The Chinese in Britain: A Long History – A British Library Online Event – 9/3/23

Posted: March 7th, 2023 | No Comments »

Join our panel of experts as they explore the long history of the Chinese people in Britain.

This is an online only event hosted on the British Library platform. Bookers will be sent a viewing link shortly before the event and will be able to watch at any time for 48 hours after the start time.

This event will be live captioned.

The Chinese presence in the UK goes back much further than many realise.

Our panel of experts and historians come together to explore this long history – from the first recorded presence in the 1600s, to trade during the 17th and 18th centuries, and from the Opium Wars, to the Chinese communities now calling Britain Home.

Dr Hao Gao is Senior Lecturer in Imperial and Global History at the University of Exeter. He is a historian of British imperialism in Asia, China in global history, particularly the encounters between the British and the Chinese empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dr Gao is the author of Creating the Opium War and various research articles in both English and Chinese journals, including History, Historical Research, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and Britain and the World. He currently serves as the University’s Academic Director for the UK-China Humanities Alliance (UKCHA).

Julia Lovell is professor of modern China at Birkbeck, University of London. Her most recent book is Maoism: A Global History. She has translated many works of Chinese fiction into English, including for Penguin Classics Monkey King: Journey to the West and The Real Story of Ah Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun. She co-curated the 2023 British Museum exhibition ‘China’s Hidden Century’.

Dr William Poole is a Tutor in English at New College, Oxford, where he is also Senior Tutor and Fellow Librarian. He is an expert in early modern literary, intellectual, and scientific history, and has interests in both early modern and modern education

Dr Anne Witchard is Reader in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster.  She is the author of Lao She in London which situates the Chinese writer as a central figure of transcultural modernism, influenced by the collision of Chinese and British literary traditions. Other publications include, England’s Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and The Great War, and as a co-editor, Chiang Yee and his Circle: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950. She is currently working on a book tracing Sino-British circuits of cultural exchange in the early twentieth century with a focus on performativity and dance.

Frances Wood studied Chinese at the universities of Cambridge, Peking and London. She was head of the Chinese collections in the British Library until retirement and her books include Did Marco Polo Go To China?,  the Blue Guide to China, The Silk Road, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port life in China 1843-1943 , Betrayed Ally: China in the Great War and The Diamond Sutra.

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Details

Name:	The Chinese in Britain: A Long History
Where:	Online
When:	Thu 9 Mar 2023, 19:30 – 20:45
Price:	From £2.50 – £5 Members’ priority booking opens 31 January, general sale 1 February
Enquiries:	+44 (0)1937 546546 boxoffice@bl.uk

More details here

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