Archives give voice to London’s earliest immigrants

London’s document repository, the London Metropolitan Archives, has shone a light on previously little-known information about the city’s first Chinese residents, as part of an exhibition about the historical roots of the capital’s earliest immigrant communities.

The Unforgotten Lives exhibition runs until March 2024 at the archive owned by the City of London Corporation and preserves the documentary history of London as a free public resource.

The exhibition aims to, in its own words, “present the stories of Londoners of African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous heritage who lived and worked in the city between 1560 and 1860”, and while long-standing historical links to Africa and India mean such communities are prominent in London history, more surprising is the story told about the city’s first residents from China.

Among the items on display are probate documents from 1815 relating to the legal estate of a Chinese sailor called Assing, signed in Chinese characters, and details of John Anthony, who in 1805 became the first Chinese person to become a naturalised British citizen, who achieved such success in life that his funeral drew a crowd of 2,000 mourners and his obituary was published in The Gentleman’s magazine, where he was described as having “accumulated a great fortune and bore a most excellent character”.

Much of the archive work is done by volunteers, going through collections of documents from organisations such as businesses, charities, schools, hospitals and parish records, piecing together and cross-referencing loose threads of information to bring long-dead characters back to life.

“A lot of records, from things such as parishes or poor relief records, tend to say what was being done, but not much about the individuals involved, so we’re trying to tease out voices and personal experiences,” explained the archive’s head of digital services, Laurence Ward.

“We’ve been working on something called the Switching The Lens project, trying to identify traces of communities in a time when very often things like people’s backgrounds or heritages weren’t mentioned in records, so it takes a lot of digging, but we’re aiming to build a more accurate picture of society in years gone by.”

One of the pictures in the exhibition shows the elaborately titled “Strangers’ Home for natives of India, Arabia, Africa, China, the Straits of Malacca, the Mozambique, and the Islands of the South Pacific, who may require them during their temporary sojourn in London”, opened in 1856 in the Limehouse region of London, which was home to the city’s original Chinatown.

“The census of 1851 shows a shelter there with 29 men living there, and several of them have their birthplace listed as China, so this building is important because, for the first time, there’s something formal being created for the welfare of stranded sailors waiting for a passage back,” said senior archivist, Howard Doble. “This is the first acknowledgement that the welfare of these people needs looking after.”

The archive’s information officer, Claire Titley, said although many of these stories and records have been viewed before, the Switching The Lens project meant they were now being looked at from a new point of view, with new results.

“Scholars have been covering this for many years, but some stories have been overlooked,” she explained. “There are always shifting trends in the way we look at history – previously we’ve done things like the working class view, or women’s, now we’re expanding the idea of what people might be interested in, and we’re seeing sources from a very different angle.”

In addition to around 60 miles of records, the archive also has a huge photo library, and two substantial multimedia collections of particular relevance to people interested in the history of the Chinese community in Britain.

“There’s also the Whispers of Time multimedia collection, which is a series of interviews with Chinese community elders, and another called the Genuine Children of Limehouse, about the community, Chinese and non-Chinese, that lived there and saw how it changed over the years,” Ward said.