Chinatown and Musee des Arts et Metiers
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Chinatown and Musee des Arts et Metiers
A couple of blocks to the west, on and around the top end of Rue du Temple, lies Paris’s original Chinatown district, The area was settled during World War I when Chinese immigrants came over to fill the gap in the workforce left by the departure of French troops for the front. Rue du Temple, lined with many beautiful houses dating back to the seventeenth century (no. 41, for instance, the Hôtel Aigle d’Or, is the last surviving coaching inn of the period), is full of Chinese-run wholesale businesses trading in leather and fashion accessories.
The streets to the west of rue du temple are narrow, dark, and riddled with passages, the houses half-timbered and bulging with age. At no. 51 rue Montmorency is Paris’s oldest house, built in 1407 for the alchemist Nicolas Flamel, whose name will ring a bell with Harry Potter fans; the building is now a restaurant, Anberge Nicolas Flamel.
West of rue Volta is the Musee des Arts et Metiers, at 60 rue de Reaumur. This fascinating museum of technological innovation is part of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers and incorporates the former Benedictine priory of St-Martin-des-Champs, its original chapel dating from the fourth century. Extensively revamped a number of years ago, the museum happily combine creaky old floors and spacious rooms with high-tech, twenty-first-century touches. Its most important exhibit is Foucault’s pendulum, which the scientist used to demonstrate the rotation of the earth in 1851, a sensational event held at the Pantheon and attended by a huge crowd eager to "see the earth go round". The orb itself, a hollow brass sphere, is under glass in the chapel and there’s a working model set up nearby.
Other exhibits include the laboratory of Lavoisier, the French chemist who first showed that water is a combination of oxygen and hydrogen and hanging as if in mid-flight, above the grand staircase is the elegant "Avion 3", a flying machine complete with feathered propellers, which was donated to the Conservatoire after several ill-fated attempts to fly it.
