The Harvest

This was some while ago when the tomatoes ripened on the vines and other edible miscellany popped out from the window-sill garden.

Autumn Runs 2011

Last couple of runs this year:

Blenheim Palace Run - 2nd of October 2011



Lovely 21km course which got a bit hilly mid-course and towards the end. Joined Noris, Alden and Rina for this one. I was a bit rubbish as I haven't run in ages (2:27:59) This was 17 mins more than my last half marathon a year ago. The weather was strangely warm for October which helped to prevent any muscular cramping and injury. Had a walk-around the ancestral home of Winston Churchill post-run which was nice.


Royal Parks Half Marathon 2011 on the 9th October 2011

This is my 2nd attempt at the Royal Parks. The Royal Parks is known for its great organization and atmosphere and as I'd enjoyed myself so much last year, I signed-up again this year. The organizers have implemented a ballot for the first time due to the overwhelming response previous years. Fantastic t-shirt again (bright lime-green charcoal shirt) which was a plus. The bag-drop was slow again as last years but Khoi and I weren't fussed and started later than the 10am gun time. Was faster this week (compared to Blenheim) at 2:20:26 but still slower than last year's (2:09:47). Last of the runs this year.

Farewell Topnotch

Had a surprise the other day when Karlos(spin instructor) asked me which gym I'd be going to next to which my response was 'eh?' Apparently the gym was closing down in 3 weeks due to Network Rail terminating the lease which I had no idea of because the letter was sent to my old address. Was a bit clueless as to where I'd be going next as I've been with Topnotch for 3 years now - being the first gym I've joined in London because of the Shard project which was just down the road.

Have to admit it's not perfect but the price was reasonable for its facilities (48pm)- classes, spin room, DJ-disco exercise room, weights, sauna, swimming pool. Lately I've significantly reduced my gym frequency routine in a week (2x max) due to work being far away and home not a walking distance either. However I've grown accustomed to the people i.e. gym members and instructors who know me by name and face.

For the track record in 3 years, they've cancelled a couple of classes without notice and didn't open at 6.30 am once(because Adam, one of the staff overslept). Looking back at it, these occurences out of a 365 x 3 day record didn't seem so bad. The manager doesn't respond to emails though.

The spin, bodypump and bodycombat class instructors are good and I've never found their classes boring due to the fact that they are fitness practitioners who genuinely like what they do and transmit that energy in the class. I've gone through 2 of them being pregnant and instructing throughout their pregnancy.

So it was pretty nostalgic to do the classes one last time with the same people and instructors which you've done for the last 3 years. A feeling not unlike leaving school and saying goodbye to your friends and teachers for the last time.

More 'English' Education

Have been recommended to watch 'Have I Got News for You' and 'Never Mind the Buzzcocks'
as they are very 'funny'.
Not sure if I'll find it very funny (with my poor understanding of English humor and all) but I'd be sure to watch these in my quest for 'English' education.

Ola Barcelona!

Cleaner than Paris
Bigger trains than the London Underground (air-cond too)
Nicer people than Milan
Cheaper tapas
Paella and sangria
Wasn't pickpocketed
Hot even in September (38 C)
Crazy architecture (Guardi)



Has a beach with nude sunbathers
Bicing ie Barcelona's Boris Bikes
Smells like pee in some corners of the street
Couldn't find the food market in La Boqueira
Las Ramblas
The bus station is not as dodgy as some European capital bus stations
Spacious pavements and roads
Nice Apartments with French Windows


Best spent with someone who'll look after you
Great birthday present!

Balik Kampung

Sailing in the Solent

Walking on the deck of the Gosport marina brought back memories of my childhood days when dad had a boat in the Royal Selangor Yacht Club. Back then, the RSYC had wooden ramps with the sea water of Klang lapping against it. My mother, sister and I would wait for dad to dock from his fishing expedition with his 'konchos, normally when the tide comes in with the evening sun. My sister and I would while our time away trying to find the biggest, fattest mudskipper under the muddy piers and the biggest treat was when mom would order us pancake ice creams with banana in it sometimes. Such was life. We spent a lot of weekends in the yacht club when finally dad got his hands on a golf club and sold off the old Barramundi boat.



D was kind enough to invite some of us to go sailing on a chartered boat for his family over the weekend. We'd start off from Gosport early Saturday and sail to the Isle of Wight to East Cowes and dock there for the night. We had an evening dinner of fish and chips and a little lager on a lighthouse ship moored in Gosport. Then it was a night in the Bavaria 38 which had 8 bunks, a kitchen, toilet etc.




The winds were favourable on Saturday morning and before we knew it, we were shutting off the motors and setting up sail. Skipper set us all on different tasks e.g. manning the helm, unfurling the sails, winching the sheets, etc. First of all we had to learn a new language as everything had proper names - ropes, not sheets, port not left, starboard not right etc.

Quotes from “Overheard Sailing” (http://www.overheardsailing.com) :
Dock person : Ok, Take this line and secure it to your aft cleat.
Dock person : No! At the STERN of the boat!
Dock person : NO! NO! That CLEAT there. There, on the back of the boat!
Dock person : THE F--KING SILVER THING!!!

Post-crash course on sea-talk, next we'd have to learn the whims of the tide and the winds. The yacht sailed along like a breeze with each of us taking turns to steer and that was the tricky. Skipper D had already charted the course by mapping the tide and wind direction at different times but out at sea, it wasn't as easy as steering the helm towards the Isle of Wight and the boat would move in the same direction. Instead the yacht moves in a zig-zag direction or 'beating to windward' with the undercurrent moving as well. And to be able to 'catch the wind', we had to judge the 'arrow' direction against the weather vane - 'V'. A seemingly tricky business but eventually like riding a bicycle, one gets the feel of it after a while.

We did finally arrive in the Isle of Wight with zero man overboard. The trip was a great way of demonstrating team effort and listening to instructions. Highly recommended and one to remember for a lifetime

Gloxinia Violacea

(Mom, if you're reading this, this is for you)


1 Month - Stumps sprouting leaves


2 Months - Lots of green velvety leaves


2 months 15 days- First buds


3 months - Buds blossoming

3 Months 15 days - Multiple flowering display

Welcome to Fu Manchu's

Limehouse has a tight linkage with the history of the Chinese in Britain. Once I told a colleague that I lived in Limehouse and he said 'That's Chinatown isn't it?' which left me wondering how old he was because the Chinatown I know now is in Soho. Was it really what it was in the past? Now there's nothing left of a trace of the Chinese ever being there.

