Prato is a small, little-known town in central-northern Italy, yet it has become one of the cities in Europe with the highest proportion of Chinese residents. Chinese immigrants from places like Wenzhou in Zhejiang province have moved labor-intensive textile industries to Italy, changing the meaning of “Made in Italy” and transforming Prato into a city with an undercurrent of activity. This winter, I spent 10 days exploring this small town and, after in-depth conversations with 25 interviewees, I bring you this report.
This is a story about the past, present, and future. The past industrial model once brought success to these immigrants but has gradually entrapped them. What price did these Chinese immigrants pay to achieve success by crossing half the globe? Was it really worth it?You will also see why, despite being part of an industrial chain that moves in the opposite direction of the world’s progress, many derivative networks have emerged, and the struggles of those involved are still deeply moving.
By Eric Jiang
Upon entering from Pisa Airport, I was transported by a clattering minibus to a desolate tram station somewhere in Florence. Then, I had to summon all my mental energy to deal with the kind of ticket machine that belonged to the pre-AI era… By the time I finally arrived in Prato, just 38.2 kilometers from Florence, it was completely dark. Most small European towns limit lighting to protect wildlife, and once night falls, cities transform into torpedoes, diving deep into the sea. Prato was no exception. It was Sunday, the air damp and chilly, and there were almost no pedestrians outside the city gates. My shadow stretched under the sparse streetlights, swallowed by the reflections of 12th-century city walls and released by ancient watchtowers. Ahead of me were tranquil, narrow alleys nestled between row houses with shutters and iron-wrought balconies, dating back a century.
A guy with his head wrapped in a hoodie, only the whites of his eyes visible, appeared from around a corner, striding toward me with a gleaming bicycle lock in his hand. Before he reached me, I had already read plenty of news about how corners of Italian streets were increasingly being dominated by illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and North Africa. Fueled by the rhetoric of Meloni’s right-wing government, some newspapers even repetitively warned: be cautious of thieves and robbers, don’t walk alone at night! After all, landing in Sicily and entering the country isn’t as hard as reaching the sky. I usually just pay attention to such warnings but never take them too seriously. Ironically, when I encounter someone who seems suspicious, like this guy, those warnings suddenly turn into a loudspeaker in my mind. My heart starts racing, and my steps become hurried. Thankfully, he was just a passerby, his long legs almost like stilts, taking three steps to leave me behind. Stereotype—the word bounced in front of me like a rubber ball. I often remind myself to be cautious of such inert thinking, don’t I?
Including illegal immigrants, Prato is home to nearly 50,000 Chinese people, accounting for 12% of the local population, according to an incomplete 2021 government census. No one knows the exact number now. Locals refer to Prato as “Little China,” and it has the second-largest Chinese community in Italy, after Milan. Although it ranks second, “Little China” is quite famous because it has caused a variety of Rashomon-like scenarios in the once peaceful, thousand-year-old city of Prato.
Around the turn of the millennium, Chinese immigrants from Zhejiang and Fujian took great risks to gradually arrive in Prato. These early settlers spoke no Italian and had little money, so they first worked in local textile factories for Italians, filling the gap left by the aging industrial workforce. Soon, they learned the Italian production processes and started their own factories. From small family workshops to textile workshops, and eventually to factories over a thousand square meters in size, the Chinese community grew, forming a massive cumulonimbus cloud that brought a new storm to Prato’s economic life. A portion of Italians resented their arrival, calling it the “Yellow Peril” (muso giallo); another group, however, welcomed them, seeing their presence as bringing economic and cultural diversity to Prato. Some even believed that the Chinese community had become an integral part of Prato, like yeast in pizza dough—without them, the dough wouldn’t rise.
On my way through the old town of Prato to my accommodation, I saw all the familiar symbols of European middle and upper-class—greenery shops, designer boutiques, record stores, opera houses, galleries, and contemporary art centers. The ancient city center was bustling with well-dressed crowds even in such terrible weather. After nightfall, classical music began to play throughout the streets and alleys. People shopped for scented toilet paper to the strains of Schubert’s Nocturne, or enjoyed freshly baked pizza and crisp bread to the sounds of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. In the organic food store, a cherry tomato the size of a bead on a bracelet was priced at 3 euros. The place looked so cosmopolitan and global, yet I rarely saw any of the Chinese community, which makes up more than 10% of the city’s population. In the Airbnb where I stayed, a 100-year-old Italian building, there wasn’t a single pair of chopsticks to be found.
But when I arrived at Chinatown, located on the edge of the old town’s commercial district, another world appeared. The main street exuded the flavor of a Chinese county town from the 1990s—stone-paved roads, beauty salons, massage parlors, cartoon sticker stationery shops, and black-and-white little pieces of paper stuck on corners and trash cans: “Pretty girls, big breasts.” A man with a unique build casually bought roasted chestnuts, and the pharmacy owner sat upright, diligently preparing herbal remedies… Unlike Chinatown in London, there were no red lanterns flying in the air, no pavilions or towers adorned with dragons and phoenixes, no wonders for the orientalists to admire. This place was simple, practical, and unadorned. Breakfast consisted of soymilk and fried dough sticks for 3 euros; a fast-food meal with three dishes and one vegetable cost 5 euros; for 15 euros, you could have four kinds of dim sum, including shumai and salted egg yolk zongzi; 80 euros was enough to treat three or four people to an authentic Sichuan hotpot. Chinese-faced workers gathered in groups after work to grab a bite. If it weren’t for the Italian signs on every shop, I would almost forget where I was.
