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In 1778, a man popularly known as Tong Atchew founded a sugar mill twenty miles southwest of Kolkata and brought in laborers from China. When he died, they moved on to Tiretti Bazaar.
"We call him AchiAppa (father) and visit his grave to venerate him as India's first known Chinese settler," says Lawrence Ho, a member of Nam Soon Club. "He's why the word for sugar here is the same word for Chinese: chini."
Like Atchew, most of Kolkata's Chinese have origins in China's Guangdong province. They came to India in waves, fleeing China's successive civil wars and the Japanese invasion during World War II. To make a...