The History of Canada’s Chinatowns from an Urban Planner’s Perspective
Canada’s Chinatowns share lessons of settlement and struggle that urban planners should learn from
As a young immigrant kid in Canada from the Caribbean, I learned a lot about the culture of my new home, guided by my mother’s hand as we set about errands around the City. As we navigated the City from suburban Nepean, through downtown Ottawa, the City’s Chinatown stood out as a distinct and remarkable landscape. It was an intricate and different neighbourhood yet it felt strangely familiar.
In a Canadian landscape painted with No Name peanut butter, Dempster’s bread, The Decadent President’s Choice chocolate chip cookie, freezies from the Quickie and all of the features that come to compose a banal suburban Canadian life in Ottawa, Chinatown stood out. Chinatown is where I would find food from back home — Ovaltine Biscuits, Milo and Ribena. Chinatown had the good mangoes, the fish my mum calls doctor fish, what I considered this weird fruit — lychee which looked kind of similar to a ginip and Chinatown had tamarind balls too.
When I arrived in Ottawa, Black people like me made up only 3 per cent of the population of the greater Ottawa-Gatineau region. What this meant is that we would sometimes go weeks between seeing another Black person in public. Ottawa had an even smaller Chinese population, less than 2 per cent of the population were Chinese — yet there on Somerset was this fascinating Chinese-Canadian landscape.
As rare as it was at that time to see Black people in our daily lives in Ottawa, Chinatown was an important hub where Black Caribbean and African communities could find produce from back home. It’s where my childhood black barber, Fades International Barbershop, in the City was located. This all contributed to my love and fascination with Chinatown. It was, to my awareness at the time also Caribbean-town. Really, as much as Chinatown was a Chinese-Canadian landscape, in Ottawa it was the landscape of the City’s ethnic diversity.
In the popular imagination of the time, I saw Chinatown also being noted for its diversity if not also marked as a place of social struggle. It was a place where ethnic minorities were the at the centre of their own narrative. I think of “Rumble in the Bronx”, released in 1995, as probably being the film that represents this idea most clearly. It’s a Jackie Chan film and a great watch if you haven’t seen it. Interestingly, the film was partly filmed in Vancouver. I loved the film.
Now, as an urban planner, revisiting the topic of Chinatown has led to even more fascinating learning and nuance and further expanded my fascination with these landscapes as they exist in Canada and the US. I feel that planners sometimes miss communities for the buildings which house them. We see land use and not people. We see heritage buildings and not lived histories. Contemplating a place and its function, asking why and how a place works and how it sustains itself should be an essential task for all planners.
So, in contemplating Chinatown: Why do Chinatowns exist and why do so many Cities in Canada have them? This is a pretty important question in understanding cultural landscapes in Canadian Cities. Does every community have it’s own blank-town? Should every community have its own hub? Why did Ottawa have a Chinatown and not a “little Barbados” or “Jamaicaville” when its Chinese population was even smaller than the Black population at the time.
Chinatowns have amazing histories of success, struggle, decline, erasure and resistance in Canada. That story is so often set against a hostile and sometimes violent Canadian society. Chinatowns, share a historical context and a somewhat intertwined lineage. They are not entirely separate phenomena which crop up at random throughout the Canadian urban landscape. They have a history of social support and community investment as a means of facilitating settlement and withstanding hostility from the wider community. They each share something of a family history of linked development reaching back to one of the first major ports of entry and settlement for Asian people in North America.
Chinatowns have been essential landscapes of resistance and political organization which have also provided space for other immigrant communities in Canada — particularly providing important social and cultural supports for new immigrant communities following the gradual opening up of Canadian immigration policy in the 1960s and 70s. I believe that Chinatowns are instructive for growing an understanding of community building, displacement and community resilience in urban Canada.
The Origins of Canadian Chinatowns: The History of Chinese Labour and Settlement in British Columbia
Chinese Canadian history extends back to the early development of modern colonial Canada. Chinese labour played an important roll in the early settling and conquest of the Canadian West Coast. The history of Chinese labour, used in the settling of the Canadian territory, dates back as early as 1788 when a British Fur Trader, Captain John Mears, brought skilled Chinese blacksmiths and carpenters from Macao and Guangzhou to build a fortress and schooner on Vancouver Island.
