The Forbidden City

Canada’s oldest Chinatown was once considered to be a “forbidden city” — a segregated maze of alleyways, hidden courtyards, brother, gambling dens and opium factories. But it’s history is also one of proud resilience in the face of some of the most racist laws our country has ever seen.

There's so much more to the history of Canada's Chinatowns and the country's Chinese Canadian heritage—do not stop with us. Our aim is to make our channel a gateway drug. A great starting point, which proved an invaluable resource for us, is Simon Fraser University's community-based research initiative 'From C to C: Chinese Canadian Stories of Immigration'.

This episode doesn't even break the surface of what is a deep well of stories, historical figures, and pivotal events through which Chinese immigration shaped the course of the country's history. In our eyes, we no longer think of the colonization of Canada through the lens of two nations interacting with the Indigenous, but three. So next time you step through a paifang or Chinese arch in your town or city, or see a Chinese restaurant or street sign, we hope you stop and consider the historical weight behind them.

We've barely touched on the construction of the railroad, we haven't even mentioned the riots in Vancouver, we haven't focused on the Chinese diaspora across the nation, nor have we even uttered a word about Chinese Canadian cuisine—down the road, there's a whole series of episodes to make if the channel survives.

Notes:

The image we included as a depiction of Lee Chong (his name is spelled differently in many different sources—the frontrunners being Lee Chong and Lee Chang) is only that: a representation. One of the roadblocks to this episode was the fact the era of Chinese Canadian history from 1858 to 1900 is sparsely documented (or too expensive for us to license). Lee Chong would/should be considered a Founding Father of Victoria, but there is no visual evidence for him—only written documentation, newspaper ads, and signage—and we think that puts sharing his story at a disadvantage. We want to bring history to life so viewers are able to picture/identify with historical figures regardless of the country's shoddily documented past, so when there is no visual record of a historical heavyweight like Lee Chong we supplement their presence with edited, historically accurate portraits of other people. To us, it's the same thing as modern re-enactments with actors—if not more accurate. For Lee Chong, we found a photo of a late 19th Century, Southern Chinese, gentleman—a business magnate. His wife? Well, the Canadian Consulate General of Hong Kong and Macao referred to the image we used as being a portrait of Mrs. Kwong Lee (that's the only way she's ever referred to)—we suspect it was a portrait of a different Chinese Canadian woman that has been run through a rumour mill, but it remains historically accurate in terms of location and time period. Our other option was to have black silhouettes or omit their characters entirely—we hope you agree it was worth it to do it this way.

If other arches were built between 1912 and 1981, we could not find them. We referred to a research exhibit (which included a focus on the arches) put together by the University of Victoria that used to be available to the public a few years ago, but has since been made private, solely for the eyes of students of the university (which is pretty lame).

Addendum (there's much more than this):

The Chinook Language (or Jargon). We initially had a section in the episode dedicated to outlining how Chinese immigrants were able to build successful businesses in a land of many different alien languages . The tool they used to communicate was a jargon developed solely in the Pacific Northwest for the purposes of trading and communicating between the plethora of different nationals who flooded there during the gold rush(es). Due to the episode's length, and the fact the Chinook language deserves its very own episode, we had to cut it.

The Bachelor Society of Chinese Canadians up to World War II. In previous cuts, we had a section detailing some of the ramifications of the Head Tax Bill (a bill that required all Chinese immigrants to pay hundreds of dollars to enter the country—in modern times, tens of thousands). We had to cut it to keep the pace moving, but the focus was on the fact that the vast majority of Chinese immigrants were men—98% or so. Chinese women were either married or sex workers, and the Head Tax made it impossible to bring families across the ocean. It's a story for another episode focused on Vancouver and Alberta.

If you're ever in Victoria's Chinatown, check out the totally-not-a-tourist-trap Fan Tan Cafe because the food there is great.

Episode Transcript:

This is Victoria's Chinatown, the second oldest Chinatown anywhere in North America. 160 years of Chinese immigration to Canada started right here before BC was even a province. And this is the neighborhood's crown jewel, the Gate of Harmonious Interest. This beautiful arch was built in the 1980s to welcome visitors, a tradition that goes back to the origins of the neighbourhood. It was meant to signify a forward-looking Chinatown.

The messages inscribed on it promoted a future of integration and harmony within a new wave of Canadian multiculturalism. That sentiment is in stark contrast to the history of Chinatown. For a long time this place was considered to be a forbidden city, a segregated maze of alleyways, secret passages, and hidden courtyards filled with drugs, brothels, and gambling.

It's through arches like these that we'll step into the past to uncover the origins of Chinatown and to discover how a neighbourhood filled with promise eventually became the target of Canada's very first war on drugs.

This is Canadiana.

In 1788, Irish Captain John Meares landed at Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island. He was the first European to establish a settlement in what's now British Columbia but he wasn't alone. With him were 50 hired Chinese craftsmen. The very first European fort in the Pacific Northwest was built by those Chinese workers. But Nootka Sound was just the beginning.

Chinese migrants would continue to colonize the west alongside European settlers thanks in large part to one thing, gold.

