Chung

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.”

Gung hay fat choy! Chinese New Year is on February 10, which will mark the beginning of the Year of the Snake. To celebrate, we thought we’d use our monthly featured photograph blog post to find some snakes in the Chung Collection.

The Chung Collection actually holds several photographs of snakes- why would that be? It’s because travellers aboard CPR cruises around the world sometimes took photographs or bought postcards of snake charmers in exotic locales along their journey, such as this photograph from Trinidad:

And this photograph from Mumbai:

Although people born in the year of the snake are thought to be careful, independent and charismatic, we know that snakes the reptilian creatures are not everyone’s favorite. For those who suffer from ophidiophobia (fear of snakes), the Chung Collection has a photograph for you too:

This snake is a hedge of flowers, taken in Vancouver in 1921. Phew! That’s better!

To search for snakes, or any other animal in the Chinese zodiac, use your keyword in an advanced search and specify “photographic material” as the media type. You can also see our Chinese zodiac round-up from 2011. Happy year of the snake and happy searching!

If you are in the Vancouver area, be sure to check out the Chinese Benevolent Association’s annual parade and the Year of the Snake Temple Fair at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Chinese Classical Garden on February 17.

We’re huge fans of the Vancouver Heritage Foundation’s lectures, and Chung Collection users may be interested in an upcoming evening lecture, to be held on February 19 at 7:30 pm at the University Women’s Club at Hycroft. The lecture on “Chinatown as a National Historic Site” will be given by historian John Atkin and city planner Jeanette Hlavach, on the process and significance of Vancouver’s Chinatown becoming a National Historic Site.

The VHF website has registration information, and information on all of their upcoming lectures and brown-bag sessions.