Chinese people in India
Chinese people in India are separate communities with separate origins and settlement. There are permanent communities descended from immigrants and refugees from China as well as an expatriate community in India on a temporary basis. The immigrant community started centuries ago and became more prominent in the late 18th century with arrivals working at the ports in Calcutta and Madras and has gone on to contribute to the social and economic life of Kolkata through manufacturing and trade of leather products and running Chinese restaurants. The community living in Kolkata numbered around 2,000 in 2013. In  Mumbai, the population of Chinese people, many who have multi-generation roots, is around 4,000. Separate from the multi-generation Chinese-Indian and Tibetan community, there are an estimated 5,000–7,000 Chinese expatriates living in India as of 2015, who generally work on two to three-year contracts for the growing number of Chinese brands and companies doing business in India. History. The first record of travel from China is provided in the travelogue of Faxian (Fa-Hien) who visited Tampralipta, in what is now Tamluk in the 5th century AD. Records of immigration for the next sixteen centuries are not  reliable although many words in Bengali can be attributed to Chinese influences. For example, "chini", the Bengali word for "sugar" comes from the word for China, and words like "Chinamati" for porcelain china hint at Chinese influences. The first recorded Chinese settler in India is Tong Achew, a trader who landed near Budge Budge in the late 18th century. Achew set up a sugar cane plantation along with a sugar factory. Achew brought in a band of Chinese workers to work in his plantation and factory. This was the first Chinese settlement in India. Achew died shortly after and the  Chinese settlers moved to Kolkata. The place came to be named as Achipur, after Tong Achew. Achew's grave and a Chinese temple is still seen in Achipur. Portuguese India. Chinese children who were kidnapped by the Portuguese from China were sold as slaves in Portuguese India. By some accounts, the Portuguese roasted and ate some of the Chinese children. In Portuguese India, the Indian Muslim Kunjali Marakkars fought against the Portuguese and raided their shipping. One of the Kunjali Marrakars (Kunjali IV) rescued a Chinese boy, called Chinali, who had been enslaved on a Portuguese ship. The Kunjali was  very fond of him, and he became one of his most feared lieutenants, a fanatical Muslim and enemy of the Portuguese, terrorizing them in battle. The Portuguese were terrorised by the Kunjali and his Chinese right-hand man, eventually, after the Portuguese allied with Calicut's Samorin, under Andre Furtado de Mendoça they attacked the Kunjali and Chinali's forces, and they were handed over to the Portuguese by the Samorin after he reneged on a promise to let them go. Diogo do Couto, a Portuguese historian, questioned the Kunjali and Chinali when they were captured. He was present when  the Kunjali surrendered to the Portuguese, and was described: "One of these was Chinale, a Chinese, who had been a servant at Malacca and said to have been the captive of a Portuguese, taken as a boy from a fusta, and afterwards brought to Kunhali, who conceived such an affection for him that he trusted him with everything. He was the greatest exponent of the Moorish superstition and enemy of the Christians in all Malabar and for those taken captive at sea and brought thither he invented the most exquisite kinds of torture when he martyred them." British India. Kolkata , then known as Calcutta, was the capital of British India from 1772 to 1911. It was also geographically the easiest accessible metropolitan area from China by land. One of the first persons of Chinese origin to arrive in Calcutta was Yang Tai Chow (a.k.a. Tong Achew and Yang Da Zhao) who arrived in 1778. He was an either northern Chinese or a Hakka from Guangdong or Fujian province of China judging by the pronunciation of his surname. Governor General Warren Hastings granted land to Achew to set up a sugar cane plantation and sugar factory in a place, currently called  Achipur, located near the town of Budge-Budge on the banks of the River Hoogly. According to records of the Honourable East India Company from the year 1778, "Achew was granted 650 bighas of land about 6 miles south of Budge – Budge for an annual rent of Rs 45". Many of the earliest Chinese immigrants worked on the Khidderpore docks. A police report in 1788 mentions a sizable Chinese population settled in the vicinity of Bow Bazaar Street. The sugar mill that Atchew had set up in the patch of land near the town of Budge Budge drew other Chinese  migrants and soon a small community had formed around it. By 1783, we know Atchew was dead – a letter shows an East India Company attorney trying to extract money from the executor of his estate. An advertisement in the Calcutta Gazette in 1804 announces that the sugar mill was up for sale. A temple and the grave of Tong Achi still remain and are visited by many Chinese who come from the city during the Chinese New Year. One of the earliest records of immigration from China can be found in a short treatise from 1820. This records hints that  the first wave of immigration was of Hakkas but does not elaborate on the professions of these immigrants. According to a later police census, there were 362 in Calcutta in 1837. A common meeting place was the Temple of Guan Yu, the god of war, located in the Chinese quarter near Dharmatolla. A certain C. Alabaster mentions in 1849 that Cantonese carpenters congregated in the Bow Bazar Street area. As late as 2006, Bow Bazar is still noted for carpentry, but few of the workers or owners are now Chinese. In Assam, after the establishment of tea gardens in Assam , the British authorities encouraged the migration of Chinese labourers, artisans, tea