Chung Collection fans may be interested in checking out the offerings of the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s Summer Walking Tours series. Some have particular ties to the subjects of the Chung Collection (click on the links to search for related material in the collection):
– July 16: “Market Alley: Opium, Laundry and Pawnshops.”
– July 23: “Blood Alley.” This tour focuses on the early history of Vancouver (link searches for 19th century items concerning Vancouver).
– August 28: “Eveleigh Street.” According to the Vancouver Heritage site, “This little known one block long street, lost amidst the Bentall development, was once home to a number of CPR employees, a well known architect and some elegant homes.”
To register or learn more, click here!
We often tell people that we started the digitization of the Chung Collection in 2008, but strictly speaking, that’s not true. There was actually a very modest start to our digitization activities in 2004, when we digitized the diary of Hector Langevin.
The Langevin diary is one of the highlights of the collection. It describes Langevin’s journey across the United States by rail, and up to the B.C. coast by boat, on his journey to scope out the appropriate place to end the Canadian Pacific Railway. Ultimately of course Vancouver was chosen as the terminus, and in this diary you can come to understand the reasons why Langevin, as Minister of Public Works, recommended a site on Burrard Inlet instead of the former front-runner, Port Moody.
Naturally, Langevin also describes his travels along the way to B.C., including a description of Chinatown in San Francisco, and in B.C. he describes the climate, natural resources, existing nations of indigenous peoples, their treaties and Chinook “trading language”, potential for settlement, business activity, public works required, postal, communication, and transportation arrangements, as well as potential railway termini on Burrard Inlet, Esquimalt, and the Skeena River.
There are three ways to access the Langevin diary:
1. See digital versions of the diary pages here:
http://www.library.ubc.ca/spcoll/langevin/
2. Read an English language transcription here:
http://www.library.ubc.ca/spcoll/langevin/Langevin_Diary_eng/Langevin_Eng_Home.htm
3. Read a French language transcription here:
http://www.library.ubc.ca/spcoll/langevin/Langevin_Diary_Fre_Version2/Langevin_Fre_Home.htm
The Langevin diary is on display in the Chung Collection exhibition room, Case 6.
Image of Hector Langevin above is courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, via the Wikimedia commons.
Hockey fever is alive and well in Vancouver, despite last night’s less than desirable results in Boston. So for all you hockey history buffs out there, we have a challenge for you:
We have two photographs in the Chung Collection that are inscribed on the back as being the “CPR Hockey Team”, taken in 1928. The photo above shows the team posing on the deck of the Empress of Canada. We do not appear to have any other records of this team in the collection, nor have we been able to find any references to the team in secondary sources. Does anyone know this piece hockey/CPR history? Did the CPR have a hockey team, or perhaps this was a team being sponsored by the CPR? If you know, we’d love to hear from you! Email us at chung.collection@ubc.ca.
The records for the two photographs can be read here and here. Click on the thumbnails to see a larger version.
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.
We recently had our friends from Chinese Canadian Stories (CCS) join us to host high school students from Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School for a tour of the Chung Collection and a Mandarin language lesson. Afterward, the researchers from CCS mentioned they had found an unopened letter in the Wah Shun Company fonds– could we […]
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 Pende
r 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.