Hong Kong diaspora forges new life and links in Colchester

In a bustling park cafe in Colchester on a sunny November day, a group of chatty women are busy serving up Hong Kong delicacies - milk tea, pineapple buns, noodles - to a steady stream of local customers.

- Heather Stewart

They're not paid staff at GO4 Café, but volunteers, honing their English and clocking up experience for their CVs. They are here in this quiet Essex city because each has made the decision to quit their homeland of Hong Kong and start a new life in the UK.

More than 130,000 Hongkongers made that leap in the first 18 months after the government opened a special visa scheme last January in response to the increasingly authoritarian political climate in the former British territory.

That's a significant collective migration by way of comparison, the highest number of citizens who arrived in the UK in a single year from the EU8 accession countries of Poland, Hungary and so on was 112,000, in 2007.

Christy Lee, 53, left because of concerns about her daughter's future. "Hong Kong chaos is a famous chaos," she says, referring to the waves of pro-democracy protests over recent years, as Beijing has tightened its grip.

She feared that her daughter could fall victim to the draconian security law passed in 2020. The pair first moved to Taiwan, before coming to England when Lee's daughter won a place to study at Essex University.