In this week’s blog post, in celebration of the Chinese New Year which falls on Friday 12th February, we’re going to delve into our collections to learn about the establishment and growth of Birmingham’s Chinese community. This research by Dr Malcom Dick, now Director of the Centre for West Midlands History at the University of Birmingham and Dr Chris Upton, who was a historian, writer and Reader in public history at Newman University, first appeared on our webpages on the City Council website a number of years ago. Our thanks go to Dr Malcom Dick and Fiona Tait (Dr Chris Upton’s wife) for granting permission to reproduce it. Reference numbers have been updated where appropriate.
Early Links between Birmingham and China
Although Chinese people did not settle in Birmingham until the twentieth century, Birmingham played a part in the first official trade mission from Britain to China. The story can be traced through letters in the Matthew Boulton Papers (MS 3782).
In 1792, Lord McCartney, the British Ambassador to China, wrote to Matthew Boulton, the great Birmingham businessman, requesting the presence of a skilled worker to accompany him on his posting. He wanted “a person capable of making judicious observations upon metals and modes of working.” Clearly, the intention was to inquire into the state of Chinese industry to obtain intelligence information for commercial purposes. He was able to take to China a collection of Birmingham patterns and designs, including tools, buttons, coins, stained glass, buckets and toys to encourage British exports (MS 3782/12/93/70-87).
The mission had an effect. A letter to Matthew Boulton from James Cobb at East India House in London in 1794 (MS 3782/12/39/10), noted how the Chinese Embassy was very interested in Birmingham manufactured goods: ‘all the ornamental articles were much admired and most of the articles of utility might very easily be brought into use amongst the Chinese.’
Birmingham’s metal goods helped to pay for the vast quantities of tea, which Britain imported from that country.
By the start of the twentieth century Birmingham and East Asia were linked by trade, travel and education. Among the early commercial connections was a mission by a Cadbury’s sales representative to Hong Kong in 1900. This picture from the Cadbury Collection (MS 466) shows Harold Waite (in the bowler hat) proudly displaying the company’s Cocoa Essence.
This photograph shows Helen Caddick in Beijing with a group of former students of Birmingham University who’d returned to China.
‘In the afternoon Mr Lo sent his carriage for me and I drove to his house. All the eight Birmingham students were there (from left to right in the back row: P.N. Lo, T.H. Yeh, C.J. Pan, K. Shen, L.C. Woo, S.Z. Wang, Y. K. Yen, K. Y. Gao, H.N. Lo). We went in the garden, or court yard, and sat under a tree to be photographed Mr Lo had a professional photographer Mrs Lo, Mrs Bien, Li Hung Changs granddaughter, and a girl friend were there. It was a very nice house, and we had an endless number of different Chinese cakes, sweets and a hot dish of minced meat done up in pastry balls very delicious Chinese tea and coffee. I stayed about two hours. They were all very nice and sent messages to their professors and friends some of them are in the Finance Department, in the Home Office, Banks, university etc. all seem doing well.’
[Based on research by Malcolm Dick and Chris Upton.]
Early Chinese presence in Birmingham
Birmingham is about as far away from the sea as you can get in England. This may explain why, unlike the port cities of Liverpool, London and Cardiff, it did not see large scale Chinese migration until the 1960s. However, there were small numbers of Chinese people in the Birmingham area from at least the 1900s.
Kelly’s Business Directory lists several Chinese owned hand laundries, for example Sing Hing Lee at 5 Stoney Lane, Sparkbrook in 1908, and Lee Hop in Mary Street, Balsall Heath the following year.
[The Searchlight of Greater Birmingham March 5th 1914, Vol. II; No. 69, p. 17]
Visual evidence of Chinese settlement can be seen from this 1914 sketch in a local magazine, The Searchlight of Greater Birmingham. As a regular feature, the magazines Spotter depicted faces in the crowd, with those portrayed able to claim the original drawing as a prize. In this case a somewhat dubious honour, as the artist captions the image of a Chinese mother and child in New Street, Birmingham, with the phrase ‘The Yellow Peril’, the prevailing anti-Chinese stereotype of the day.