In the following days, as I became more familiar with Prato, I realized that the Chinese community had, to some extent, transformed the face of this small European town. The old town is the heart of Prato, but on its outskirts, like a satellite city, there are Chinese factories and showrooms. These industrial zones look like the old Wenzhou, the old Dongguan, the old Yangtze River Delta—basically, like any place in China that once rose on the back of labor-intensive industries. They have reemerged in distant Italy. Surrounding them is a third circle—thousands of hidden, private workshops nestled in the suburban-urban fringe of Prato.
In Europe, when clothes are labeled with “Made in Italy,” people typically imagine a scene from the mid-20th century: ancient workshops, artisans with gold-rimmed glasses, and an almost obsessive attention to craftsmanship. For example, in the UK, a place where people want heritage, beauty, and affordability all in one, the respect for “Made in Italy” is akin to the reverence for “The Tailor of Gloucester,” a character from Beatrix Potter’s illustrations.
However, in less than 30 years, the Chinese community has completely shattered the traditional concept of “Made in Italy.”
On my first day in Prato, I was kindly reminded by several people that everything here is about speed. If I followed the British approach of booking a year and a half in advance with appointments precise to three decimal places, I probably wouldn’t see anyone in Prato. You need to book on the same day, and even if you do, there’s no guarantee the appointment will be kept—once a customer places an order, whether it’s 300 pieces or 500, the workers immediately return to the factory and make it as quickly as possible.
Wenzhou entrepreneur Da Fu was the first Chinese businessman I met after adapting to the “Prato speed.” He owns a knitwear factory in the area. He is young, handsome, with single eyelids and bright black bean eyes, looking at first glance like a cheerful Korean guy.
“The key to success in Prato’s garment industry is speed,” he explained to me, describing how Chinese people succeed in Prato. “If a customer wants a certain design, it can be made immediately; if this week’s trend is burgundy, we can dye it right away.” In other words, a fashion piece seen at Paris Fashion Week at 8 a.m. can have its Prato version ready by 4 p.m. “If you place an order with India or somewhere far away, it takes so long that by the time the clothes finally reach the European market, they’ve lost that fresh appeal,” Fu said.
Inspired by the production model from their hometown, Chinese-owned factories in Prato have developed a comprehensive and efficient system. They excel at breeding “fast beasts,” using them to feed the aging and slow European market. Fu’s knitwear factory doesn’t directly produce finished products from customer orders; instead, their pattern maker creates the prototype according to the customer’s specifications, then sends the semi-finished products to another processing factory to complete the remaining steps.
An 80s-born Fujian guy, nicknamed “Little Tailor,” runs one such processing factory. His upstream partners are cutting companies similar to Fu’s knitwear factory. The cutting companies take orders, create samples, and cut the pieces, then Little Tailor stitches the fragments together piece by piece. Each worker focuses on one specific task, whether it’s the shoulder seam or the zipper, working from morning to night, day after day. It’s much like how the Dafen village in Shenzhen uses assembly lines to replicate Van Gogh paintings. One person paints the sunflower stem, another paints the petals, and except for the boss, no one sees the complete painting.
Like Fu, Little Tailor’s focus is also on speed. He told me that when there’s work to be done, he would work “for thirty-some hours, thirty-some hours straight.”
“But there are only 24 hours in a day!” I said, incredulously.
“It’s just several days without sleep, then a few hours of rest, and then back to work,” Little Tailor replied.
In Prato, there are probably close to 20,000 similar family workshops. Every worker I met, hoping to strike gold, wished to earn over 3,000 euros a month. If they work 17 hours a day, are fast enough, have top-notch skills, and make almost no mistakes — this isn’t impossible, because in Prato, Chinese workers are paid by the piece. During peak season, they work overtime; during off-season, they rest. Fu calls this “voluntary 997” (working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week). “I tell our masters and workers that if you want shorter hours or weekends off, it’s fine, but the pay will be less…” He says they always eagerly reply, “No rest, no rest.”
But even if they are fast, skilled, and make almost no mistakes, earning over 3,000 euros still requires a bit of divine intervention. If they are just a little slower, they can only complete a maximum of 100 pieces a day. At 0.7 euros per piece, even if they work nonstop, they can only make a maximum of 2,100 euros a month.
“Wouldn’t it be easier if the processing fee for each piece of clothing were doubled?” I asked Little Tailor. He frankly said that he had no bargaining power. Fu’s answer was the same. “Because the production cost of a piece of clothing is only a few euros. Even a pair of shoes that sells for 3,000 euros in a boutique only costs about 30 euros.”
Fu told me that once, a British brand was reported for using sweatshop factories. In order to satisfy the hidden moral comfort of the European middle class, they wanted to add an audit label (proving no unethical practices were involved) to their clothes. They searched all over Prato but couldn’t find a factory willing to take the order. The reason was simple: the factories refused to raise the price. “So, the only way to resist is for all the factories in Prato to go on strike at once,” Fu said. “But as long as one factory compromises, the whole thing falls apart.”
In reality, in most cases, no one dares to go on strike. Due to the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war, Eastern European orders have dropped sharply in recent years, and Western Europe is also facing a downgrade in consumption. Prato’s garment industry is experiencing an unprecedented winter, and many Chinese workers have no choice but to return home. If you don’t do it, someone else will. There will always be someone more desperate for money than you.
To meet deadlines, Little Tailor has developed a form of hard work that only Chinese people could perfect during his 21 years in Prato. When he first arrived, he worked in a factory owned by a fellow Fujianese, where the boss’s wife would beat and scold him. After saving up some capital, unwilling to endure the humiliation, he decided to start on his own. He rented an Italian country house (because private residences are harder to detect and cannot be raided without cause), hired a few workers, and they worked tirelessly. The income from processing a piece of clothing has barely changed in 20 years, ranging from 0.5 to 1 euro. Little Tailor took 30%, and the workers took 70%. They worked on an assembly line, their hands moving like flying wheels, seamlessly integrating with the machines. Outsiders would have a hard time distinguishing between the machines and the people.
