19 January 2011

Empress of Japan Launched Once Again

Vancouver British Columbia - When it was launched in 1930, the Empress of Japan was the pride of the Canadian Pacific Railway's steamship fleet.
 
It was big (more than two football fields in length), skimmed across the Pacific from Vancouver to Yokohama at up to 23 knots, and had room for almost 1,200 passengers.
 
It was also drop-dead beautiful, with the gleaming white body of the CPR's legendary "white empresses."
 
Unfortunately the age of steamship travel passed, and the CPR sold the ship in 1957.
 
It caught fire in New York harbour in 1966, and was scrapped.
 
But visitors to the Vancouver Maritime Museum can still experience the glory of the legendary ship, thanks to Wallace Chung.
 
Chung is a retired surgeon who assembled a dazzling collection of maritime and Canadian Pacific Railway artifacts.
 
When he decided to sell his house and downsize, he donated 25,000 items to the University of B.C., and another 20,000 to the Maritime Museum, including a model of the Empress of Japan.
 
You might think a model is a model is a model.
 
But this is what they call a replica, an unbelievably detailed 10-foot-long copy that a shipbuilder would have put together for a prospective client.
 
"It's built in extreme detail, very exact in scale," explains Chung.
 
"I mean, the little doorknobs move. Many of the masts are movable, and look at the detail of the [lifeboats], you've got little oars and everything."
 
Five oars, in fact, the size of long toothpicks, are in each of the 20 tiny wooden lifeboats that line the upper decks.
 
The replica has tiny life preservers, tiny rigging, and a tiny staircase with 10 steps, everything the real ship would have had, in miniature.
 
"The Empress of Japan [was] the most luxurious liner on the Pacific, [and] the last CPR liner on the Pacific," says Chung.
 
"Many people consider this the most beautifully constructed ship of all."
 
It's certainly the most beautiful model.
 
And it's the centerpiece of a new exhibit at the Maritime Museum, The Golden Age of Steamship Travel, culled from the Chung collection.
 
The exhibition includes a tremendous collection of the colourful posters used to lure tourists and prospective immigrants to Canada, large bronzed "CPR" letters from the now-demolished CP Pier BC downtown, and even a setting of CPR steamship china.
 
The china comes with a story.
 
"I was phoned by a man who was a diver in Nanaimo some years ago," recalls Chung.
 
"He was photographing plants underwater. He'd been seeing these dishes sticking out of the sand and never paid attention, until one day he picked one up, and it was in perfect condition. So he started [taking] a bag, and every time he'd find one he'd put it in the bag. Through his lifetime he collected about 400 pieces. Big water jars, mugs, dishes, cups, and saucers."
 
The diver eventually sold his collection of underwater china to Chung, who tracked down an old CPR steward to try to find out how it got to the bottom of Nanaimo harbour.
 
He said, "Well, we'd serve people in their rooms. After they finished they'd phone us, and we'd come and pick it up in the room. Bring it back to the galley, look around. [If] nobody's there, [we'd] open the window and throw it out instead of washing it. If ever the Pacific Ocean dries up, all you need to do is follow [the trail of] CPR porcelain and you'll reach China."
 
Chung is a third-generation Canadian, his grandfather moved to Victoria in 1887 after seeking his fortune in the California goldfields.
 
He brought Chung's father over from China in 1897, and his dad eventually owned his own tailor shop, the Kam Lun Company.
 
A poster for the CPR's Empress of Asia hung on the wall of the tailor shop.
 
"When I was growing up, six, seven, years old, I would sit there between the workers and look at that ship for hours at a time," he recalls.
 
"A beautiful [ship], steaming out of the sunset towards Canada.
 
The romantic image of the Far East, where my parents came from, hoping, just hoping, I would have the opportunity to do the same thing, to travel there."
 
He caught the collecting bug, cutting pictures of ships out of his father's newspapers and magazines, haunting local shipping agents for pamphlets and blotters, and generally grabbing anything he could lay his hands on.
 
Chung declines to give his exact age, but will say he's in his 80s and was born shortly after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923, which cut off Chinese immigration until 1947.
 
"I lived in Victoria's Chinatown and we played in the streets there, advised by parents never to go beyond that because you'd get beaten up and things like this," he recounts.
 
