Chinese and British: how much do you know?
* Photo: Polin Law’s Chinese takeaway doll’s house. She moved to the UK from Hong Kong when she was 7
Daniel Nelson
The growing Chinese population in the UK exceeds 400,000. How much do you know about their lives here?
Ok, you probably know some work in Chinese takeaways and restaurants. You may have a Kenneth Lo or Ken Hom cookery book. But are Britain’s Chinese migrants from China? Or specifically from Hong Kong? What about people of Chinese heritage from Vietnam, Malaysia or Singapore?
A small free exhibition at the British Library, Chinese and British, aims to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge about the community’s struggles and achievements.
It starts in the late 1600s, with visiting scholars, merchants and artisans, mostly from China’s southern port cities. The first documented Chinese visitor — in 1687 — was Shen Fuzong: King James 11 commissioned his portrait.
He and other visitors, the exhibition points out, were “sometimes called on to provide expert information on Asian subjects, regardless of their background”. (This still works in reverse, when British visitors to a foreign country suddenly become “experts” on whole continents.)
Loum Kiqua is credited with producing the first Chinese music in Britain, and, much later, in 1805, John Antony, hired by the East India Company to organise lodgings for Chinese seafarers in London, became the first Chinese person to be naturalised as a British citizen - which could be conferred only by an expensive private Act of Parliament.
Canton Street and Oriental Street in east London still bear testimony to this group of newcomers, who were, unsurprisingly, the subject of prejudice, malicious gossip, misrepresentation and violence.
Anti-Chinese racism persisted even though 100,000 were recruited to the Chinese Labour Corps and played a significant part in the First World War.
After the Second World War came the horrific British Government action of rounding up and deporting an estimated 2,000 seamen who remained in Liverpool, home of this country’s first Chinatown. Many had married here and had children and were shipped out without being given a chance to say goodbye to their families.
The exhibition contains heart-rending memories of their grown-up children: “None of our mothers have talked about it… One of our mothers went to her grave believing she had been deserted.”
As is usual with such British scandals it took until 2022 for the Home Office to release an internal report “acknowledging the coercion and racial element” in the appalling repatriation policy.
This modest exhibition does not try to dramatise Chinese people’s bad experiences in this country: it perhaps underplays the stereotyping and everyday aggression they faced. In the early 1960s, for example, I knew of many instances of British customers ostentatiously walking out of Chinese restaurants without paying. Assaults were rarely investigated by the police. Attacks on Chinese (and people perceived as Chinese) were not uncommon during Covid lockdown, which showed how racism still lurks.
The exhibition records the positives, too. People such as Charles Kao, who came from Shanghai to study, laid the foundation for digital communications and won the Nobel Prize for Physics; Frank Soo, the first Chinese origin player in the English Football League; and Anna Lo, who grew up in Hong Kong, became the first non-white elected politician in Northern Ireland and was instrumental in the campaign for legislation against racial discrimination in the province.
Co-curator Lucienne Loh of the University of Liverpool describes the exhibition as “an incredible opportunity to celebrate the diverse contributions to British society by under-represented communities through personal stories of survival and success.
* Chinese and British is at the British Library, 96 Euston Road, NW1, free, until 23 April. Info: 01937 546 546/ Public libraries across the UK will be hosting Chinese and British, through panel displays simultaneously opening in over 30 towns and cities via the Living Knowledge Network. A programme of regional events will showcase the history of Chinese British communities across the UK.(
+ 24 Nov, Chinese and British: The Conversation, panel with Georgie Ma, Amy Phung, Jason Kwan, 7-8.30pm
+ 28 Nov, A Celebration of Chinatown, Lucienne Loh, Xiao Ma, Lisa Yam, in person and online, 7-8.30pm