1848, Gold Rush begins in California. It doesn't take long for the news to spread across the Pacific. Tens of thousands of Chinese migrants sail to San Francisco to mine for riches. They're greeted with racism but persevere.

A decade later, California has been stripped bare but word gets out there's more gold up north in the Fraser River Valley. People from all over the world make a mad dash for British Columbia. Their destination, Victoria, the gateway to the mainland. Overnight it was transformed from a trading post of just 300 people into a boom town of thousands. A third of the newcomers are Chinese.

This time they're here to stay and many, many more are on the way. Thousands of Chinese tradespeople, merchants, and labourers will help turn the trading post of Victoria into the economic engine of British Columbia for years to come. Soon messages were being sent home to China about what they were calling Gum Shan or Gold Mountain. And before long, ships arrived in James Bay carrying even more people from southern China.

Most were here for the gold. But some were fleeing the Second Opium War or rebellions, or famine, or even just in general, lack of opportunity. This place, and BC in general, was gaining a reputation as a promised land.

Suddenly nearly half the population of Victoria was Chinese. Most of them stuck together in one area of town where a cluster of wooden shacks quickly evolved into a district filled with stores, theaters, temples, and schools. Canada's first Chinatown was born.

Soon companies sprang up selling goods from across the ocean like rice, sugar, and tea. This block at the corner of Government and Pandora became a row of storefronts. And business was good, so good in fact, that one of them, the Kwong Lee Company became the second largest business in Victoria and eventually opened stores all over the mainland competing with the Hudson's Bay Company.

The Kwong Lee Company's manager was Lee Chong, an English-speaking Chinese man who was among the first to come to Victoria from San Francisco. His wife was actually the first Chinese woman in history to come to Canada. Lee and his fellow Chinatown businessmen became de facto community leaders. When they heard representatives of the Crown were coming to town, they wanted to send a message so they put up the money for a paifang.

It was common for dignitaries on tours of the country to be greeted by European-style arches. Paifangs were part of a Chinese tradition. They marked districts and welcomed visitors. In a show of goodwill, they anglicized some of the banners with lines like God Save the Queen and English Laws Most Liberal. It was a display of cultural fusion and that was part of the point.

From then on, every time a Governor General came to Victoria, the community built arches all over Chinatown. And embedded within the decorations was a symbolic statement. Chinatown was a distinct community but it was loyal to Canada as long as its residents were treated fairly. The problem was they weren't.

In 1871, BC joined Confederation and that gave the BC Government the power to pummel the people of the province with a wave of bigoted legislation. And the fact the Chinese-Canadians had booming businesses while being forced to work harder for less, made it even worse. Now they were being accused of taking white settlers' jobs.

Over the next seven years, laws were passed making it illegal for Chinese-Canadians to work as lawyers, doctors, teachers, accountants, pharmacists, their voting rights were revoked in both federal and provincial elections. And Chinese immigrants were banned from being employed in public works all the way until 1958. The governments of British Columbia and Canada had made their intentions abundantly clear.

And then something surprising happened.

Suddenly, Sir John A. Macdonald and the Federal Government seemed to change their tune entirely. They went from trying to suppress the Chinese-Canadian community to calling for thousands more Chinese workers to come to Canada. Ships started pulling into port filled with new arrivals from Hong Kong.

It seemed as if Canada was back to being a land of opportunity. And this time Chinese immigrants were welcomed with employment and a gigantic nation-building project. They were being hired to build a railway through the Rockies.

Everything was about to get even worse.

The horrific conditions Chinese workers faced, the hundreds of lives lost was finally over in 1885. The Canadian-Pacific Railway was complete, the most difficult portions built solely by the Chinese. The Canadian Government owed them big time. But in Parliament, John A. Macdonald was now calling to slow the Chinese immigration he had encouraged. 

As far as he was concerned, they'd done their job and now there was a danger the Chinese would take over BC and disrupt what he called, the Aryan character of the country, with Chinese immorality and eccentricities. So the Federal Government passed one of the most racist and exclusionary laws the country has ever seen, a head tax on Chinese immigrants introduced the very same year the railway was finished. Five years later it was doubled. And in 1903, it was increased five-fold. The effect was devastating.

The country they had worked so hard to be a part of, the country they died for had just slammed the door shut on their futures. But through it all, Chinese-Canadians remained resilient. And here in Victoria's Chinatown they were still building celebratory arches to welcomed Governors General, even British royalty.

Some of the displays had turned into hidden protests. They made their anger against the government's policies known but they were also still filled with messages of openness to a country they had long considered their home. But the damage had been done. Something had changed in Chinatown.

The bans, the head tax, the recently unemployed railway workers, it was all leading to an epidemic that would throw the nation into a panic and the center of it all was right down here. This is Fan Tan Alley.

This is the place that gave Victoria's Chinatown its shady reputation. It's actually officially a street, the narrowest street in North America. Today it's filled with hipster art galleries and boutique shops. But over a century ago, Fan Tan Alley was known for three things: brothels, gambling dens, and opium factories. This is where the nearly all-male population of Chinatown came to spend their free time.

