THE day after Xi Jinping met President Biden at the G20 summit and on the afternoon before this little exhibition (free) opened at the British Library (News, 25 November), I conducted a funeral in a hillside cemetery in south-east London.

In a graveside conversation, one of the bearer’s men recounted a recent interment of a Chinese man. He told of how the family had brought flowers as well as fruit and incense, replica money, and a representation of the deceased’s house, which they burned. I rather hoped that this exhibition of the Chinese in Britain might inform me of this traditional way of preparing the departed for the next world.

That was not the case, but it provides a corrective for some of the Environment, Minister Mark Spencer’s recent caricature of the Chinese (31 October). Sadly, it might all too readily remind the Home Office of the 1916 system of tagging migrants with identity bracelets when the British and French governments brought in a workforce of 100,000 as part of the war effort. In 1919, those who survived were all returned to the Chinese ports from which they had been imported.

It was only in 2022 that the Home Office apologised for the clandestine operation of forcible repatriation of the Chinese who had outstayed their visas in 1946. Many left behind in Britain wives and families who were never informed where their menfolk had gone. The exhibition is, therefore, about individuals rather than groups: no mention here of the murderous, drug-dealing, and corrupt warring Triads, for instance, of the later 20th and early 21st century.

British LibraryFrank Soo featured on a collectable cigarette card

The first individual whom we meet through one of his letters is Michael Alphonsus Shen Fuzong. Born in Nanjing around 1658 to parents who had converted to Christianity, he himself later became a Jesuit, dying at the age of 33 in Mozambique. He is the first known Chinese visitor to England, coming to the court of King James II in spring 1687, after being received at Versailles by Louis XIV (1684) and by Pope Innocent XI in Rome.

Well-connected in Roman Catholic circles, he worked at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, helping the librarian, Thomas Hyde, to catalogue and identify manuscripts and early Chinese volumes. Shen Fuzong assisted Hyde in the publication of an illustrated directory of weights and measures in Chinese, which suggests that his high-profile visit across Europe may have had a second purpose — that of trade.

James II commissioned Godfrey Kneller for a famous full-length portrait of him in Chinese dress and holding a crucifix (Royal Collection) soon after he arrived. A poorly reproduced image of this (uncredited and unattributed) is on the wall above a hand-drawn map of China which he had annotated with place names.

In the 1770s, William Macao, a Chinese Scot, came to work in Edinburgh, and the Cantonese sculptor Tan-Che-Qua (c.1728-96), who lived in London for three years and exhibited clay figure-work at the Royal Academy in 1770, is among those whom Johan Zoffany portrayed in a celebrated group painting of a life class of the newly established Academy. Another cheaply downloaded image of The Academicians of the Royal Academy (Royal Collection, RCIN 400747) scarce suffices.

It was not until 1805 that a Chinese man was naturalised in England by Act of Parliament; John Anthony served the East India Company by running an accommodation racket for Chinese sailors arriving in London. Apparently, he made a personal fortune out of it, no doubt learning exploitation from his company masters.

Other individuals leap out of pages, prints, and photographs, making this an apt celebration for a show opening in the Year of the Tiger and running into the Year of the Rabbit of strength and serendipity. By the time that the short-lived romantic poet Xu Zhimo (1897-1931) died in an air crash, the poem that he had written when he left King’s College, Cambridge, for home in 1922 was already widely known.

To this day, “Saying goodbye to Cambridge” is still learned by Chinese schoolchildren, much as we force ours to imagine daffodils in a landscape world that they will probably never see outside films. Zhimo’s continuing popularity may explain one reason for Chinese tourists on the Cam.

British LibraryMing’s Restaurant is Polin Law’s doll’s house model of a Chinese takeaway, lent by her for this exhibition, is based on her own business. She moved to the UK from Hong Kong when she was seven, grew up in her parents’ takeaway, and later started her own takeaway business. Many of the details are miniature copies of items in her own shop

Charles Kuen Kao, who was born in Shanghai, came to the UK as a student in 1953, and in 2009 was nominated joint Nobel Prize Winner in Physics for his work on fibre optics and digital communication. Frank Soo was the first Chinese-born player in an England football team in the 1940s, and the Canadian-born professional tennis player Emma Raducanu has Romanian and Chinese parents.

The 2011 census returns used for the exhibition show that nearly 400,000 people from the Chinese ethnic group live in England and Wales, the largest number in Manchester, with nearly a quarter born in the UK. Nearly half (47.2 per cent) were aged 18 to 34 (compared with 20.3 per cent of White British people) while the educational attainment (2017/19) among Chinese outstrips White British pupils in early years, throughout primary education, at GCSEs, and A level. Ethnic Chinese pupils have registered the highest entry into higher education out of all ethnic groups in each year 2006 to 2018 (latest available figures).

There is still much for many of us to learn.

“Chinese and British” runs at the British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1, until 23 April. Phone 01937 546060. www.bl.uk