Since China put the European Union on its list of approved tourist destinations two years ago, the volume of Chinese sightseers to the Continent has surged - and France is their top destination. About 700,000 Chinese tourists visited France last year and the number is climbing annually.

By 2020, the World Tourism Organization estimates, 100 million Chinese will make foreign trips each year - and surveys indicate that a European vacation is by far the typical Chinese tourist's biggest travel dream.

The rising volume of these visitors is remaking European tourism, whose once intimate attractions are already struggling to accommodate the world's vacationing hordes.

The wait to ride an elevator up the Eiffel Tower, billed as the most-visited paid tourist attraction in the world, has crept up to an hour during the peak tourist season but that is nothing compared with what it will be if the trend continues.

Seeing the gargoyles on the towers at Notre Dame, meanwhile, will soon require the patience of Job.
"How to accommodate the growth of visitors is something that's on everyone's mind, and the Chinese are a very big piece of that," said Paul Roll, director of the Paris Tourism Office. He said that only factors like limited airline seats and limited manpower to process visas were keeping the growth in check.

Tourism is just one of the ways China's rapid economic growth is affecting the Continent. While Africans and Arabs still make up the bulk of Europe's new immigrants, ethnic Chinese - from both China and Southeast Asia - are quietly making their growing presence felt.

The number of ethnic Chinese in France tripled between 1985 and 1990 and then doubled between 1990 and 2000, to about 300,000 today, about half from Zhejiang Province, near Shanghai. Chinese brides in extravagant wedding gowns are now a regular weekend feature on Place de la Concorde, where they come with their grooms to have pictures taken.

Last month, an affiliate of Tang Frères, already Paris's largest Asian grocer, began offering potential subscribers a package of 14 Chinese television channels for the monthly price of €8.88, the luckiest number in Chinese numerology. The programming includes Chinese state news broadcasts.

The juxtaposition of signs for Chinese shops and Mandarin-speaking workers amid the vestiges of medieval Europe is increasingly common these days as Asian immigration and investment slowly spreads across the Continent.

Each noon, people line up for lunch at 3 rue Volta, one of Paris' few surviving half-timbered houses in the city's medieval Marais district. However, they do not come for French food: The tiny restaurant squeezed into the ground floor of the historic building is Chinese, as is the small barbershop beside it.

Carine Pina-Guerassimoff, a French expert on Chinese immigration, says that the migrants move among European countries based on opportunity.

"For them, the destination is really Europe," she said. "Going from France to Germany is like moving between provinces at home."

Hotel chains now deploy Chinese- speaking staff and offer congee, or Chinese rice porridge, for their breakfast buffets. Some luxury goods makers hold private soirees for groups of Chinese tourists in their Paris stores.

Roll, of the Paris Tourism Office, said his organization leads a group representing 50 Parisian companies to China each year to meet tourism officials in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Most Chinese tourists visiting Europe come on tours because individual tourist visas are still difficult to obtain. The average tour includes three countries in 10 days and costs about €1,600, or $2,045, with almost as much money dedicated to shopping.

Most of the spending takes place at the beginning or end of the trip, which benefits France because it is most often the point of arrival and departure. The tourists stay a day or two, spending their nights in medium-priced hotels outside the city and visiting the sights on tour buses.

However, like the Japanese before them, they spend a lot of money when they get to the department stores, much of it on luxury goods that are cheaper in Europe than China because of the high import duties there.

The Chinese shopping appetite is so big that some luxury retailers limit the number of items any one shopper can purchase. It is not uncommon these days for Chinese tourists to ask shoppers outside Paris luxury goods stores for help buying designer handbags or clothes in order to circumvent the quota.

While Japanese tourist tastes have evolved from high-priced handbags, expensive watches and perfume to more trendy shopping, the Chinese have taken up the slack and promise huge growth. Many of France's prestigious department stores now accept "China Union Pay" credit cards, one of the most popular cards in China.

Li from Wuhan said most people in her tour group were ready to spend up to 10,000 yuan, about $1,200, on souvenirs and luxury goods during their European tour. She said most would be spent in France.

Nicolas Gayerie, who runs the Express Duty Free boutique at the Printemps department store in central Paris, said that his store had a team of 15 people who speak both Mandarin and Cantonese to help Chinese shoppers find their way around the store and through the "detax" procedure, by which shoppers can recoup the French tax paid on purchases before they leave the country.

"In general, Chinese customers are slow to decide but once decided, everything has to go very fast," he said.

"For them, good service equals speed and efficiency."