Yellow Peril Awareness Day

Tickets for both London and Manchester events available here.

Did you know there were six Chinese survivors on the Titanic? Or that the first Japanese visitors to London came in the 1500s? That after 1945, the Home Office secretly and illegally deported thousands of Chinese seamen who had helped Britain during WW2? Their families, left in Liverpool, weren’t notified, and spent decades assuming their husbands and fathers had died or abandoned them, only finding out the truth decades later.

Yellow Peril - a term that depicts the peoples of East and Southeast Asia as an existential danger to the Western world - continues to rear its ugly head through history and in more recent years. To ensure the next generation of ESEA people don’t have to battle anti-ESEA scapegoating, we’re launching Yellow Peril Awareness Day, an annual deep-dive into chapters of interwoven British-ESEA history.

Kickstarting on the 6th May, we’ll annually commemorate the signing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which explicitly prohibited Chinese immigrants from entering the country by US law. To date, it is the earliest and first known ban a country has made explicitly against a certain ethnic group. For 83 years, until 1965, it justified top-down, racial tension, inclusive of riots and massacres of the Chinese people who already lived there. On the other side of the border, it historically kept the six Chinese survivors of the Titanic stranded on a lifeboat instead of getting treatment, when they’d suffered exactly the same as the other survivors.

With our annual Yellow Peril Awareness Day, we want to:

1. Uplift and educate about the depth of ESEA history, inclusive of yellow peril and its global impact.
2. Implement resources for top-down changemakers in the British public.
3. Empower ESEA people to acknowledge their belongingness, share their experiences and be emboldened to report incidents.​

Join in on a national exploration of hidden history - and of ESEA belongingness - in the UK! Our exhibition will highlight some of the key moments throughout British (and some Western World) history whereby

Where: Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, London, E1 5QJ

When: Monday 6th May, 11am to 4pm (please pick a time slot when ordering tickets, but you do not definitively have to arrive during this time - it just allows us to know the capacity of the venue throughout the day)