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C.I.28 1929 (original C.I. issued 1918) Ng You Kong

An excerpt from the Winter 2022 edition of British Columbia History magazine

By Catherine Clement and June Chow

The 1885 Chinese Immigration Act introduced the first Chinese head tax; with it, an elaborate new system of documentation and surveillance was born.

Over the next six decades, a dizzying array of Chinese Immigration (or C.I.) records was created by the government to thwart Chinese in Canada at every turn. Each type of record was assigned a number; those that were designed as identification certificates were colour coded for easy reference. Altogether, some 60 different types of C.I. records were created and in use between 1885 and 1953.

Some C.I.s were innocent enough—simply forms that needed to be completed. For example, the C.I.9 permitted Chinese living in Canada to temporarily leave the country, allowing Chinese men to travel home to China to see their wives and have children.

Conversely, the C.I.18 and C.I.18a was a two-part questionnaire designed to authenticate the relationship between a father already living in Canada and the child he wished to sponsor, ostensibly for an education. School-aged children sponsored by their fathers would be the last allowable category under which Chinese could enter the country prior to the passing of the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act. As such, many boys entering Canada did so as “paper sons.” The C.I.18 and C.I.18a questionnaire was designed to catch those engaging in such fraudulent relationships; it often felt like an interrogation to those answering the questions.

Posed separately to father and child, the questions reveal heartbreak, reflecting the long years of family separation, and they foreshadow often strained father-son relationships between strangers being reunited:

“Where does your father live at present?”
“Vancouver, BC.”
“What business is your father engaged in?”
“Laundryman.”
“How long has he been in Canada?”
“I don’t know.”
“When did you last see your father?”
“Three or four years ago.”
“How often has he been back to China since first
coming to Canada?”
“Once only, I know. Three or four years ago.” [1]

The most common and coveted of the C.I. records were the certificates issued to a migrant once they were approved for entry to Canada. The C.I.5 and the C.I.30 were the two main entry certificates. A C.I.5, which by 1912 was a green certificate that included a photo, was issued to labourers and others required to pay the head tax. The brown-coloured C.I.30 was issued to those belonging to a class exempt from its payment, mainly merchants, diplomats, teachers, or clergy, and their family members. The bluish-green C.I.28 certificate and the orange C.I.36 certificate were both replacement certificates. And the C.I.45 was created exclusively to implement the registration requirement of the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act.

Regardless of when or where a C.I. was issued, only one original was produced. As valuable as gold, C.I. certificates had real monetary value, given the associated head tax. They could be used as collateral for loans or bought and sold so that another person could come to Gold Mountain. The papers had to be safeguarded. Chinese had to show their papers on demand; many carried their C.I. certificate with them at all times, especially transient labourers. Over the years, some certificates became worn, dog-eared, ripped, and taped back together—a testament to the hard lives of their owners.

These fragile pieces of paper also served as a constant reminder of the unwanted and second-class status of the Chinese in Canada. Not surprisingly, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1947 and Chinese residents were finally allowed to become Canadian citizens, one of the first casualties was the C.I. certificate. Tens of thousands of these documents were destroyed—torn up, burned, or thrown in the garbage—as part of an effort to expunge the memories and humiliation associated with these papers.

Some 600 surviving C.I. certificates and records contributed by families across Canada for the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act will form the largest and most comprehensive collection of such documents available for research, study and public history. The collection will be available at UBC Library, Rare Books and Special Collections, starting July 1, 2023.

1. Excerpted from C.I.18a of thirteen-year-old Quon Moon Man, Port of Vancouver, BC, May 30, 1923, regarding his father, Quon Loy

June Chow is completing her Master of Archival Studies at the School of Information at the University of British Columbia. Her practice is dedicated to advancing archival preservation, access, and equity issues across Chinese Canadian communities. She is the archivist for “The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act,” https://1923-chinese-exclusion.ca/.