Both sides of the alley were boarded up and guards stood looking through peepholes. You needed permission to enter this section of The Forbidden City. The shadowy dealings drew regular police raids. A lookout would spot them coming and send out a warning. Everyone on the street would drop what they were doing and flee.

Opium dens were clear, bars and brothels would vacate, gamblers would grab their money and run. They'd escape through back doors and passages into hidden courtyards and alleyways leaving an empty street. The police would arrive, finding only the evidence of the crime left behind. coins, beads, and small buttons from an ancient Chinese game with similarities to roulette, Fan Tan, the namesake of the alley.

 You see, gambling was illegal, but the use and manufacture of opium was fine. In fact, both the federal and provincial governments actively encouraged the refinement of opium.

Why?

Because it made them a ton of money on licensing fees and taxes.

After all, the British had forced the opium trade into China from India then fought a couple of Opium Wars against China to keep it going laying the groundwork for opium to be grown and then shipped across the ocean into a British colony turned country. The Kwong Lee Company, one of those businesses that had been funding the ornate arches had been on the receiving end of that supply chain since they first opened shop. They had an opium factory here in Fan Tan Alley for decades and theirs was just one of more than a dozen in Victoria.

Chinatown's merchants didn't just trade in tea and sugar. Victoria was actually the center of the opium trade in all of North America. For years, the city had been the primary exporter of opium to the United States going as far as to smuggle it in after the drug was made illegal there. The whole operation was a cash cow for everyone involved.

But now there was a big problem and it would outweigh the government's greed.

That railroad they just had the Chinese workers build was now fully operational and the opium which had mostly been harming communities in the west now had a highway east straight into the heart of Canada's population. Abuse and addiction exploded in the rest of Canada.

And who took the blame?

Chinese-Canadians and their Chinatowns. 

In 1908, the Opium Act, Canada's first ever anti-drug law, came into being after the future prime minister, a young William Lyon Mackenzie King visited opium dealers in BC and was horrified. The number of white opium addicts was growing. Fan Tan Alley reacted by becoming even seedier. A black market had emerged. Chinatown was about to enter a long period of decay and truly be treated as a forbidden city.

The City of Victoria which had lost its economic power over the region to Vancouver rejected Chinatown entirely. They decided to project a new, genteel, and ultra-British persona in order to attract what they saw as more favourable visitors. And the crown jewel was this, The Empress Hotel.

 It was built by the Canadian-Pacific Railway, the very same Canadian-Pacific Railway that hundreds of Chinese-Canadians had died working for. It was completed the same year the Opium Act was passed. The message was clear, Chinese-Canadians were no longer welcome in the city they'd helped to build. One last time an arch was built to celebrate the visit of a Governor General in 1912.

But this time, the arch was placed outside Chinatown here at Yates Street. It was bright and modern and in gigantic letters front and center was the word welcome. But once again that message was ignored. It wasn't long before the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act would ban Chinese immigration to Canada entirely for 24 years.

The Chinese-Canadian community never gave up, though, and they never left. They kept fighting for their rights and eventually the racist laws were overturned. But for the next 70 years not a single new arch was built in Chinatown.

That is until the Gate of Harmonious Interest in 1981, more than a hundred years after the first arch was built, through a century filled with some of the most racist policies the Canadian government has ever enacted against its own citizens, the message has remained constant. This Chinatown is, and always has been, striving for harmony between cultures. 

Today it's a thriving district. It's a National Historic Site and one of the most popular tourist attractions in Victoria. The Forbidden City is a thing of the past but down the alleyways and the side streets, behind the storefronts, and in the courtyards, there's the memory of the Chinese immigrants who first came to this place, who persevered through everything the government threw at them to help build the Canadian west into what it is today.

The attacks on Chinese-Canadian culture weren't just coming from a few politicians in Ottawa. There was a wide-spread campaign of hate and its leaders included some pretty famous people you might not expect. I'll tell you more about them in a second.

But first, I wanna thank you so much for watching. If you'd like to see more incredible stories from the history of Canada, please click subscribe. We're incredibly thrilled to have been able to come 4,000 kilometers or something all the way to Victoria to tell this story and we'd like to keep going. But to do that, we'll need your help. You can become a patron on Patreon or just give us a one-time donation on PayPal. Every little bit helps. You can also follow us on social media @thisiscanadiana.

Now, back to those famous bigots I was talking about. One of them was Emily Murphy. She's one of the most famous Canadian feminists ever. She's actually one of the Famous Five who have statues on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. She spent her life fighting for women's rights but also fought against Chinese-Canadians. In fact, she wrote an entire book blaming them for Canada's drug problem.

Another one of those famous bigots had a more direct tie to the City of Victoria. The famous British author, Rudyard Kipling, loved this place but hated the Chinese-Canadians in it. He wrote some of the most vilely racist things you will ever read in your entire life. He called for the mass extermination of all Chinese people. There's actually a lot to both of those stories so we're gonna tell you even more about them in a couple of future editions of Canadiana Shorts. You can look out for those by subscribing on YouTube or following us on social media @thisiscanadiana.

I'm Adam Bunch and we'll see you next time on Canadiana.