Beyond Black Tea and White Gold: The hidden actors behind how China shaped British culture
It is an undeniable fact that life in the UK today is crucially informed by its interactions with China. Coming from Singapore, a country whose national consciousness is largely framed by the British East India Company, this had always been most apparent to me through the empire’s exploits concerning tea. First sold at exorbitant prices to the aristocracy, the lightly floral drink and its dark, shadowy hues quickly became an indicator of wealth and status within the British Isles. Even as the cost of tea dropped, it staunchly remained as an indispensable staple at pantries all around. At around the same time where the international networks surrounding tea is made, an obsession with Chinoiserie and Chinese porcelain likewise became rampant across polite society. So lucrative were they that countless labs were built for the sole purpose of recreating through alchemy what was referred to as “white gold”.
As a Chinese person living in the UK, the allure of these products that became regarded as luxuries helped me build my self-esteem. However, they were also how I had developed my sense of belonging to the region, as I wile away my time, imagining the unsung heroes that had shaped British culture into what it is today. Every nugget of information on these histories I come across moved me tremendously, but they had always been scarce and I had to count more on my imaginations and my speculations, but things changed when I came across the Chinese and British exhibition at the British Library. Tracing the activities of Chinese communities within the UK over the last 400 years, this exhibit which runs until 23rd April 2023 is an absolute must-see.
Starting with the a portrait of of Michael Alphonsus Shen Fuzong, the first documented Chinese person to visit England (who is most certainly not the first amongst us to step onto the British isles), I found myself spirited away onto an eye-opening journey of self-discovery from the very get-go. As suspected, many of these early visitors were scholars, merchants and artisans and Shen in particular was noteworthy for visiting Oxford’s Bodleian Library to work with librarian Thomas Hyde in 1685. If we were going to acknowledge these foreign contributions, the exhibit could have used a more active verb than the decidedly vague “helped” but I’ll let that slide for now.
Aside from the delightful blurb of how Hyde asked Shen about the Chinese phoenix, fenghuang, which is right up my alley as a mythology buff, I was also fascinated by two other points. The first is of course his Anglicised name which I thought, must have made it more difficult to surface those who are of foreign origins through written records alone. Following which, I was also in awe of how Shen had the honour of having his a portrait commissioned by King James II. Not many are privileged enough to rub shoulders with royalty so just how many of us may have slipped through the cracks of history?
On the topic of art, the next personality featured in the exhibit is Tan-Che-Qua, a sculptor who visited London between 1769 and 1772. Only two of his works survived but he had apparently set up a business producing highly accurate clay portraits on commissions. Like Shen, he also moved in elite circles, having met King George III and exhibited his works with the Royal Academy of Arts. If you look closely at the group portrait that I started this article with, you can see him towards the left-end of the work.
Aside from this tidbit about his professional credentials, the exhibit also mentions how he had gotten involved in the West’s conflation of Asian cultures as he had been called upon to comment upon Zukai Honzo, a Japanese book on the medicinal qualities of plants, as if he was also an expert on herbology and the botanical sciences.
Little else is known about his life but he was supposedly meant to visit Batavia (now Jakarta) instead of London and that he had alleged committed suicide shortly after returning to China. To add on to the grimness of his life, his name had also been used by Sir William Chambers to narrate two of his books on Chinese gardening, Explanatory Discourse by Tan Chet-qua, of Quang-Chew-fu, Gent., an appendix to the second edition (1773) and Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772). Talk about appropriation and using someone else’s voice to falsely lend authority to your own work…
On a more positive and modern note, the exhibit also spotlighted Frank Soo, the first non-White footballer to play for England, and also had tidbits on Asian-fronted industries like takeaways that served kidney pies and fish chips, laundries and merchant shipping. Many of these stories were very sweet, and an endearing reminder of how some things always remain the same (such as the importance Chinese families place on studying) but something that left a lasting impression on me was the power of names.
Amongst the many personalities introduced, one of them was John Antony (who is also known as John Anthony). First hired by the East India company to organise care and lodgings of Chinese sailors in London, he had also been called upon by the judiciary to act as a translator. Antony was said to be responsible for the belief that the Chinese swore oaths by cracking a saucer upon their head. I’ve never heard of that one before but here’s an image of that practice as immortalised by Arthur Garratt.
While Antony’s impact on the law is also evident through the passing of a bill to allow him and his somewhat duplicitous moniker to become the first Chinese person to be naturalised as a British person in 1805, what stood out the most to me was the appellation that he went by. As with my earlier mention on the ambiguity of names, Antony’s profile stands as a testament to the unreliability of written records in capturing our identities. Without any other supporting information, his name offers hardly any indication of his Chinese origins and it brings to mind how conceptions of self can be played with, even in official documents. While his wholesale adoption of an English name may seem like an exceptional case, the malleability of our identities is a thread that runs through the exhibit.
Take for instance the story of Ho A Ming who arrived from the colony of British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1862 where he changed his name to the somewhat ambiguous Andrew Hunter Hoahing. Similarly, there is also ‘Agent for Chinese Interest’ Emily Hoare, a mixed-race personality with a Singaporean-Chinese father, who helped Chinese seafarers with medical and legal concerns in Liverpool’s Chinatown. Curious title that had been conferred upon her by the 1911 census aside, the ambiguity within her name was also curious.
Theories abound as to what motivated these changes and the distortions that took place through the anglicization process but from my personal experience, I know of many from the time of the British administration who had their family names transliterated in many different ways. In fact, a friend of mine has uncles and aunties that go by Law, Lor, Low and Lau even though they are all, indisputably related. And like a tale as old as time, we see how foreign identities may be regarded as problems for the institution, even in 1920. Chin Nam’s story stood out particularly to me as he unwittingly got the fate of his family changed when officials confused his given name Nam for his family name such that his descendants are still using Nam as their surname.
Their continued use of the “wrong” family is interesting to me. One can only speculate as to whether the decision is made out of respect for Mr Chin’s game-changing decision to relocate (he was even supposed to disembark only in Canada originally!), a decision to simply go with the flow and assimilate as many migrants do (begrudgingly or not) or something else altogether but this is to me evidence of how identities are so much more broader than what we think it is. Whether it is spiritual or cerebral, there is something that transcends the physical and there is something beautiful about it.
The exhibit ends with a closer look at the cultural productions of many of these British Chinese actors and this notion surfaces once again as we have Chiang Yee who published one of the first books written in English by a Chinese writer by the rather unambiguous pen name, the Silent Traveller. Literary pioneers such as Ling Shuhua who is a contemporary of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group were also featured alongside fashion icons like Oei Hui-Lan who popularised the cheongsam. On top of being highly informative, the exhibit is also highly interactive with lots of beautiful displays and fun mini-activities installed so I really do recommend checking this out (it’s free!) before it closes.
