From the beginning of the 19th century and on, indian merchants from Bombay, Karachi and Calcutta, settled down in the north and south of Vietnam. Around 1930 there were a thousand of them in Indochina. They formed a large group of well-to-do businessmen, specialized in the sale of fabrics and the change of money. They were to be found in the large markets, buying and selling cotton, silk, and jewelry. Their stores were located in the streets of all the major cities. In Hanoi they lived grouped around “Rue De la Soie” Silk Street where they bought silk from Chinese merchants and shipped this to India and Singapore. This group was rich and big enough to build mosques. English subjects from South India and Bombay built the mosque Al Nuhr in Hanoi around 1900 along with other mosques in the South. Today the mosque is frequented by a varied group of Muslims, most of them expatriates connected to embassies from Malaysia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Indonesia India, Algeria, Yemen, Iraq, Vietnam, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.