The earliest reference to a person of Chinese origin in Leicester?

The Chinese Giant Rummaging in the British Newspaper Archive has churned up a few more gems. Ostensibly seeking more information about Mr On Lee and his ‘Chinese oath’, I stumbled upon a reference to ‘The Chinese Giant’ (aka ‘Chang woo goo’). ‘Chang woo goo’ or Zhan Shicai to give him his accepted name today was,…

New Chinese Propaganda pages on the British Library website

Great news! The British Library now has an online guide to the Chinese Propaganda poster collection, which includes a downloadable list of posters with their shelfmarks, based on the catalogue I put together at the end of last year.    

Revolutionary nian hua at the British Library

On a suitably ‘new year’ theme,* my blogpost about a set of revolutionary nian hua prints from 1950 has been posted to the British Library’s Asia and Africa blog. The image is a detail from Jian zheng huan xuan hao ren (建政懽選好人), ‘Good people happily select a government’, by ‘Wulejibatu’ (烏勒吉巴图) of Inner Mongolia (Neimeng, 内蒙]). Revolutionary nian…

The Chinese in Leicester

Towards the end of my work on the dreaded book (I’m steeling myself for the reviewer’s comments due next week), I came across an intriguing photograph in Benson and Gomez’s The Chinese in Britain, 1800-present. It showed a group of Chinese children or, perhaps children of mixed Chinese-European heritage wearing Chinese-style suits and slippers, standing in…