Chung Collection: Highlights Audio Tour

Here we have a builder’s model of the Empress of Asia, one of the jewels in the iconic Canadian Pacific Steamship fleet that plied the waters between Hong Kong and Vancouver. It is also the vessel upon which Dr. Chung’s mother arrived in Canada, alongside many other early Chinese migrants. After his retirement he spent over 4,400 hours working on restoring the model; a true labour of love. 

Thanks to these efforts, this ship which has great meaning to Chinese Canadians across the country can be engaged with for future generations. Rare Books and Special Collections also has an original blueprint where you can see both the luxurious first-class amenities and the crowded steerage conditions that defined a passage on this vessel.  Below you will also notice a seascape with pieces of porcelain strewn on the seafloor. This reminds us of a story shared by Dr. Chung, where he learned that overworked cabin stewards would toss a dirty dish over the side of the boat instead of taking it all the way to the kitchens!  

In the centre in the white shirt you can see Chung Ham, Dr. Chung’s father, who had arrived in Canada in 1898 from Moy Gok Village in Sunwui county, Canton province. Dr. Chung’s mother, Hung Sze, would arrive in 1919, just a few years before the passage of the harsh 1923 Chinese Immigration Act (better known as the Chinese Exclusion Act.)

Growing up above the tailor shop, Dr. Chung would see the poster of the Empress of Asia (left side), and dream about what it must be like to travel the world, seeing the vast Pacific Ocean from its deck. This childhood fantasy eventually became reflected in the 25,000 materials found in the Chung Collection at UBC today. As merchant-tailors, the Chungs supported a network of village and family connections here in Canada. Outside the bounds of Chinatown, white society was often hostile to their existence on these lands, leading to Chinese residents relying heavily on one another for support. Eventually the Chung family would move out of Chinatown to run tomato greenhouses and build a home there. From these humble beginnings, Dr. Wallace Chung, like many others in his generation, strove for academic success and upward mobility. He would later become one of the first Chinese Canadian surgeons in the entire country.  

The land was considered the best farmland in Canada, the so-called “Golden Northwest,” a land of opportunity the CPR promised to rapidly settle with colonists from Europe. Their ideal candidate was, in the words of this poster, a “British farmer of moderate capital.” By 1885, railway construction enabled the military defeat of the Metis and First Nations peoples during the Northwest Rebellion, and with the passing of new harsh immigration laws, the Canadian government and CPR were already envisioning a “White Canada” on the horizon. 

The CPR maintained a dominant place in Western Canadian society for generations, controlling not only the major railways, but also the prime real estate, grain elevators, placement of towns and schools, breeding of grain varieties, tourism industry, and more. By the 1920s the CPR was a major consumer of coal, lumber, manpower, and water across Canada. In 1925 the Canadian government signed the Railway Agreement with the CPR and Canadian National Railways, giving the corporations broad authority over immigration and farming policy. The landscapes of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, as well as many family histories, were directly and permanently shaped by the Canadian Pacific company.  

This mythology minimizes the reality of this moment. For one, the railway was not completed on Nov 7, 1885, and was rapidly running out of money, leading to CPR directors staging this event to keep the creditors away. No major Canadian politicians attended, and the spike driven was a humble iron one, compared to the golden spike of the American transcontinental railway or the silver one intended for CPR, which the Governor General kept after he declined to attend. Donald Smith, known as Lord Strathcona, is pictured in the center after hammering the spike in. He had failed to do so once already, bending the first iron spike, damaging the hammer, and requiring another try. On this rainy day, Alexander Ross, an attendee who happened to bring his camera, was drafted into capturing this flawed moment.  

Noticeably, there are no Chinese workers present in this photo, despite the between 6,000 and 15,000 estimated workers on the mainline.  

This case contains not only Meares’ journals, but also the accounts of other Europeans who charted the Pacific coast during the late 1700s and early 1800s, notably Captains Cook and Vancouver. They also testify to the diversity of the maritime fur trade, which brought Americans, Spanish, British, over a dozen First Nations, Chinese, and Indigenous Hawaiians among others, into contact with one another for the first time. With Meares in 1788, for example, was Comekela the brother of the Mowachaht Chief Maquinna, returning from China where he had picked up Cantonese.  

Unfortunately, the historical diversity and complex stories of encounters driven by exchange, kinship, captivity, and curiosity have often been concealed or reduced to a few, often mythologized, stories of so-called “explorers.” Despite the limits of these materials, they can offer insight into the life of the Pacific Coast before diseases ravaged First Nations communities and colonialism uprooted families. By reading against the grain, we can recover critical information that asserts that even during devasting changes and legal papering-over, these have always been the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of First Peoples.  

Many of the men you see here came as “bachelors” meaning the extreme cost of the Head Tax and locked door of the Exclusion Act kept them separated from family in China as they worked in blue-collar jobs here, often for decades at a time. These certificates were also used to surveill, control, and restrict where Chinese migrants could live, travel, and work, representing the first ever use of photo technology for community identification purposes in Canadian history. Beyond their broader historical significance, these certificates are a way for Head Tax family descendants and others to reconnect with the ancestors who came before them. Sometimes the photos these documents contain are the only photo we have of the individual.  

