The man with a Saigon Tourist baseball cap and a dirty collar rushed up, clutching his Mandarin phrase book. 'Ni shi nai guo ren? (Which country do you come from?)', he asked, stumbling on each syllable but proud that he had finished his sentence.
We are standing on a beach overlooking a vast bay surrounded by rocks jutting out of the water, Halong Bay, on the coast of North Vietnam, halfway between Hanoi and the border with China.
On February 17, 1979, 250,000 soldiers of the People's Liberation Army swept over that border in a one-month campaign 'to teach Vietnam a lesson' for invading Cambodia and becoming an ally of the Soviet Union.
They did not get this far south and were defeated by the battle-hardy Vietnamese army which killed 46,000 Chinese. The war helped accelerate the expulsion of most of the Chinese population of Vietnam.
Now there is an invasion by a different kind of Chinese - tourists with Nikon cameras, swimming trunks and wallets full of yuan.
'It began about five years ago,' said the manager of the souvenir shop in the Halong Plaza Hotel 'They are our number one source of tourists.
'From Beijing and Shanghai, they take a plane to Hanoi and come by bus, about three hours on the expressway. If they come from Guangxi [the region that borders Vietnam], they take a coach along the coast road. That is not so good. It takes four hours or more.