Leaving the Docklands Light Railway at Westferry station in East London, it was impossible to tell that I was standing in what had once been London’s Chinatown. Looking more closely, I spotted a few street names that gave clues to the area’s history - Mandarin Street, Ming Street, Canton Street - but otherwise, only a tin dragon sculpture marked the site of what I knew had once been a thriving dockside community.
It was whilst I was researching my second book, The Mystery of the Jewelled Moth, that I learned about the Chinatown that sprung up in Limehouse in the late 19th century - and decided to take a look at the area for myself. Today, it’s hard to imagine that what now feels like a fairly anonymous corner of East London was the centre of London’s Chinese community as recently as the 1930s. It was at this time that the area began to decline: much of it was later destroyed during the Blitz. After the war, a new Chinatown began to develop in Soho where it continues today - and the earlier Chinatown was all but forgotten, a lost fragment of London history.
What little I did already know of this former Chinatown had mainly come via the colourful images of Victorian and early 20th century literature. Mystery and crime novels of the era paint a dramatic picture of this part of East London – a vision of dark streets, smoky opium dens and villainous doings down by the docks.
Chinatown pops up everywhere from Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories in which a diabolical Chinese genius plots world domination from his East End HQ; to Charles Dickens’ final novel, Edwin Drood. Seedy and sinister Chinatown opium dens are visited by the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Grey; Hercule Poirot’s assistant Hastings is even imprisoned in one by a menacing Chinese crime lord.
In the early 20th century, the author Thomas Burke also wrote popular stories set in the area, which he depicted as a place of sordid backstreets, petty crime, violence and despair. In the 1920s and 30s, his stories such as Limehouse Nights went onto inspire jazz tunes and Hollywood movies featuring stock characters like the dangerous Chinese femme fatale and scheming Chinese drug baron - as well as, of course, the innocent young white heroine and the brave English hero who saves her from their schemes.
Throughout all these stories, the same picture of Chinatown emerges: a mysterious, grimy underworld of opium, crime and corruption. I learned that in the early 20th century, these ideas had also been reinforced by sensationalist stories in the press, warning of the dangers of Chinatown and gangs of Chinese criminals. These stories fuelled tensions around race and immigration, and even led to clashes on the docks. By 1929, this stereotype had become so widespread that the novelist Lao She wrote - sounding understandably irritated: “If there were 20 Chinese living in Chinatown, their accounts would say 5000; moreover every one of these 5000 yellow devils would certainly smoke opium, smuggle arms, murder people then stuff their corpses under beds…”
Revisiting such stories as part of my research, their cartoonish images of Chinatown seemed preposterous - crude evidence of the racism of the 19th and early 20th century. What’s more, it soon became clear to me that they had little basis in reality. In his autobiography Thomas Burke admitted that when he wrote Limehouse Nights, he “had no knowledge of the Chinese people, and all I knew of Limehouse and the district was what I had automatically observed without aim or purpose during my unguided wanderings in remote London. I had thus been able to write those stories with the peculiar assurance of a man who knows nothing of what he is writing or talking about.”
But if it wasn’t in fact a hotbed of drug-smuggling and exotic criminal misdeeds, what might London’s forgotten Chinatown really have been like? In The Mystery of the Jewelled Moth, I was keen to take the opportunity to rethink. With little information about the area’s true history to hand, I knew that I was equally as ignorant as Thomas Burke - but just the same, I was interested in taking on the challenge of reimagining what life could have been like there during the Edwardian era.
The previous book in this series, The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow, is set in the elegant surroundings of a luxurious Edwardian department store - but for its sequel, I also wanted to show a very different side of 1900s London, a city of both incredible wealth and incredible poverty. At this time, Limehouse was one of the poorest areas of London, made up of small streets of terraced houses, squashed up alongside canals, railway lines, factories and workshops - a far cry from the glitter and glamour of a West End department store. It was also one of the most diverse parts of the city: its proximity to the docks brought sailors from all over the world there, in search of temporary lodgings and cheap entertainment.
The Chinese sailors tended to congregate around Pennyfields and Limehouse Causeway, and in the late 19th century, this area had started to become known as “Chinatown”. Definite information about its residents was hard to track down, but it was clear that the Chinese community had always been a small one - in 1895, the Gentleman’s Magazine described it as just a single street of shops and boarding houses “for the Chinese firemen, seamen, stewards, cooks and carpenters who serve on board the steamers plying between China and the port of London”.
As well as the sailors who came and went, there were also some resident families - many of them mixed race, as Chinese sailors married white British women and set up homes. By 1911, there were a number of businesses there run by Chinese people, including shops and cafes. The few photographs I managed to find of Chinatown at this time showed men standing proudly outside their shops, and children playing in the street.
Out of this research came the character of Mei - a 14-year-old girl, growing up above a grocer’s shop in Limehouse, daughter of a white British mother and a Chinese father. In The Mystery of the Jewelled Moth, Mei’s family and their shop are very much at the heart of my reimagined Chinatown: a small, close-knit East End community that - whilst it faces very real dangers in the shape of poverty, violence and organised crime - is a world away from the Chinatown of Victorian and Edwardian literature.
It was important to me that Mei should be a different character to the downtrodden young girls that often appeared in the stories about Limehouse Chinatown, sometimes called “broken blossoms”. I also wanted her to be someone quite different from the stereotypical orphaned urchins of the East End that we so often see in Victorian and Edwardian tales. Instead, in this story, it is Mei’s family and community who give her the strength and determination to take on a peculiar - and perilous - adventure.
Mei soon encounters Sophie and Lil, the young detectives who appeared in The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow. Together with their friends, they set out in pursuit of the mysterious Jewelled Moth, uncovering a trail of secrets that soon leads them deep into danger. The adventure that follows takes them all over London - from the drawing rooms of London’s high society to the East End docks, and from Sinclair’s department store to the cosy back room of a Chinatown grocer’s shop.
I hope that readers will be entertained by the twists and turns of this new adventure for Sophie and Lil - but also that they’ll be interested to learn more about an intriguing chapter in London’s history. Perhaps they’ll even be inspired to go and seek out the tin dragon sculpture outside Westferry station for themselves. Most of all though, I hope that they’ll enjoy the chance to see through Mei’s eyes, a very different vision of London’s lost Chinatown.
Katherine Woodfine’s The Mystery of the Jewelled Moth is available from the Guardian bookshop.