Chinese migrants would continue to arrive in small numbers in the early 19th Century in the United States, arriving as merchants and sailors. In 1848, Gold was discovered in California and people the world over arrived to take part in the California Gold Rush. California was booming, experiencing a population explosion. Between 1850 and 1860, the population of the state grew from 93,000 people to nearly 380,000. San Francisco’s Chinatown was the port of entry for early Chinese migrants. Following defeat to Britain in the first opium war, natural disasters and peasant revolts, economic conditions in Canton and southern China declined rapidly. The Chinese population of San Francisco would continue to grow with new economic migrants. With new arrivals, the population would continue to concentrate as Chinese residents were not particularly welcome in other parts of the City. The neighbourhood grew as merchants began opening shops within the port district.
By 1858, affluent migrants from San Francisco’s Chinatown moved north purchasing properties on Cormorant Street on Vancouver Island in Victoria. They built lodging in preparation for the arrival of Chinese labourers who were recruited to pan gold in the Fraser River. As the neighbourhood grew, it remained physically separated from the rest of the City. In Victoria, the City government required that the community remain separate, separated from the centre of town by the Johnson Street ravine and only accessible via narrow footbridges.
Victoria’s Chinatown was seen by Westerners as an unscrupulous and immoral destination. An ominous landscape of a dark, mysterious and unknowable topography on the edge of town. Chinatown was foreign. This separation however would also allow the residents of Chinatown to live together unencumbered, able to observe their own customs, developing businesses and services supporting the community— free from the scrutiny of the white population.
Import and export businesses boomed during the gold rush in Victoria’s Chinatown. The business of provisioning Chinese gold prospectors with their tools and daily necessities would see the rise of three import-export companies and produced a brisk trade.
Following the British conquest of southern China and the port of Hong Kong in the Opium Wars, opium became a common and legal import from China into Canada. Chinatown’s three import-export companies were also opium importers and refineries providing large revenues to the Canadian government through the licensed sale of opium and the major export of refined opium to the United States.
As the gold rush continued, Chinese labourers would arrive directly from Hong Kong. The colonial government retained contractors and labourers to build the infrastructure of the rapidly growing settler colony. Business in British Columbia would come to rely on labour from migrants from across Asia in particular industries. By 1865 however, the frenzy and excitement of the Gold Rush had ended and the lofty economy turned sharply downward.
Victoria would go on to experience a building boom by the end of the 19th Century as Canada’s western gateway. Chinatown would expand its physical footprint and many of the structures in the neighbourhood would be reconstructed from wood-framed buildings to masonry.
With the end of the gold rush White workers would come to view Chinese and other Asian residents as scapegoats of their worsening economic prospects. Rage and hostility increased towards Chinese residents. In 1872, as one of the first acts of the newly formed British Columbia legislature the Qualification and Registration of Voters Act was passed preventing both Indigenous and Chinese peoples from voting in provincial elections.
By the end of the 1870s, Victoria’s Chinese population had grown to 1,000 people and would expand by 16,000 over the coming years to 1884. Most new arrivals to Victoria would continue onwards towards the mainland to the Village of Granville and onwards to help build the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Chinese labourers were essential to the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The majority of the White population in was reportedly 1880s was engaged in various commerce, fishing and processing or mining and only 400 white labourers were willing and available for railway work. White workers protested Chinese employment in the construction of the railway however and petitioned the federal government through the Workingmen’s Protection Association, demanding that Chinese labourers not be used. A total of 10,000 labourers were required and therefore the federal government deemed Chinese labour essential to the completion of the railway. Chinese migrants would make significant sacrifices in the completion of Canada’s transcontinental railway. Hundreds would die of exposure, unsafe conditions disease and malnutrition.
By 1886, with the completion of the national railway, a budding Chinatown emerged on the mainland in the newly established City of Vancouver. Vancouver’s Chinatown would continue to grow quickly. By the early 1890s, more than 1,000 residents crowded the single block comprising Vancouver’s Chinatown at the time.
The district would expand by the early 1900s welcoming new businesses but remaining crowded. As Vancouver took preeminence in trade over Victoria as a deep-water port and railway terminus, so too did Vancouver’s Chinatown rise in relative importance and sheer population.
The Chinese Benevolent Association was founded in 1896 and would begin to act as spokesman and a political voice for the Chinese community in Vancouver.
In 1907, long simmering hostility and suspicion of Chinese, Japanese and East Indian people would spill out into violence in the streets of Vancouver. That year, British Columbia’s legislature would pass An Act to Regulate Immigration to British Columbia prohibiting Asian immigration to the province. The Lieutenant Governor refused to sign the legislation — likely out of fear of the impact the restriction would have on business interests rather than in consideration of the migrants themselves.
