A gallery of memories: How Kolkata’s citizens are preserving the city’s Chinese heritage
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A menu from the 1960s from Waldorf Restaurant, located on Russell Street. A bottle of Pou Chong’s sauce, established in a factory in Tangra.
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These are among the artefacts on display at the Cheenapara Heritage Gallery, which opened its doors in Kolkata’s Tiretta Bazar on September 5 to showcase the rich heritage of the city’s Chinese community.
“We need a place to keep, preserve, document, and showcase all of it to not just the Chinese community but also Kolkata’s citizens at large,” said Sohini Pyne, a conservation architect and curator of the gallery. “Those who live in Kolkata must know the Chinese history of the city and the intimate stories of these spaces.”
Added Chen Yao Hua, the gallery’s manager, “It is also a way to honour our ancestors who worked so hard to make a home in this city.”
A city of Chinatowns
Tiretta Bazar is one of Kolkata’s two “Chinatowns”. The other is 6 km away in Tangra. Both were established by the 1930s and were busy centres of commerce. Cantonese migrants lived in Tiretta Bazar and Hakka migrants in Tangra.
The most prominent exhibit in the Cheenapara Heritage Gallery is a photograph of Sun Yat-sen, the physician who founded the Republic of China and the Kuomintang, a...