Chinese people in the Czech Republic form one of the country's smaller migrant communities. Migration history A few Chinese settled in Czechoslovakia prior to World War II. They consisted largely of overland migrants from Wenzhou, Zhejiang. Most were Catholics. They came largely as travelling salesmen to the Bohemia region; some married local women and settled down. Up to the 1940s, a few more Chinese arrived, for example as acrobats with travelling circuses. However, most of them left the country when the war broke out. The few who did remain fled to Western Europe after the Communist takeover, when their businesses were confiscated. Due to the worsening Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, there was little further contact between Czechoslovakia and the People's Republic of China. Hungary, rather than Czechoslovakia, was the initial hub of the post-1989 Chinese community in Eastern Europe, due to their policy of offering visa-free entry to PRC nationals; as many as 45,000 Chinese may have arrived in Hungary by 1992, largely shuttle traders and migrant workers. However, when that visa-free policy was terminated, the Chinese began to spread out to other neighbouring countries, primarily Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. They consisted not of poor rural migrants, as was the common image in the popular imagination, but rather of former civil servants and workers in state-owned enterprise, who were giving up their "iron rice bowls" to go abroad and try to get rich as traders. In the mid-1990s, the Czech Republic briefly came to prominence as a transit point for Chinese migrants being smuggled into Western Europe, but Hungary regained its popularity by the end of the 1990s. There was a brief spike in asylum seekers in the late 1990s. Demography and distribution Most Chinese in the Czech Republic reside in Prague, though they are less concentrated than they were in the past; in 1993, only 7% of Chinese in the country lived elsewhere, but by 2000 that figure had grown to 41%. However, they remain more urbanised than any other immigrant group in the country. They come largely from Zhejiang, Beijing, and Shanghai, and men outnumber women by a ratio of three-to-two, according to unofficial surveys. In the late 1990s, there may have been as many as 9,000 Chinese in the country, including illegal migrants. However, December 2007 official figures from the Czech Statistical Office showed a total of just 4,986; this made Chinese the 10th-largest group of