Chinese people in Sri Lanka

[4] Approximately 80% of Sri Lankan Chinese live in Colombo and are mainly involved in the dental trade, textile retail, hotel and restaurant industries.

[8] In the past, some younger generations of Sri Lankan Chinese left the country due to political instability.

[9] Sri Lanka's earliest known Chinese visitor was Faxian, a 5th-century Buddhist pilgrim travelling overland from his home through present-day Nepal and India before coming to Abhayagiri Dagaba, where he stayed from 410 to 414.

When Ceylon was under Dutch rule in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Dutch East India Company authorities at Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia) would occasionally deport unemployed or illegal Chinese residents to Cape of Good Hope, the Banda Islands, while only deported some to Sri Lanka, in order to provide manpower and limit the growth of the foreign population in Batavia.

[5] In July 1740, a plan was drawn up for mass deportations of Chinese workers from Batavia to work in cinnamon harvesting in Ceylon.

The British governor Frederick North, the colonial Governor of Ceylon from 1798 to 1805, arranged for the import of migrant workers and soldiers of various ethnic groups, including Malays, Malayalis, and Africans; under North's direction, 47 Malayan Chinese were recruited from Penang to come to Ceylon for agricultural work near Galle (hence the local place-name China Garden) and Trincomalee.

However, with the outbreak and intensification of the WW2, and following it Communist victory, these migrants ended up staying in Ceylon far longer than they had intended, and made it their home.

[17] The Sri Lankan Chinese community once numbered in the thousands; however, beginning from the 1960s, most began to migrate overseas to Europe as well as North America.

[19] However, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the easing of immigration regulations, a new wave of Chinese migrants came to Sri Lanka to try their luck in small businesses, braving the intensity of the Anti-Tamil violence and the civil war.

One major chain, the Chinese Lucky Store, imported goods from Hong Kong; branches still remain in Maradana, Wellawatta, and Trincomalee.

In the meantime, due to the rise of supermarkets and malls and other modernisation of Sri Lanka's retail and medical sectors, the descendants of early migrants have moved away from their families' traditional businesses into areas as varied as shrimp farming and accountancy.

In January 2008, after lobbying led by University of Peradeniya zoology graduate Chwing-Chi Chang, Prime Minister and Internal Administration Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake presented the Parliament of Sri Lanka with a draft bill to grant Sri Lankan citizenship to stateless persons of Chinese origin who had been settled in the country for a long time.

The government provided scholarships for 16 Sinhala language majors from Beijing Foreign Studies University; they arrived in September 2008, and spent six months in the country.