alien, in 1805 he used part of the fortune he had amassed from his London work to pay for an Act of Parliament to naturalise him as a British subject; thus being the first Chinese person to gain British citizenship. However, he died a few months after the Act was passed. 1800s to World War II Chinese migration to Britain has a history of at least a century and a half. From the 1800s until 1945, it is estimated 20,000 had emigrated to Britain. The British East India Company, which controlled the importation of popular Chinese commodities such as tea, ceramics and silks, began employing Chinese seamen in the middle of the 19th century. Those who crewed ships to Britain had to spend time in the docks of British ports while waiting for a ship to return to China, establishing the earliest Chinatowns in Liverpool and London. In 1901 there were 387 Chinese people living in Britain, and which grew to 1,219 in 1911. These communities consisted of a transnational and highly mobile population of Cantonese seamen and small numbers of more permanent residents who ran shops, restaurants, and boarding houses that catered for them. During this time period, mixed marriages between Chinese men and white women were increasingly commonplace in Britain. Such relationships often attracted racist attention. In nineteenth century portside communities, for example, the wives of Chinese men were often given nicknames such as "Canton Kitty" and "Chinese Emma" to ridicule their interracial relationships. Racist attitudes continued into the twentieth century as Chinese men were increasingly vilified and associated with the "Yellow Peril," a racist stereotype that depicts people from East and Southeast Asia as an existential threat to the West. Yellow Peril imagery was used to shame mixed marriages, portraying Chinese men as a danger to white women and "the purity of the Anglo-Saxon blood". In World War II as more men were required to crew British merchant ships, the Chinese Merchant Seamen's Pool of approximately 20,000 was established with its headquarters in Liverpool. However, at the end of the war few Chinese who had worked as merchant seamen were allowed to remain in Britain. The British Government and the shipping companies colluded to forcibly repatriate thousands of Chinese seamen, leaving behind British wives and mixed-race children. More than 50 years later in 2006, a memorial plaque in remembrance for those Chinese seamen was erected on Liverpool's