Members of the Asiatic Exclusion League including Vancouver’s Mayor Bethune, several city councillors and religious leaders planned a parade featuring signs “For a White Canada” on a circuitous route through the City to City Hall, located between Chinatown and Japantown in the City. They called for the Immigration Act to be signed by the Lieutenant Governor and in only a moment after a young boy reportedly threw a rock through the window of a Chinese merchant’s store all hell broke loose. Every window in Chinatown would be broken and the riot through Vancouver’s Asian communities would continue for days before a sense of order would return.
The Vancouver police would go on to release most people it held in custody. Three people were charged, but only one was convicted of any offense.
Even with these attacks, Vancouver’s Chinatown continued onward with the Chinese association continuing to build and grow new businesses to serve its own population, theaters, schools, a hospital, libraries and clan and family associations. In the face of hostility, Chinatown remained a resilient landscape supporting and sustaining its community.
A Timeline of Enforced Exclusion in Canada
Canadian hostility to Asian immigration and residence has resulted in several extraordinary efforts to enforce the explicit exclusion of Asian migration. Federal, local and Provincial governments would each enact regulation and legislation seeking to limit Asian migration or seeking to limit the freedoms of Asian Canadians.
1885 — Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration
- The Commission sought to establish proof that restrictions on Chinese immigration was in the best interest of Canada. Argued that Chinese were immoral, prone to disease and incapable of assimilation.
- Recommended that Government introduce a $10 head tax to avoid the negative impact that an outright ban on Chinese immigration would otherwise have on Canadian industry. The commission also believed that a tax would avoid the potential negative effect on trade with China that a ban on immigration would have.
1885 — Chinese Immigration Act
- First Canadian legislation to exclude immigrants based on ethnicity
- Imposed a $50 head tax on all Chinese migrants entering Canada
- The Chinese Immigration Act would be amended repeatedly from 1887, 1892, 1900 and 1903, increasing the value of the head tax from $50 to $500.
1902 — Licensing of Chinese Laundries
- In 1902, White business owners in Toronto lobbied the city to impose a significant licencing fee on Chinese owned laundries. The City complied, approving a universal licencing fee of $50, unduly impacting smaller Chinese Laundries.
1908 — Continuous Journey Regulation
- The regulation required arrivals to Canada to have traveled via a continuous journey from their country of origin. The regulation was an amendment to the Immigration Act and had the effect of limiting migration from Asia to British Columbia as few seamlines offered few direct routes between Asia and Canada.
1910 — Immigration Act
- The Act expanded the list of prohibited immigrants from the 1906 act to include immigrants who were determined to be “unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada”. While the 1906 Act did not include additional specific ethnic or racial criteria, this amendment concentrated discretion within the executive and barred the courts from interfering in the Minister’s orders.
1919 — Amendment to the Immigration Act
- Allowed governor-in-council to prohibit immigrants of any nationality, race, occupation or class because of their “Peculiar customs, habits, modes of life and methods of holding property”.
1922 — Segregation of Chinese Students
- The Victoria School Board separated Chinese Canadian students into a separate school.
1923 — Chinese Immigration Act
- This Act, known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, restricted nearly all Chinese immigration to Canada by defining very narrow acceptable categories of Chinese immigrants: diplomats and government representatives, merchants, children born in Canada who had left for educational or other purposes, and students while attending university or college. The Act was passed due to an increase in White hostility following the War and an increase in nativist and racist opinions.
1923 — Restrictions on the Employment of White Women by Chinese Businesses
- British Columbia would restrict Chinese businesses from employing White women by law. The Acts were then replaced by new special permits which were rarely granted which required that Chinese businesses apply to hire White women.
1930s — Segregation Continues
- By the 1930s in British Columbia, Chinese Canadians were required to sit in the balcony of movie theaters, segregated from the White population. Chinese bathers in Victoria were not permitted to swim in Victoria’s Crystal pool.
1931 — Order-in- Council PC 1931–695
- Order-in- Council PC 1931–695 was Canada’s most severe immigration policy. Only American and British subjects with enough capital to maintain themselves, agriculturalists with sufficient means to farm in Canada and the wives and minor children of Canadian residents were admitted. With this policy, Canada effectively closed its doors to the rest of the world. It would not be until a change in Canada’s immigration policy in 1962 that Canada would again reopen. Order-in-Council PC 1962–86 would see the end of overt racism as the basis Canada’s immigration policy and see the beginning of a system of skills based admission.
Toronto
Early Chinese settlers to Toronto would arrive from the United States following worsening economic conditions in the western US at the end of the gold rush. With the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway by the late 19th Century, many more migrants would continue to arrive in Ontario. As the Chinese population grew people would mix into the fabric of newly settled migrants in the City in a multiethnic area known as The Ward.