His family workshop is located in an old house on the outskirts of Prato, at the junction of urban and rural areas. The front door is sealed, and you must enter through the side yard. The yard is surrounded by a fence, which is further secured by wire mesh. It is sunny, with a lovely coop, a dozen local chickens, and a neatly organized vegetable garden. Little Tailor, a farmer from the countryside who followed the wave of migrant workers to Prato, couldn’t even bring a photo with him; the memory of his land was the only baggage he carried. A few years ago, he moved from the center of Prato to this place. Besides the cheaper rent, he liked the small vegetable garden.
However, this seemingly idyllic rural life disappears the moment Little Tailor’s thin figure enters the house. What’s in front of you is a small workshop, measuring no more than 20 square meters, with thick wooden boards nailed to the windows, blocking any natural light. There is no furniture or decoration. Instead, there are seven or eight sewing machines, a few fluorescent light tubes, and piles of colorful threads stacked like mountains. If he has time to sleep, Little Tailor rests in a humble room downstairs. The two bedrooms upstairs are shared by the workers: one room for the female workers, the other for the male workers, each room housing two people. If there is more work and more hands are needed, he gives up his room and sets up a sleeping mat in the workshop.
“Are you at the bottom of this supply chain?” I asked.
“I’m not at the very bottom. Below me, there are the factory workers; they are the ones at the bottom,” Little Tailor replied.
“In what circumstances would you fall into that lowest tier?” I asked again.
“During the off-season, when there are no orders to take. It can happen anytime. Last year, around this time, I couldn’t get any orders at all, so I had to work in a factory. The factory environment, you know, it’s all about watching your boss’s face and enduring their temper. When I used to work in a factory, the owners were a couple who worked like crazy, working long hours, right? Their two-year-old daughter would crawl around on the floor, picking up cigarette butts to eat. The boss’s child… we, the workers, couldn’t stand it,” he said. He explained that this was the reason he didn’t want to bring his son over from China to reunite in Prato: “If I fall back into factory work, who would take care of him?”
Fu’s parents arrived in Prato in 1998 and worked in a relative’s clothing factory. In 2004, when the Italian government offered an amnesty, they decided to bring Fu and his sister over from China. He was 12 years old, and his sister was 17. I asked him: With so many different processing factories in Prato, what made you stand out? Was it quality?
“We don’t compete on quality,” Fu said.“The quality of products made by Chinese factories is all about the same. For example, our parents’ generation didn’t care too much about precision when making clothes. The shoulder width, for instance, could be rounded off—4, 6, or even 7. Their clients were mostly relatives and fellow villagers who didn’t mind that, as long as it was cheap and looked decent.”
“My generation is the pioneering generation, we’re different. We compete on service.”
Seeing the confusion on my face, he explained. For example, when dealing with British clients, who are conservative and rigid, he makes sure everything is clearly priced and always provides an invoice. “You need to understand your customers’ psychology,” he said. He speaks Wenzhounese and Mandarin, and from the age of 12, he learned grammar and daily conversation at school, becoming fluent in Italian—a skill that surpasses many of his peers in Prato. At 21, he proactively went to a Franco-Chinese clothing factory to learn sales. “It’s all about treating customers better, being polite.”
In 2021, Fu opened his own company, and in just four years, his clients spanned the globe, including the UK discount chain TK Maxx. “I don’t want to rely on the connections of my parents’ generation,” he proudly said. “My clients are all foreigners.”
From the production lines of Fu and Little Tailor, the clothes are neatly ironed and displayed in the showrooms of Prato’s Macrolotto industrial zone. The kind-hearted Hongjie, a former garment worker, later a fashion store owner, and now a volunteer in the charity sector, drove her Mitsubishi and took me on a tour of this industrial zone.
Every building boasts glaring lightboxes, engraved with every Chinese name you could imagine, symbolizing prosperity, wealth, or ambition—names like “Taobao Fashion City” and “United Fashion Company,” just to mention a few. The showrooms of each company are spacious, bright, and minimalist, resembling an Ikea store. At the front desk, you often find two or three young girls dressed in their own brand, greeting every customer enthusiastically.
Macrolotto also has a large canteen called Ristorante Chen, located on the first floor of a building by Via Toscana. From steamed buns to pan-fried buns to fried noodles, it offers a wide variety of tasty food. A young girl from Fujian, along with her friend, opened a milk tea shop in a corner, sharing profits with the “Ristorante”. They specialize in the iconic Fujian dessert, “Sì Guǒ Tāng” (Four Fruit Soup). The tapioca pearls, made from cassava flour, look translucent and tempting.
Tuscany’s trade president, Marco Landi, revealed in 2023 that there are approximately 4,000 Chinese-owned garment companies in Prato. According to data from China Global Network in 2015, Chinese businesses had already contributed 10% of Prato’s GDP by that time. An Italian high-end leather manufacturer, who preferred to remain unnamed, also stated that among Tuscany’s high-end brand manufacturers, six out of ten were owned by Chinese individuals. However, at the same time, local Italian media often criticize the Chinese for not adhering to the ideals of “Made in Italy,” for not focusing on perfection; for importing cheap fabrics from China (Prato alone consumes a third of the fabric imported into Italy from China each year); for selling “Made in Italy” products back to China; and for employing the mafia to control logistics. Some of these issues may be true, while others are more like rumors, as fleeting as the waves of Sicily. In a documentary titled Macrolotto Zero, local Italian residents complain that Macrolotto has only clothing showrooms and no public spaces for the Italian locals.
