Between 1881 and 1885, more than 15,000 Chinese men traveled from Guangdong province to British Columbia to help build the Canadian Pacific Railway. They were assigned the most dangerous sections of the route — blasting through the Fraser Canyon using nitroglycerin and dynamite, drilling tunnels into solid mountain rock, and crossing unstable bridges prone to collapse. Rock slides killed workers without warning. For all of this, a Chinese laborer earned one dollar per day. White workers doing the same job earned two dollars.
Workers lived in temporary camps that moved as the railway progressed. These camps were basic and crowded, offering little comfort through harsh mountain winters.
Once the railway was completed in 1885, the Canadian government moved quickly to reduce Chinese immigration. The Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 introduced a “head tax” — a fee of $50 that every Chinese person had to pay just to enter Canada. No other ethnic group faced this requirement. The government raised the tax to $100 in 1900, and then to $500 in 1903. At $500, the fee represented roughly two full years of wages for a laborer. The practical result was that most men could not afford to bring their wives or children from China.
Chinese men who remained in Canada built tight communities in Vancouver, Victoria, and New Westminster. Because their families could not join them, these neighborhoods became known as “bachelor societies.” Men packed into shared boarding houses, combining their wages to cover rent and food. Streets within these communities lined up with shops, laundries, and small businesses that served the population.
To survive, Chinese Canadians took on work that others refused. They operated hand laundries, worked in salmon canneries cleaning fish for ten-hour shifts, and ran market gardens that supplied vegetables to surrounding areas. Before the railway era, some had worked as gold miners, panning and sluicing in British Columbia’s rivers.
Provincial laws in British Columbia barred Chinese Canadians from voting in elections. They were also legally blocked from working in professional fields including law, pharmacy, and engineering. In September 1907, an anti-Asian riot caused serious damage to storefronts throughout Vancouver’s Chinatown.
Chinese Canadians also appeared in communities far from the West Coast. In Toronto, a Chinese quarter developed with its own shops, printing operations, and social life. Vendors sold goods in the streets, and community members gathered in public spaces like High Park.
In 1919, a large group of Chinese Torontonians organized a physical training demonstration and Boy Scout gathering at High Park. The photographs from that day show organized groups, young scouts, and ordinary community members spending time together — a rare public display of community life during a period of widespread legal exclusion.
Chinese workers also appeared at major construction projects across the country. At Camp Petawawa in Ontario, Chinese laborers worked crushing stone and carried out other heavy labor. Their presence there, far from British Columbia, shows how broadly Chinese workers had spread across Canada by the early twentieth century.
Tunnel work was another area where Chinese laborers were heavily employed. At the Sarnia Tunnel in 1900, Chinese workers were photographed on site — documentation of their continued role in building Canadian infrastructure long after the CPR was complete.
Street scenes from the 1880s and 1890s capture daily life within these communities — men carrying goods on shoulder yokes, children walking the wooden sidewalks, and vendors moving through the streets. These images document a world that existed largely out of sight of mainstream Canadian society.
In Vancouver’s Chinatown, community members built a ceremonial arch to mark the 1901 visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York. Groups of residents gathered for formal photographs, presenting their community to the visiting royals. On July 1, 1923, the Canadian government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, halting nearly all Chinese immigration for more than two decades. Chinese Canadians named that date “Humiliation Day.” The law remained in force until 1947, and during those years, Chinatown populations grew older as no new arrivals — no young people, no children — were permitted to come.
