Nowadays, China–India relations are awkward at best, but it wasn’t always that way: Asia’s two giants used to be intimately linked together through the trading network of the British Empire. For instance, there used to be a sizeable minority of Indians here in Shanghai back in the day.  And The Economist ran an interesting little piece on the Chinese minority in India in their latest issue:

Georgie Ling, a chef, says that when his father arrived in Calcutta in the early 20th century, Chinese “lived like kings”. Chinese migrants had begun coming to India in the late 1700s, setting up the first sugar refineries. Then the British, who pressed exports of Indian opium on China in order to pay for purchases of tea and to plug a huge outflow of silver to China, brought back carpenters and tea-plantation workers to Assam in India’s north-east. Most Chinese were Cantonese-speakers from Guangdong in the south. A century ago, they numbered about 100,000 in India. Calcutta’s Chinatown won fame for its red lanterns, exotic food and drug dens.

Now, there are only about 4,000 Indians of Chinese descent left.