Here's an interesting article on the history of Limehouse and the Chinese based on a talk on the same topic at the Museum in Docklands in January 2007 can be found on the Museum of London website.

The Chinese In Limehouse 1900 - 1940
March 8, 2010

John Seed's book Wonderful London looks at the supposed Chinese community in Limehouse.

Before the First World War there were never more than a few hundred Chinese people in London - and many of these were transitory sailors.

Why then did so many myths grow up around the Chinese of Limehouse – stories of mysterious murders in foggy riverside alleys, of sordid opium dens, of innocent English girls lost in a dangerous underworld controlled by an evil Chinese genius?

In a talk at the Docklands Museum on 28th January 2007, Dr John Seed from Roehampton University explored some of the realities of Chinese life in Limehouse from 1900 - 1940. He showed how public responses to several drug scandals, to interracial marriage, to housing shortages and unemployment, contributed to an enduring myth: the idea of a Chinatown in Limehouse that never really existed.



A Chinese shop in Limehouse at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries. This image comes from the book 'Wonderful London'. Courtesy of John Seed.

Has any district of London attracted as much attention as did Limehouse between the Great War and the 1930s? Limehouse, and its ghostly double ‘Chinatown’, figured as a dangerous and exotic place in a whole series of novels, films, magazines, even in popular songs.

‘Chinatown’ was a key theme in Sax Rohmer’s early Fu Manchu novels in which an evil Chinese genius plots world domination – often from some kind of secret headquarters around Limehouse. Several other Rohmer novels published between 1915 and 1920 dealt with drug smuggling and the dangerous oriental presence in the London docks.

Others jumped on the Fu Manchu bandwagon. Edgar Wallace’s novel The Yellow Snake published in 1926 had its Fu Manchu character Fing Su and an underground Chinese network in London (though, oddly, located in Peckham). In Agatha Christie’s The Big Four, published in the following year, Hercule Poirot confronted another diabolical Chinese genius seeking world domination and at one point his assistant, Hastings, was imprisoned in a Limehouse opium den. Throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties the threat of Fu Manchu and his numerous oriental clones was recycled in comic books, magazine stories, radio shows and several film adaptations and imitations.


A Chinese man swears an oath in an East End magistrates court, from 'The Graphic' August 2nd, 1913. Courtesy of John Seed.


A very different kind of Limehouse Chinatown was manufactured by Thomas Burke, in a number of short stories, collections of verse and newspaper articles during the same years. Burke’s Chinatown stories – fiction and journalism – owed much to Jack London. Their tough boozy narrators revealed the sordid and dangerous spaces of the East End to a nervous suburban readership.

They were stories about the interaction between working-class English men and women and their Chinese neighbours. They happened in little corner cafes, in the backrooms of terraced houses, in corner shops and public-houses, and they involved petty crime, sex and much violence. Burke’s writings on Chinatown did not have quite the international currency of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, but they were best-sellers. And they too found a ready market in the United States and were picked up by Hollywood.

One story from Limehouse Nights, ‘The Chink and the Child’, was made into the film Broken Blossoms by D. W. Griffiths in 1919. Griffiths’s film of Burke’s story is evoked in ‘Limehouse Blues’, a jazz number from the early 1920s which became a standard in the repertoire of many jazz musicians. With added lyrics by Douglas Furber, it was turned into a hit record by Gertrude Lawrence in 1931. A few years later Limehouse Blues was the title of a Hollywood movie set in the London docks. Starring George Raft and Anna May Wong, this 1934 film played with a fairly conventional cast of stereotypes – the erotic and dangerous Chinese femme fatale, the scheming Chinese-American café-owner and drug-smuggler in Limehouse, the innocent English girl and the manly square-jawed hero. There was an English remake of Broken Blossoms in 1936 and there were other films in these years in which Limehouse and Chinatown played a strategic role – Twinkletoes (1926) and Piccadilly (1929) for instance.

In a very different register, George Formby had his first record success in 1932 with ‘Chinese Laundry Blues’, recorded with the famous Jack Hylton Orchestra. It was a comical song about a lovesick Mr Wu in his Limehouse laundry.

Oh Mr. Wu,

what shall I do,

I'm feeling kind of Limehouse Chinese Laundry Blues’.

There were other George Formby songs about Mr Wu in Limehouse, including ‘The Wedding of Mr Wu’ (1933) and ‘Mr Wu’s a Window Cleaner Now’ (1939).


A series of best-selling novels and short stories, several English and American movies, American comic books, radio programmes, a classic jazz number and two very different hit records brought into international currency images of a Chinese underworld set in a dark, foggy, dockside district of East London called Limehouse.


This image comes from 'The Graphic' of November 1911. It shows Chinese men reading news of Sun Yat-sen's rebellion. It notes that most expatriate Chinese people are in favour of the revolution.


By the beginning of the twentieth century, Limehouse and the whole riverside district of East London, stretching along the Thames from the Tower and Wapping to Limehouse and inland north up to the Commercial Road, was a notorious slum area. Its streets of little terraced houses were squeezed among canals and railway-lines, timber-yards and sawmills, lead-works and coal-yards, dry docks, ship-repair-yards, factories and workshops. There was heavy pollution and bad sanitation. There was overcrowding, along with low and irregular wages and among the highest levels of child mortality and the highest levels of poverty in London.

What made Limehouse and its riverside neighbours distinctive was their maritime connection. This was the most cosmopolitan district of the most cosmopolitan city in Britain. Since Victorian times dozens of cheap lodging-houses and brothels, public-houses, beer-shops and dance-halls had catered for, and often ruthlessly exploited, a floating population of sailors with little English and too much money in their pockets: Charles Dickens Junior in 1879 noted how the cafes, pubs, beer-shops, boarding-houses and dance-halls along the old Ratcliffe Highway were ‘each, for the most part, devoted almost exclusively to the accommodation of a single nationality’. Thus the Rose and Crown at the Wapping end of the Highway was mostly used by Spanish and Maltese sailors. There were other places largely catering for Germans, or Swedes, or Greeks or Italians. There was even a music-hall, The Bell, which provided entertainment ‘for the edification of Quashie and Sambo, whose shining ebony faces stand jovially out even against the grimy blackness of the walls’.

