‘Why did the relatively small Chinese community in London’s East End produce such a strong cultural reaction in late Victorian Britain?’ Should we be exploring this question in history lessons in UK schools? And if so why and how?

This paper focuses on popular perceptions of the Chinese community in the UK in the 19th and early 20th century. It involves a discussion of Chinese invasion novels. These were commonly read in the UK in the 19th C. The growth of a Chinese community in the UK is often seen to be a recent phenomena starting in the 1980s and accelerating thereafter. However, a Chinese community in London’s East End existed in the 19th century. This small immigrant community attracted attention in popular media of the time out of proportion to its size. The Victorian cultural reaction to the Chinese presence in London was in part concerned with the threat of reverse colonisation. This was exemplified by the rise of a new genre the ‘invasion novel’, whose protagonists were sometimes Chinese or were mixed race Chinese and Japanese. They typically involved a mastermind who planned to invade Europe with the story being commonly set in London. This was consistent with older stereotypes of the Chinese as a collective group that resisted individuality, and could be violent. However, these novels typically ended with the failure of the Asian invasion conspiracy and the triumph of the British Empire. Thus, these invasion novels primarily demonstrated British hegemony through resistance to the imaginary threat of reverse colonisation. This is an area of history rarely taught in UK schools. The usefulness of these novels as historical sources that could enable an understanding of British attitudes of the time and reflection on contemporary attitudes to race and immigration are opened for discussion by this paper.