Smoke and Silk: Re-imagining London’s Very First Chinatown

As we head into spring, Trapped History takes a brisk wintery walk through the streets of London’s Docklands to seek out the Limehouse Chinatown of the 1880s.

Jack the Ripper is striking fear into the heart of the East End, the Bryant & May matchgirls are on strike and the magnificent Ching Hook is knocking them dead at the Sebright Music Hall. And Pearl Fitzgerald, a young woman with a Chinese mother and an Irish father, is trying to secure her inheritance.

But Pearl isn’t real. She is a fiction, the main character in novelist Fiona Keating’s bodice-ripping Smoke & Silk. Everything else, though, is true – and so Fiona is taking us and you on a journey through Pearl’s world to re-discover London’s first Chinatown. Here you will find laundries and opium, poverty and anger – but above all else a small Chinese community, hanging on by its fingernails in the onslaught of the tabloid ‘yellow peril’ scare.

It's bracing, it’s exciting and it might help change your mind about Sherlock Holmes.

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