By the early 1900s a new geography began to emerge as Chinese Canadian businesses began to coalesce around respective secret societies either seeking to overthrow the Manchu Government (The Chee Kung Tong on York Street south of Queen Street West) or supporting the rescue of Emperor Guanxu (The Chinese Empire Reform Association on Queen Street East at George Street).
While the open hostility towards the Chinese population has been noted to be different to that experienced in Vancouver, in November of 1919, a mob of 400 raided Toronto’s first Chinatown breaking the windows of storefronts on Elizabeth Street.
And just the same, the cluster of businesses at Queen and York would continue to expand. With the fall of the Manchu government in China, Chinatown consolidated in one location and the community grew north of Queen Street. As in Vancouver, many small businesses, Chinese schools, churches, theaters, opera houses and clan organizations would open on Elizabeth and Chestnut streets. Toronto’s Chinatown became Canada’s third largest, home to 2,326 Chinese by 1941.
As the population grew, the City attempted to constrain Chinese expansion. In response to lobbying by a group of white businessmen known as the “Laundry Association of Toronto”, a $50 licensing fee was imposed on Chinese laundromats. Similar restrictions and impositions were placed on Chinese laundries in Vancouver, San Francisco and Ottawa. Controlling the growth of the few businesses serving the wider community that Chinese residents were permitted to operate in these Cities. Toronto’s fee would subsequently be reduced only with the efforts of the community and African-Canadian Alderman William Hubbard. In 1908, the City refused operating licenses to Chinese restaurants employing white women and by 1914 the province passed a law that forbade Chinese businesses from hiring white women believing that “Chinese were an amoral and evil influence on innocent girls and women”.
By the 1950s Chinatown has been targeted for demolition to make way for Nathan Phillips Square and the new City Hall. By 1953, two thirds of Chinatown was expropriated. High land costs restricted the growth of Chinatown and the district began to be turned over to developers. During this time the population was dislocated and scattered through the City’s downtown.
In 1965, the City planned again for further expropriation and at the recommendation of the City’s Development Commissioner, Toronto began to prepare for a northern expansion of the Civic Square and the relocation of Chinatown. This effort by the City would be headed off by the Save Chinatown Committee and its founder Jean Lumb. Lumb’s work would lead to the preservation of Chinatown in 1969.
While Chinatown was saved, it had been reduced through major redevelopment around Nathan Philip Square and Old Chinatown would continue to decline as a result of the City’s revitalization effort.
What is now the City’s major Chinatown at Dundas and Spadina began as a low-density residential area home to a predominately Jewish community. The Jewish community had themselves moved west from the historic Ward to this area and the areas surrounding Kensington Market, all in walking distance to warehouses and factories in the City’s fashion district. By the late 1950s the Jewish community began to move north towards to edges of the City and members of East Asian communities in the City began to resettle. The shift in Canada’s immigration policy in the 1960s would see the arrival of large numbers of migrants from across East Asia from Hong Kong and Taiwan to Vietnam and Malaysia.
Chinese groceries, businesses, rooming houses and retail through the City’s Chinatown. As settlement in the community continued, many migrants found it too expensive to find cheap or adequate housing and sought out places where housing was cheaper. In 1971 Charles Cheung opened Charlie Meat Store on Broadview Avenue and later that year, many more Chinese businesses would open. Residents of Chinatown West would begin selling their housing to acquire properties that were several thousand dollars cheaper around the emerging Eastern Chinatown.
Chinese centres would spread further across the GTA following investment by Chinese-Canadian businesses. Torchin Plaza in 1977 was developed by a Chinese developer who purchased land on Sheppard Avenue east in Scarborough. Many Chinese Restaurants and Grocery stores would locate there, becoming a hub for Chinese Canadians in Scarborough. In 1984, a row between White and Chinese business owners over parking in Agincourt and Glen Watford Plaza saw the distribution of hate literature aimed at the Chinese community. The event would see community organize and form the Federation of Chinese Canadians in Scarborough.
Ottawa
By the early 1930s, Ottawa was home to a cluster of Chinese shops, the locus of a small Chinese-Canadian community in the City. These shops were located in the Centre of the City, on Albert Street between Kent and O’Connor Streets. Though some Chinese organizations would develop, the community would not grow, ultimately declining as the City redeveloped and new office buildings began to rise in the City’s new downtown.
