Kolkata once had a very famous city in China, but what is it now?

Kolkata has two China cities, one in BBD Bagh district; The other is located in Tangra, southeast of Kolkata.

Taba is a small town in the east of Calcutta, with an area of only 0.5 square kilometers. The streets are winding and dirty, and the streets are full of Indians coming and going. Except Guoyuan Restaurant, Gjesing Leather Factory, Changcheng Soy Sauce Garden and Meipei Middle School, most of them have closed, leaving only the Chinese character signboard on the door, the black and white couplets faintly visible outside the courtyard, and occasionally a few shabby lanterns hanging on the red painted high wall. It is hard to imagine that this was once the largest Indian city of China-Taba China.

The Chinese in Taba China City are mainly Hakkas in Meixian County, Guangdong Province. Since18th century, there have been frequent trade exchanges between China and India. They went to India to do business, mainly in leather industry and footwear industry. At its peak, they owned hundreds of shoe stores run by Hakkas. However, with the gradual rise of India's local leather industry and India's anti-China policy in the 1960s, many Chinese have closed their factories and moved overseas, and the leather factories that stayed behind gradually moved to Taba District in the first half of the 20th century.

In recent years, the Indian government asked china leather factory to move out of Taba on the grounds of environmental pollution. Coupled with the gradual decline of the leather industry in the Chinese community, many leather factories simply closed down and opened Chinese restaurants. But with the passage of time and the migration of Chinese, there are fewer and fewer Chinese restaurants. People who meet in sparsely populated streets all have simple and honest smiles on their faces. Chinese here basically communicate with vendors in fluent Hindi happily, but when they meet the same China compatriots, they still chat in Hakka or Mandarin at home.

Nowadays, China people are even rarer here. The former gold shops, Changcheng and Changbao, have now become shops mainly selling China condiments. The two plaques hidden in the shops, Changcheng Jinpu and Changbao Jinpu, have become the last evidence of China's heyday.