A factory inspector working for the Ministry of Labor confirmed that some Chinese-owned garment factories indeed neglect production safety, fail to enforce the wearing of masks, gloves, and other protective equipment for specific jobs, and have issues like outdated machinery and lack of regular maintenance. “If you issue them a fine, the next day, everything — people and machines — will just vanish. The trash is cleared away, and the place is left spotless,” the inspector said. “After a while, they change the name of the factory, and it reappears. Behind the whole disappearance and revival is a full-service chain, from lawyers to accountants, and you never know who the actual owner of the factory is.” However, Dr. Fan Yintan, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Essex and a researcher on the Chinese community in Prato, told me that many of the issues Italian media complain about also existed in Italy’s own labor communities in the past. In his view, rather than a form of structural discrimination, it is more of an “xenophobic sentiment arising from bewilderment.”
To understand this mixed love-hate emotion, one must trace back to the history of Prato.
Prato is surrounded by mountains and has a relatively large population, resulting in limited land and agricultural resources, which makes it difficult to develop animal husbandry. Therefore, locals early on accumulated a technique for recycling scrap wool fabrics and re-spinning them into new yarn.
As early as the 12th century, Prato became one of Italy’s bases for textile recycling, with countless small family workshops. The woolen shawl produced in the 15th century (which looks very similar to a mozzetta worn by the pope) is still displayed at the local textile museum. I circled the display three times, carefully looking for flaws, even using a scanning app to examine the stitching, but I couldn’t find a single mistake. The wool was delicate, the color even, and the texture could rival the skin detail in a Raphael painting.
In the period around World War II, Prato’s textile industry split into two branches: one that produced cheap carpets and military blankets for India and Africa, and another that produced fabrics for high-end clothing in Europe. The former gradually faded away, while the latter continued to thrive. By the 1970s, Prato had become one of Europe’s largest producers of mid- to high-end textiles, and even produced a small amount of high-end clothing and shoes.
In front of an outdoor stall selling wooden deer at the market, I met an elderly Italian man who was helping his granddaughter watch the stall. Although he needed a cane to support his back, the pride he carried was as strong as a lion’s. He told me that in the early 1960s, when he was in his twenties, Prato’s textile industry was in its golden age. He came rushing up from southern Italy, carrying a leather suitcase. First, he became an apprentice, learning how to cut leather and smooth the edges for two or three years. Then he learned to make shoe soles, cut uppers, and fit them to the lasts to form the shoe shape. Every step was meticulous and slow, like grinding a pestle into a needle. He learned each process, and after some ten plus years, he finally became a shoemaker. He worked at three different shoe factories, all of which adhered to Prato’s handmade traditions. The largest factory had only a dozen shoemakers. The shoes they made, branded “Made in Italy,” could sell for as much as 150,000 Italian lira (about 800 euros later).
However, the European economic crisis of the 1980s, along with the high labor costs and an aging workforce (young people were reluctant to follow in their parents’ footsteps), caused Prato to lose out in the wave of global competition that swept in during the late 1990s. The wool recycling industry shrank by 40%, and other industries also suffered major declines. In 2001, the shoemaker retired early because he couldn’t bear the changes in the work processes—what was handed to him was no longer a complete shoe, but rather two pieces of the upper or a zipper.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that the Chinese were relatively unknown in Prato and the rest of Europe. Chinese faces only appeared in Chinatowns and gangster movies, symbolizing some exotic, Eastern flavor. In 1982, the first Chinese restaurant opened in Prato, founded by Marco Wong’s parents. Now in his sixties, Marco told me that he still remembers helping out at the restaurant on weekends during high school, taking the train from Florence. “We sold half Chinese food, half Italian food. Back then, China was still a very distant country to the Italians in Prato. They had never had Chinese food before, and they would keep pouring soy sauce over their white rice. So I had to play the role of an educator, teaching them the proper way to eat.”
However, in less than half a century, according to Italy’s right-wing media, Prato has been “occupied” by the Chinese. Edoardo Nesi, in his 2011 Strega Prize-winning novel Story of My People: On September 7, 2004, I Sold My Family’s Textile Company, describes the decline of Prato’s traditional textile industry in the wake of the rise of Chinese fast fashion garment factories. He writes: “In the new millennium, every day an Italian factory closed, every day hundreds or thousands of people lost their jobs, every day we were out in the square protesting…” Even those old textile factories that survived found it difficult to keep up with the Chinese model.
To this day, the image of Chinese workers in Prato remains negative in some Italian media, with portrayals such as “drying cured meats on the streets and apartment balconies,” “spitting everywhere,” and “construction workers violating labor laws by staying overnight on construction sites.” I can understand why the media might consciously choose to focus on these images, as a way to express the dissatisfaction that has built up over more than half a century.
In 2010, Carlo Chionna, the founder of the brand 9.2, decided to spend a fortune printing a poster from the movie Gladiator across various Italian newspapers. However, the image of the gladiator on the poster wasn’t the well-known actor Russell Crowe, but instead the founder himself—blond, charismatic, with piercing eyes. Below the image, a striking slogan read: God save the Made in Italy.
Despite Chionna’s efforts, his campaign didn’t succeed, as he couldn’t alter history. Scholar Antonella Ceccagno, in her paper The Hidden Crisis: Prato’s Industrial Area and the Once Thriving Chinese Garment Industry, points out that from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Chinese garment factories brought life back to the struggling Prato industry by offering wages less than half of what Italians earned, producing at much faster rates, and employing highly efficient logistics. By the mid-2000s, with the involvement of Chinese immigrants, Prato solidified its foundation as the largest fast fashion hub in Europe.
