From a handful of Catholic converts brought back to the court of Louis XIV, the Chinese in France have grown to a community of some 600,000 and their numbers continue to swell with new waves of immigration from Manchuria and other depressed parts of the home country.
Some 25 years after the first mass arrivals into France, the Chinese population has spread well beyond its original stronghold in the 13th arrondissement -- or district -- in southern Paris and is now active in all major French towns and cities.
"Like everywhere else in the world the Chinese community in France stands out for its dynamism and its adaptability," said Pierre Piquart, professor of geopolitics and specialist in the Chinese diaspora.
The first record of a Chinese man in France is of Arcade Hoange, who was brought back by Jesuit missionaries to the Versailles court of the Sun King in the late 17th century and oversaw a collection of manuscripts sent as a gift from the Chinese emperor Kangxi.
More than two centuries passed before the first major influx, when around 140,000 Chinese workers mainly from Zhejiang province were brought to France to help the allied effort in World War I. Many succumbed to their atrocious work conditions and are buried in Chinese plots in military cemeteries.
Most of those who survived were sent back in 1918, but a few thousand remained to form the first rooted Chinese community in Paris, based first around the Gare du Lyon in the east of the capital, and then near the Arts et Metiers metro station in the 3rd arrondissement.
Numbers did not significantly increase over the next 50 years, until the expulsions of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam -- the Boat People -- led to a wave of immigration, and the colonization of what Parisians now call Chinatown: the high-rise neighborhood near the Port d'Italie in the 13th arrondissement.
And then since the 1980s has come the mass influx, as economic change in China, globalization and the proliferation of people-smuggling networks have combined to generate persistent migratory pressure. Today the population is growing at 20 percent a year, according to Picquart.
Many of the new arrivals are Dongbei, escaping the large-scale de-industrialization of northeastern China, and therefore of different origins and traditions from the long-settled communities from Indochina and Zhejiang. They also have less of a support network, making them more easily exploitable as cheap labor or prostitutes.
While French society reacts nervously towards its 5 million strong Muslim community, the 600,000 Chinese prompt little concern -- mainly because they are discreet, well-behaved and hard-working. But Picquart warns that their self-imposed isolation is not to be encouraged.
"No one wants to brandish the menace of the yellow peril. But France needs to keep tabs on the community and do more to encourage integration. In England if you go to a public library you will see signs in Chinese and other languages. It is a way of encouraging people out of their community. We don't do enough of that here," he says.
But as time passes, the process of integration seems to take hold.
"I am far more attached to the home country than the new generation -- they hardly know how to use chop-sticks. And my eight year-old daughter won't let me talk Chinese to her," said Veronique, a 34 year-old restaurateur.
And the community's industry and economic success is increasingly held up as as example.
"They are not exactly 35-hour-weekers," says Picquart, referring to France's controversial reduction in the working week brought in by the last Socialist government.
"For France the Chinese are an opportunity ... Their economic dynamism, their knowledge-based civilization and their thirst for success assure them an ever greater place in society," said Liberation newspaper.
"They can be an irreplaceable bridge to a China with which France nurses high hopes of strategic dialogue and rich contracts -- the centerpiece of the state visit by President Hu Jintao (
Hu begins a state visit to France tomorrow to mark the 40th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between France and China.
Two days before the arrival of Hu, France was to afford China a rare honor by opening up the Champs Elysees in Paris for a traditional dragon-and-drums new year parade.
Promoters say this is the first time the celebrated avenue has been devoted to a foreign cultural event -- wartime German march-pasts excepted.
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