Catherine Clement is a community historian, curator, and author based in Vancouver. Her work has focussed on the lesser-known, personal stories of Chinese Canadian history. She is curating a national exhibition called “The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act” which will open July 1, 2023, in Vancouver. Learn more at 1923-chinese-exclusion.ca.

C.I.5 August 1923 Quon Song Now (also known as Charlie Quan)

C.I.5 July 1918 Yong Jack Sang

Lee Yick Hong

C.I.30 1914 Mrs. Sam Shee

C.I.36 October 1914 (original C.I.5 issued in 1910) Wong Gut

C.I.45 May 1924 WONG Young Ming (aka James Ming Wong)

N.F.63 June 1947 Jin Hong

Filmed at Old Hastings Mill Store Museum in Vancouver, author Lisa Anne Smith in conversation with BCHF’s Mark Forsythe, about all things related to Vancouver’s oldest surviving building.

Smith discusses her new book, Hastings Mill: The Historic Times of a Vancouver Community, delving deep into colourful stories of the mill, its eclectic cast of characters, and how an unlikely group of women, the Native Daughters of British Columbia, saved an iconic remnant of Vancouver heritage from demolition. Follow the link HERE.

During our 2022 conference, each session began with a minute-long video consisting of historic moments and pictures from the BCHF’s first century. We’re now posting the videos on Facebook. You can also watch them below.

Content warning: This video relates to Indian Residential Schools. A reminder that the Indian Residential School Survivors Society has a 24 hour Crisis Line available: 1-866-925-4419.

A research team from Williams Lake First Nation spoke to the recent BCHF conference about how accessing residential school records helps to shape to shape commemorations of school sites and the surrounding communities. The panelists are Genevieve Weber (Royal BC Museum), Charlene Belleau (Williams Lake First Nation), and Whitney Spearing (Williams Lake First Nation)

Scott Sheffield’s investigations of the academic literature on the Second World War in BC revealed a surprising dearth of literature explicitly exploring the impact of that global conflict on the communities and residents of this province.

Through some concerted searching he was able to glean a number of references and sometimes thoughtful and concerted coverage of the war years across a diverse range of hundreds of works on BC’s history. On the whole though, the story was fragmentary, disconnected, and relatively meagre.

Only a few stories have been incorporated into the broader narrative of BC’s history: the internment, dispossession and expatriation of the Japanese-Canadian population; the economic and industrial boom; women’s enhanced contributions as a result; and the growth in the strength and legitimacy of organized labour.

Beyond these usual touch stones, relatively little evidence that the war occurred in this province has managed to penetrate the scholarly history, public memory or identity of British Columbians. Yet, as he explains in a recent presentation to the BCHF annual conference, the evidence and historical writing that does exist suggests that the Second World War was fundamentally important to the development of modern British Columbia.

R. Scott Sheffield is an associate professor of history at the University of the Fraser Valley who spent the bulk of his career researching Indigenous military service and he is the author of The Red Man’s on the Warpath: The Image of the ‘Indian’ and the Second World War (UBC Press, 2004), and (with Noah Riseman) Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War: The Politics, Experiences and Legacies of War in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cambridge U Press, 2019), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.  His current research explores British Columbia’s home front during the Second World War, especially the role of community in shaping British Columbians’ experience of total war. 

Objects have a life within a museum’s collection. That life may be short or long. New objects enter collections and others leave collections as part of the professional process of curatorial stewardship. Today as a society we are re-evaluating our many histories. In this recent talk to the BCHF annual conference, Dr. Lorne Hammond presents examples of how that process works with a museum collection and in exhibits, and show how an object’s meaning can completely change over the centuries, as our interpretations of BC history evolve.

Hammond is a curator in the history department at the Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives.

Today Indigenous people are struggling to negotiate treaties with the BC and Canadian governments and in other ways to re-assume meaningful say over their ancestral lands and resources. Likewise, they are seeking to re-establish forms of self-governance that will be recognized and respected within Canada’s federal constitutional traditions.