Furthermore, the real estate market in Prato thrived due to Chinese presence. Factories, residential areas, and commercial spaces… rental income alone generated significant yearly returns for Italians. Factory leases, which are renewed every 12 years, were consistently marked up by the owners. The area known as Chinatown has become particularly valuable—real estate ads I saw in Prato indicated that a small shop in Chinatown could fetch a monthly rent of 9,000 euros.
Nevertheless, Chinatown never lacks tenants. A young man working nearby said, “The restaurants there keep changing over and over. It’s inevitable, Chinese people are very picky about food. The old ones fall down, and new ones keep popping up.” In the window of an Italian tripe sandwich shop owned by a Chinese, I saw a Chinese advertisement that read, “Hello, I am a 49-year-old Italian woman, looking for a job as a nanny. I am highly favored by Chinese families.”
In any case, it is a fact that the Chinese have, to some extent, rewritten the fate of Prato. Today, many European cities have transformed from manufacturing hubs into rust belts, and it is undeniable that the Chinese community has played a role in helping Prato escape this fate.
Every day after the interviews, I would walk around the commercial streets of the old town, thinking about these issues that are trapped by the iron grip of history and seem impossible to escape. Removing the “stereotyped” identity labels, exploring the most real lives of the Chinese in Prato — this task is as complex as the city of Prato itself.
I visited one of Europe’s largest contemporary art museums, the Luigi Pecci, located in the heart of the old town. Inside, there were over 1,000 works by 300 contemporary artists, but I didn’t see any Chinese faces except for my own. There are also several galleries on the pedestrian street in the old town, and without exception, the gallery owners told me, “We have very few Chinese clients, and Chinese laborers never come in.” Their enjoyment isn’t found in places like these.
On the third day in Prato, I met Jingjing, a young woman who looked to be under 30. She was already the mother of three children. When I asked her what she thought about rumors like “many Chinese in Prato don’t even want to buy water,” she laughed and replied, “It’s fine, there are mountain springs everywhere in Italy. We never bring water when we take the kids to the park. We just open the spring water tap, and everyone stands there drinking.”
She and her husband both work at the same Chinese-owned garment factory. Although the work is very hard, when she spoke about everything, her face shone with the glow of hope. “When we went on blind dates, we usually just went to a shopping mall, bought an ice cream at a counter, or ordered fast food, and then chatted in the fast-food area. If we liked each other, we’d arrange to meet again at the mall. My husband and I met at a shopping mall,” Jingjing said sweetly.
Many Chinese workers in Prato who have been working for over twenty years have never been anywhere outside of Prato. Some of them haven’t even visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which is only about a two-hour drive away. About ten years ago, an entrepreneur named Ru Yu came up with a brilliant idea. With a background in Chinese literature, she posted ads in Chinatown with her phone number, offering a one-day tour for 60 euros, including transportation and lunch. The flyers she distributed were almost immediately snapped up. Some clients even called at 3 AM to inquire about the next day’s itinerary, and the dedicated Yu, ever the professional, answered every call. When the tour was fully booked, she recruited two or three friends to help, rented a minibus, and hit the road.
“Workers spend long hours in the factory with loud voices, so I had to shout along with them all day. I didn’t even have time to eat. I would shout non-stop from morning till night, and by the end of the month, my throat was so sore that speaking made me want to vomit. But I earned my first bucket of gold. Then, I used that money to get my driver’s license, buy a tourist bus, rent a shop, hire an Italian employee, and officially started my travel agency,” Yu told me.
I admired her hard work and business acumen but had some doubts about her pricing. “60 euros a day? That doesn’t even cover the cost of a ticket,” I said.
“We don’t buy tickets,” Yu explained. “There’s no time to buy tickets. For places like the Vatican, you have to wait in long lines, and by the time you buy the ticket, half the day is already gone.” She added, “Our workers aren’t interested in the inside of the attractions. They’re fine just taking a picture outside and checking in.”
When I met Yu, I had already been in Prato for several days, and I could understand the underlying meaning of her words. Compared to the Italians, who are immensely proud of their art and culture, the pride of the Chinese community in Prato is rooted in something much more practical and steeped in reality.
In that small yard, tightly enclosed by a fence, Little Tailor told me that, like the first wave of immigrants to arrive in Prato, he had come by climbing mountains and crossing fields. They referred to this as “legitimate illegal immigration.” A group of them climbed from the snowy mountains of Russia to the wilds of Ukraine, then hiked across Slovakia, and eventually entered the European Union, either through the Czech Republic or via Poland. The most treacherous part of the journey was not only the forests, glaciers, freezing temperatures, and unexpected accidents or illnesses during the climb, but also the interference from border police. One of his compatriots told me that he had been called by the police to apply for refugee status near the Czech-Slovenian border, only to be immediately thrown into a refugee camp. He spent three months in a camp filled almost entirely with people of color, and only when the camp became overcrowded with new arrivals did they finally push him out like cattle.
As they talked about these experiences, there was a sense of resoluteness and determination on their faces, as if they were showing me a collection of precious, hard-won medals of honor. Little Tailor said that when he first came to Prato, he was 19 years old. His father, who was already in his 40s, had originally planned to take the risk of going to strike it rich in Italy, but he couldn’t bear to let his father go alone.
