Sapa is a Vietnamese town of about thirty-five hectares on the southern edge of Prague. Inside are wholesale depots, food halls, grocers, herbalists, hairdressers, travel agents, insurance offices, a kindergarten, language classes and a Buddhist temple, with several thousand businesses registered on the ground. The signage is Vietnamese first, the layout is industrial and the aisles are stacked with boxed goods, because the place was built for trade rather than for visitors.
What outsiders come for is the food: canteens serving what the traders themselves eat, at the hours traders keep, which are early. The community goes back to labour and study agreements between two socialist states in the 1970s and 80s, and Vietnamese nationals are now the third-largest group of foreign citizens in the country. The corner shop found in almost every Czech village is supplied out of these depots. All of it sits inside a meat and poultry plant that stopped work in 1999 and was rented out within a year.