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Earlier this month we had the pleasure of hosting students from Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School for a tour of the Chung Collection. These students are in International Baccalaureate Mandarin 11 and the visit was arranged by their student teacher, UBC Faculty of Education student Erica Huang.

The students were divided into two groups: each group had a tour of the Chung Collection, during which they practiced their Mandarin by completing a worksheet about each case in the collection. They also had a Mandarin language session with our colleagues from the Chinese Canadian Stories project.  The students examined letters written in the Toishanese dialect (facsimiles made from the Yip Sang digital collection of letters, held by the City of Vancouver Archives) and worked with CCS researcher Joanne Poon and archivist Lilly Li to interpret them. Reading these letters is particularly challenging, even for Mandarin readers, because of the older style of handwriting and the specific nature of the dialect.  In the photograph below, there are three Churchill students working with Joanne on interpreting one of the letters. If you are interested in Joanne’s research with the Chinese Canadian Stories project, you can read her research diaries on their website.

Thank you to our friends at Chinese Canadian Stories and to the students and teachers at Churchill for coming to visit us!

Photos are courtesy of the Chinese Canadian Stories project.

Please excuse us while there is a bit of a mess in the Chung Collection exhibition room- and stay tuned in the near future for exciting new additions to our exhibition space!

As extensive as the Chung Collection is, there are a number of related collections here at UBC that are complimentary- this is part of what makes the Chung Collection such a great fit here at UBC. One modest but important example is the R. Mathison Printing Collection. Acquired in 2009 by the Rare Books and Special Collections division of the library, these 54 ephemeral items were all printed by R. Mathison Jr., a job printer who operated in Vancouver from ca. 1886 to 1890.

There are many examples of early B.C. printing in the Chung Collection as well, but a few items in the R. Mathison Printing Collection are also relevant to the study of Chinese-Canadian history. For example the item to the left is an advertising card for a Chinese business called the Hop Yick Drug Store.  In addition to selling tea, sugar, rice, nut oil and Chinese merchandise, it advertises that it is “prepared to contract for the supply of first-class Chinese labor to any extent on public or private works, at lowest current rates.”

There are also two examples of laundry advertising cards: one Chinese (Tong Yuen Laundry) and one white (Pacific Steam Laundry). Note that the Pacific Steam Laundry advertises that they employ white labour only:

Both laundries were on Dupont Street (now Pender Street)- could they have been each other’s competition?

The R. Mathison Printing collection is completely digitized and is available through UBC Library Digital Collections and Services.

We are very excited to be displaying posters created by students in the Coordinated Arts Program, just outside the Chung Collection exhibition room. These students were part of the Law and Society stream of CAP and came to the Chung Collection in January for a tour and an introduction to archival research. The students were all assigned to choose an item from the Chung Collection and use it to inspire a poster presentation, an essay or a video.  They presented their posters at the CAP conference in April, where several of the students met Dr. Chung who came to see their posters. We have selected a number of the posters for this display and the variety of topics is very interesting:

• Chinese-Aboriginal relations in B.C.
• The history of drug law enforcement in Vancouver
• Civil rights history in Canada
• Funeral and death rites in different cultures
• Traditional Chinese medicine
• Chinese in B.C. during the gold rush
• Relationship between the Japanese and Chinese communities
• The history of interracial marriage

Congratulations to the CAP students for their very interesting research! We hope that you found your experience using the Chung Collection to be a rewarding one.

We will keep the posters on display in the reading room until May 20th. They can be viewed during our regular summer opening hours (Monday to Friday, 9-5).