In recent years, those who come to Prato on tourist visas and then “go underground” (mainly newcomers from places like Hebei and Northeast China) are often ridiculed by those who had undergone the “legitimate illegal immigration” journey. I mentioned to them that on the train to Prato, I met three northeastern brothers who worked in construction. They were in their 50s, covered head to toe in cement stains from work, from their hair down to their shoes. They explained that installing a bathroom costs around 60,000 euros, and although they had to give a cut to the company boss and the foreman, the three of them still made a decent amount. However, just like garment work, they had to work from dawn to dusk. But the “legitimate illegal immigrants” seemed disdainful of this. With pride, they conveyed the message to me: This level of hardship was nothing compared to “our kind of hardship.”
“Some Italians, when they lose their jobs, live off government welfare, but we’ve never considered depending on benefits. Especially us Wenzhou people, when we see others with money, we don’t envy or curse them; we just keep our heads down and quietly earn our own,” Fu said.
Fu and his sister came to Prato in 2004, undoubtedly a great year for Chinese people in Italy. That year, the Italian government granted amnesty to 630,000 undocumented immigrants, an unprecedented event in European history. The amnesty also meant legal status, which brought tax revenues as well as the same welfare benefits as local residents. In Italy, if you can’t find a job, you can apply for several hundred euros in unemployment benefits each month. But whether in Prato or the UK, to this day, I haven’t met a single Chinese person who uses their legal status to claim welfare.
The Chinese people who brought their hometown model to Italy inherited the spirit and ethos of the golden age of this industry. They possess the resilience and adaptability of wild grass, take pride in their own labor, and view idleness and laziness with shame. However, at the same time, other things quietly followed the industry chain to Prato, becoming an inseparable burden, silently trailing behind them.
At a Chinese language school, I interviewed its founder, Teacher Ke. She is petite, yet she bears a heavy responsibility. The school is divided into two districts, offering classes from kindergarten, elementary, and middle school to adult education. Its mission is to cultivate cultural confidence in children by teaching Chinese culture. However, it ends up dedicating more time and effort to emotional and affection-based education. Teacher Ke is undoubtedly an expert in this field. As soon as she opens the door to the classroom, the children rush at her like little monkeys, clinging tightly to her legs, and it takes quite a bit of strength to pry their affectionate and tender limbs away.
“I have witnessed many heartbreaking scenes. I remember a child who had just been sent back from China, barely a few years old, who never spoke. Whenever the teachers asked her questions, she would hide under the blackboard and cry—quietly, silently crying—until even the teachers were moved to tears,” Teacher Ke shared. To help these children overcome their fear of the unfamiliar environment, she and her colleagues put in tremendous effort. After all, the school’s resources are very limited, with the children only having 4 hours of Chinese classes per week, and attendance is entirely voluntary.
Compared to the second-generation Chinese who were born and raised in Prato, Pastor Huang Zhenhua of the Chinese church refers to these children as “1.5 generation.” Pastor Huang told me that most of them were born in Prato but, due to their parents’ inability to care for them, were sent back to China. They were then brought back to Prato around their teenage years. For the 1.5 generation, the Italian they once spoke fluently in childhood slowly faded after returning to China, and by the time they returned to Prato, their Italian skills were far behind their Italian peers. There was also an unimaginable language barrier between them and their parents. The children in China tended to speak Mandarin, while their parents, who had spent years working in factories, mostly spoke dialects.
Xiaohua, who studied in Italy and completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees before working as a translator for social workers in Prato, also told me that many first-generation Chinese parents, who are at the lower end of the industry chain and do not speak Italian, rely on Chinese agency services for everyday tasks such as seeing a doctor or buying plane tickets. Not only does this cost them a lot of money, but they also miss out on various policy benefits. For instance, they don’t know that the government provides subsidies for each child or that many Italian language courses for immigrants are free. Even when they have some knowledge of these programs, they often don’t know how to apply for them.
Even without language barriers, there are emotional gaps between parents and children. Xiaohua shared an example: “There was a child whose parents wouldn’t let him play with Legos, and the child became very depressed and resentful toward his parents. The teachers and social workers tried to mediate, encouraging the child to write a letter to his parents. The letter was written in Italian. The child knew that his parents didn’t understand Italian, and he could speak Chinese, but he just couldn’t bring himself to communicate with them in Chinese.” Xiaohua added, “There are a lot of Chinese children in Prato with mental health issues, but the adults don’t always recognize it. That’s when social workers step in. The most tragic case I encountered involved a couple who didn’t speak Italian and didn’t understand Italian child protection laws. They kept hitting their child, and the court eventually stripped them of custody. The child was placed in an adoption center, and the adoption process was incredibly fast—within a few months, the child was adopted. The child’s mother came to ask me when her child could come home. I had no idea how to face her or how to explain that her child would never return.”
In Pastor Huang’s view, whether it’s the 1.5 generation or the second generation, they experience a marked generational conflict compared to their parents’ generation of Chinese in Prato. “The first generation seems to still be stuck in some rural culture, and they have no sense of belonging to Italy. Many just want to save enough money quickly and retire back to China. The more they hope for this, the more stressed they become at work, leading to emotional instability and increasingly strained parent-child relationships,” Pastor Huang said. “So their children, the 1.5 and second generations, often carry a sense of identity anxiety. They don’t feel fully Italian, nor do they feel entirely Chinese. The kids come to the church because it provides them with a sense of certainty in their identity. It is their ‘spiritual home,’ and they are God’s people.”
Unconsciously, I had already spent a week in Prato. Another Sunday morning, with light rain. I went to a Chinese Christian church on the outskirts of the city center to observe the service. The service was divided into two parts: in the morning, it was for the youth, and in the afternoon, for adults. The church was simple, with a whitewashed interior, and a pragmatic stage setup. On the stage were microphones, speakers, drum kits, and an electronic keyboard—everything needed for a performance. On the big screen opposite the audience, a lively and rhythmically engaging modern choral hymn was playing, evoking the feeling of Chanty, a type of black gospel that originated from sea shanties.
