Kolkata’s Cheenapara Heritage Gallery preserves the city’s 248-year-old Chinese history

“This place used to be a club where people who migrated from the Guangdong region stayed. Sei Vui is the place where the Chinese migrants who built this place came from,” says the professor. Looking ahead to 2028, when Kolkata marks 250 years of its association with the Chinese community, Tansen says that the aim is to create a similar gallery in Tangra’s Chinatown.

The lives inside ordinary things

The history of the community survives in objects that might otherwise seem unremarkable. Wooden chairs, vases, cymbals, incense sticks, sauce bottles, mahjong sets, abacuses, tools used by people who worked with their hands and built their lives in a new city.

Placed together, these objects begin to speak.

“The exhibition looks at the multiple waves of migration through the 1800s and then moves into economic specialisation. Different Chinese communities that came to the city began specialising in particular trades,” says Sohini Pyne, who designed and curated the exhibition. Those trades gave Chinese Calcutta a distinct economic geography.

Cantonese migrants became closely associated with carpentry. Hakka families with shoemaking and, later, the tanneries of Tangra. Migrants from Hubei with dentistry. Those from Shandong with the silk trade. Laundries, beauty parlours and restaurants cut across some of these divisions.

By the 1950s, more than 300 Cantonese carpenters were working on ships at the Hooghly docks. More than 20 Cantonese-owned carpentry factories operated in Calcutta.

A shoe-making implement inside the gallery is therefore more than an old tool. It belongs to a city where stretches of central Calcutta were lined with Chinese shoe businesses.

An abacus recalls shops and workshops where accounts were kept by hand.

Finding a place in the city

The associations helped hold the community together. Migrants arriving from the same regions of China formed native-place organisations. These could contain a temple, a school and spaces for social life. Huining Huiguan was one among several such associations in the city.

“When the Chinese came from their native places on the mainland, they formed associations here. These could have a temple and sometimes a school. They became important institutions for the community,” says Sohini.

Tansen hopes the Blackburn Lane gallery will eventually become one chapter in a larger archive scattered across Kolkata. There are about seven such associations, he says, each carrying a different history. Tangra tells another story one of tanneries, leather and restaurants, shaped particularly by its Hakka community.

“We hoped that each of these clubs, including those in Tangra, would have these galleries or museums in it. The Tangra Chinese community has its own historical aspect,” says Tansen

Names brought back to life

Some histories in Cheenapara had been present all along but remained unread by much of the city.

Chinese inscriptions survive within the association and temple. With the help of scholars, several have now been translated. The exhibition also contains rubbings from temple inscriptions, including a donation record whose names can once again be read.

“We have religious objects, but also objects from daily life. Together they allow us to look at different aspects of Chinese life here,” notes Sohini. 

Before Chinatown became a memory

Kolkata’s Chinese history is commonly traced to Yang Dazhao, better known as Atchew, the Chinese trader who received land near Budge Budge from Warren Hastings in 1778. He established a sugar mill there and brought Chinese workers to Bengal. The settlement that grew around it became Achipur.

Research, however, indicates that the Chinese were already present in Bengal before Atchew. The familiar description of him as the first Chinese settler is therefore more complicated than it first appears.

Successive migrations created a community that, by the middle of the 20th Century, was woven into the working life of Calcutta.

Chinese carpenters worked for shipping and railway companies before establishing workshops of their own. Shoemakers built businesses around Bentinck Street. Dentists practised across the city. Laundries multiplied during the 1940s and 1950s.

Restaurants would eventually become the community’s most visible legacy, even as many of its other occupations faded from public memory.

Then came 1962. The India-China war tore through much of this social and economic world.

Chinese Indians were interned or deported. Dockworkers lost jobs on security grounds. Businesses closed. Many families later left India for North America, Europe, Australia and elsewhere.

Restaurateur Miranda Liu, whose family is associated with Beijing and Tung Fong, remembers the period as the beginning of the great thinning out. Families left in search of work and security. Today, Miranda estimates Kolkata’s Chinese population at roughly 2,000.

A neighbourhood still alive

The gallery is not trying to recreate a vanished Chinatown behind glass. Its photographs resist that temptation.

The final section moves between festivals and ordinary life: streets, people and moments in Cheenapara recorded across decades.

“These are extremely evocative photographs,” says Sohini of the images clicked by photographer Bijoy Chowdhury who is associated with the community for more than 50 years. Some are photographs of festivals in Cheenapara, but others show regular, normal, everyday life in this part of the city.

Chen Yaohua, president of the Huining Huiguan, helped execute the project from within the community.

Its ambitions, however, extend beyond Blackburn Lane. Sohini hopes the gallery will prompt other communities to look at what they have inherited before the objects, and the stories attached to them, disappear.

At the inauguration, Barun Ray, Additional Chief Secretary, Department of Tourism, described turning into Blackburn Lane and feeling as though he had “gone back in history, gone back in time”. He also assured the community of the government’s support for initiatives that preserve the neighbourhood as a living experience.

The gallery shows you what remains: the heat and noise of Sei Vui’s kitchens, incense burning in the temple, the worn halls of the Chinese community and visitors moving across Sun Yat-sen’s face in the glass.