The police seemed unprepared for the spontaneous protest. At sunset, protesters moved barriers from elsewhere in the square and built a barricade around the assembled police, who had brought a van equipped with water cannon. Bonfires were lit between the barricade and the obelisk, on the site where the guillotine once stood. ‘We decapitated Louis XVI,’ the crowd chanted, ‘we can do it again, Macron!’
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Lo’s Noodle Factory supplies almost all the Chinatown restaurants, as well as the Hakkasan group; no one was cutting noodles when I went there on a Friday afternoon. ‘It’s not just Chinatown. It’s anywhere where there are Chinese people. France, Italy – it doesn’t matter; it’s the whole world,’ said the man handing me my order of char siu bao, red bean buns and cheung fun. Lo’s only just avoided closing last November, when Shaftesbury plc (which owns most of Chinatown) tried to turn it into an electrical substation. The whole area was already under pressure from skyrocketing rents and immigration enforcement raids. The novel coronavirus has further stymied Chinatown’s micro-economy.