“You Are From Canton, Why Should I Give You Money?” – What Old Bailey Records Tell Us About Britain’s Early Chinese Communities

London's Chinatown, April 1911: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images (https://flashbak.com/wonderful-pictures-londons-old-chinatown-limehouse-59348/)

When eight men arrived at the lodgings of Wang Noo and her husband Tuck Quy, one Sunday in 1855, the mood was tense. Quy claimed one of the men, Apoi, asked him for £200 to return to China. Quy said he could offer them £10 or £20, and no more.

Wang Noo, according to her own testimony, was less equivocal. “You are natives of Canton, and I am of Nankin”, she said, “why should I give you any money?”

The men produced knives and set upon Quy and Noo, severely wounding both. In August 1855, the case came to trial. Four assailants were found guilty, and each sentenced to four years of penal servitude.

When cross examined, Noo said she knew the men, but had not “been eating or drinking with them” because “they were persons of an inferior province”.

A Perceived “Transnational Community”

The case both supports and refutes some of the long-standing ideas around Chinese communities in Britain in the nineteenth century. In their 2007 book The Chinese in Britain, 1800-Present, Gregor Benton and Edmund Terence Gomez describe the long-standing perception of Chinese communities as transnational, “constantly on the move, rather than [constituents] of the British nation”.

The court records seem to add weight to this. Apoi and his companions sought money to return to China. Quy and Noo resided in lodgings, rather than an address of their own. And yet, Wang Noo and Tuck Quy were engaged as complainants in the British court system. The family appear to have made money. They had their own child with them – Teen Shee – who had learned English. They also had another family with them – a woman named Amoy and her child. There’s no suggestion they themselves were transnational, and the truth is likely to be more complex than this.

There are other complexities too. The vastness and longevity of the Chinese Empire and the association between Chinese people and opium, contributed to a monolithic construction of what Chinese people represented – the cultural idea of “the Chinaman”.

But Wang Noo clearly did not see Apoi and his fellow Cantonese as her compatriots. Qing Dynasty China was in fact a continent-sized network of cultures and identities – something that the external perception of the Chinese community failed to engage with.

Later, as the Boxer Rebellion and harmful depictions of Chinese in popular culture by writers such as Thomas Burke and Jack London, further coloured the British perception of Chinese people, this lack of engagement would contribute to an eventual shift towards violence.

The Old Bailey Online – Reviving Lost Voices

Wang Noo’s testimony: Old Bailey Proceedings Online (https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t18550820-788)

The fact that Wang Noo’s words have been passed down to us at all is thanks to the Old Bailey Online archive. Published by The Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield, Old Bailey Online began providing digitised versions of proceedings in 2003. Painstaking manual work from teams at the Open University, the University of Hertfordshire, and the University of Sheffield, resulted in an accurate and searchable record stretching back to 1674.

In total, 190,000 pages of Old Bailey Proceedings, and 4,000 pages of Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts, are now available.

The potential applications of this database are broad, ranging from the academic to the personal. But perhaps the most fascinating possibility for the resource is in rescuing voices that would otherwise be lost.

Wang Noo was not a diplomat. Tuck Quy did not write political pamphlets, or serve at the court of Queen Victoria. And yet their voices are preserved, providing insight into the reality of an often marginalised community.

Plaintiffs and Defendants

Other recovered voices include those of Peter Francis and Erpune, two Chinese men who were complainants in theft trials in 1800 and 1804. In both instances, the men were interpreted and advocated for by John Anthony, an employee of the East India Company that brought the men to England onboard its ships.

Only Erpune’s case was eventually successful, but each offers us a glimpse into the lives of the East India Company’s foreign sailors at their lodgings in Shadwell, London. These lives are strikingly different to the seedy opium dens and Chinese master criminal tropes that would become part of popular literature later in the century.

In 1863, a Chinese man named Saqui was tried twice – once for the murder of his acquaintance Yon Ahqui Neen, and again for the wounding of the deceased. In both cases Saqui was acquitted, but the accused’s testimony paints a picture of professional jealousy and arguments over money that led to the incident.

“[On the Dockyard, Chulau Fak] introduced me to a captain, and wages as cook at 4l. a month; then Ahqui went to the captain and told him not to have me,” Saqui told the court. “He told him I couldn’t speak English; then Ahqui got my place”.

“Thursday Ahqui came to my home and asked me to lend him some money,” he continued. “I had only 4d. in my pocket. I gave him 3d.. He said, ‘It’s too little’. […] Then he went into my room […] to get a coat to pawn, and took the coat away”.

Engaging with a Marginalised Community

Britain’s Chinese community was tiny in the nineteenth century – only 147 Chinese-born individuals were recorded as living in the country in 1861 – but by the end of the century a strong stereotype of what the Chinese represented had emerged.

In 1929, novelist Lao She spoke of an obsession with “yellow faced demons [who] smoke opium, smuggle arms, commit murder [and] rape women - regardless of age”.

“Thus are the Chinese transformed”, he wrote, “into the most sinister, most foul, most loathsome, and most degraded two-legged beasts on Earth”.

Lao She’s words are from a fictional account of his own time spent in London in the early twentieth century. But they are supported by the words of Gregor Benton, who believed anti-Chinese feeling to be “greater than that aimed at any other racial group”.

When we examine the history of prejudice and acceptance in relation to migrant communities, it is easy to focus on the stereotyping and marginalisation meted out by the press and popular culture. The Old Bailey Online resource, however, enables us to bypass these second-hand constructions. We are given insight – albeit, filtered through the lens of the court system, and of translation and interpretation – into real stories from that community, real lives and real people.

The Hidden Historic