Little Hanoi, Prague

There are currently over 80,000 Vietnamese citizens and Czech citizens of Vietnamese origin living in the Czech Republic. They form the largest ethnic minority in the country (after Slovaks and Ukrainians) and the third-largest Vietnamese community in Europe. The Vietnamese are the only significant non-white community in Czechia other than the Roma.

The Sapa Trade Center, sometimes known to Czechs – not always affectionately – as Little Hanoi, is a gigantic Vietnamese retail complex founded in 1999–2000 on the site of a poultry and meat processing plant in the Prague suburb of Libuš. Sapa is named after a town in the Hoàng Liên Son mountains of northwestern Vietnam, an area renowned for its natural beauty. Libuš lies on the far southern outskirts of Prague.

If it were not for the bilingual Czech-Vietnamese signs, you could be in Hanoi’s Old Town or the Binh Tay market in Saigon. The sounds and smells are Asian. Ramshackle warehouses, shops, and market stalls with corrugated-iron roofs sell everything from fresh fruit and vegetables and fish, meat, and poultry to Hello Kitty toys and fake designer handbags.

But we are still in Czechia. Garden gnomes in the shape of vodníci, the lugubrious pipe-smoking watermen who (as every Czech child knows) drown unwary mortals and keep their souls under mugs on the riverbed, line the pavement outside a stall selling Vietnamese baskets.

There are hairdressers and beauty parlors, casinos and betting shops, a wholesaler of lingerie and leather gloves. There are accountants, lawyers, travel agents, a medical clinic, a nursery school, a gym, a Western Union branch, and a Buddhist prayer room. And there are eateries aplenty, ranging from large restaurants to hole-in-the-wall snack bars. Tourists are thin on the ground, but plenty Czechs come to Sapa to eat.

Unlike in many Western countries, the Vietnamese did not arrive as refugees. They first came to Czechoslovakia during the communist era as students or in work-training programmes. By the mid-1980s around 28,000 Vietnamese people were living in Czechoslovakia.

Many returned to Vietnam after 1989, but around 10,000 stayed on. Their numbers were swelled by Vietnamese relocating from East Germany, Poland and Hungary. The largest wave of Vietnamese immigration came after 2000. The Czech government restricted the issuing of visas at the end of 2008.