Leaving the modern-day, dishevelled Old Chinatown in Tiretta’s Bazar behind for the course of this journey, let us take a deep dive, instead, in this vibrant Chinatown of yore. Our story begins, like most other stories in Calcutta’s Chinatown, with the arrival of Tong Atchew, an original arrived with a Chinese junk full of tea in the Hooghly River in 1778. After long drawn out negotiations with the East India Company, Warren Hastings, then Governor General, agreed to grant Atchew and his compatriots land to settle and start a sugarcane plantation, sugar mill and a rum distillery in a place around 40 kms south of Calcutta. This would later be known as Achipur (or Atchew’s settlement). After initial years of struggle, the Cantonese settlement moved to central Calcutta – first in Dharmatala, and then near Tiretta’s Bazar by the late 1780s. Once here, the members of the Cantonese community settled in clans, with each clan tracing their origin to a single or a collection of closely knit villages or hamlets in and around Canton. Each clan built a temple and a community centre (known as huiguan) of their own, and purchased land first near Tiretta’s Bazar, and later near Tangra (which then bordered the East Kolkata Wetlands), to build their cemeteries. As a diaspora community involved in remittance economy, the members of the local Cantonese community were mostly men, who earned a living by practising carpentry, ship building and other crafts they were skilled at. At the end of each year, they would send a sizeable portion of their earnings back to their ancestral villages in the Canton region. But soon, following their success overseas, more members of the Cantonese community started arriving in Calcutta, exploiting family and clan connections, and many of them decided to settle here permanently, thus snapping ties with their ancestral homes. This resulted in the growth of a permanent Chinatown by the early 1800s in and around the Tiretta’s Bazar area. Soon, members of other Chinese communities, such as the Hakkas from Canton, Hupeh from Hubei, among others, started pouring in to Calcutta in search of a better life, married local Indo-Portuguese women (their wills are a fascinating read) and settled around Tiretta’s Bazar and the Bowbazar area.