The first of July, 1859. Yokohama opened to foreign trade, and the clock on this neighborhood started running. Merchants arrived from Europe and America, and with them came large numbers of people from Guangdong and Shanghai.

Where they settled was reclaimed land, an area that had been rice paddy called Yokohama Shinden. The street names still carry that: Nanmon Silk Road, Kaiko-do, Choan-do are said to follow the lines of the old paddy paths. A temple to Guan Yu went up, and the festival calendar came with it, Qingming, Guandi's birthday, the lunar new year.

As of a 2022 count there are around six hundred and thirty businesses here, of which about two hundred are Chinese restaurants. The whole thing fits inside roughly five hundred meters square, bounded by the gates at the four compass points, with the main street running about three hundred meters.

Inside that square you can eat dim sum straight out of the steamer, or congee at a shop that has been simmering it since early morning. It is the densest concentration of one cuisine anywhere in the country. And the streets you walk to reach it are still, in outline, the paths between somebody's rice fields.