Indigenous people and non-Indigenous Canadians alike are rightly asking why this process is proving so difficult, and likewise why respectful reconciliatory relations were not established much earlier? The answer to these and related questions require careful historical analysis.

In this recent presentation to the BCHF annual conference Keith Thor Carlson brings ethnohistorical methods and techniques to provide an assessment of settler colonial processes in Canada’s Pacific province. He concludes by outlining the pre-conditions, as he sees them, for building reconciliation between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous Canadian society today.

Thor Carlson is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Indigenous and Community-engaged History at the University of the Fraser Valley. He is also the director of the university’s Peace and Reconciliation Centre.

Victoria became John Adams’ adopted city in 1960. As a new kid who was interested in history, he tried to make up for lost time by exploring far and wide and by talking to neighbours and the parents of his friends. His studies and work eventually took him in numerous other directions but when he returned to Victoria in 1979 to work at the Royal BC Museum, he quickly picked up where he had left off and has never stopped searching for hidden corners and arcane information about BC’s capital city.

What was happening in Victoria 100 years ago when the BC Historical Federation’s predecessor held its inaugural meeting here? John has chosen several disparate themes and have woven them together as a series of vignettes in the locations where they took place. This video was presented at the recent BCHF conference.

John Adams is the owner of Discover the Past, a history company in Victoria. He is a researcher, author, speaker and tour leader. He is a former president of the Victoria Historical Society and the Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria. His latest book Chinese Victoria will be released around the time of the conference.

Nowhere is remembrance more evident than in Victorian funerary rituals, where a range of memento mori and markers of death served to maintain the deceased in the minds of the living. As an educator, Nicole Kilburn has found that tangible learning experiences serve a similar purpose in memory-making.

This presentation to the recent BCHF conference explores the intersection of teaching historical content in tangible, material ways to heighten the act of remembrance and presents a recent example of a partnership with the Royal BC Museum. It also highlights how remembering the past, particularly in the context of death, is a powerful tool when contemplating the same concepts in the present.

Kilburn teaches anthropology at Camosun College in Victoria, British Columbia. She has a background in archaeology, but teaches a wide range of courses, increasingly with a focus on applied learning for student success. Her most recent new course, the Anthropology of Death, considers many topics, including memory making and the creation of ancestors across time and space. She has enjoyed learning from, and partnering with the RBCM to create memorable learning opportunities for students while sharing these important concepts with the public.

Due to historical exclusion and colonial record-keeping practices, not many non-Indigenous families from minority groups can trace their family histories back to the gold rush period that began in 1858 in the land we know as British Columbia today.

Two families, one French Canadian and the other Chinese Canadian, however, continue to prosper with rare well-recorded generational continuities from the gold rush era to the present day. The Guichon and the Louie-Seto families have persisted through historic periods of great adversity, including the Great Depression and the Chinese exclusion era, and have built lasting legacies in BC In juxtaposition, their experiences reveal patterns that informed their resilience. Specifically, the families through generations have emphasized education, intercultural community building, and family values of kindness, resonating with our needs during the unsettling time of global pandemic crisis.

This recent presentation to the BCHF conference takes a closer look at the family lessons from these two BC families that sustained them through challenges in BC history. Their demonstrated strength is at the core of shared values for BC’s intercultural community lives.

Dr. Tzu-I Chung is a cultural and social historian, specializing in the study of transnational migration within the context of historical, cultural and economic interactions between North America and Asia-Pacific. As a curator of history at the Royal BC Museum and Archives, she has developed, facilitated, and led cross-sectoral community heritage and legacy projects. Her research has informed numerous exhibitions, curriculum development, and public and academic publications on the topics of anti-racism, cross-cultural community histories, and critical heritage studies. She is currently a member of the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board, and a peer reviewer for academic journals and a juror for public history prizes and grants.