For Dickens, European and black sailors were to be found, separate but at least visible, on the open streets of Shadwell. The Chinese, by contrast, occupy a more sinister kind of space:

Hard by Quashie’s music-hall is a narrow passage, dull and empty, even at the lively hour of 11 pm., through which, by devious ways, we penetrate at length to a squalid cul-de-sac, which seems indeed the very end of all things. Chaos and space are here at present almost at odds which is which, for improvement has at the present moment only reached the point of partial destruction, and some of the dismal dog-holes still swarm with squalid life, while others gape tenantless and ghastly with sightless windows and darksome doorways, waiting their turn to be swept away into the blank open space that yawns by their side. At the bottom of this slough of grimy Despond is the little breathless garret where Johnny the Chinaman swelters night and day curled up on his gruesome couch, carefully toasting in the dim flame of a smoky lamp the tiny lumps of delight which shall transport the opium-smoker for awhile into his paradise.

The Chinese opium den is, Dickens implies, the lowest stratum of the international hierarchy in the streets around the London docks. And it is to be discovered only through ‘narrow passages’ and ‘devious ways’. These kinds of image of a sinister Chinese settlement in the London docks were recycled and elaborated throughout the first half of the twentieth century.


A still from D W Griffiths' 1919 film Broken Blossoms shows a 'Chinese' man walking down a decaying Limehouse Street. Courtesy of the BFI.

Broken Blossoms is one of a series of 100 films about London that you can see at the new BFI Mediatheque when it opens on the South Bank in March (next to the NFT cinema). Use of the Mediatheque is free, but it's likely to be very oversubscribed, so book well in advance.


Is it possible to penetrate the endless riverside fog and get some precise and accurate figures of the settled Chinese population in London – and around Limehouse in particular? Official census figures cannot be treated as anything more than the roughest of estimates. Categories defining Chinese were always uncertain and shifted between censuses. In particular, there was a problem in categorizing nationality, as opposed to the fairly simple question of place of birth. Place of birth is not the same as ethnic or national identity. Around two-thirds of those counted in the 1881 census as living in London and born in China were the children of British merchants, missionaries or soldiers. Conversely, Chinese people born in Malaysia, British Guiana or elsewhere would not be categorized in the census as Chinese. Nor would the children of one or even of two Chinese parents born in London. An example from the 1881 census returns: William Achong and his English-born wife (and three children) had a laundry in Fulham. Here were children with a Chinese father and an English mother. They were invisible in the census as far as their Chinese origins went. Their place of birth was, of course, London.

A further set of complications: how accurate could census figures be when the evidence was provided by householders whose English was usually very limited and who were deeply suspicious of any enquiries by the agents of the British state? Journalistic forays and police investigations were consistently met by deep suspicion, unwillingness to communicate information and apparent incomprehension. The Chinese lodging-house keepers in Limehouse were frequently prosecuted for accommodating more than the maximum numbers they were legally permitted. They too are unlikely to have provided accurate information to the authorities.

Having given these cautions about the limitations of census data, here are summaries of the returns for 1881 – 1931.

Table 1. Chinese in London, from census

National London Limehouse
1881 224 109 70
1891 767 302 82
1901 387 120 55
1911 1120 247 101
1921 2419 711 337
1931 1934 1194 167

These figures suggest first, a slow and uneven increase of the Chinese in London, rising to 1,194 by 1931. Second, the census shows that the Chinese population was extremely small throughout this period. By comparison with European immigrants the Chinese presence in Britain was negligible. The Chinese before the First World War numbered half of one per cent of the foreign-born population of Britain. In the 1920s and 1930s they constituted just over one per cent. Compare the 1,194 Chinese aliens in Greater London in 1931, for instance, with over 25,000 Poles, nearly 18,000 Russians, 11,000 Italians, and over 9,000 French and Germans.

Within London there was a marked concentration of Chinese in Limehouse. Around forty per cent of the Chinese counted in the pre-1914 censuses of London were in and around a couple of Limehouse streets. In the 1921 census the highest concentration was still in Limehouse, which is inconveniently and arbitrarily split down the middle between the borough of Poplar (221) and the borough of Stepney (116). These 337 Chinese made up forty-seven per cent of the London total of those born in China and of alien or unstated nationality.

By contrast, Chinese were absent from other working-class and industrial districts, such as Bethnal Green and Shoreditch in the East End or Deptford, Southwark and Bermondsey along the southern bank of the river. However, by the nineteen-twenties there were significant numbers in several core West End boroughs – Westminster (75), St Pancras (65), St.Marylebone (38), together adding up to 25% of the Chinese in London. They were also settled in smaller numbers in such suburbs as Hampstead (31), Kensington (22), and Wandsworth (18).

The 1931 census figures indicate that the movement of the Chinese to the West End and the suburbs was accelerating. The Chinese-born population of Stepney and Poplar had apparently fallen from 337 to 167 – now less than fifteen per cent of the London total. By the early 1930s the largest settlement of the Chinese was in the West End: Kensington (135), Westminster (115), St Pancras (93), Paddington (75), Holborn (68). There were also sizeable clusters further out in Wandsworth (82), Hampstead (81), Hendon (44) and Ealing (34).

The Rector of St Anne’s, Limehouse was probably not too far out in 1930 when he said of the resident Chinese community around Limehouse that ‘their invasion’ began in the 1880s, reached its height during the Great War and had since declined. They currently numbered, he thought, about 300, sometimes increased temporarily by Chinese crews. Other sources indicate a similar kind of trajectory. If, for instance, we count the number of Limehouse businesses with a Chinese name listed in the various Directories of the period – admittedly a very blunt instrument – we find steady growth until the early 1930s. In the 1890s we find no Chinese businesses in Pennyfields; Limehouse Causeway had only a couple of tobacconists and a boarding-house . By 1911 there were at least nine Chinese businesses around Limehouse – including several tobacconists and lodging-houses. The post-war years saw a rapid increase. By 1919 there were fourteen Chinese businesses – grocers, tobacconists, a boot-maker, a couple of restaurants. These businesses peaked at twenty-six in the early 1930s. Numbers began to fall away after 1932.

