The Treaty of Nanking and Liverpool’s Chinese Community

An unequal treaty

The First Opium War was closely connected to Britain’s lucrative and illegal trade in opium.

British merchants imported enormous quantities of tea, silk and porcelain from China, but China bought comparatively few British goods. To address the resulting trade imbalance, British merchants increasingly sold Indian-grown opium into China despite Chinese restrictions.

When Qing officials attempted to suppress the trade and confiscated stocks of opium at Canton in 1839, Britain responded with military force.

British warships possessed overwhelming technological and naval advantages. After a succession of Chinese defeats, the Qing government was compelled to negotiate.

The Treaty of Nanking ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain, required China to pay an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars and opened five ports to British merchants:

• Canton, now Guangzhou
• Amoy, now Xiamen
• Foochow, now Fuzhou
• Ningpo, now Ningbo
• Shanghai

British merchants were permitted to live and trade in these ports. The old system that had restricted foreign commerce at Canton was dismantled.

The treaty did not itself legalise the opium trade, but it was imposed after a war fought largely to defend and expand British commercial access. In China, it is remembered as the first of the “unequal treaties” that weakened Chinese sovereignty and increased foreign influence.

That uncomfortable history matters. Liverpool benefited from commercial opportunities created through imperial power, but the people who later travelled along those trading routes were not merely part of an economic story. They became part of Liverpool itself.

Liverpool was already looking east

Liverpool’s direct connection with China did not suddenly begin in August 1842.

The East India Company’s monopoly over British trade with China had already been removed under the Charter Act of 1833. Private British merchants were therefore able to enter the trade when the new arrangements took effect the following year.

According to the Liverpool Chinese Business Association, the first vessel to arrive in Liverpool directly from China reached the port in 1834.

This is an important distinction. Chinese trade existed before the Treaty of Nanking, and individual Chinese sailors may have reached Liverpool before a permanent community developed.

What the treaty changed was the scale and structure of Britain’s commercial access.

Shanghai’s opening was especially significant. Over the following decades, it became one of the world’s most important international ports. British shipping companies established regular routes between China and Britain, carrying tea, silk, cotton, manufactured goods and passengers.

Liverpool, with its docks, merchants, warehouses and shipowners, was well placed to benefit.

The treaty did not directly create Liverpool’s Chinatown, and it did not produce an immediate wave of Chinese immigration in 1842. Instead, it helped create the commercial conditions from which regular shipping connections—and sustained migration—would later grow.

The Blue Funnel connection

The decisive Liverpool development came in the 1860s.

In 1866, Alfred Holt and Company established the Ocean Steam Ship Company in Liverpool. Its vessels became widely known as the Blue Funnel Line because of their distinctive blue-painted funnels.

The company developed regular services connecting Liverpool with ports in East and Southeast Asia, including Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Steamships transformed the relationship. Unlike the earlier sailing trade, scheduled steam services created a more dependable maritime corridor between China and the Mersey.

The ships also required crews.

Blue Funnel and other British shipping companies employed large numbers of Chinese seafarers, often recruiting through ports such as Shanghai and Hong Kong. Chinese sailors worked in demanding conditions as firemen, stokers, greasers, cooks, stewards and deckhands.

Their labour helped keep Liverpool’s Asian trade moving.

Most arrived as working seamen rather than conventional migrants. Some stayed only while their ship was in port. Others waited in Liverpool to join another vessel. A smaller but growing number remained permanently.

That was how the city’s Chinese settlement began to take lasting shape—not through one dramatic influx, but through repeated voyages, longer stays and individual decisions to make Liverpool home.

From sailors to Liverpool families

Behind the shipping statistics were people building ordinary lives.

Chinese seamen initially settled close to Liverpool’s south docks, particularly around Cleveland Square. Living near the waterfront made practical sense: ships, employment offices, boarding houses and maritime businesses were all within walking distance.

As the community grew and the surrounding streets were redeveloped, its centre shifted towards Pitt Street, Nelson Street and the streets around what is now recognised as Chinatown.

Some Chinese men opened boarding houses for visiting sailors. Others established laundries, restaurants, grocery shops, tailors and businesses supplying ships and crews.

These places provided food, accommodation, news and companionship for seafarers who might otherwise have had little support ashore. They also became permanent parts of Liverpool’s working-class economy.

Most importantly, families were formed.

Chinese men married Liverpool women and raised children in the neighbourhoods around the docks. Their children grew up with connections to both Chinese and Merseyside culture—speaking with Liverpool accents, attending local schools and becoming part of the city’s extended dockland community.

The 1911 census recorded around 400 Chinese-born residents in Liverpool, although this figure did not include the many visiting seafarers moving through the port or all the locally born children of mixed Chinese and British heritage.

Liverpool’s original Chinatown was never a sealed enclave. It stood within a port district filled with sailors and migrants from Africa, Ireland, Scandinavia, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and many other parts of the world.

