The Chinatown Dilemma

 

In every large city in the world, there is always a Chinese community, and Milan is no exception. Here, the Chinatown district is different, because the colours and style of the buildings are still traditional Milanese.

It is located in Via Paolo Sarpi and the surrounding streets, about ten minutes by tram from the Lanza stop on the green Metro line. Alternatively, you can stroll through Parco Sempione and emerge at its northern end, take Via Canonica, and you’re there. There is no giant red gate or the typical Eastern pagoda roofs: in short, everything looks quintessentially Italian.

The area is one of Milan’s many multi-cultural districts (another is Porta Venezia, with its Eritrean and African shops and restaurants). Chinatown began to develop as a Chinese community from the 1920s on, and today there is a vast selection of shops selling products in the traditional categories, including textiles, silk, bags and leatherware, souvenirs and electronic gadgets and so forth.

Of course there are also many Chinese restaurants.

From about 1995, trade in the area accelerated rapidly, when a series of wholesale clothing stores opened. Today there are about 350 of these businesses, which represent another facet of Milan’s thriving fashion industry. The streets are narrow, and stores are small, and there are some traffic restrictions that make things difficult for the logistics required for trading. This means that trucks or big vans have to load goods constantly, and clothes have to be piled up in the store instead of in a warehouse.

In Via Bramante, which is a normal two-lane street with two tram lines, there are almost 100 wholesale stores. Not surprisingly,

traffic jams frequently occur.

Store owners quickly invented other solutions, using hand trolleys and even bicycles piled high with packages to transfer goods. It is typical here to see people pushing a hand trolley loaded with boxes or winding in the alley with the back of the bicycle stacked with goods.

The Municipality have, in the past, attempted to regulate the Chinatown district, and the fact that there are no gates or pagodas in the area is attributed to the administration’s refusal to give planning permission. It has to be said that the world’s more colourful Chinatown districts are much older: San Francisco’s Chinatown dates back to 1850 and the gold rush, while the Chinese areas of London and Liverpool developed from the early 1800s, when Britain began importing silk and other textiles from Shanghai. So in Milan, the balance between national residents and the Chinese community is still developing. In recent years, there have been occasional moments of tension. In 2006, the city council tried to limit the use of hand trolleys in the area in order to improve traffic circulation, even confiscating over a hundred trolleys. But the Chinese consulate intervened, and these measures soon stopped.

In 2007, an incident that developed from a fine issued to a Chinese woman by the police developed into an angry stand-off between the community and the police that led to a number of injuries and arrests. From then on, the municipality’s projects for the area have focused principally on Via Sarpi, which has become a pedestrian precinct, with tight traffic restrictions.

The only motorized traffic allowed in the street will be for residents, with goods vehicles limited to certain times of day.

Ownership of the premises is often still Italian, and the commercial development of the area has driven up shop rental prices considerably. This is one of the reasons why there are so many wholesale businesses, which are the most profitable forms of trade. Often, a new wholesaler has to pay a massive one-off “entrance fee” just to begin a rental contract. But these financial pressures have not prevented the increasing specialization of the district, and as a result it has become a point of reference for retailers from all over Europe, attracting buyers from as far afield as Poland. The current city administration had launched plans to transfer the wholesale trade to an ex-industrial area outside the city, at Arese, and discussions were held with representatives of the community, but in the end, the project was abandoned.

The municipal government is now facing a dilemma, because the Italian residents of the district – in actual fact, 90% of the 18,000 inhabitants of the area are Italian – say that conditions in the streets of Chinatown have been made more difficult by the wholesale trade. By way of comparison, only 10% of stores have remained Italian.

The once familiar Italian bakeries, butchers’ shops and grocery stores have disappeared. Both the Italian residents and the Chinese wholesale businesses want to stay in their beloved district, and so in the near future, the only choice is to safeguard that peaceful cohabitation that has predominantly hallmarked the area for almost a century. It is possible that as the wholesale trade increases, a move to areas with more space in the outskirts will become more attractive to the businesses, enabling Chinatown to become a more fully-integrated district of Milan.

 

Yelei Kong