When the Government of Canada apologized for the Head Tax in 2006 and offered a payment, they required survivors or their spouses to bring forward an original certificate under the principle of “one certificate one payment.” This process retraumatized many Chinese Canadian families, and reflects the general limits of government redress, which claimed no legal responsibility for the suffering caused by this law. You can view hundreds of stories, sourced from Chinese Canadians across the country, at a digital archive of certificates held at Rare Books and Special Collections called the Paper Trail Collection. 

From the 1870s to 1890s, salmon fishing and canning was booming, with canneries sprouting up from the Fraser River in the south to the Skeena and Nass Rivers in the North. This industry was primarily controlled by Anglo-American firms, but workers of many diverse backgrounds did the unforgiving work of fishing, processing, and canning salmon and other fish. In BC, Japanese and First Nations were often the fisher-people, while Chinese and white men did much of the processing.  

Tycoon Henry O. Bell-Irving and his ABC Packers conglomerate dominated this area by the early 1900s, relying on labour contractors within the Chinese community to supply him with cheap labourers. Chinese contractors, like the Wing Sang Company and Chock On firm, would arrange for new arrivals – already deeply indebted to them due to the head tax cost – to be placed on cannery crews, subtracting their debts, room, and board from the lump sum issued at the end of the fishing season. This meant that many men spent at least 10 years working off their debts, if not many decades. By 1906, increased head taxes and mechanization in the industry reduced Chinese presence, and in the following decades, overfishing, various rockslides in spawning grounds, and Japanese internment caused the fishing industry to shrink significantly. 

In the aftermath of the construction of the CPR, the white population of the province surged, quickly overwhelming the delicate multicultural balance of early BC with a torrent of European colonization. In cities like Victoria and Vancouver, as well as in smaller towns across the province, the new colonial elite sought to re-create their homeland, in other words “to build a new Albion [Britain] on the Pacific Coast.” Above all, people from Asia were seen to be undesirable and dangerous to this dream of a “White Canada” and a threat to their economic well-being. Insultingly, these new colonists soon began to form organizations like “The Native Sons of British Columbia” with goals of restricting Chinese and Japanese immigration and denying the true Indigenous peoples of this land their rights.  

Organized labour, often the underdog in fights with rich industrialists like coal baron Robert Dunsmuir, commonly refused to seek solidarity with these communities, instead targeting them as outsiders and seeing them as “living machines.” This culminated with a series of flashpoint incidents, namely the 1907 Vancouver Race Riot and the Komagata Maru standoff of 1914.  Only recently have provincial and municipal apologies to various communities, alongside promises to support efforts around education and redress, begun to shift broader awareness of these painful events. The Chung Collection, in preserving ugly material like these, bears witness and gives us evidence of this past when some might try to deny historical reality in present struggles against hate. 

In fact, his Chinese given name, Cumyow “金有” means “to have gold.” Ethnically Hakka Chinese, his family ran a general store, and young Cumyow picked up multiple Chinese languages in addition to the common trade language of the Pacific Northwest, often called Chinook Jargon. Won Alexander Cumyow would become a community broker, political leader, interpreter, and labour contractor who specialized in mediating with the hostile white community. He articled, but due to the racist laws of the day was unable to practice in his own right as a lawyer. In 1871 the BC legislature took Cumyow’s right to vote away, alongside the rights of BC’s First Nations and other Chinese, solidifying Anglo-European control over government institutions.  

In 1885, while living in Victoria, Cumyow was accused of fraud and sentenced to three years in prison in a case that is still debated by historians. By his release in 1888 he was living in New Westminister BC, whose Chinese community held him in great esteem, and where he married and started his family. Most of his life following was spent in Vancouver, working as a court interpreter and contractor. By 1947, towards the end of his life, he would finally be able to vote in the land of his birth. This photo, which is located above the portrait, is a powerful witness to the resilience and fortitude of Chinese Canadians fighting for their place at the table. 

Societies and Associations, which based their membership on shared kinship (clan), place of origin, dialect, politics, work industry, recreation, or sworn brotherhood have remained an important part of Chinese Canadian life since the time of the Fraser Gold Rush. In the past these organizations often provided housing, job support, legal protection, conflict resolution, mutual aid, interest-free loans, education, and entertainment for the majority- ”bachelor” men. In addition, these groups coordinated fundraising for major political efforts in China like the 1911 Xinhai Revolution and local construction of hospitals, schools, bridges, and other public works in the home regions of the “Lo Wah Kieu” ( 老華僑 Old Overseas Chinese.)

Here we have a mahjong set, a game that can still be seen to this day (and more accurately heard) in places as wide-ranging as Chinatown heritage buildings, summer camps, family reunions, and seniors’ centres across the country. It’s important to remember the role that joy has in resilience and building connection. Often historians write about people in the past in a way that makes them seem very far from our daily lives, especially if they write off things like music, games, jokes, and relationships as less important than big picture political or economic events. By listening to the stories and experiences of our elders, neighbours, friends, and family we can connect with the resilience of those who came before us and understand how they navigated huge challenges. Often, we will find resistance and resilience hand-in-hand with joy and kinship.