The Arch
If you have ever walked down Faulkner Street, you have walked under the arch. Red and gold, adorned with dragons and phoenixes, decorated with ceramics and lacquer and gold leaf. It stands at the entrance to Manchester's Chinatown, and it has been there since 1987.
It is said to be the first authentic Imperial Chinese arch erected in Europe. Twelve craftsmen from the Beijing Landscape and Classical Architecture Company built it, working from Christmas 1986 through to Easter 1987. The components were constructed in China and shipped to Manchester in three containers. The project was linked to the twinning of Manchester and Wuhan in 1986, and Manchester City Council commissioned it as a permanent marker of the Chinese community's place in the city.
The original mortar, reportedly mixed with pigs' blood in the traditional Chinese method, did not cope well with Manchester's weather. The tiles cracked. The colours faded. In 2013-14, the council commissioned a £120,000 restoration, stripping the roof, replacing damaged tiles with exact replicas, and repointing with a mortar mix that could handle the rain. The arch survived. It was the largest Chinese arch in the UK until Liverpool's was completed in 2000.
Manchester City Council officially classifies it as a bridge, because road traffic passes underneath. That's Manchester for you. The most beautiful thing on the street, and it's filed under infrastructure.
The Warehouses and the Laundries
The buildings that make up Chinatown were not built for the Chinese community. The streets around George Street, Faulkner Street, and Nicholas Street were laid out in the 1780s as Georgian houses and later turned commercial, filling up with warehouses as Manchester's textile trade grew through the 19th century. By the early 20th century the area was in decline. In 1915, it was described as "a squalid and noisy slum." By the 1950s and 60s, many of the buildings were cheap, run-down, and available. That mattered.
Chinese people had been in Manchester since at least 1851, and the first Chinese business appeared in the city directories in 1907. By 1912, the Manchester Guardian estimated there were around 100 Chinese immigrants in the city, mainly Cantonese. Most of them ran laundries. The work was hard, the hours were long, and the pay was poor, but it was a foothold. A way in. The Chinese community grew slowly through the first half of the 20th century, concentrated around the cheap commercial spaces south of Piccadilly where the old warehouses stood empty and affordable.
After the Second World War, everything changed. The 1948 British Nationality Act opened the door to immigration from Hong Kong and the Commonwealth. Refugees from mainland China, farmers displaced by urban development in Hong Kong's New Territories, families looking for something better. They came to Manchester, and they found those same empty warehouses, and they started cooking.
The Restaurants
Ping Hong was the first. It opened in 1948, the same year the NHS was born. The sources can't agree on whether it was on Oxford Street or Mosley Street, which tells you something about how long ago it was. A Chinese restaurant in Manchester in 1948, when most English people had never eaten anything more exotic than fish and chips. It must have been extraordinary.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, more followed. The Mogambo Cafe in the late 1950s. The Hong Kong Cafe in the 1960s. Kwok Man on Princess Street, with its formica-top tables and proper Cantonese cooking, the kind of food the community actually ate rather than the anglicised versions the English customers expected. Sun Ho in 1966. Charlie Chan's in 1972. And then, in 1977, Yang Sing opened on George Street, founded by the sons of Hong Kong dim sum chef Tim Kwan Yeung. It later moved to Princess Street and became the most celebrated Chinese restaurant in the city. Harry Yeung, who ran it, holds an MBE.
These were not chain restaurants. They were family businesses, run by people who had come to Manchester from the other side of the world and built something from nothing. The kitchens were staffed by uncles, cousins, brothers. The dining rooms were managed by wives, daughters, sisters. The children did their homework in the back room between service. Every restaurant was a family, and every family was a story.
None of the originals are there any more. Not Ping Hong, not the Mogambo, not Kwok Man, not Charlie Chan's, not the Hong Kong. Yang Sing, the last link to that era, closed in December 2021 after a kitchen fire earlier that year. The neon signs have come down. The names on the doors are different. New businesses have replaced a forgotten era. Walk through Chinatown today and you will find Japanese ramen, Korean barbecue, Vietnamese pho, Malaysian laksa. The food is good. The variety is extraordinary. But the families who built the place have mostly moved on, and the Chinatown they made is not the one you see now.
