Why Limehouse’s Chinatown Always Looked Deserted?

Reading Anne Witchard’s excellent Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown prompted me to read Burke’s follow up to Limehouse Nights, London Nights, which I’d never read before. In London Nights Burke revisits the streets of Chinatown in Limehouse and around Poplar during the First World War when times were a bit lean, London’s nightlife a bit down and the London County Council had banned opium. Still Burke did perhaps answer one question I’d always pondered – why do photos of London’s original Chinatown always show streets largely free of people and bustle compared to pictures of, say, the Jewish East End or Chinatowns in San Francisco and elsewhere? People I’ve spoken to over the years who grew up in Limehouse remember it being as bustling and busy as any other part of the East End but you don’t get this impression from most of the pictures of the streets around Pennyfields, the old heart of Limehouse’s Chinatown.

Burke, however, offers a reasonable explanation. Writing in 1918, he notes:

‘Not so long ago a press photographer set out boldly to get pictures of Chinatown. He marched to the mouth of Limehouse Causeway, through  which, in the customary light of grey and rose,many amiable creatures were gliding, levelled his nice new Kodak, and got – an excellent picture of the Causeway after the earthquake. The entire street in his plate was deserted.

Certain impressionable people – Cook’s tourists and Civil Servants – return from the East mumbling vague catchwords – mystic, elusive, subtle, haunting, alluring. These London Chinese are neither subtle nor mystic. They are mostly materialist and straightforward…but…they are shy…and exclusive.’

And so it seems, according to Burke anyway, that the streets were busy until a camera appeared when everyone would miraculously disappear! Which perhaps explains the rather people denuded photos of the old Chinatown. London’s original Chinatown just didn’t much fancy having its photo taken by curious outsiders.