The history of Chinese Canadians in British Columbia began with the first recorded visit by Chinese people to North America in 1788. Some 30–40 men were employed as shipwrights at Nootka Sound in what is now British Columbia, to build the first European-type vessel in the Pacific Northwest, named the North West America. Large-scale immigration of Chinese began seventy years later with the advent of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858. During the gold rush, settlements of Chinese grew in Victoria and New Westminster and the "capital of the Cariboo" Barkerville and numerous other towns, as well as throughout the colony's interior, where many communities were dominantly Chinese. In the 1880s, Chinese labour was contracted to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. Following this, many Chinese began to move eastward, establishing Chinatowns in several of the larger Canadian cities.
History
Earliest arrival
While the legend of the mythical country of Fusang is sometimes claimed to refer to Chinese monks in British Columbia in the 6th Century AD, it wasn't until the late 1780s that the first confirmed record was made of Chinese arrivals in BC. Some 120 Chinese contract labourers arrived at Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island. The British fur trader John Meares recruited an initial group of about 50 sailors and artisans from Canton (Guangzhou) and Macao. At Nootka Sound, the Chinese workers built a dockyard, a fort and a sailing ship, the North-West America. Regarding this journey and the future prospects of Chinese settlement in colonial North America, Meares wrote:
The next year, Meares had another 70 Chinese craftsmen brought from Canton but, shortly after arrival of this second group, the settlement was seized by the Spanish in what became known as the Nootka Crisis, with the Chinese being imprisoned by the Spanish in the course of their seizure of Meares' property, which brought Britain and Spain to the brink of global war. It is unclear what became of them but likely that some returned to China while others were put to work in a nearby mine and later brought to Mexico. No other Chinese are known to have arrived in western North America until the Fraser gold rush of 1858.
Gold rush era Chinese arrived with the massive and sudden migration of 30,000 gold-seekers and merchants from San Francisco and the California goldfields with the Fraser Gold Rush of 1858, forming the nucleus of Victoria's Chinatown and leading to the establishment of others at New Westminster, Yale and Lillooet, though most Chinese gold-seekers were not in the newly emerged towns but busy prospecting and working the goldfields. Estimates indicate that about 1/3 of the non-native population of the Fraser goldfields was Chinese.Claiming the Land, Dan Marshall, UBC Ph.D Thesis, 2002 (unpubl.)McGowan's War, Donald J. Hauka, New Star Books, Vancouver (2000) As more and more goldfields were found, Chinese spread out all over the colony, and confrontations at Rock Creek and Wild Horse Creek with mostly American miners, but the colonial government intervened on the side of the Chinese (other similar situations were fairly rare, until the railway era).
Chinese miners were notable in many of the gold rushes in the coming decades, including the remote Omineca and Peace River Gold Rushes of the 1860s Cassiar Gold Rush of the 1870s. While Chinese were driven from the Similkameen Gold Rush in the 1880s, the Cayoosh Gold Rush at Lillooet in that same decade was entirely Chinese. In most goldfield towns there were no distinct Chinatowns, and in many towns and gold camps, Chinese miners and merchants were often the majority so the term "Chinatown" is inapt for them. Barkerville had an "official" Chinatown but Chinese dominated the population in the town's whole area, and many non-Chinese lived in the "official" Chinatown; nearby Richfield was near-entirely Chinese, as were many of the towns in the Cariboo goldfields. As the more impatient non-Chinese miners moved on, Chinese took over their diggings, often pulling out more due to more advanced placer-mining techniques, and also obtained ranches and farms and Chinese retailers were often the mainstay of commerce in the waning goldfield towns.The Resettlement of British Columbia, Cole Harris In Victoria, the first tax register for that city indicates that of the ten richest men in the city, eight were Chinese (with the Governor and James Dunsmuir only ahead of them on the list).In the Sea of Sterile Mountains: The Chinese in British Columbia, J. Morton, 1974
Chinese merchants from New Westminster were among the first to set up shop in Gastown, the townsite that sprang up next to the Hastings Mill property which was the historical kernel of what would become the City of Vancouver. Some were on Water Street but most early Chinese businesses (mostly bordellos and opium dens) were along what is now the 100 block of West Hastings Street. The use of Chinese labour in the clearing of the West End led to the winter riots of 1885 which saw Chinese residents flee to a refuge in a creek ravine around the then-southeast end of False Creek, thereafter known as China Creek. It was not until the 1890s that Chinese businesses began to relocate back into the growing city, along Dupont Street (now East Pender Street), forming the nucleus of Chinatown.[Early Vancouver, Vol I, Maj. J.S. "Skit" Mathews, Vancouver Archives publ. 1939From Milltown to Metropolis, Alan Morley Vancouver had the largest Chinese population in Canada until around 1980, when Toronto's Chinese population became the largest.Ng, p. 7.