We can track the development of some kind of émigré Chinese community. Its cafes, shops and lodging-houses were places to meet and exchange news and gossip. Shops served as post-offices where letters could be left and collected and banks where money could be left in safe keeping. There was no local Chinese newspaper but notice-sheets of news from China were sometimes pasted on a wall in Pennyfields. There was an Oi T’ung Association set up in 1907 and the Chung Sam Workers Club founded in the early 1920s – both providing support to Chinese seamen and both politically aligned with the Kuomintang

The existence of a Chinese community was, however, short-lived, however. In 1934 Limehouse Causeway was widened and a maze of alleys and side streets, including several occupied by Chinese businesses and lodging-houses, were demolished. But the primary causes of the long-term decline of the Chinese community in the area were to do with the port. Chinatown, an 1895 article in the Gentleman’s Magazine accurately stated, was no more than a single street of shops and boarding-houses:

It exists by and for the Chinese firemen, seamen, stewards, cooks, and carpenters who serve on board the steamers plying between China and the port of London.

This remained the case for the next fifty years. It was this dependence which generated the rapid growth of Chinese businesses in Limehouse during the First World War, continuing throughout the 1920s. And it was this dependence which brought about their decline in the 1930s. Chung Chu, who kept a café on Limehouse Causeway, said in 1931 that the slump in shipping entering the London Docks was killing the Chinese population. There were now about a hundred families living in the area but they were drifting away and there was no future for the Anglo-Chinese children:

the boys find work hard to get, and the girls drift about the streets ostracised by white girls of their own age. They, and not the white wives, are the broken blossoms.

Much of Limehouse, was destroyed in the Blitz. There were still some Chinese sailors entering the port during the Second World War and some Chinese lodging-houses and businesses remained open. Others however were closed and many Chinese were evacuated to the relative safety of the West End or the suburbs. In 1951 Peter Fryer for the Daily Worker found a few cafes and laundries, some Chinese seamen, and a fairly impoverished population of fifty resident families: perhaps a quarter, he thought, of what it had been before the Blitz.

It is, of course, from the 1950s that a very different kind of Chinatown began to be developed in the West End of London around Gerrard Street. In the early 1960s Ng Kwee Choo interviewed several workers who had jumped ship in the 1920s and ’30s and found jobs ashore. But they looked with some resentment on new generations of post-war Chinese immigrants in the West End, mostly from Hong Kong. The older generation were generally from mainland China, especially Kwangtun, and looked back with some nostalgia to the inter-war years when the London Chinese were still a small and close-knit community.

A final but crucial point: the streets that are always specified as Chinatown – Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway – were never at any time exclusively Chinese. Visitors were often struck by the obvious Chinese presence. As George Sims reported in 1905:

There is no mistake about the Chinese element. The Chinese names are up over the doors of the little shops, and as we peer inside them we see the unmistakable Celestial behind the counter and Chinese inscriptions on the walls.

The visible strangeness of Chinese shops and signs and faces was similarly commented on by many visitors in the 1920s and 30s. There was, however, no territorially distinct and ethnically homogenous Chinatown in Limehouse. From the 1890s through to the 1950s the Chinese were a small minority in a mixed community of tradesmen, casual labourers and transient sailors. Chinese boarding-houses and shops and cafes existed side by side with English working-class families, pubs, shops and tradesmen and a multinational population catering for sailors of a hundred different nations.

To summarize: in one way the census figures consistently overemphasize the numbers of Chinese living around Limehouse by including seamen temporarily ashore. At the same time, there were always some Chinese seamen with English wives and children around Limehouse who were overseas at the time of the census. Contemporary estimates vary widely, as we have seen. For what it is worth, I trust Chung Chu, the local Chinese restaurant owner, who in 1931 said there were around a hundred Chinese families in Limehouse. This is confirmed by a by a local policeman, with twenty years experience in the district, who told an inquest in 1934 that there were no more than 100 Chinese men living in the area. A sympathetic correspondent to The Times in the same year similarly gave a figure of around 100 Chinese in Limehouse. And in 1935 a survey cited by Michael Banton gave a figure of 100 Chinese in Limehouse, adding that ‘they have decreased in numbers very considerably’.

The 1931 census figure of 167 would thus include sixty or so transient seamen. But the local Chinese Chung Hwa School in 1935 mentioned ‘some hundreds of children with Chinese fathers and British mothers’. Taking this into account and adding the unknown numbers of wives and children, the real figure for the Chinese community is probably closer to the Rector’s 1930 estimate of about 300, with some fluctuations of numbers of seamen. The figure was probably higher during the 1920s with as many as perhaps 200 or more Chinese residents at various points, numbers of them, as we have seen from the 1931 census, moving into other parts of London.

Whatever the precise numbers, the question remains: how did these few riverside streets, with their small Chinese settlement, become such a focus of national attention? How did drab Limehouse become exotic ‘Chinatown’, one of the most exciting and dangerous ‘places’ in Britain by the 1920s?

First, it inherited something of the dangerous mystique of the Victorian opium den. A variety of circumstances began to make the association of opium, the docks and the Chinese minority a much more potent image. A 1907 newspaper article headed ‘Opium Smoking and ‘East End Dens’ warned that there were now at least six places where opium smoking occurred, all in the Chinese district of the docks. This was a dangerous and unsavoury area, especially for those more accustomed to the West End:

But the opium victim, intent on satisfying his desire, rubs shoulders with criminals and desperadoes of the worst type, careless of the risk he may be running.

Thus opium smoking, among the Chinese of Limehouse, was no longer a youthful adventure. Now it was corroding the moral backbone of sections of the middle classes. The article went on to signal another dimension of the opium problem, one which was to figure prominently in the fictions of Sax Rohmer and in sections of the press after 1918. The patrons of one Chinese restaurant which provided opium in luxuriously-furnished upstairs rooms included ‘Society women seeking a new sensation’.

