Calle Capón

This guide to Calle Capon in Lima opens with a puzzle: why, in 1999, total strangers lined up to pay to have something of their own carved into this sidewalk. It traces mayor Alberto Andrade's project to clear the vendors who had packed the street since the 1980s and restore its cracked, Chinese-inscribed tiles, timed to the 150th anniversary of the first Chinese immigrants arriving in Peru. It also follows the street's older layers, back to the pigs that gave it its plain original name and the Cantonese migrants who opened the first chifa restaurants here in the 1850s.