A group of Chinese in California sent one of their number, Ah Hong, to survey the Fraser Canyon after hearing that gold had been discovered there. Ah Hong verified that the gold rush was happening and stated this upon his May 1858 return.Lai, "The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association in Victoria," p. 53. The Chinese first appeared in large numbers in the Colony of Vancouver Island in 1858 as part of the huge migration from California during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush in the newly declared Mainland Colony. Around a third of the sudden, massive immigration were Chinese.Claiming the Land, Dan Marshall, University of British Columbia, Ph.D Thesis, 2002 (unpublished)Pierre Berton, The Last Spike. Doubleday Canada, 2010. Unabridged edition. , p. 194 Although the first wave arrived in May from California, news of the rush eventually attracted many Chinese from China itself. The San Francisco company Hop Kee & Co. commissioned the voyage of 300 Chinese gold miners and merchants on June 24, 1858; additional in-migration from California continued later in 1858 and throughout 1859.Chung, Dr. Tzu-I. "Early Transpacific Chinese Travelers and Today's British Columbia" (Archive). Royal BC Museum. Retrieved on January 26, 2015.
Most Chinese mined gold, but there were some who mined jade, exporting it untaxed until British officials figured out what the big "black rocks" were.Short Portage to Lillooet, Irene Edwards, self-publ. 1976, and various other sourcesGuo, p. 42. During the gold rush era, coal mines on Vancouver Island hired Chinese workers.Yee, p. 11. Coal mines on the Island were to later hire Chinese workers as scabs, notably at Cumberland, where the Chinese workers' settlement was protected by barbed wire fences and watchtowers because of potential violence from union workers the Chinese had been brought into replace.
The Chinese often entered existing mining sites that white miners had abandoned since it was easier for them to acquire the claims to those fields instead of getting a claim to a new field. In many cases claims to used mining sites were less expensive than claims to new sites. Chinese miners then reworked the abandoned sites.Yee, p. 10. In the goldfields, Chinese mining techniques and knowledge turned out to be better in many ways to those of others, including hydraulic techniques, the use of "rockers", and a technique whereby blankets were used as filter for alluvial sand and then burned, with the gold melting into lumps in the fire. The amount of gold earned by Chinese mining operations is not exactly known due to the difference between what was reported to the Gold Commissioners and what was not, a problem that also applied to miners of other nations in the goldfields:
In the Fraser Canyon, Chinese miners stayed on long after all others had left for the Cariboo Gold Rush or other goldfields elsewhere in BC or the United States and continued both hydraulic and farming, owned the majority of land in the Fraser and Thompson Canyons for many years afterwards. At Barkerville, in the Cariboo, over half the town's population was estimated to be Chinese, and several other towns including Richfield, Stanley, Van Winkle, Quesnellemouthe (modern Quesnel), Antler, and Quesnelle Forks had significant Chinatowns (Lillooet's lasting until the 1930s) and there was no shortage of successful Chinese miners.Mark S. Wade, The Cariboo Road, publ. The Haunted Bookshop, Victoria BC, 1979, 239 pp. Robin Skelton, They Call It Cariboo, Sono Nis Press (1980), 237 pp. .
In addition to the mining operations, Chinese established auxiliary businesses including vegetable farms, restaurants, and laundries. Chinese opened a fishing company in an area near the provincial capital. When fish canneries opened in the 1870s Chinese workers were hired. Chinese also worked for Western Union to install a telegraph line between New Westminster and Quesnel. Western Union hired 500 Chinese for this task in 1866.
In the beginning British Columbians had more tolerance and had little fear of the Chinese and that this differed from California. The province had given the Chinese the same legal protections that other ethnic groups enjoyed.
Non-Chinese were vocally upset because the Chinese were willing to work for wages lower than wages than whites.Pierre Berton, The Last Spike. Doubleday Canada, 2010. Unabridged edition. , pp. 194–195 "At the time there were some three thousand Chinese in British Columbia, all of them prepared to work for lower wages than any white labourer; this was the chief cause of the discontent." Non-Chinese workers and later organized labour groups criticized Chinese for working for less money than they did, preventing them from taking labour jobs and depressed overall wages. Whites perceived themselves to have superior physical condition and morals compared to the Chinese, and held that the Chinese had many diseases.Yee, p. 14. The Chinese often sent money back to China instead of doing local investment. In addition the Chinese were observed to be taking in more money than they needed since the Chinese had simple lifestyles and did not have their families with them."Archived – The Early Chinese Canadians 1858–1947 ." Federal Government of Canada. Retrieved on December 28, 2014. Therefore, non-Chinese held that Chinese were not contributing anything to the area while they were taking resources from it:Lim, Imogene L. "Pacific Entry, Pacific Century: Chinatowns and Chinese Canadian History" (Chapter 2). In: Lee, Josephine D., Imogene L. Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa (editors). Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History. Temple University Press. . Start: 15. Cited: p. 17