"Every restaurant was a family, and every family was a story. The names on the doors are different now, but the stories are still in the city."
A Personal Note
My surname is Lai. If you haven't worked that out by now, I'm half Hong Kong Chinese. And Chinatown is personal.
A relative of mine owned Kwok Man on Charlotte Street. My godfather owned Charlie Chan's. My girlfriend's uncle owned the Hong Kong restaurant. Three restaurants, three families, all part of the same community that turned a few streets of empty warehouses into the second largest Chinatown in the country. I grew up around these places. I knew the kitchens before I knew the dining rooms. I knew the people before I knew what they had built.
They're all gone now. Every one of them. The buildings are still there, but the businesses have changed hands, the signs have changed, and the families have scattered across Greater Manchester. That's what happens. People build something, it works, and then the next generation moves to the suburbs and the high street fills up with something else. It's not sad, exactly. It's just how cities work. But when you walk through Chinatown now and you can't find a single restaurant that your family had a connection to, you notice it.
The Chinese New Year celebrations are still the best free event in the city. Dragon parades from the Town Hall, lion dances through the streets, firecrackers that set off car alarms, food stalls stretching into Piccadilly Gardens. For one weekend a year, Chinatown fills up again the way it used to, and you remember what it felt like when those streets belonged to the community that made them.
More Than a Menu
Chinatown was never just restaurants. In 1979, the Chinese Cultural and Education Centre opened. Community Chinese schools started running weekend classes for children who spoke Cantonese at home and English at school. Wai Yin Chinese Women's Society was founded in 1988. The Chinese View Arts Association, later the Chinese Arts Centre, was founded in 1987 and opened its first gallery on Charlotte Street in 1989. It later moved to the Northern Quarter and is now esea contemporary on Thomas Street. Tong Sing Chinese Housing Association started in 1984. Wing Yip, the supermarket, opened in Manchester in 1977 and is still on Oldham Road. Woo Sang on George Street supplied households and wholesale goods across the north west.
There were herbalists, travel agents, solicitors, accountants, and at least one branch of HSBC. In 1933, a Chinese Kuomintang government consular representative was appointed to Manchester, with offices on Spring Gardens. In 1942, the Manchester China Institute was established on George Street by the Universities China Committee. A Chinese community in Manchester did not start with the restaurants. The restaurants were just the part that everyone else noticed.
George Street was designated a conservation area in June 1985, two years before the arch went up. Manchester City Library officially catalogued "Chinatown" as a recognised area of the city in 1983. The conservation area designation is also the reason Chinatown has no Chinese street signs. The council wouldn't allow bilingual signage in a conservation area. They built a community, and the council wouldn't even let them put their own language on the road signs. That's Manchester for you too.
Still Standing
Manchester's Chinatown is the second largest in the UK after London, and the third largest in Europe. That's a statistic that gets repeated a lot. What it doesn't tell you is that the Chinatown you see today is not the Chinatown that was built. The Cantonese restaurants that defined the area for 40 years have largely been replaced by a broader mix of East and South East Asian food. The Chinese Arts Centre moved to the Northern Quarter and rebranded. Yang Sing, the restaurant that put Manchester Cantonese food on the map, has been closed since 2021. Investment has flowed to Spinningfields, Ancoats, the Northern Quarter. Chinatown is still on the map, but it is not where the money goes.
And yet. The arch is still there. The Chinese New Year still fills the streets. The supermarkets still stock everything you need to cook a proper Cantonese dinner at home. The community that built this place is still in Manchester, even if it has spread far beyond Faulkner Street. You will find Chinese families in Chorlton, Didsbury, Sale, Whitefield, Prestwich, Ramsbottom. Everywhere. The takeaway in your town was probably opened by someone whose parents once ran a kitchen on George Street.
Chinatown was built by people who arrived in Manchester with nothing and turned a few streets of empty cotton warehouses into something that mattered. The restaurants have changed. The neon has come down. But the families are still here, the arch is still standing, and every February the dragons still dance through the streets.
That's a Manchester story. That's my story.