where they were offered land along the Volga River. Some settlers left for Siberia in search for fertile land. The Russian capital itself, Moscow, also had a number of Dutch immigrants, mostly working as craftsmen. Arguably the most famous of which was Anna Mons, the mistress of Peter the Great. Historically Dutch also lived directly on the eastern side of the German border, most have since been assimilated (apart from ~40,000 recent border migrants), especially since the establishment of Germany itself in 1872. Cultural marks can still be found though. In some villages and towns a Dutch Reformed church is present, and a number of border districts (such as Cleves, Borken and Viersen) have towns and village with an etymologically Dutch origin. In the area around Cleves (German , Dutch ) traditional dialect is Dutch, rather than surrounding (High/ Low) German. More to the South, cities historically housing many Dutch traders have retained Dutch exonyms for example Aachen () and Cologne/Köln () to this day. Southern Africa Although Portuguese explorers made contact with the Cape of Good Hope as early as 1488, much of present-day South Africa was ignored by Europeans until the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established its first outpost at Cape Town, in 1652. Dutch colonisers began arriving shortly thereafter, making the Cape home to the oldest Western-based civilisation south of the Sahara. Some of the earliest mulatto communities in the country were subsequently formed through unions between colonists, enslaved people, and various Khoikhoi tribes. This led to the development of a major South African ethnic group, Cape Coloureds, who adopted the Dutch language and culture. As the number of Europeans—particularly women—in the Cape swelled, South African whites closed ranks as a community to protect their privileged status, eventually marginalising Coloureds as a separate and inferior racial group. Since VOC employees proved inept farmers, tracts of land were granted to married Dutch citizens who undertook to spend at least twenty years in South Africa. Upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, they were joined by French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution at home, who interspersed among the original freemen. Between 1685 and 1707 the company also extended free passage to any Dutch families wishing to resettle at the Cape. At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were roughly 600 people of Dutch birth or descent residing in South Africa, and around the end of