Suffice to say, my existence was a cultural curiosity. Born somewhere in the Chinese Empire, I somehow acquired an excellent command of the English language and hence found employment as an administrator with the English East India Company in Canton. There and then, the Europeans in their respective factories traded for Chinese products under the strict terms of the Ching court. It would be an understatement to say that it was a scene of mania for tea. Needless to say, that was the case before the two Opium Wars. The good, old days of the powerful Celestial Cathay came to an anguished end and were replaced by the abject decades of foreign invasion, colonisation and internal turmoil. Nevertheless, that was all beyond my time.

Traversing the world widened by ambition and imagination, I arrived in England in 1799. In the same year my conversion to Christianity took place locally at Shadwell Church, paving my splendid assimilation into British life, the second chapter of my superb trajectory. As an employee of the East India Company, my role presided over caring for Chinese sailors who came and went with the Company’s vessels. With this lucrative work of providing lodgings and food, I accumulated a vast amount of wealth in a short space of time, so much so that multiple properties across London as well as British citizenship came under my belt. In 1805, I was the first Chinese person to be naturalised Briton through a private Act of Parliament, a costly undertaking available only to the privileged. Thus I became a hyphenated entity.

It goes without saying that my very grand achievements and accomplishments could not be more different from the destiny of other Chinese workers. Due to unemployment on land, lack of the English language as well as local residents’ hostility, the lascars suffered from poverty, squalor and criminality on their sojourn in East London, where we were. On the Company’s vessels, they worked deadening jobs mostly as cooks and labourers. Once on British soil, the seamen were daunted by the task of making their return journey to the Chinese Empire, possible only on an East Indiaman. From the 1880s, the sailors began to establish their lives, community and the first British Chinatown here in Limehouse. In the twentieth century, deportation, slum clearance, the Blitz and redevelopment saw all of that go. Alas, such was itself a manifestation of impermanence.

Let it be said that my legacy as one of the earliest Chinese residents in the British Empire was a case of perceived success and social validation. Reviewing my existence posthumously, it is clear to me that I was a model migrant in my own right, negotiating my own longing and belonging, making and unmaking.

My dear Esther, sister of my colleague Abraham Gole, and I were blessed by the institution of marriage, making possible my further integration into the fabric of British life. By way of my dedication to work and excellent character, I was entrusted by the directors of the East India Company and befriended with the upper-class circle. Similarly, the local Chinese community held me in high regard and the respect was reciprocal. In 1804, I supported and interpreted for my fellow Chinese, Erpune, at the Old Bailey against Ann Alsey and Thomas Gunn, who committed thievery. Famously, I introduced breaking a saucer as the Chinese way to swear an oath in court. In 1805, impermanence descended upon me. More than two thousand friends and associates, poor and otherwise, attended my funeral at Shadwell Church, where I was baptised upon arrival and where my journey in this country came full circle. I, John Anthony, thus departed this world of gaiety and ubiety a British subject.

Research and Script: Clare Chun-yu Liu

‍Voiceover: JJ Yu

‍References:

Archives give voice to immigrants

‍https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202310/07/WS6520b2d1a310d2dce4bb937f.html

Act of Parliament

‍https://www.legislation.gov.uk/changes/chron-tables/private/23

Barkley Rice, The Chinese in Britain

Ann Alsey, Thomas Gunn – Theft (theft from a specified place); Theft (receiving). 5 December 1804.

‍https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t18041205-56

Chinese Communities

‍https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/about/chinese

Chinese in Britain

‍https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/chinese_in_britain.shtml

The Black and Asian Presence in the Tower Hamlets

‍https://www.mernick.org.uk/thhol/miscellany01.html#note1

The Story of Limehouse’s Lost Chinatown

‍https://poplarlondon.co.uk/limehouse-chinatown-history/

V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

Accidental archives

Building on the more documentary-rooted approach of The Undesirables, this project marks a first attempt at a speculative mode of research and storytelling. Rethinking archival records as “unstable, unsettled, and unfinished” and time as “overlapping circles of relationships” rather than a linear sequence of events represents a critical shift in research, opening up alternative ways of understanding and imagining Pitt Street’s histories.

Beyond the established narratives of Liverpool’s Chinese communities, the project focuses on “accidental” archives and the minor histories they evoke. One example is a collection of CR10 seamen’s identity cards held at Southampton City Archives. This index, created under the Defence of the Realm Act, existed for only three years (1918–1921) and served purposes that remain unknown. A distinctive feature of the index is its inclusion of passport-style photographs. These over 6,000 portraits offer a rare glimpse into the lives of Chinese seamen on British merchant ships in the 1910s while simultaneously exposing the inherent violence of identity photography.

Most of the men appear unsettled by the camera’s gaze, their expressions fixed in a permanent state of confusion or unease. The intrusive presence of identification numbers is inescapable—either written directly onto the photograph, displayed on metal poles in the background, or held as cutouts by the men themselves. These numbers bear a haunting resonance with another community of men: the Chinese Labour Corps, digging trenches across the Atlantic during World War I, where contract numbers replaced names as markers of identity. As one historian notes, “It’s the number on his wartime employment records, his death compensation, and his grave.”

Potential histories

Among the CR10 cards, some seamen listed addresses in Limehouse, London, as well as No. 85 Pitt Street, a Chinese boarding house in Liverpool. While unremarkable compared to Pitt Street’s historic landmarks—such as the first Chinese restaurants, grocery shops, or the Chinese Progress Club—the recurring presence of No. 85 in the records led to several “accidental” discoveries.

Census records reveal that in 1921, two men named Ah Sam (a central figure in the project) lived next door to No. 85. The family managing the boarding house also rented rooms to three Caribbean seamen. This prompted an exploration of their experiences during the 1919 race riots, when black seamen and black-run businesses were targeted in a wave of unprecedented violence across Liverpool and other UK port cities. While little is recorded of the Chinese community’s response during that summer, No. 85 offers the possibility of imagining moments of solidarity within this tight-knit neighbourhood.

Pitt Street’s identity has always been intimately tied to its relationship with the sea and the colonial history of Liverpool as the second city of the Empire. Examining intersections between Chinese and other migrant communities—such as long-established Caribbean and Filipino-run boarding houses, or Singaporean and West African seafarers in the area—offers a way to explore Pitt Street’s “potential” histories that remain unrecorded.

The second part of the project will feature a series of community workshops designed to foster intergenerational dialogue around Pitt Street’s invisible histories and create space to reimagine lives lived in close proximity—connected by shared experiences of migration, displacement, labour, and racialised otherness.

Voice artist: Nadia Anim

Sound design: Jash Yuan

‍