Dr Anne Witchard’s research has helped to fight prejudice by retelling the story of Chinese communities and their contribution to British culture.
Despite their significant contribution to British culture, our Chinese communities have been marginalised – and even demonised – throughout history. A leading scholar in the literary representations of Chinese Britons, Dr Anne Witchard’s research counters prejudice through education.
Her book, England's Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and the Great War, highlighted the important role British Chinese labourers played in World War I (WWI), and their subsequent scapegoating amid the anti-foreign sentiment that followed. The then-Managing Editor of Penguin Random House China describes the book as “one of the first to take a nuanced look at the perception of China and the Chinese in England in the early twentieth century”. Further, Witchard’s AHRC-funded project China in Britain: Myths and Realities explored the role that stereotypes have played in shaping perceptions of China and Chinese people in the west.
Witchard’s research has informed resources used by GCSE History students across the UK, aided the pioneering work of contemporary Chinese playwrights, and was central to the successful campaign to commemorate writer and painter Chiang Yee with an Oxfordshire blue plaque.
Our Migration Story: Educating Britain about diversity and inclusion
The ARHC selected Dr Witchard’s China in Britain: Myths and Realities project as a key “impact case study” for its Translating Cultures scheme, due to its help in supporting intercultural perceptions of China in the UK.
The findings from this research were then used by Witchard to create resources for the Runnymede Trust’s award-winning Our Migration Story project.
An innovative teaching and learning tool, the project’s website features historical migration narratives, case studies, study materials, and recommended source texts, supporting the OCR and AQA GCSE History module, Migration to Britain. Witchard wrote all of the website’s content on Chinese Britons and also curated accompanying study materials. This included Lao She’s novel Mr Ma and Son, which Witchard helped get back into print as part of the Penguin Modern Classics series, with a previously unpublished translation by William Dolby.
Our Migration Story was central to campaigns to further embed migration histories into the UK curriculum and was the subject of a 2019 Westminster Hall debate led by Helen Hayes MP. It was a joint winner of the 2017 Community Integration Awards’ Research Champions prize, where it was praised for “disrupting and unsettling the unhelpful, binary narratives around ‘Them and Us’”. The site also won the Royal Historical Society’s Public History Prize in 2018 and The Guardian’s Research Impact award In 2019. The Guardian praised Our Migration Story for “responding to demands from young people seeking to “decolonise” the curriculum”.
Anne’s entry, entitled ‘Chinese Limehouse and “'Mr Ma and Son”’, is a valuable and important contribution to the site’s section on twentieth and twenty-first century migrations. We’re incredibly grateful to Anne for her willingness to share her research on this platform and for contributing to the project’s collective success.
– Runnymede Trust director, Dr Halima Begum.
Visit the Our Migration Story website.
Enhancing Chinese Britons’ representation in TV and theatre
Dr Witchard is regularly invited to act as a historical advisor for creative projects, such as Ian Hislop’s BBC2’s documentary Who Should We Let In? (2017), which drew upon her book Thomas Burke’s Chinoiserie. Her consultation work on Showtime/Sky TV drama Penny Dreadful (2014-16) included advising on historically accurate production design (which won the show a BAFTA Craft Award in 2014), costume, props, make-up, language and storyline elements.
When undertaking her China in Britain project, Witchard invited British East Asian playwright and actor Daniel York Loh to participate in her exploration of Western representations of the Chinese diaspora. He describes this involvement as having “empowered me to go on and then tell these stories in my work with greater confidence and authority”.
Throughout the British East Asian theatre community, Dr Witchard is known as a great resource and support.
– British East Asian playwright and actor Daniel York Loh
York Loh found Witchard’s research to be “invaluable” to the writing and production of his successful plays: The Fu Manchu Complex (2013) and Forgotten 遗忘 (2018).
Described by The Guardian as a story of “immense, heartbreaking importance”, Forgotten 遗忘 was praised by The South China Morning Post for finally spotlighting the contributions and sacrifices made by approximately 140,000 Chinese labourers for the British and French armies during WWI.
The majority of parts in both York Loh’s plays were created for British East Asian actors, who are, as The Stage has noted, “severely under-represented” in theatre and television. This, in turn, drew interest in the play from a more diverse audience. “There are more East Asians in the audience for Forgotten than I’ve seen in the audience for possibly anything else,” wrote Frey Kwa Hawking for Exeunt Magazine. “And that feels significant even before we get into the play’s subject.”
Watch a video on Audience reactions to Forgotten 遗忘 by Daniel York Loh on YouTube.
Increasing diversity within British Heritage
In 2022, Dr Witchard published her book Chiang Yee and His Circle: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950. Her expert knowledge of Yee’s work, which was also communicated through her China in Britain project, “underpinned” the successful application to erect a blue plaque at the writer, painter and calligrapher’s Oxford residence, explains writer and campaign partner, Paul French.
Chiang Yee’s entry into the world’s oldest and most famous commemorative scheme was a significant moment, not just for Chinese Britons, but for all UK ethnic minorities. According to English Heritage, only 4% of London’s 900 plaques are dedicated to black and Asian figures. As an article in The Guardian highlighted, Yee is only the third Chinese figure to be honoured like this in the UK.
The blue plaque’s 2019 unveiling was preceded by a full-to-capacity symposium co-organised by Witchard at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, attended by around 100 delegates, including Chiang Yee’s granddaughter.
One attendee summed up the significance of the unveiling of Yee’s blue plaque succinctly when they noted: “It means including more diversity in a country where diversity can sometimes be overlooked”.
As an invited academic consultant, Witchard’s research on Yee and other Chinese cultural and intellectual figures in Britain, has since helped to inform the scope and contents of the British Library’s Chinese and British exhibition (Nov 2022 – April 2023).
Find out more about this exhibition at the British Library website.
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Connect with Anne Witchard
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