The Chi­na­town arch at the cor­ner of Park Street, Port-of-Spain, is now an un­mis­tak­able land­mark and is recog­nis­able from a dis­tance.

The sec­ond Chi­na­town arch is sched­uled to be erect­ed on In­de­pen­dence Square, Port-of-Spain, on Tues­day.

But the first struc­ture has had a po­lar­is­ing ef­fect on cit­i­zens, busi­ness­men, ven­dors and passers-by alike, some with xeno­pho­bic com­ments and those who care for its con­struc­tion.

Guardian Me­dia did some re­search and took a look at the his­to­ry of Chi­nese in the cap­i­tal city.

The Chi­nese are not new­com­ers to the coun­try or Char­lotte Street. They have been in T&T for 213 years, the first ship­ment of 192 Chi­nese im­mi­grants ar­rived on a ship named For­ti­tude on Oc­to­ber 12, 1806, 39 years be­fore the Fa­tel Raza­ck ar­rived in Trinidad bring­ing with it the first In­di­an in­den­tured labour­ers from a port in Cal­cut­ta, on May 30, 1845.

There were Chi­nese mer­chants on Char­lotte Street since the 19th cen­tu­ry.

John Lee Lum, a pi­o­neer in the lo­cal oil in­dus­try came to Trinidad in 1885 and set up a pro­vi­sion shop on Char­lotte Street. It was a pros­per­ous en­ter­prise since there was a boom in the price of co­coa and he trad­ed pro­vi­sions for dried co­coa beans which were then ex­port­ed.

Hum­ming Bird medal re­cip­i­ent Carlisle Chang, who de­signed the na­tion’s coat of arms and na­tion­al flag, his works of sculp­ture, ‘Con­quer­abia’, is out­side the Port-of-Spain City Hall, and the in­her­ent No­bil­i­ty of Man was lo­cat­ed at the Pi­ar­co Air­port but was de­mol­ished dur­ing the air­port’s ex­pan­sion.

Willi Chen’s “So­lar Mari­no­ra­ma” mur­al is on dis­play at the Cen­tral Bank.

When Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed the arch, sev­er­al Chi­nese work­ers from the Shang­hai Con­struc­tion Group were back­fill­ing the base of the columns with con­crete and they were done in less than an hour.

Some cit­i­zens made their feel­ings known about the arch and what it rep­re­sents.

A man de­scrib­ing him­self as a “passer­by civ­il en­gi­neer” said, “Peo­ple are afraid of change, they want de­vel­op­ment with­out change. There was an up­roar over the Gov­ern­ment Cam­pus Plaza, now every­one wants to be part of it and the wa­ter­front de­vel­op­ment. It is some­thing in­evitable and will im­prove the lives of cit­i­zens one way or an­oth­er.”

He­len Houl­der said, “It’s long over­due. I know when Ling Nam was one of the best Chi­nese restau­rants on Char­lotte Street. A lot of peo­ple don’t know the his­to­ry that al­most the whole of Char­lotte Street was owned by Chi­nese.”

A fe­male ven­dor added, “Whole day Fri­day no one was pleased with it. There were more neg­a­tive re­spons­es than pos­i­tive. Some peo­ple said they had no in­put in the mat­ter, they said they felt they were be­ing pushed out of ei­ther their her­itage or the coun­try.”

A male ven­dor said “I like the sign, it’s very good but I want the au­thor­i­ties to com­pen­sate me for my rent Thurs­day and Fri­day when they locked off the road and I couldn’t sell. They didn’t even in­form the busi­ness­men. The Chi­nese give them 200 bikes, now they’re ow­ing the Chi­nese.”

Busi­ness­man Ay­oub Kabli said, “I like it. It’s very nice for the city. Every ma­jor city in Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca has a Chi­na­town. It will def­i­nite­ly gen­er­ate an in­ter­est but they must solve the ven­dor prob­lem, reg­u­late it, bring or­der to the city; it’s chaos with the ob­struc­tion in front of busi­ness­es. The arch is a very, very good idea, it’s part of the cul­ture. You will get the ob­vi­ous stereo­types; some peo­ple are ill-in­formed to a cer­tain point, I would say ig­no­rance.”