This kind of press attention and the linkage of Limehouse, Chinese immigrants and opium with moral danger and English women was recurrent in pre-war years. But it reached a crescendo in the immediate post-war years. The singer Billie Carleton was found dead in her Savoy Hotel suite the morning after her starring role at the great Victory celebration at the Albert Hall on 28 November. The inquest decided that she had died of cocaine poisoning and connections to Chinatown were made.

The press had a field-day with sensationalist stories derived as much from the fictions of Sax Rohmer as from any substantial evidence. Rohmer himself quickly cashed in, turning the Carleton case into a novel: Dope: a Story of Chinatown and the Drug Traffic. Full-blown paranoia was whipped up by the Daily Express. One article in October 1920 screamed in large headlines: ‘Yellow Peril in London’, ‘Vast Syndicate of Vice with its Criminal Master’, ‘Women and Child Victims’. ‘A Chinese syndicate, backed by millions of money and powerful, if mysterious, influences is at work in the East End of London.’ As fast as the London police captured its Chinese agents and the magistrates imprisoned and deported them, new ones appeared. Stories were everywhere of a Chinese ‘Moriarty’ who never strayed from the back streets of Limehouse but knew everything that passed in the wider world and exerted immense authority on his myriad of subordinates. ‘In the underworld his name is uttered only with that respect due to a master.’ And white women, suborned by the Chinese in ways left to the reader’s imagination, were the particular victims of this international drugs and gambling syndicate:

White Englishwomen seem to exert a remarkable fascination for them. But the white women who fall into the clutches of the ‘yellows’ are not Londoners, but mainly come from provincial inland towns. They are without exception young and pretty, but in what manner they are attracted to the Chinese quarter in of London has not been unravelled.

Not be outdone Evening News headlines in the same week shrieked: ‘The Lure of the Yellow Men’, ‘English Girls’ “Moral Suicide”’. It recounted stories of young and attractive English girls drawn into a world of drug addiction, gambling and sexual abuse. Even children were not spared: ‘The police have acquaintance with cases where young children have fallen victims to the lure and the lust of the coloured races’. We are in the ideological territory here of Burke’s fiction and Griffiths’s film Broken Blossoms.

Dozens of newspaper and magazine articles in 1919, 1920 and 1921 reinforced these supposed connections between Chinese seamen, Limehouse shopkeepers, suborned white girls and the West End demi-monde. Smuggled into the London docks in the bilges and engine-rooms of cargo-ships or, in smaller quantities, hidden in the clothing of Chinese seamen, opium found its way into the hands of Limehouse shopkeepers or other agents in the docks. The Chinese dealer cultivated local English ‘girls’:

He … went into the streets, selected some of the prettiest girls he could find, and lavished luxury on them. For their rags and penury he gave them fine clothes and wealth, and after about four months with him they were sent forth into the West-end to spread the cult.

They in turn cultivated ‘the wealthier kind of profligate’ in clubs around Leicester Square, introducing them to the opium pipe. These subsequently converted their friends. Thus addiction to the drug spread into the city via the Chinese in Limehouse and the English women they had seduced.

So much for the national press and the moral guardians of the state. What about the attitudes of the wider population, and especially the working-class population of the London docks?

The tiny Chinese minority provided little competition in the English or the London labour market.

TABLE 2 - Occupations of Chinese men, England & Wales, 1911

Number % of occupied Chinese males
Merchant navy 480 49%
Laundry 348 36%
Retail 62 6%
Cooks, waiters, etc. 35 4%

Source: Census 1911

These four areas of work occupied 95% of Chinese men in England and Wales. In the kinds of ordinary trades found in every city of the time – transport, for instance, or the building trades -- the Chinese migrant was absent. However, there was one area of the labour market in which the Chinese did compete with the English working class, as Table 2 indicates: the merchant navy.

Tensions exploded in the London Docks in 1908 when British seamen repeatedly stopped Chinese crews from signing on at the Board of Trade offices at East India Dock Road, a few hundred yards from the streets of ‘Chinatown’. There were violent clashes and police had to escort the Chinese safely home. Questions were asked in the Commons and Winston Churchill gave assurances of government concern about the use of Chinese labour on British merchant ships.

During the transport worker’s strikes in Cardiff in July 1911 there were anti-Chinese riots during which all thirty-three Chinese laundries in the town were destroyed. Nothing on this scale occurred in London but there was continuing tension and sporadic violence. This blew up into something more serious in the summer of 1916. The Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union organized protest meetings around Limehouse and Poplar against the increasing use of Chinese labour on British ships. There were wild accusations, voiced by union leaders and even by their lawyers in court, that some of these Chinese seamen were spying for the Germans.

Several of these protest meetings spilled over into demonstrations which turned violent. Windows of Chinese shops and houses in Limehouse were broken, though nobody was hurt. In May and June 1919 anti-Chinese rioting again broke out around Limehouse. Rumours were rife that Chinese seamen were signing on for much less than British sailors would accept. An angry crowd of unemployed British seamen gathered outside the Board of Trade Offices on East India Dock Road and later there were attacks on individual Chinese and damage to property before a strong police presence restored an uneasy order.

Antagonism in the London docks to the Chinese as cheap labour was exacerbated by conflicts over housing. There was an acute housing shortage in the area. In June 1919 a crowd attacked a house in Poplar into which two Chinese men and their English wives were moving. There were rumours that a demobilized British soldier had been refused as a tenant. The wives were besieged in the house and had to be rescued by the police. The house was then set on fire and furniture destroyed. Over several days following there were angry crowds in the area, attacks on a nearby Chinese laundry and threats to destroy the whole Chinese quarter, as well as sporadic attacks on black seamen. Again hostility to the Chinese persisted. Under the headline, ‘London’s Expanding Chinatown’, an article in the Daily News in 1920 said that the expansion of the Chinese population beyond its Limehouse base was provoking local hostility because of the housing shortage.

The Star summarized the sources of anti-Chinese resentment at the end of the war:

As Englishmen joined the Army, Chinese came in to replace them in many instances in the factories and in the kitchens of hotels and restaurants. The Chinaman gave up the sea for a shore job, earned good money and then he and his compatriots overflowed from his original quarter, forming alliances in some cases with white women.