As historian Chris Upton points out, the literary figure initially responsible for the ‘Yellow Peril’ idea was born in Birmingham. The author Arthur Henry Ward (more widely known as Sax Rohmer) was born in Rann Street, Ladywood in 1883. His most popular fictional creation was Dr Fu Manchu a figure of sinister portent, alluding to the vague sense of unease stirred in Western circles by the prospect of a resurgent modern China (Chris Upton, ‘Images of Diversity’, Birmingham Post, February 1st 2003).
There is documentary evidence that Chinese workers were starting to arrive in Birmingham by 1917. John Beard, one of the activists in the Workers’ Union, wrote an article in the Workers’ Union Record in December 1917 noting how Chinese people had come to Birmingham during the First World War. Most of these men were sailors on ships from Asia, which had been sunk by German U-boats.
In Birmingham these men were employed in the lowest paid sector of the metal trade and Beard encouraged the unionisation of these men to prevent them being used as blacklegs by employers. He reproduced a poster in Chinese to attract the workers to a meeting in Birmingham on October 21st 1917.
[Copyright Malcolm Dick]
Post-war settlement
Like many of the migrant communities in the West Midlands, the present structure of the Chinese population took shape in the 1950s and 1960s. With Hong Kong still a British colony, and at that point relatively underdeveloped, men from the rural New Territories region of Hong Kong began to arrive in Britain. The expanding post-war economy, changing family structures and food tastes created a demand for convenience food, and Chinese catering businesses spread throughout the land.
One of the earliest Chinese settlers in Birmingham, Mr John Wong, recalled the rapid development of Chinese restaurants in the 1960s in an interview that can be heard in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s City Sound Archive. As people were getting educated in Chinese cuisine these restaurants did a roaring trade, through word of mouth. Slow Boat opened in 1961 under St Martins Car Park, Heaven Bridge was on Smallbrook Queensway and by 1968 the Old Happy Gathering opened on Pershore Street, serving more authentic Cantonese cuisine.
By the early 1970s Chinese businesses and community associations were clustering around the Hurst Street and Digbeth areas. Wing Yip opened the regions first Chinese supermarket in Coventry Street. A Chinese Club on Bromsgrove Street reflected the political tensions of the day by showing Chinese communist inspired films.
The first generation of male migrants was increasingly joined by family members and Chinese takeaway businesses spread throughout the suburbs.
Community institutions were established to meet the social needs of this emerging population, in particular translation and support for victims of racial harassment. The Chinese Community Centre was formed in 1977, and by the 1980s several supplementary schools were teaching the Chinese language to British-born Chinese children at weekends.
The consolidation of Birmingham Chinese population estimated at just over 5,000 in the 2001 population Census*- is reflected in the development of the Chinatown area in the Arcadian Centre. This has become the setting for the annual Chinese New Year celebrations.
[*In the 2011 Census, the Chinese population was estimated at 12, 712.]
For further archival and printed material in our collections relating to Birmingham’s links with China and Birmingham’s Chinese community, see our guide ‘Sources relating to China and Chinese people’. You can view photographs by the photographer, Terry Lo, on the Connecting Histories website along with photographs by Sir Benjamin Stone.
The Iron Room 
Reblogged this on Andrew James.
The article states that “Birmingham did not see large scale Chinese migration until the 1960s. However, there were small numbers of Chinese people in the Birmingham area from at least the 1900s….Chinese workers were starting to arrive in Birmingham by 1917. John Beard, one of the activists in the Workers’ Union, wrote an article in the Workers’ Union Record in December 1917 noting how Chinese people had come to Birmingham during the First World War. Most of these men were sailors on ships from Asia, which had been sunk by German U-boats.”
Looking in the Birmingham Newspaper Archive online I came across a few mentions
In September 1917 there are reports that hundreds of Chinamen have recently come to Birmingham.
A further report for the same month tells of a raid on Opium Dens in Birmingham, when 12 Chinamen brought to Court. Locations being..
215, Newhall Street,
41, Newtown Row, (where 43 Chinamen were registered).
67, Summer Row.
Also in the Gazette it reports the presence of 400 Chinamen in Birmingham. For the most part they were engaged in the munition factories, and lived in lodging houses in Broad St, Granville St, Summer Row and other districts. Some Chinamen were marrying English girls, and the danger arising from this particular phase of the alien problem was appreciated. If parents did not interfere no one else had the right to do so, and it was difficult to find a solution.
The Birmingham Mail reports “Trouble in Chinatown” in September 1918, and May be the first reference to a Chinatown in Birmingham.