Paris’ 13^th arrondissement has never been one of the chic areas of Paris. From the 1930s to the end of the 1950s it was a sort of gangsterland. The arrondissement’s Rue Tolbiac that runs west-east (Paris’ streets are numbered from west to east) through it was where the mobs roamed and ruled. The mobsters weren’t vicious.  They didn’t shoot you dead for a shot of shit (police lingo for hashish and heroin), but were considered rather glamorous, made so by Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura and Eddie Constatine movies.

In the 1960s the arrondissement changed. Factories south of Rue Tolbiac moved out to the grande banlieue (suburbs) for financial reasons and real estate promoters began to construct tall apartment blocks  – not skyscrapers but buildings of 15/18 floors which the Parisians called a tour – tower – nonetheless. Those were the years of Vietnam and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians flocked to Paris to seek asylum with their former colonial master (De Gaulle told both President Kennedy and Johnson not to go into Vietnam because it will be a war they would not be able to win – but that is another story) and joined the Chinese immigrants who were already here, and as the toursof the 13^th were standing unoccupied because the French refused to live in them, that was where the French government housed the Asian refugees. And so that part of the 13th became Chinatown.

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