The streets to the west of rue du Temple are narrow, dark, and riddled with passages, the houses half-timbered and bulging with age. Practically every house is a Chinese wholesale business, many of them trading leather – and, on the face of it at least, not very friendly. This was Paris's original Chinatown, fed by thousands of immigrant workers brought in to fill the factories while French men were being sent off to the trenches of World War I.
|