In other words, while courageous young Englishmen went off to fight for King and Country, these Chinese immigrants took their jobs and their homes, earned good wages and seduced their women.

Resentments were fuelled by consistent exaggerations of the size of the Chinese population. At a well-publicized court case in May 1916 a local police superintendent stated that there were thousands of Chinese living in Limehouse and a lawyer for the seamen’s union claimed a few weeks later that ‘the Chinese population had grown from 1,000 to 8,000, and a large number of British seamen were pushed out by them’. There were other equally ludicrous overestimates. For instance, one newspaper in 1926 claimed that before the war Limehouse had had a Chinese population of 2,500 – clearly a wild overestimate. As the Chinese novelist Lao She wearily commented in 1929:

If there were twenty Chinese living in Chinatown, their accounts would say five thousand; moreover every one of these five thousand yellow devils would certainly smoke opium, smuggle arms, murder people then stuff the corpses under beds, and rape women regardless of age…

There is much more to be said about this: about how the Victorian opium den was transformed into a broader space for the interplay of sexuality, Empire and drugs in the first two decades of the twentieth century; about anxieties surrounding inter-racial sex; about some kind of historically-specific crisis of masculinity at the end of the war; and about how these intersected with fears and frustrations about unemployment, low wages and housing shortages in working-class districts like Limehouse and Poplar. This potent mix of fears and resentments was the brew out of which the writings of Sax Rohmer and Thomas Burke emerged and to which they in turn contributed. Fu Manchu and the tales of Limehouse Nights were merely the latest instalments of an ideological repertoire which was utilised by journalists, policeman, magistrates and even local people.

Much much more needs to be said about the experiences and perceptions of the Chinese population itself.

Enough has been said, however, to at least begin to explore why a small district in the London docks with a population of a hundred or two Chinese men, many of them seamen temporarily ashore, should have attracted an inordinate amount of public attention, especially during the Great War and the years immediately after.

JOHN SEED teaches History and Cultural Studies at Roehampton University in London. He has published on art, religion, politics and the propertied classes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. He has also published on twentieth-century British and American poetry and on the 1960s and is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Pictures from Mayhew: London 1850 (Shearsman Books, Exeter 2005).

Notes

A longer version of this talk was published as ‘”Limehouse Blues”: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900-1940’, History Workshop Journal, No.62, Autumn 2006.

1. Sax Rohmer’s three early Fu Manchu novels are: The Mystery of Fu Manchu, London,1913; The Devil Doctor, London, 1916; The Si-Fan Mysteries, London 1917.

2. Rohmer’s other relevant works dealing with the docks, the Chinatown area and drugs are: Yellow Claw, London, 1915; Tales of Chinatown, London, 1916; The Golden Scorpion, London, 1919; Dope, London, 1920.

3. Relevant works by Thomas Burke include: Nights in Town: a London Autobiography, London 1915; Limehouse Nights, London, 1916 (Broken Blossoms, London, 1920 and In Chinatown, London, 1921 were selections from Limehouse Nights); Out and About London, London, 1919; Whispering Windows: Tales of the Waterside, London, 1921 (also published as More Limehouse Nights, New York, 1921); The Wind and the Rain: a Book of Confessions, 1924; East of Mansion House, London, 1928; The Pleasantries of Old Quong, London, 1931 (also published as A Tea-shop in Limehouse, Boston, 1931); City of Encounters: a London Divertissement, London, 1932; Night-Pieces: Eighteen Tales, London, 1935.

4. There are recordings of Limehouse Blues by Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Stefan Grappelli, Benny Goodman, Oscar Peterson, Sonny Rollins, Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie, Glenn Miller – even by Gerry Garcia and Grateful Dead.

5. See George Formby Complete, ed. A. Bailey and P. Foss, London, nd.

6. Charles Dickens (Jr), Dickens's Dictionary of London, 1879, pp. 218-19.

7. For a good introduction see P. J. Waller, ‘Immigration into Britain: the Chinese’, History Today 35: 9, September 1985, pp. 8-15.

8. For an excellent account of this case and of the whole issue of drugs, women and race at this juncture see Marek Kohn, Dope Girls: the Birth of the British Drug Underground (2nd edition) London 2001

9. Lao She, Mr Ma and Son. Sojourn in London, trans J.Jimmerson, Beijing, 2001, p.25. This novel was first published in China in 1929.

10. The Chinese in Britain, a series of programmes by Mukti Jain Campion and Anna Chen, to be broadcast on Radio 4 from April 30th 2007, will give a voice to the experience of many Chinese migrants.

The so called 'Summer'

So the longest day of the year has passed 3 days ago signifying the start of summer. Frankly this summer's been a bit insipid after the short warm blasts in April. Weather forecast this evening is rain and wind again so not so good for frisbeeing. But we're still going anyway.

Next week is a striking week - UKBA immigration striking (20th July), school teachers striking over pension pay, the tubes were meant to strike but they're off now. A year ago, all the private sector employees got laid off due to cost cutting. But now that the public sector is doing the same, the public sector employees decide not to go to work.

More 'English' English

Sheep dip - Make an individual go through an inspection.
"We'll have each programme manager go through the 'sheep dip'..."

by the drumbeat - by the timetable
"By the August drumbeat we'll have this baseline sorted"

lost the plot - Losing the point of the discussion
"Its no point asking Keith. He lost the plot before we even arrived at the issue"

POETS day - Friday i.e.
'Piss Off Early Tomorrow's Saturday'

getting on his soapbox - 'used metaphorically to describe a person engaging in often flamboyant impromptu or unofficial public speaking'~Wikipedia
'There he goes, getting on his soapbox'

The Green Thumb + Purple Finger

I must be turning English day-by-day dabbling in gardening and such. It all started when I moved into Limehouse and saw the sorry looking empty pots with the various levels of decaying beings which once lived in them. My colleagues laughed when I told them about my 'garden' because the 'garden' really is a few pots and containers. Forgetting that being English, they probably live in the suburbs/countryside and have a real garden which makes it pretty amusing after all.

Then a trip to B&Q saw me buying some seeds, compost and a seed tray which I thought was pretty cool and little did I know when I planted those seeds in the compost lined cells, I'd unwittingly planted something else too i.e. a high and bordering-geeky interest in horticulture. I guess looking at it from a psychodynamic perspective; my childhood experience involved an exposure of gardening as my mother gardened a lot hence my unconscious interest in plants experiencing a revival.

