This blog post is part of RBSC’s new series spotlighting items in the Phil Lind Klondike Gold Rush Collection and the Wallace B. and Madeline H. Chung Collection.
Welcome to our second short-form blog highlighting items from the Dr. Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection. This week we will be introducing one of the of many large and oversized materials we have in the collection: a historic map of Guangdong Province (廣東省).
This map of Guangdong Province, c.1924, highlights the Chung Collection’s transnational holdings CC-OS-00034, https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0216272
This vibrant and colourful map was published in February 1924 by the Commercial Press of Shanghai (上海商務印書館), the first modern publishing house in China, which is still running today. It belonged to Vancouver’s prominent Yip family of merchants associated with the Wing Sang Co. Guangdong province, also known as Canton or Kwantung province during this period, is the ancestral origin place of the vast majority of Chinese Canadians before the immigration reform of the late 1960s, including the Yips. Similarly, many generations have emigrated from Guangdong to other places overseas, including from the Chaoshan (潮汕) and Hainan (海南) regions to Southeast Asia, as well as to other parts of North and South America. Maps like these are a valuable resource for rediscovering family roots.
A particularly cool detail of this map includes the line showing the Sun Ning Railway (新寧鐵路) one of China’s first railways, and entirely financed by Chinese rather than colonial capital. Its main proponent, Chin Gee Hee (陳宜禧), was a titan of the Pacific Northwest Chinese community, especially in Washington. Also indicated is the Chao Chow-Swatow Railway, the very first Chinese owned line, that was favourably supported by overseas donations from Southeast Asian Chinese. Sadly, both these important railroads would be torn up and destroyed during the 2nd Sino-Japanese war in the late 1930s.
We welcome you to explore these themes and connections between migration, memory, transportation, and colonial conflict in the Chung Lind Gallery, as well as through the Rare Books and Special Collections Reading Room.
Further Reading
Willard G. Jue, “Chin Gee-hee, Chinese Pioneer Entrepreneur in Seattle and Toishan”, The Annals of the Chinese Historical Society of the Pacific Northwest, 1983, 31:38.
Hsu, Madeline Y. (2000). Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943. Stanford University Press