growers and tea makers, who were then employed in the burgeoning tea gardens. The migration started in 1838. They soon surmounted the language barrier and started intermingling, many of the Chinese married local women and established a new society in Assam. Instances of intermarriage grew to the point where it became hard to physically differentiate Chinese immigrants in Assam from the locals during the period of their internment during the 1962 Sino-Indian War. A series of voluntary migrations of Chinese from China followed. This broadened the space of  the newly established society and made it more multi-cultural and multi-ethnic as the migrants married local girls and settled down. Their physical features changed; the descendants forgot the Chinese language. Through sheer hard work and perseverance, the dislocated Chinese made a new life for themselves and prospered. Many 'China Patty,’ or small China towns, sprang up in different parts of Assam – of which the China Patty of Makum was the biggest. Some Chinese convicts were deported from the early history of Straits Settlements entirely inhabited by Teochew and some Hakka immigrants were sent to be jailed in Madras  in India, the "Madras district gazetteers, Volume 1" reported an incident where the Chinese convicts escaped and killed the police sent to apprehend them: "Much of the building work was done by Chinese convicts sent to the Madras jails from the Straits Settlements (where there was no sufficient prison accommodation) and more than once these people escaped from the temporary buildings' in which they were confined at Lovedale. In 1866 seven of them got away and it was several days before they were apprehended by the Tahsildar, aided by Badagas sent out in all directions to search. On 28 July  in the following year twelve others broke out during a very stormy night and parties of armed police were sent out to scour the hills for them. They were at last arrested in Malabar a fortnight later. Some police weapons were found in their possession, and one of the parties of police had disappeared—an ominous coincidence. Search was made all over the country for the party, and at length, on 15 September, their four bodies were found lying in the jungle at Walaghát, half way down the Sispára ghát path, neatly laid out in a row with their severed  heads carefully placed on their shoulders. It turned out that the wily Chinamen, on being overtaken, had at first pretended to surrender and had then suddenly attacked the police and killed them with their own weapons." Other Chinese convicts in Madras who were released from jail then settled in the Nilgiri mountains near Naduvattam and married Tamil Paraiyan women, having mixed Chinese-Tamil children with them. They were documented by Edgar Thurston. Paraiyan is also anglicized as "pariah". Edgar Thurston described the colony of the Chinese men with their Tamil pariah wives and children: "Halting in the course of a  recent anthropological expedition on the western side of the Nilgiri plateau, in the midst of the Government Cinchona plantations, I came across a small settlement of Chinese, who have squatted for some years on the slopes of the hills between Naduvatam and Gudalur, and developed, as the result of ' marriage ' with Tamil pariah women, into a colony, earning an honest livelihood by growing vegetables, cultivating coffee on a small scale, and adding to their income from these sources by the economic products of the cow. An ambassador was sent to this miniature Chinese Court with a suggestion that the men  should, in return for monies, present themselves before me with a view to their measurements being recorded. The reply which came back was in its way racially characteristic as between Hindus and Chinese. In the case of the former, permission to make use of their bodies for the purposes of research depends essentially on a pecuniary transaction, on a scale varying from two to eight annas. The Chinese, on the other hand, though poor, sent a courteous message to the effect that they did not require payment in money, but would be perfectly happy if I would give them, as  a memento, copies of their photographs." Thurston further describe a specific family: "The father was a typical Chinaman, whose only grievance was that, in the process of conversion to Christianity, he had been obliged to 'cut him tail off.' The mother was a typical Tamil Pariah of dusky hue. The colour of the children was more closely allied to the yellowish tint of the father than to the dark tint of the mother; and the semimongol parentage was betrayed in the slant eyes, flat nose, and (in one case) conspicuously prominent cheek-bones." Thurston's description of the Chinese-Tamil  families were cited by others, one mentioned "an instance mating between a Chinese male with a Tamil Pariah female" A 1959 book described attempts made to find out what happened to the colony of mixed Chinese and Tamils. According to Alabaster, there were lard manufacturers and shoemakers in addition to carpenters. Running tanneries and working with leather was traditionally not considered a respectable profession among upper-caste Hindus, and work was relegated to lower caste "muchis" and "chamars". There was a high demand, however, for high quality leather goods in colonial India, one that the Chinese were able to fulfill . Alabaster also mentions licensed opium dens run by native Chinese and a "Cheena Bazaar" where contraband was readily available. Opium, however, was not illegal until after Indian independence in 1947. Immigration continued unabated through the turn of the century and during World War I partly due to political upheavals in China such as the First and Second Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, the First Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Rebellion. Around the time of the First World War, the first Chinese-owned tanneries sprang up. Sino-Indian