Chung

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.

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.

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.

The cataloguing of the Chung Collection has been done over a number of years, by a number of very hard working professionals and student assistants. However, mistakes do happen, and while we endeavor to make the records as accurate as we can, we are always happy to hear from an expert who can help us make them even better. Here are a couple of recent examples:

We had thought that this photograph was of Chin Shee, one of Yip Sang’s wives who moved to be with him here in Vancouver, but a researcher informed us that it is actually Wong Shee, another of Yip Sang’s wives. The researcher was able to confirm this with descendants of Yip Sang. If you see a correction like this that needs to be made, you can contact us at chung.collection@ubc.ca.

Another way to communicate with us is through the digital collections, where you can leave a comment about each item. For example, this photograph of the Kuo Min Tang was recently commented on by a researcher, pointing out that we had the photographer wrong- we had catalogued it as W.H. Wand, which the researcher very logically thought should have actually been the well-known Chinese Canadian photographer C.B. Wand. On closer inspection of the photograph, the typo turned out to be in the last name, not the first- the photographer is William Henry Wills, who was active in the Kelowna area in the first quarter of the 1900’s.

Thanks to our researchers for their help and expertise, and if you have information about an item in the Chung Collection, we’re always happy to hear from you!

Running a hand laundry was a popular occupation for early Chinese migrants to North America due to the low start-up costs. It was so common that the sterotype of the “Chinese laundryman” became prevalent in North American popular culture.

A program tonight on CBC Radio One’s Ideas, promises to go beyond the sterotypes by exploring what it was like to grow up in a Chinese laundry. Tune in at 9 pm (9:30 in Newfoundland).

In the Chung Collection, try searching for keywords such as “laundry” or “laundryman” to see items related to laundries.