"But we had a very, very delightful and secure childhood. There were some taunts by bullies in school, but I was fortunate in that I never really experienced a really acute kind of discrimination."
 
Still, when he graduated in 1945, he wasn't sure what he was going to do with his life.
 
"In 1945 the Chinese had no franchise, no right to vote," he says.
 
"And if you have no right to vote, you are not a citizen. And if you are not a citizen, you can't practise medicine, pharmacy, law, or any of the professions. So I was really in a dither as to what I should do. But then in 1947, they started giving the veterans the vote. In '48, we got the franchise. So right away, I knew I could do whatever I want. In '49, I went into medicine at McGill. Graduated in '53, and came to Vancouver General Hospital on an internship."
 
He continued to collect maritime artifacts, even when cash was in short supply.
 
"As an intern I got $25 a month, with room and board," he recalls with a chuckle.
 
"I can remember how mad my wife was when I got my first paycheque, $25, and went out and bought a book on the early history of British Columbia for $17.50. But that book now is [worth] over $2,000."
 
When he became an established surgeon in the 1960s, he started collecting in earnest.
 
"Being on the teaching staff of UBC in surgery, we have meetings all over the world. Some people complain about that, these surgeons going on these trips and getting paid for it," he laughs.
 
"The best posters I ever got were from a man who went all over the place looking for steamship things. [He lived in] Hoboken, New Jersey. There was another [dealer] in New York. Whenever I'd go to England, I'd look for things, there are beautiful things there."
 
The Golden Age of Steamship Travel exhibit shows off some of the treasures he found, such as a beautiful "To Canada by Cunard White Star" poster with a maple-leaf motif, a 1911 CPR calendar featuring its steamship fleet, and a list of CPR assets (16,000 miles of railway, 67 steamships, 16 hotels, and 75,000 employees), and a gorgeous tricolour poster for the French line by the great French poster artist Paul Colin.
 
The Empress of Japan replica came from Winnipeg, where it had been stored at the HMCS naval reserve.
 
Chung won't say how much he paid for it, but says he has a similar replica model of the Empress of Asia at UBC that was appraised at $250,000.
 
The Empress of Japan was in need of repair when he got it, though, so he spent "400 or 500 hours" working on it.
 
"I did it all myself," he says.
 
"It costs too much to ask anybody. All the railings had to be repainted. You see the silver? It was all rusted. And the wood on the decks was all chipped. The corner, you see the cracks there, all the angles had fallen apart, so that had to be redone. The deck was covered with 50 years' worth of dust. Even in a case like this, it's really dusty. That took a lot of time cleaning, all the decks and the railings."
 
The exhibition also includes a copy of the poster that hung in his father's tailor shop, an image that still resonates in Chung:  "A childhood experience:  powerful, beautiful."
 
But beneath it is a shocking example of the racist attitude toward the Chinese in early B.C.
 
It's the cover of The Canadian Illustrated News from 26 Apr 1879, called "The Heathen Chinee in British Columbia."
 
It depicts former B.C. premier Amor De Cosmos escorting a Chinese man to a ship to leave Canada, and reads "Heathen Chinee:  Why you send me offee?"
 
A.D.C.:  "Because you won't assimilate with us."
 
Heathen Chinee:  "What is datee?"
 
A.D.C.:  "You won't drink whisky, and talk politics, and vote like us."
 
Chung thinks people should be aware of Canada's racist past, but prefers not to dwell on it.
 
He marvels that within four decades of Chinese-Canadians getting the vote, B.C. had a Chinese-Canadian lieutenant-governor (David Lam), and Chinese-Canadian chancellors at UBC (Bob Lee), Simon Fraser University (Brandt Louie), and the University of Victoria (Ronald Lou-Poy).
 
Chung gave a presentation to the Chinese-Canadian medical association in the 1980s illustrating the change in the medical profession.
 
When he moved to Vancouver, there were only seven Chinese doctors, all practising in Chinatown.
 
By the 1980s, there were 400, including Chung and his wife Madeline.
 
"The opportunity is in the future, if you want it," says Chung, who received the Order of Canada in 2005.
 
"I think that's the message to Chinese now. Don't be bitter. We came through a difficult period, but the opportunity now is all open to us. And if you look in the past all the time, you miss those opportunities in the future."
 
The Chung Collection at U.B.C.
 
John Mackie.