War. Chinese in India faced accusations of anti-national sentiment during the  Sino Indian war of 1962. After the war, India passed the Defence of India Act in December 1962, permitting the "apprehension and detention in custody of any person [suspected] of being of hostile origin." The broad language of the act allowed for the arrest of any person simply for having a Chinese surname, a drop of Chinese blood, or a Chinese spouse. Under the draconian law, 10,000 people of Chinese origin were estimated to have been detained at the desert prison camp in Deoli, Rajasthan. All of them were accused of being spies, but not a single charge has ever  been proven. In 1964, many internees were forcibly and arbitrarily deported, resulting in the breakup of many families. The rest were released starting in 1965. The last internees were released from Deoli in mid-1967, after four and half years of captivity. The Chinese population in Calcutta decreased by half, from 20,000 to 10,000. Those who remained were seen as enemies, and most could not hold any job except in the restaurant, tanning, and shoemaking businesses. Moreover, their movements were restricted. They were required to report to designated police stations once a month, and until the mid-1990s, they had to apply  for special permits to travel more than a few kilometres from their homes. The situation was alleviated when India and China resumed diplomatic relations in 1976. However, it was not until 1998 that ethnic Chinese were allowed naturalized Indian citizenship. In 2005, the first road sign in Chinese characters was put up in Chinatown, Tangra. In Assam, Chinese people living in different places were rounded up by the armed forces and compelled to leave their houses. The administration told them they would be shifted to a safer place for two or three days. They were not allowed to take anything  with them except papers. In the Makum area, they were picked up and packed into a cowshed, from where they were taken to the Dibrugarh jail. In other parts they were arrested and brought to the police station and put in jails. They were then asked to board a closed train, which took them to the Deoli internment camp in Rajasthan. It was a long, seven-day journey of utter suffering. Infants, pregnant women, the old and the sick were also arrested and sent to the camp, violating all human rights. After some time the Government of India decided to  deport the interned back to China in a few batches. In this process, the already divided families were divided again as the government selected the names randomly. The majority of them were deported to China. Many Indian (Assamese) wives also accompanied their husbands to China with their children. The interned people who were allowed to return to their places after a couple of years again faced a difficult situation. The property of most of the people had been auctioned as enemy property. There was no society and no government to support them. They were compelled to live in sheer misery  and isolation. Most of them did not get to meet their deported family members ever again. Indian Chinese cuisine. Chinese Indians also contributed to the development of fusion Indian Chinese cuisine (Chindian cuisine), which is now an integral part of the Indian culinary scene. In particular Chinese influences on Bengali cuisine are pronounced. Communities. Chinese Indians. Chinese Indians today are located in ethnic neighbourhoods in Kolkata and Mumbai. In Mumbai's Chinatown, there are 400 Chinese Indian families. The population of Chinese in Mumbai stood at 4,000 in 2015. In 2013, there were 2,000 Chinese-Indians live in Kolkata. The  most visible Chinese community in India is found in Kolkata where there are two Chinatowns. One exists in Tangra and an earlier Chinatown was established at Tiretta Bazaar, sometimes referred to as the old Chinatown. The Chinese presence at Tiretti Bazaar and Tangra has dwindled. The older generation of this community works as tannery-owners, sauce manufacturers, shoeshop owners, restaurateurs and beauty parlours owners. The new generation have gone in large numbers to dentistry. Many of the shoe shops lining Bentick Street, near Dharmatolla, are owned and operated by Chinese. The restaurants have given rise to fusions of Chinese and  Indian culinary traditions in the widely available form of Indian Chinese cuisine. There is one Chinese newspaper published in Kolkata, "The Overseas Chinese Commerce in India", but figures from 2005 show that sales have dwindled from 500 to 300 copies sold. At one time, 90% of the students of the Grace Ling Liang English School were ethnic Chinese. But in 2003 they comprised only about 15% of the 1500 students. Many of the Chinese of Kolkata are Christians due to the influence of missionary schools they studied in. Architecturally, a feature of the Chinese imprint on Kolkata are the Chinese  temples. The Chinese New Year remains widely observed as well as Zhong Yuan Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival. The Chinese of Kolkata celebrate Chinese New Year with lion and dragon dance. It is celebrated in the end of January or early February. An exhaustive study of the Kolkata Chinese by Zhang Xing has recently been published. Expatriates. Expatriate Chinese in India are concentrated in the cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore. The Mumbai neighbourhood of Powai is described by the "Economic Times" as an "upcoming hub" for Chinese expats, who according to the newspaper "form close communities within themselves ." Better integration of Chinese expats in their host communities is hampered by short time frames of stays, often durations only last for 2–3 years as part of a work contract. Also many in order to comply with visa regulations must routinely exit and leave India. Notable people. Notable Indian-Chinese include Chindian people who are of mixed Indian and Chinese ancestry.