28 August 2010

New Web Site Honours Long-Ignored Chinese Who Built the CPR

Chinese railway workers - Date/photographer unknown.

British Columbia - Perched in a wooden lift-top desk with working ink well, at first in a two-room schoolhouse, and then in a recently vacated army hut, I was initiated into the mythology of Canada's sacred megaproject, the building of a railway from Atlantic to Pacific.
 
I memorized dates and names from the hagiographies of the Canadian Pacific Railway saints, John A. Macdonald, Sanford Fleming, William Cornelius Van Horne, Donald Smith, and Andrew Onderdonk.
 
The tale was cast as a hero quest. There were trials, villains, and temptations. Governments fell and were resurrected, heroes strayed and returned to the true course after hair breadth escapes. I learned about steel-driving Irish navvies laying rail across scorching prairies and how profane, tobacco-chewing Maj. A.B. Rogers found a hidden pass through the Selkirks.
 
There was an unspoken history that I didn't learn, the story of the 15,000 Chinese labourers who actually built the Canadian Pacific Railway. Their labour saved the railway company an estimated $5 million in construction costs. That would be around $100 million in today's dollars. But the savings were paid for with workers lives. Some say every tie laid in the Fraser Canyon is a gravestone for a Chinese labourer.
 
Even today, the debt Canada owes these workers is strangely unacknowledged. I visited the CPR's web site the other day. I found not a mention of Chinese workers in the online history and not a picture of them in the galleries of historic photos.
 
 

Web site screen capture.
 
 
The launch of a new web site changes all that today. The Ties That Bind:  Building the CPR, Building a Place in Canada documents the seldom-told story of Chinese immigrants and their role in creating the Canada we share today. A project by the Foundation to Commemorate the Chinese Railroad Workers in Canada, the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, and Citizenship and Immigration Canada, the web site provides a virtual exhibit that explores the history of Chinese-Canadians, the railroad workers, and their long struggle to find equality.
 
I looked over the site Thursday and was impressed. It combines archival research with the oral histories of their descendants. David Wong, Cindy Leong, Brian Joe, and Kevan Jangze are four locally interviewed descendants of those rugged men, they were almost all men due to restrictive immigration laws, who proved so crucial to the construction of one of Canada's most important icons of historical identity.
 
The ribbon of steel they spun was the price British Columbia exacted for joining Canada in 1871.
 
In school, I learned that the CPR was incorporated in 1881 and that the last spike was driven less than five years later, an astonishing feat by any standards, and yet, impossible without the invisible Chinese.
 
I learned that the first CPR train steamed into Port Moody on 28 Jun 1886, and understood that from that moment everything in Canada changed. Goods travelling from Vancouver were suddenly more than 20,000 kilometres closer to Montreal and Toronto.
 
Clipper ships now spared the perilous passage around Cape Horn could discharge precious Asian cargo at what's now Vancouver, and it sped to Toronto and Montreal aboard silk trains and tea trains. The remote interior of a continent opened. Prairie wheat farmers and Okanagan orchardists and West Coast salmon-packing plants could ship to the world. Immigrant trains would fill the country.
 
What I didn't learn was the vital role of Chinese labour in building the CPR. Not until I was out of university would I read James Morton's history of the Chinese in B.C., "In the Sea of Sterile Mountains", or a decade later, Anthony Chan's "Gold Mountain:  The Chinese in the New World".
 
From Chan and Morton I learned new dates. That the Chinese role in the building of the CPR began at 11 a.m. on 14 May 1880, with the detonation of a blasting cap at Yale.
 
I discovered that Onderdonk, saviour of the CPR, hired Chinese railway workers in the face of hostility and prejudice because he believed them the most able and least expensive workers. B.C.'s chief justice, Matthew Baillie Begbie, extolled the virtues of what he called the four personal qualities of Chinese workers:  "industry, economy, sobriety, and law-abidingness."
 
Between 1880 and 1885, Chinese labourers drove the railhead through some of the most difficult and unforgiving terrain in the world. It can reasonably be argued their sweat and blood made our dominion.
 
Their legacy deserves to be remembered and honoured. Public celebration of our unacknowledged history is long overdue. This remarkable, commendable web site makes it available to everyone.
 
Stephen Hume