ethnic concentration and “themed consumption centers” or even “tourist attractions.”
The model that Almeida's project seems to point to.
Manhattan's Chinatown is home to 141,000 residents, 28% of whom are of Asian origin.Maremagnum (Getty Images)
Filipino (and Spanish) China
The oldest known Chinatown that still exists today is not in any Western city, but in Manila, the capital of the Philippines.
It has been located since the end of the 16th century (1594, according to some sources) in the old Parián de los Arroceros, today the Binondo neighborhood.
It had very illustrious residents, such as the Filipino martyr Lorenzo Ruiz or the nun Sor Ignacia del Espíritu Santo.
The Spanish, colonial administrators of the Philippines at the time, concentrated there, on the banks of the Pasig River and very close to the walled enclosure, the sangleyes (the community of Chinese merchants and artisans and, in later years, the children of mixed marriages between Filipinos and Chinese).
It was the first of the immigrant ghettos established in the Spanish East Indies.
Then came those from Calamba, Pampanga, Visayas or Cebu, very different from each other, but all of them inspired by the desire to separate the Han immigrants from European settlers and the indigenous population.
From Binondo, the so-called “China company” was apparently hatched, the (rather utopian) Spanish project of conquest of the Ming empire at the command of an army of “6,000 vassals” who were expected to obtain the support of the “ ancestral enemies of China”, Japanese, Cochinchinos and natives of Siam, Borneo or the Moluccas.
Other large Chinese settlements in Asian cities that have had some continuity or of which vestiges are preserved are those of Jakarta, Singapore, Bao Vinh or Hoi An (both in Central Vietnam), Yokohama, Kobe, Nagasaki.
Mumbai, Bangkok or Calcutta.
Yokohama, in particular, was nourished by Cantonese emigrants in the first decades of the 19th century, has temples as spectacular as that of Kwan Tai and once gathered a very active community of more than 4,000 Chinese residents.
Chinatown Calcutta.Alamy Stock Photo
Remote deserts, distant mountains
The great leap to the West, as explained by Bonnie Tsui in her book
American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods
, occurred in the 1850s, coinciding with a long period of famine that produced a mass exodus in rural China.
One of the first was established in Liverpool by the Chinese workers of the Blue Funning Shipping Line, a shipping company that had at that time established a direct commercial shipping line between the north of England and the ports of Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Today, the site is accessed through the spectacular
paifang
, or ornamental arch gate, located on Nelson Street, a short distance from the city centre.
In the United States, the pioneers, associated with the progress of the transcontinental railroad that ended up linking the great capitals of the East Coast with the Pacific Ocean, were the Chinatown of Omaha City and San Francisco.
The latter, with its imposing Dragon Gate, the populous Grand Avenue (full of shops with a local flavor and adorned with the unmistakable street lamps and red Chinese lanterns), its colorful street murals, the popular Stockton Street market and the pair of buildings with which began the reconstruction of San Francisco after the devastating earthquake of 1906, could oppose the most genuine, attractive and famous Chinatown in the world with hardly any rivals.
In a certain sense, the Chinatown of the bay, in the shadow of the Golden Gate, served as a model for the rest of similar neighborhoods that began to spread like an oil spill throughout the United States between the final stretch of the 19th century and the first decades of the XX, from California to Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Arizona or Idaho to, beyond the central prairies, Saint Louis, New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore or Providence.
The one in Manhattan, a neighbor of Little Italy, is home to 141,000 residents, 28% of whom are of Asian origin, and has inspired satellites in the New York area such as Queens, Brooklyn or Long Island.
People walking through Chinatown in Buenos Aires.Alamy Stock Photo
Braden Goyette, Huff Post editor, considers that American Chinatowns are “fruits of racism,” given that they were built to isolate the Chinese population in a context in which “legal barriers that made assimilation difficult or impossible” proliferated.
Goyette describes the high concentration of workers from China that occurred in California in the mid-19th century, the years of the gold rush and the even more feverish campaign to expand the railroad.
This “large batch of poor immigrants of non-European origin” faced deep-rooted cultural prejudices, “received wages much lower than those of white workers and was accused of unfair competition and stealing work from competitors whose living conditions were objectively better than yours.”
Around 1885, acts of racist violence took place in the West Coast states, such as the murder of 28 Chinese residents in the mining town of Rock Springs, Wyoming, a massacre perpetrated by a popular militia of about 150 members who had the support tacit from local authorities.
Goyette speaks of “a total of 153 similar episodes”, with highly variable numbers of victims, recorded in places such as Los Angeles, Denver or Seattle between 1870 and 1890.
As a consequence of all this, the Chinese who did not return to their places of origin settled in the exclusion areas assigned to them by the authority, creating, in many cases, new neighborhoods from scratch, in an environment of very dubious health and lacking services. that they managed to “gradually humanize until they became habitable with their perseverance and effort.”
In that decade, the popular association between the expression “Chinatown” and red light districts and other degraded environments where crime and illicit businesses are concentrated also began to consolidate.
Image of Joss House in Chinatown San Francisco taken between 1896 and 1906.Getty
The traditional European Chinatowns had similar origins, also children of immigration, precariousness and exclusion.
The most notable are the one in London and the Quartier Asiatique in Paris.
The first of them was originally established in Limehouse, in the shipyard area on the banks of the Thames, and owed part of its terrible reputation to the abundance of brothels and opium dens.
After the Second World War, a new wave of citizens from the British colony of Hong Kong began to settle in the neighborhood's current location, in Soho, around Shaftesbury Avenue.
The neighborhood flourished from 1970, supported by a growing popularity of Chinese culture and cuisine, so it could be considered a precursor to the new Chinatowns, more of a theme park than an area of ethnic exclusion.
As for Parisian “little Asia”, also known as the Choisy Triangle, it is an area of the 12th arrondissement where Chinese immigrants have been living together for more than 50 years with refugees from the colonial conflicts of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
A high percentage of its 200,000 residents are of Asian origin, a detail that gives extraordinary authenticity to public manifestations of community life such as the Chinese New Year parade.
In any case, if you are a seasoned traveler with a sensitivity for the peculiar, it is more than likely that you will stumble upon here and there some of the most atypical Chinatowns in the world, in places like Honolulu, Vancouver, Atlanta, Lima, Melbourne, Kuala Lumpur, Houston or Toronto.
Although some are more genuine than others.
If Almeida's plan succeeds, Madrid will soon join this massive club.