‘British Chinese Heritage Project | Chinese Lives in Birmingham’ is permanently archived in the Library of Birmingham

· 15 month project comes to an end and is now permanently archived in the Library of Birmingham.

· Project participants encompassed pillars of Birmingham Chinese Community including; Professor Rayson Huang CBE – the eldest participant, who’d turned 95-years-old this month.

· Over 25 volunteers involved totalling 1610 hours – including one volunteer who’d donated nine months’ (approx. 1080 hours) worth of pro-bono time to the project.

The ‘British Chinese Heritage Project | Chinese Lives in Birmingham’ has been permanently archived in the Library of Birmingham, following a 15-month long project journey.

The project blog (chineselivesinbirmingham.com) has been re-launched with an eight minute documentary style video depicting the project journey.

Other project outputs include; a booklet, DVD, bilingual hardback photobooks, a visual exhibition as well as audio recordings of the interviews – all of which were archived for future generations to look back upon, in both hard and soft copy formats.

A legacy project for the city, it was created to capture the hidden histories of Birmingham’s Chinese community after being awarded a grant of £35,600 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

Anna Yim, CEO of Chinese Community Centre Birmingham (CCC-B) said; “We are delighted to have created this historical project – and that the Library archives can now help reflect the lives of individual migrants and British Chinese, as well as the development of the Chinese community in Birmingham.

We would like to thank everyone for their hard work, especially all the volunteers who have contributed over 1610 hours- without whom, this project would not have been possible.

We hope to build upon the success of this first project , pending funding, to take the heritage project on even further and help allow the Chinese community here to have a voice and be proud of their heritage. ”