own tea, pepper, and rice plantations to supply the domestic Vietnamese market. Hoa gardeners monopolized the grocery stores in the suburban areas of Saigon and Chinese-owned restaurants and hotels began to germinate in every urban Vietnamese market center. In 1906, Hoa and French businessmen together generated a total capital output of 222 million francs, compared to 2 million francs for the indigenous Kinh majority. The first steam-operated rice milling enterprise owned by the Chinese came into being in 1876 in Cholon. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Hoa controlled five of the eight rice milling factories in Saigon-Cholon. In 1920, they expanded to 13 out of the 20 rice mills, and by the 1930s, the Chinese ended up controlling 75 of the 94 rice mills. By the 1930s, niches and gaps between the large-scale manufacturing establishments, commercial, plantation, and financial services businesses held by the French were filled by smaller businesses controlled by the Chinese. Auspicious economic policies attracted a rapid influx of Chinese immigrants who sought to unlock their financial destinies through business success until the mid-twentieth century. Between 1925 and 1933, some 600,000 Han Chinese immigrants settled in Vietnam. Between 1923 and 1951, as many as 1.2 million Chinese emigrants moved from China to Vietnam. Hoa merchants delved into the rice, liquor, opium, and spice trade, where they set up plantations in the rural hinterlands of the Mekong delta and sold their products in Cholon. In the north, the Hoa were mainly rice farmers, fishermen, and coal miners, except for those residing in cities and provincial towns. The French regularly collaborated with Chinese businessmen in the agricultural and heavy industry sectors, and the latter often served as middlemen to liaise between themselves and the French in the domestic trade sector. South Vietnamese rule (1945–1975) By the 1950s, the Hoa had held enormous sway on Vietnam's economic and political life as the concomitant brunt that came with the societal implications of wielding such vast amounts of economic power and political influence, the Chinese community was stereotypically viewed as "a state within a state", forming a more distinct cosmopolitan and wealthier population than the host Kinh majority. The glaring economic success of the Hoa ‌inflamed and incurred the wrath, resentment, envy, animosity, and outright hostility from their Kinh counterparts. The Hoa had a huge propensity to voluntarily segregate themselves from the Kinh, typically associating themselves with the Chinese