The children arrived early, about a hundred of them, ranging in age from eight or nine to teenagers and young adults. Under their North Face jackets, they wore hoodies, sitting in rows on long benches, chattering and whispering before the service started. From their demeanor and dress, they seemed no different from Western children, especially when they opened their mouths to sing with enthusiasm, puffing their cheeks as they sang in Italian, “Your name is higher than the heavens; Your name is above all names.”
After an hour and a half of service, most of the children stayed for lunch. I, too, was grateful for the blessing and enjoyed a free meal. Crispy fried pork ribs, scrambled eggs with tomatoes, and a big spoonful of steaming hot white rice—this “God-given lunch” was just perfect for the Chinese stomach on a rainy day. Small round tables and folding chairs were lined up across the spacious dining hall, with people packed closely together. The noise of bustling conversations filled the air, and the sound of Mandarin—a world of Chinese children—echoed through the room.
During his adolescence, Fu was once one of these children. He had excellent social skills and was not without good Italian friends at school, but “no matter how much fun I had with the Italians, there was always a gap between us.” I asked him what his most profound feeling was from interacting with Italians. His answer was, “You can share happiness, but not hardship.”
“From the age of 5 to 12, I didn’t have a father. He was working far away. So, from a very young age, I had to learn to protect myself. When I first came to Prato, I lived with my parents at a relative’s clothing factory. I remember clearly that my relative, whom I called uncle, bought a McDonald’s meal for his own child but didn’t give us any. Because in his eyes, we were just workers. Then my cousin threw a tantrum and directly threw the McDonald’s meal into the trash. I stood in front of the trash can for a long time, wanting so badly to pick it up because I had never had it before. It was McDonald’s, the dream of a child.”
“You can have fun with foreigners. But if you try to share your troubles with them, they can’t understand,” he told me. “It’s not like with our own buddies. You call him in the middle of the night, ask him to come out for a drink, and you don’t need to say anything. He just knows you’re suffering inside.”
It wasn’t until 2019 that Prato saw its first Chinese member of parliament. Marco Wong—the same young man who once went crazy over “Italians pouring soy sauce over rice”—fought tirelessly for the Chinese community’s right to have a voice. From 2010 to 2019, he faced numerous setbacks but continued to run for office.
Chinese participation in politics is rare, and with less than 3% of Prato’s Chinese population holding Italian citizenship, not having an Italian passport meant not having the right to vote. Therefore, Marco had to earn the support of Italian voters. Fortunately, Prato has historically been a left-wing stronghold, with more people supporting immigration than those in the far-right opposition. After nine years of campaigning, Marco finally succeeded, winning the most seats. To gain insight into his experience, I took a train to Rome to meet with him.
Rome, from the perspective of a storefront, looked like a version possessed by Prato. At the morning market, Italians were selling wool sweaters imported from Prato for 10 euros for 3 pieces from the back of a van; at the night market, North African immigrants laid cardboard on the ground, selling counterfeit bags with altered names—Louis Vuitton for 5 euros each, Valentino for 7 euros. In fashion and leather stores, even those with “Made in Italy” labels mostly came from Prato—I could already recognize them from the shelves.
At the side of Piazza Vittorio, where Chinese shops were gathered, I met Marco, who arrived on a motorcycle. He wore a cartoonish round helmet, and beneath it, a scholarly Chinese face.
The area around the Piazza is very clean, and we strolled slowly into the park. “Here’s a proposal of mine, I’ll show you,” Marco said in English. To convey his ideas on more international platforms, such as English-language newspapers and Instagram, he maintained the habit of writing and giving interviews in English.
After walking for a short while along the tree-lined path filled with maple trees, we arrived at a sanded and cushioned sports area, where a few ping-pong tables were set up. Marco told me that this was his proposal— “From 2019 to 2024, during my time as a member of the Prato City Council, I proposed placing ping-pong tables and Chinese chess tables in parks like this one in Prato.”
Marco shared that during his tenure, he had proposed several renovation plans for Prato’s Chinatown. While the Italian government strongly advocated for building a library in Chinatown, Marco felt that 80% of the residents were Chinese, and the area was densely populated with Chinese shops and restaurants—with trucks frequently loading and unloading, traffic congestion and parking difficulties were the most urgent issues facing the neighborhood. He restructured the sanitation system, added parking spaces, widened sidewalks, and even went so far as to repair the roads.
“Actually, there isn’t really a problem of ‘dirty, chaotic Chinatown,’” Marco said. “It’s not that Chinese people don’t value cleanliness, but rather the issue lies in the ‘structure and allocation of sanitation work’ versus the ‘actual needs’—whether or not those conflicts are resolved well.”
However, in 2024, Italy’s right-wing government came into power, and Marco was subsequently voted out. The library that the Italian government had championed was already built in Chinatown (though it reportedly sees few visitors), while whether Marco’s proposed ping-pong tables and chess boards would ever come to fruition became uncertain with his defeat. Fortunately, Marco’s primary job was as a high school physics teacher, so even without the 90 euros per session he earned as a council member, he could still live comfortably. In fact, he felt more drawn to quiet, community-based work than to the theater of politics.
“Politics is a stage; its main function is drama,” Marco said. “The real changes come from the everyday, often mundane, community actions. For example, when I took office in 2019, the pandemic hit, and many Chinese students stopped attending school. I had to step in as a mediator, explain to the Italian side why Chinese children were so terrified of the pandemic. It was tied to the history of insecurity in Chinese families, and it required a lot of storytelling. Storytelling always has a stronger impact than lecturing or presenting facts.”
