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The Art Gallery of Ontario is hemmed in by Chinatown , a bustling and immensely appealing neighbourhood cluttered with shops, restaurants and street stalls selling every and any type of Asian delicacy. The boundaries of Chinatown are somewhat blurred, but its focus has been Dundas Street West between Bay and Spadina ever since the Sixties, when the original Chinatown was demolished to make way for the new City Hall. The first Chinese to migrate to Canada arrived in the mid-nineteenth century to work in British Columbia's gold fields. Subsequently, a portion of this population migrated east, and a sizeable Chinese community sprung up in Toronto in the early twentieth century. Several more waves of migration - the last influx following the handing over of Hong Kong to mainland China by the British in 1997 - have greatly increased the number of Toronto's Chinese in recent years, bringing the population to approximately 250,000 (about eight percent of the city's total). Next door to Chinatown, just north of Dundas between Spadina and Augusta, lies Toronto's most ethnically diverse neighbourhood, pocket-sized Kensington Market . It was here, at the beginning of the twentieth century, that Eastern European immigrants squeezed into a patchwork of modest little brick and timber houses that survive to this day. On Kensington Avenue they established the open-air street market that has been the main feature of the neighbourhood ever since, a lively, entertaining bazaar whose stall owners stem from many different ethnic backgrounds. The lower half of the market, just off Dundas Street, concentrates on secondhand clothes, while the upper half is crowded with fresh-food stalls.
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