Chung

Items from the Chung Collection were chosen for inclusion in a new digital collection published by Adam Matthew Digital. The collection is called China, America and the Pacific: Trade & Cultural Exchange and is available to UBC users either on campus or authenticated from home. In addition to other resources from the Rare Books and Special Collections division of UBC Library, the collection also contains resources digitized from University of Alberta, the California Historical Society, the Phillips Library at the Peabody, the University of California San Diego and more.

If you’ve just discovered the Chung Collection through this new digital collection, welcome! We hope you enjoy your research.

Gung Hay Fat Choy! We hope you enjoy the Chinese/Lunar New Year as we ring in the Year of the Horse. People born in the year of the horse are thought to be active, energetic and love to be around people- not unlike the faithful animals themselves! Human connection with horses goes back thousands of years and in collections like the Chung Collection, you’ll find lots of historic photographs and images of horses.

Here’s one that we’re not sure where it was taken- it is believed to be Chinatown in either Vancouver or Portland Oregon.

The sign on the horse cart reads “Quong Sang Chong & Co.” You can view a larger version and zoom in to see the details in our digital collections here. If you know where this is, we would love to hear from you! Email us at chung.collection@ubc.ca, or leave a comment below.

Here are some more images from the Chung Collection of horses:

Horse Racing at Hastings Park, 1936

Piano movers, ca. 1890

Mrs. Ricardo tries her hand at horse riding, ca. 1900.

Happy Year of the Horse! If you are looking for a way to celebrate, the Chinese Benevolent Association of Vancouver’s Chinese New Year Parade is always a hit.

From our friends at the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of B.C.:

“CCHSBC is pleased to host “Saltwater City for Youth”, a one week day camp for young teens, August 12-16.  The objective of the camp is to educate young teens about the role Chinese Canadians have played in the historic development of Vancouver and how they continue to shape the city.  Field trips include Museum of Vancouver, Chinatown, UBC and Steveston.

Please visit the website www.cchsbc.ca for the registration form and more information. Inform your friends and relatives of this exciting opportunity to learn about Chinese Canadian history. Teens of all backgrounds are welcome. Early registration is recommended, $160 for CCHS members and $200 for non-members.

 CCHSBC kindly acknowledges financial funding from the Province of B.C. and support from the Museum of Vancouver.”

If you’re lucky enough to live in Vancouver or a place with a similar climate, you’re starting to see the cherry blossoms bloom. Vancouverites look forward to this time of year as our city is home to many cherry trees. According to the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, the trend for planting cherry trees started in Vancouver in the early 1930’s when the mayors of Kobe and Yokohama donated 500 cherry trees to be planted in Vancouver, to honour Japanese Canadians who fought in WWI.

To honour this time of year, our featured photograph for the month of April shows cherry blossoms in Tokyo:

This photograph, like many from the Chung Collection depicting international scenes, is part of a scrapbook kept by world travelers on the Canadian Pacific Railway lines. These particular travelers took both the Empress of India steamship throughout Asia, and a train tour in North America. You can see in the bottom right corner that the photograph was distributed commercially and sold to travelers for their photograph album- this was common practice before owning a camera for your personal use became common. This album was assembled in 1910.

To check out good cherry blossom viewing and related events in Vancouver, be sure to check the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival website!

Have you come to visit us at the Chung Collection lately? If you have, you will have noticed one of our new additions- a model locomotive, built by a former CPR Engineer as a retirement hobby project and given to Dr. Chung several years ago:

We think it’s pretty neat! We have had great feedback from visitors already. It’s a very nice companion to the model Empress of Asia steamship, which has long been the “centrepiece” of the exhibition.

This new addition to the collection got me to thinking about CPR locomotives, and how photographs from the Chung Collection can really be used to show the evolution of train locomotives over time. Take our new model in contrast, for example, to this photograph from ca. 1890:

What a difference! The model is of a K1a-class locomotive, which were in use from around 1930-1950’s. If you know what kind of locomotive is depicted in this photograph we’d love to hear from you- leave a comment, or email us at chung.collection@ubc.ca

To search for more images of locomotives, search for “locomotive” under Photographic Material, or more broadly for “train.”