Vancouver British Columbia - Dr. Wallace Chung is Canada's foremost collector of historic Chinese and Canadian Pacific Railway artifacts and memorabilia.
 
Phil Lind was Canada's top collector of artifacts and memorabilia from the Klondike Gold Rush.
 
Both donated their collections to the University of B.C.
 
UBC's Katherine Kalsbeek thought the collections worked well together, so made a proposal, to display them side by side in a new museum.
 
"I introduced Phil and Dr. Chung to each other over lunch and pitched this idea. They liked it, thankfully. And five years later, here we stand," said Kalsbeek, the head of Rare Books and Special Collections at UBC.
 
The new Chung/Lind Gallery will open to the public 1 May 2024 on the second floor of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre at UBC.
 
Sadly, Lind passed away last year.
 
But about 40 members of his family made it to the official opening of the 3,100-square-feet space on 19 Apr 2024.
 
Dr. Chung made it to the opening, but at 98, declined to give a speech.
 
Both Chung and Lind's voices can be heard in the gallery, relating taped stories about their collections.
 
The Chung collection was previously displayed in a smaller space on the first floor of the Barber Centre.
 
The new gallery is in a much higher profile location, right off the main entrance to the building.
 
Visitors are greeted with one of Dr. Chung's most cherished objects, an unbelievably detailed scale model of the Canadian Pacific luxury liner the Empress of Asia.
 
But the display in the new gallery adds a wrinkle, the model seems to float atop an aquarium simulating the ocean, with porcelain cups and saucers dotting the bottom.
 
There even seems to be live fish.
 
"We really wanted to bring to life a story by Dr. Chung. He tells the story of how you could trace the path of the (CPR) ships on the ocean floor, because a lot of dishwashing staff on the ships would throw the dishes overboard rather than clean them," Kalsbeek explains.
 
The water and fish in the aquarium aren't real, though.
 
They're an illusion created by Dutch Igloo, a company in Amsterdam that creates "holographic experiences" and dioramas to bring museum displays to life.
 
The Chung collection of 25,000 items began with Dr. Chung's childhood infatuation with a Canadian Pacific poster that used to hang in his father's tailor shop in Victoria.
 
Both collections strike a balance between artifacts and ephemera.
 
There's a Klondike miner's equipment on the Lind side, and an "opium chest" in the Chung collection with a genuine opium pipe, bowl, and needle.
 
On the Lind side, there's colourful posters luring people to the Klondike, and early Hollywood movie posters about the Klondike's characters.
 
On the Chung side, there is an astonishing collection of Canadian Pacific travel posters, collected round the globe for their beauty.
 
UBC has mounted both collections on its Open Collections website, which has 288,998 "unique digital objects."
 
John Mackie.