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1911.40 After the First World War, the number had risen to over 2,000. (These figures do not include several thousand seamen, mostly firemen, stokers and stewards, without permanent domicile). At the beginning of the century, it is claimed, Chinese tended to ‘avoid Scotland and Wales', but were strongly attracted to London, especially Limehouse. With such small numbers present in Britain, it seems certain British judges and lawyers rarely came in contact with Chinese, only very occasionally perhaps in certain Liverpool or London courts; but never, one surmises, in normal social intercourse. In the 1920s, then, the Chinese in Britain were still a mysterious, but minute, social entity, habitually caricatured in the press and by novelists as 'vellee' strange people who spoke a particularly difficult and dissonant language and wrote, as Dr. Johnson noted, a script that was perversely pictorial to alphabet-lovers. Even professors of Chinese, sinologues and sinologists, were regarded at that time with as much wry amusement as were Assyriologists or Egyptologists, seekers after equally rarefied knowledge of no great practical importance.
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The first mass movement of Chinese to the outside world occurred in the nineteenth century. It was mostly 'coolie emigration', to use Campbell's descriptive term, the drift of mainly uneducated and relatively unskilled, though hard-working, Chinese to places where opportunities appeared to be brighter than in the homeland (a territory then much wracked by rebellion, foreign wars, famine and other afflictions). Lock Ah Tam, as mentioned above, is representative of the first wave, an emigrant who did well in his adopted country. As China was forced reluctantly into the modern world and into normal diplomatic relations with foreign powers, a different type of Chinese was becoming known abroad — the educated Chinese, a member of the 'Mandarin class', as Europeans were wont to describe him. In 1876 Kuo Sung-tao was appointed as the first Chinese minister in England.18 A Legation was then established in London, in 1877, with a normal complement of officials and secretaries. Chinese diplomatic staff became a common sight in Whitehall although, until the 1911 Revolution, most wore traditional Chinese attire and sported the queue. (After 1911, they took to frock-coat and top-hat and adopted European hair-styles).