Chinese Liverpool developed within that wider maritime community while maintaining its own businesses, associations, traditions and family networks.

More than tea and silk

The trade between Liverpool and China is often reduced to lists of cargo: tea, silk, cotton and manufactured goods.

Those goods mattered. They filled ships, warehouses and merchants’ accounts, and they helped generate wealth throughout the port.

But cargo alone does not explain Chinatown.

The human connection was created by the people who worked aboard those ships. Every regular service between Shanghai, Hong Kong and Liverpool increased the movement not only of goods but of seafarers, information, letters and relationships.

A shipping route could become a migration route.

A boarding house could become a permanent home.

A temporary stay could become a marriage, a business and a family whose descendants remained in Liverpool for generations.

The community was not a side effect of trade. Its members contributed directly to the maritime system on which Liverpool depended.

Essential workers treated unequally

Chinese seafarers performed dangerous work but were regularly treated as a cheaper and supposedly more disposable labour force.

They could be paid significantly less than British sailors performing comparable jobs. Their contracts, accommodation and immigration status were frequently controlled by shipping companies and government authorities.

During the Second World War, Liverpool became a crucial centre of the Battle of the Atlantic. Chinese merchant seamen served on ships carrying food, weapons, fuel and essential supplies through waters patrolled by German submarines.

They faced the same mines, torpedoes, storms and air attacks as other merchant sailors, yet their pay and conditions remained unequal.

In 1942, Chinese seamen in Liverpool went on strike to demand better wages and the same wartime bonuses received by British colleagues. Photographer Bert Hardy documented members of the community during the dispute, although his photographs were not published by Picture Post at the time.

A settlement was eventually reached, but the sailors’ willingness to organise appears to have contributed to the authorities later portraying them as troublesome or undesirable.

The postwar betrayal

The darkest chapter came after the war.

Chinese seamen had helped sustain Britain through one of the most dangerous periods in its history. Some had lived in Liverpool for years. Some had British-born wives and children. Many believed they had established permanent homes.

Nevertheless, in October 1945 government officials opened a secret Home Office file titled Compulsory Repatriation of Undesirable Chinese Seamen.

Over the following months, more than 1,300 Chinese men were repatriated, many through coercion or force. Men were taken from boarding houses, workplaces and Liverpool streets and placed aboard ships leaving Britain.

Their families were often given no proper explanation.

Some Liverpool women believed that their husbands had abandoned them. Children grew up believing their fathers had chosen to disappear. In reality, many of those men had been removed from the country or pressured into leaving.

Officials knew that some had British wives and children, yet information that might have helped them establish a right to remain was withheld.

The exact number removed remains disputed, but the consequences are not. Families were broken apart, livelihoods were destroyed and the truth was concealed for decades.

Liverpool City Council later acknowledged the episode as a profound injustice. A memorial plaque at the Pier Head now remembers the Chinese merchant seamen and the families they were forced to leave behind.

Their treatment cannot be separated from the longer story. The same maritime system that brought Chinese sailors to Liverpool profited from their labour and later treated many of them as disposable.

A community that endured

Despite discrimination, exclusion and forced removals, Liverpool’s Chinese community endured.

The physical centre of Chinatown moved over time, eventually settling around Nelson Street, Berry Street and Great George Square. Restaurants, supermarkets, community organisations, churches and cultural groups continued to serve successive generations.

In 2000, Liverpool’s Chinese arch was assembled on Nelson Street by craftspeople from Shanghai, Liverpool’s twin city. It stands as a visible symbol of a relationship stretching back through generations of trade, seafaring and settlement.

Yet the community’s history is not contained in the arch.

It lives in family photographs, seamen’s records, marriage certificates, boarding-house registers and the memories of descendants whose relatives worked aboard ships sailing between China and the Mersey.

It also survives in stories of resistance: sailors demanding equal pay, families searching for missing fathers and descendants forcing Britain to confront what was done after the war.

What did the treaty really change?

It would be inaccurate to say that the Treaty of Nanking directly created Liverpool’s Chinese community.

Chinese trade with Liverpool had begun before 1842. Sustained settlement did not develop until regular steamship routes expanded from the 1860s. The community grew through the work, relationships and choices of Chinese seafarers and their families—not because a treaty instructed anyone to settle beside the Mersey.

However, the treaty was still an important turning point.

It opened Shanghai and four other ports to British merchants, expanded imperial trade and helped create the maritime network later developed by Liverpool shipping companies.

Those routes carried wealth into Liverpool’s docks.

They also carried people.

Some of those people stepped ashore, remained in the city and built lives that would permanently change Liverpool’s identity.

The Treaty of Nanking was imposed through war and unequal power. Liverpool’s Chinese community should never be presented simply as one of its products. The community was created by people who transformed an imperial trade route into something more human: homes, businesses, friendships and families.

Their history contains exploitation and resilience, prosperity and prejudice, belonging and betrayal.

It is not only the story of Liverpool trading with China.

It is the story of Chinese people becoming part of Liverpool.