Marco is undoubtedly a master storyteller. He has written and illustrated two graphic novels, both centered around the identity struggles and resistance of the 1.5 and second-generation children.
“This story is about a second-generation Chinese ping-pong player in Prato. She loves the sport, and she’s really good at it, but her parents want her to inherit the family factory, so she starts fighting back against them,” he explained. “And this one is about a Chinese lesbian. For this one, I even hosted a launch event with an LGBTQ group in Prato. A lot of young Chinese people came because, out of fear of their parents, they couldn’t come out.”
As he spoke, Marco flipped through the pages of his graphic novels on his phone, showing me the artworks. All of them, without exception, were products generated by AI based on his own scripts. Beneath the high-tech, futuristic aesthetics of the visuals, however, lay a portrayal of an ancient, conservative Chinese society, along with the resistance of the new generation of young people against it.
Qin Huang, a single mother, has two brilliant sons. Her eldest son is an outstanding violinist, who was accepted into the Florence Music Academy at the age of 12, but later switched to fashion design. Her younger son, 18 years old, is fluent in English and plans to study AI in the United States. I met the family at a Wenzhou restaurant in Prato.
Qin is clearly not a “tiger mom.” She smiles with a certain sharpness but an underlying sweetness, like a little cat with edges. She came to Italy from Wenzhou in 1999, working in her uncle’s factory, where she met her ex-husband, who was also a fellow worker. When her eldest son was 12 and her youngest was 10, she left her husband and the factory — they were the driving force for her to break out of the cycle. In Prato, she worked three jobs: a translator during the day, a waitress at night, and a Chinese language teacher on weekends. Fitness was her passion and goal. She worked tirelessly to turn her dream into a career, training and dieting for years, even winning a regional bodybuilding competition in Italy. By the time we met, she had already taught classes for 10 hours straight.
“Ten-hour days are normal,” she told me. “Although it can be exhausting, it’s what I love to do most.” Her two sons, raised in Italy, seemed to have inherited her incredible adaptability, showing little sign of identity crisis. They conversed with her in fluent Italian and spoke to me in perfect English, sharing their future aspirations with sincerity and idealism — they could have been just like any other cosmopolitan youth around the world.
Yu, the one who distributed flyers in Chinatown to start her travel agency, arrived in Italy at 28 to join her parents who were running a garment factory. Unable to tolerate the monotony of the assembly line, she soon left the factory and threw herself into learning Italian while working as a journalist for a Chinese-language media outlet. Journalism, however, was a dying industry; not only was the media company unable to pay salaries, but at its lowest point, the boss even had to borrow money from employees. Starting a travel agency came to her as a sudden stroke of genius and also as a last-ditch effort after lending money to the boss.
“I had just started learning Italian, and could only manage very simple conversations. But I thought, why not try? We could give it a shot, right?” she recalled.
Today, in addition to her travel agency, she also runs a tea house. Her goal is simple: “The gap between the Chinese and Italians in Prato is too wide. The constant arguing and tension are very harmful to the children’s growth. I want to use tea to share the beautiful elements of Chinese culture.” Her tea house looks like a meditation center, with ancient fabric curtains, beechwood floors where guests can sit, and her own handmade flower arrangements. She named it “Zhì Liǎo” (知了), which can be translated as “Cicada” — a symbol of renewal and the passing of time.
One evening, in the Basilica di Santo Stefano, I met a blind Chinese woman. At that moment, during the Mass, the congregation was taking turns receiving the bread symbolizing the body of Christ from the priest, when suddenly her phone emitted a series of loud Chinese voice prompts, catching the attention of everyone, including the priest. However, no one stood up to scold her. An Italian woman recognized her, and it turned out they had been friends for many years. After the Mass, the three of us eagerly talked, with me speaking in English and Chinese, and the blind woman replying fluently in Italian.
The blind woman shared her story. She was originally a masseuse, with no formal education, and had come to Prato to join her husband, hoping to open a massage studio for the blind to supplement the household income. However, her husband opposed the idea, fearing that it would ruin his reputation, as people might mistake her for a “massage girl.” So, for over a decade, she had stayed home, raising children and doing odd jobs. Despite the monotony and hardships of her life, she learned Italian through interaction with the locals by listening and asking questions. When she spoke Italian, her pronunciation was clear and resonant, like playing a child’s harmonica.
On my last day in Prato, I met the Italian anthropologist, Leone Contini. Contini lived in the Carmignano mountains near Prato, and aside from teaching, he farmed and raised chickens, leading a life close to nature. In 2020, as the pandemic began, discrimination against Chinese people swept through Italy’s right-wing media. Chinese farmers’ bitter melon was scapegoated and labeled as “genetically modified crops” and “unidentified species,” leading to massive confiscations. Contini was infuriated by these articles, as many Chinese farmers were his friends. He had learned a great deal about Chinese crops from them. “You have to understand the characteristics of a crop first, and then learn how to grow it,” he said. He decided to combine his research on Chinese crop cultivation with his anthropological studies, using the crops to tell a story.
In April 2020, he planted Chinese bitter melon seeds next to his favorite olive tree, and a miracle happened. Olive trees are notorious for attracting pests, and once pests latch onto the fruit, the olive juice is drained, and a good harvest becomes impossible. The extraordinary thing about Chinese bitter melon is that its leaves grow densely around the olive tree, like a green armor, and the strong scent of the melon keeps pests at bay. Contini viewed this as a “metaphor for symbiosis,” but I preferred to see it as a symbol of friendship. In a world where humanity migrates constantly for survival, like a herd of African elephants floating on drifting tectonic plates, friendship is incredibly important.