With changes in Canada’s system of immigration in the 1960s, heralding the birth of Canada as a multicultural society and a nascent acknowledgment of the country as a settler and immigrant nation, a large number of Chinese migrants arrived into the 1970s. They settled in a run-down but affordable and diverse neighbourhood around Somerset Street West.
Chinese investors arrived from communities in Toronto and Montreal. They purchased properties and opened shops along Somerset Street West and in 1980, the City targeted Somerset for improvements and commercial expansion. Chinese business owners and investors assembled properties along Somerset, redeveloping them as multi-unit commercial buildings. Business in the community expanded. Grocery stores, gift shops and restaurants opened.
With investment and commercial success, as in other Chinatowns across Canada and the United States, the social infrastructure of the neighbourhood also grew to accommodate a growing population. In 1982, an eight-storey Ottawa Chinese Community Centre opened south of Somerset including apartments, a community hall, a library and an office for the Chinese Community Association of Ottawa. The neighbourhood would come to be known as Chinatown in the 1980s. The neighbourhood would continue to grow but the proportion of the Chinese population relative to other residents remained small.
In 1986, a Chinatown Development Committee was established, petitioning the City to undertake a study of Somerset Street West with a view to developing a Chinatown. Approved by City Council, the Ottawa Planning Committee briskly began work. As the plan developed it began to gather opposition from other members of the community who felt that the City’s Chinatown should be more multi-cultural — from the City’s Japanese and Italian and Vietnamese communities. There were after all, many businesses located along Somerset, both Chinese and others alike. City Council would approve a feasibility study but Ottawa Planning would ultimately decide to cease the study, allowing the district to continue to grow on its own.
The neighbourhood would continue to change and evolve. It emerged into the Chinatown I became acquainted with in the 1990s. It was a distinctly Chinese neighbourhood, open for all and including businesses of other cultural groups mixed into the fabric of the street.
By 2006, the community would have another go at seeking recognition of the neighbourhood. The newly established Somerset Street Chinatown Business Improvement Area would oversee the Chinatown Gateway project. The project would see the construction of a Chinese Gate welcoming visitors to the City’s Chinatown.
It would be designed by the City of Beijing through the twinned City relationship between Ottawa and China’s capital City. Beijing also provided architectural consultants and crews to see to the crafting of the gate. It would be dedicated in 2010 marking the official home of the City’s Chinatown, part of a lineage of Chinatowns across Canada tracing the settlement of major Chinese communities throughout Canada’s history.
Struggle, Displacement and Resistance
And so here we are. It is interesting how this rich history of Chinese settlement, struggle, displacement and resistance leads me home to the beloved Chinatown of my Childhood. It is interesting how the lineage of the settlement and success of Chinatowns can be traces back to San Francisco, the first port of arrival of so many migrants to North America.
I am fascinated by the history of these urban geographies — how their space is contested and how communities can so easily decline and vanish. So many communities persist though, reestablishing themselves, being once displaced and so then re-rooted. The growth and maintenance of a Chinatown, or of any community is a deliberate act. Communities contend with the shifting sands of wider Canadian society. It should be remembered from what we read in our own history that our society can sometimes be hostile, sometimes open, sometimes indifferent.
In my life as a City resident and in my professional life as an urban planner, I feel that we should remember that we choose how we view the communities around us. We may choose to be obstinate, hostile, open, or indifferent. Remembering this, it is best that we choose to know our history and remain open to the communities and people around us. We should choose to learn from their experiences and value perspectives different from our own.
In contemplating the history of Chinatowns, I am taken also by the role of municipalities in keeping these communities separate, to retard their growth, reform or dislocate their businesses or in the attempts of planners and development officials to swallow these communities whole, either assimilating them or scattering them through an otherwise homogeneous fabric of a revitalizing or gentrifying City. And still, in the absence of these attempts, the threat of decline continues. The life of Canada’s Chinatowns have been in their resistance to the forces of decline and disruption and so, the struggle continues.
It is in that resistance that I, as a young new immigrant in Canada, found my place, memories of another home offered through another culture. Ottawa’s Chinatown was my wonderful introduction to an emerging multi-cultural Canadian society.
I’ve since moved from Ottawa. I live in Toronto now and have an office just steps from Chinatown.
This post benefits hugely from the work of David Chuenyan Lai and Jack Leong at Simon Fraser University and the website, A Brief Chronology of Chinese Canadian History: From Segregation to Integration.
Notes and references also taken from the following sources:
https://pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/royal-commission-on-chinese-immigration-1885
https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/settlement-immigration/the-lessons-of-the-anti-asiatic-riot