Nevertheless I planted some seeds and labeled them
As it was cold still (that was mid-March 2011), I put the clear plastic cover to insulate them but later took it off as I noticed spores of white fungus in the compost which would multiply quicker if kept in an enclosed area. Apparently I should have bought seedling compost as these are sterilized - fungus in the compost is normally harmless but could 'kill' or 'dampen-off' seedlings.

Then came a period of watching the seedlings everyday - which involved staring at black compost most of the time as they take at least 14 days to germinate (which seemed like an eternity). The weather in the UK turned suddenly early April which was happy news for all things green and saw the sudden overnight sprouting of the seeds.



In the midst of waiting for the seeds to germinate, my impatience for flowers and plants saw me and Khoi going to Colombia market to get 'already-potted' plants and I randomly picked a few based on its 'prettiness' and colour (a common mistake), not really knowing its countenance and type.




An important fact to remember about caring for plants are that they are no less different from a dog or a cat - apparently they need light, food, warmth, water, rest and grooming just like an animal - how fascinating! An excellent book I discovered on choosing plants was 'The House Plant Expert' by Dr. D.G. Hessayon which lists almost every house plant variety and its characteristics. With new information I cultivated some more plants from my first 2 plants which I kept since moving from the old place.

Meanwhile my seedlings were growing up slowly but surely and the persistent warm weather. The tomatoes have a few premature looking buds (plant itself is about 2 feet high) and would need to be repotted in a bigger container. The coriander is starting to yellow after 2months but still fragrant- think the life span of the plant is pretty short after a month. The french dwarf beans are still growing and haven't started any flowers yet.



And since we're talking of green thumbs, might as well talk of the other colored digit that got smashed at ultimate a few weeks ago

Objects: The Schoolbook

When I was about 9 years old,I had a rather strict class teacher named Mrs Lim. She was a petite, squat lady with short hair and thick glasses. Her clothing was rather old fashioned i.e. 1960's-cut dresses, flat shoes. She'd walk really fast through the corridors in a stomping fashion in a great hurry.

Back in the day, we wrote down our tasks in an A1 sized note pad bound in brown paper which we called 'Exercise Books'. Depending on which school you were from, the brown cover had the school badge printed in black ink. When we'd finish one (which was quick as they were rather thin), we'd staple the end cover of the old book to the front cover of the new book to create a compendium of previous notes and exercises.

These would be carried in our schoolbags to-and-fro; uniform blue dwarves (that was the color of our uniform) hoarding sacks of potatoes to school. If any one of us students came to Mrs Lim's class without our homework, there'd be hell to pay. No one escaped from not bringing homework to class as she'd call us one by one to her table so that she could scrutinize our unearthly scribblings. It was rather terrifying.

"Tangkachi! What kind of writing is this? Like 'cacing'only!!" (Cacing meaning 'worms' in Malay)
"What is this?? You call this writing ar??!!!" *Slap*


Thus came a couple of weeks of holidays where I was quite happy to enjoy it at home not doing very much except watching video re-runs of the 'Never Ending Story' and annoying my sister. As all good things come to end, the days whittled away leading to the unenviable task of packing our bags for school. First thing to go was the exercise book which I'd worked very early on so that I could enjoy the hols. And since it was done some time ago, I couldn't recall where I'd left it. Panicking, I looked in every possible nook in the house, including under the couch, on the glass table etc. I just couldn't possibly go to Mrs Lim's class without my homework! After much scrambling around, I was resigned to my fate. It was a hot Sunday, that afternoon and feeling drowsy, I fell into a deep sleep.

I dreamt that I went downstairs to the living room to the low glass coffee table looking for my exercise book. This time with a sure feeling, I found it - sitting right under my mom and dad's papers.

It was late evening when I woke to this revelation. Exactly as my dream instructed, I went down stairs and into the living room and lifted the stack of papers on the glass and table.

Lo and behold, there was my brown exercise book.

On the Starting Line...

You are standing at in the crowd, fidgety, crackling, fiddly. You've been here before - around you are the familiar sight of men and women in tights, garbage bags ponchos, GPS tracking gadgets, sweatbands, isotonic drinks belts. One or two even wrapped in their national flags like Supermen in the midst - albeit with trainers on . Some are stretching their legs, flexing muscles, shaking their arms loose. Some are talking and chatting - with friends which they've travelled all these miles to get here with , or with someone they happened to be standing next to.



" Are you running on your own?"

"Yes, I am. Looks like you'v done this many times before?"

"Oh this is probably my 5th"

"Wow - when was the last one?"

"The last was in Florida - a bit different from this one"

"Impressive! All the best to you!"

"And to you too!"



After this brief and single exchange with a total stranger, suddenly you feel a strong caramederie with everyone - "Yes! We are in this together...We're going to brave this 42km....May the Force be with us!" There's no mistaking the feeling of anticipation and excitement in the air all felt by these starters on the line- young, old, men, women, big, small, tall, short - the combined energy is unlike anything experienced so far. No matter how many times its been run, no matter where it may be, every single marathon is unique and once in a lifetime. And there's no doubt that anyone who's running, no matter fast or slow, will end it a winner.

Cold Runnings

Have been running weekends lately in preparation of the Big One next weekend. It's been 4 years since my last marathon and frankly don't feel quite prepared. The last long run was 3 weeks ago at 30k, slogging at 8mins/km at the 20th km onwards. When I lug my kit to work, I don't look forward to the run home. Am not sure why the gradual change in my receptivity to running. Maybe it's probably an ego thing. I don't do well in group runs as I'm always trailing behind in the nether back end of the pack - most times beating myself up for not keeping up - psyches me downwards. I probably did better when it was a lone sport . Nowadays the more I run, the slower I get and saps the joy out of it. Someone told me I'm doing 'junk runs' where the training is not 'training me up', but instead 'running me down'.Probably true. This marathon, my only aim is to finish and won't be bothered with my times - it's after all not a race, but a marathon.

Tube screamers 2

She leapt through the closing doors just seconds before it closed. However the doors still were unable to close as the little stuffed toy hanging at the end of the keychain which hung on her bag squashed between the squeezing metal. The force tore the metal clasp and the toy fell to the floor of the platform. The man witness it fall and picked it up, "You dropped your bear!" he said. She tried to retrieve it but couldn't in a split second as the doors of the train closed.

It's not a bear, it's a Swedish Elk

The man held it up to the glass. She stared through the train windows - unable possess it. "I wonder if he will keep it? Souvenir of a piece of someone else's past. Or will he bin it outside the tube station?"

The underground train began to move - the familiar howling Whoooooo with an underlying clanking like a mad symphony, seeming to come alive. She has a theory about the tubes. The trains move like live things all across London - parallel, adjacent, criss-crossing - worms in the belly of London. As the train rushes through the tunnels, the life force of the thousands of people on the train get sucked out by osmosis, left behind as microscopic auric debris underneath the udders of the city. That's why one feels extremely tired and drained after a journey on the train and spiritually low people jump off the tracks- their souls drawn by the life forces of the underground.

21 Immortals

Read a very entertaining Malaysian detective fiction by writer Rozlan Mohd Noor, an ex-mata called the '21 Immortals: Inspector Mislan and The Yee Sang Murders".

Good or not? Yes (if 'good' is by Malaysian standards) - it surpasses expectations. I liked the local setting and the characters are rather convincing. Inspector Mislan is a Malay inspector in the Malaysian Police force - a single parent, working in a corrupt force, internal power-mongering, Chinese mafia tai-kors in Petaling Street...sounds like Malaysia to me.

I'd read it for the characters though and not the plot - a little like Gerak Khas meets CSI in English. I wouldn't put it on the table alongside Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle or G.K. Chesterton just yet. Nevertheless it's a good effort and deserves a read.

Malaysia Boleh!

Balik Kampung End of the Year (again)

This Christmas, am once again back home trying to adjust to the drastic weather change (biting frost and snow of highs of -1C to humid heat of highs of 31C) - seems like I've been away forever but it's only been 4 years and a bit. I've chosen again to come back at the end of the year because its easier to take leave over Christmas/New Year's and the other reason is for the cooler weather (since it rains almost every other day mid-monsoon).

Trusty ole parents picked me up from the airport in the trusty old Perodua. Mom prepares one of her specialties - Prawn Mee aka Hokkien Mee (Last year I think it was a noodle type dish in soup I think) Everything is the same; house has a little bit more junk and dust than last year. When asked my dad says 'Don't touch, that's my treasure'. Ha...

Next - getting in touch with friends (of which the circle is growing smaller and smaller as time away grows) for the usual annual gatherings. I wonder how life for the others potters on when you're not in the country. By then you've missed so much of it that you don't wonder anymore and wish them well in whatever they do. You gather as much gossip as you can about whos-doing-what-and-where to last you for another year.

Then there's the usual checklist of things to do e.g. cut hair, go to the dentist, shop-for-groceries, deliver stuff for people etc. All this done in Malaysian time too - which means you have to stay conscious throughout the day when you're wide awake at night. Today it's 1.54am and I just woke up to poke around my stuff which has gathered a few layers of dust and write this blog since I'm in such a nostalgic mood.

So the year 2010 was quite eventful for me - new job in a new airport, another pay rise, found a special other, did a lot of running ( 2 half marathons, 3 10k's), played a lot of frisbee - all in good time. It's a blessing to be able to say 'Hey it's the end of the year - where did the time go?' Well fortunately for most of us, we have the luxury of this time to ponder on what we've done for the past 12 months and what we'd like to do for the next. (Imagine being terminally ill/or at the end of your lifetime and not being able to see through the end of the annum...never being sure if you've had achieved what you've wanted in the past 12 months let alone the rest of your short life time in this world)

What's important on these sojourns I realise is that Malaysia is still a home to come home to - with my family, friends, the food, the weather. (so I think seeing the uncles in the selipar and shorts, the makcik in the tudung, the lush green trees on the horizon, the endless tolls on the highways) And that you're still the same person that never left - just a little bit older and a little bit wiser.

So here's wishing all my friends and family a Merry Christmas everybody and a Happy New Year!

I'll Be Home For Christmas - Kristin Chenoweth

I'll be home for Christmas,
you can plan on me...

Kristin Chenoweth - I'll Be Home For Christmas (Official Music Video). Watch more top selected videos about: Kristin Chenoweth

It's almost the end of the year...

...and it's freezing. Really felt the cold this morning whilst walking to work as temperatures dropped almost overnight. The the autumnal chill has gone, never to return and there's a mean cold bite to the air now.

... and I can't believe we're at the tail end of the annum - where did the year go? It seemed only yesterday that I came to Heathrow airport. I was still in Gatwick earlier this year (as Rita reminded me - bumped into her on the train). I worked with Rita and a small team of 6 in Gatwick who were just lovely - very easy to work with and the times were very flexible. I remember it was a crazy winter where snow fell and stopped London literally and we cracked jokes about AT's ability to drive through snow. I turned back twice due to the snowfall as there weren't any trains. Can't believe this was in January.

...and I've started lighting candles in my room - feelings of deja vu; a reminder of winter in Stockholm in a freezing student dorm where I endeavoured to burn candles to ward off the cold. Ok so it wasn't a very great idea in terms of HSE. Somehow feel comforted by the little fairy lights twinkling on my window sill. My room is freezing cold for some reason despite the fact that central heating is on full blast. This is the 3rd November I'll be spending in this flat at this end of the world. I have no qualms as OKR has been good to me so far.

... and I've got another round of pay increase this time of year. Which is a jolly unexpected surprise. I had one mid-year already and didn't foresee another one coming in a long time. One of the directors , KF, gave me a call but I wasn't at the phone. It was my first line manager, PR, who got me and told me the good news. It was great to speak to PR after a while. She was the line manager in my first project in T&T - sure do miss the good old days at the Shard with the dream team. Nevertheless working in the airport is also pretty interesting too with another view of Project Management. Told my current line manager, GP, that it's like going to a university everyday - every working day I have a morning mantra (aka Microsoft) 'Where do I want to go today (in the University of Heathrow)' He found it funny.