Chinatowns in Greater Vancouver
by Eleanor Yuen
Vancouver has the biggest Chinatown in Canada, boasting a history of more than a century. When the City of Vancouver was incorporated in 1886 a small Chinese settlement had already developed at Shanghai Alley near what is now Pender and Carrall Streets. Soon, it started to develop along the shores of False Creek adjacent to Gastown. Though Victoria was the port-of- call then, Vancouver was dubbed “Salt Water City” by the Chinese and was their favorite city for settlement. Smaller groups of Chinese laborers, farmers and merchants were also found in Nanaimo and New Westminster.
The typical Chinatown building at that time was a two-story wooden structure with a storefront on the ground floor and the residence and meeting rooms tucked in on the second floor The area was often cramped, run-down and dirty. Many of the buildings now standing in the commercial and tourist centre were built by different clan associations in the early 1980s. The architecture of these three-story brick buildings with recessed balconies and decorative metal railings were modeled after structures in Southern China.
In 1971 the municipal government quelled the growth of Chinatown by declaring it an historical area where all old buildings of significant value were to be preserved and new development strictly controlled. This designation was a blessing in those years as it helped fight proposals for a freeway across the heart of the area. A decade later, however, the heritage classification turned into a curse by stalling development in the district. Meanwhile Chinatown underwent two “beautification projects”. New lampposts, phone booths with oriental designs and colorful banners added festive charm to Chinatown while modern shopping arcades such as the Golden Crown Centre and the Golden Gate shopping mall gave the area a face-lift.
Today Chinatown is a lively cultural centre frequented by the Vancouver Chinese community and tourists alike during weekends and Chinese festivals. To many of its patrons it is also a commercial hub with its 13 financial institutions and numerous professional services where business can be carried out in the mother tongue. Both the Sun Yat-sen Garden, a major attraction featuring classical Ming Dynasty garden architecture, and the Chinese Cultural Centre which hosts a variety of cultural events, were built with support from the city. Plans for a new wing in the centre to house a museum, library and retail scores are now in the pipeline. Restaurants offering savory cuisines, shops specializing in famous Southern Chinese barbecue meat, Chinese herbs, health foods, seafood, groceries and articrafts, and theatres showing Chinese opera and film line the busy streets bounded by Hastings, Georgia, Jackson and Carrall. Shopping in Chinatown is always enjoyable because of the great variety of commodities, its self- containment and its century-old traditions. Toishanese, Cantonese, Mandarin and English mingle freely in the hustle-and-bustle of everyday business. Chinese from many different parts of the world come here for a taste of their old traditions. To this day clan and locality associations, tongs and cultural societies still attract the ethnic Chinese community, even when pitted against the modern Concord Pacific project to the immediate east of the area.
The Chinatown Merchants Association worked very hard to maintain its vitality in the mid 1980s when suburbs such as Richmond, Burnaby and Coquitlam started to develop into major Chinese settlement areas, drawing substantial business away from their merchants. Its greatest task in the last decade has been fighting for the construction of a 100-car parkade (which materialized in 1995), part and parcel of a huge development plan funded by local and offshore investments. Other major milestones in the rejuvenation of Chinatown are the new Chinatown Plaza which accommodates the largest Chinese restaurant in Canada, seating 1,000 people in total, and the new Wayfoong House which houses Hongkong Bank’s Chinatown branch serving about 20,000 clients. Their business catchment area will no doubt be further broadened with residential projects in the neighborhood such as the International Village. Citygate, General Motors Place and 84 residential units with retail outlets in the 200-block East Georgia are complete. It should also draw a good mix of upscale residents who used to shun the area because of its proximity to the Downtown Eastside.
Meanwhile the quality of life in Chinatown in general has been enhanced by the redevelopment of Block 17 which includes new quarters for SUCCESS, a 100-bed intermediate care facility and hundreds of units of social and market housing. The presence of a community police storefront and security personnel hired by merchants help make Chinatown a safer place to live and visit. Even the neighborhood’s notoriously high taxes started to level off in 1994 and gave merchants some much needed breathing space. In view of all these favorable factors, Chinatown is now charged for another boom and enjoys a rosy vista despite the squeeze from Richmond and its new Chinatown.
Demographic changes in Chinatown were once a significant sign-post in Chinese immigration trends. After 1947 the rate of immigration was bolstered by family reunification and some newcomers moved into the adjacent Strathcona region. In the 1960s Strathcona was targeted for redevelopment and the McLean Park housing project was built under the city urban renewal plan. In response, the Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association (SPOTA) was formed to ensure preservation of the character of the neighborhood. Many elderly Chinese prefer to live in a familiar environment and senior housing built by the Chow Lun Association at Keefer and Gore and other projects along Hastings and Main became their home.
Many locally born Chinese who came of age in the 1980s, along with overseas immigrants with a taste for more spacious houses, have chosen to settle in new suburbs in the south and east. This factor coupled with its proximity to the Vancouver International Airport and the United States helped kick off the speedy development of Richmond, a small piece of flat land sitting on the mouth of the Fraser River.
In 1961 there were only 298 ethnic Chinese in Richmond. By 1994 about 25 per cent of its population was ethnic Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China and the Philippines. They are served by social services centres such as the Caring Place and community groups like the Richmond Chinese Community Society. Chinese specialty food markets, Asian malls, the President Hotel and numerous restaurants offering a broad variety of Chinese cuisines sprawl along No. 3 Road. Aberdeen Centre, Parker Place, Yaohan and the T&T shopping mall form the longest stretch of modern Chinese shopping arcades in North America. It is also said to have attracted the highest concentration of good Chinese cooks in overseas Chinatowns. To accommodate the rapid influx of population, city council plans to encourage high density housing in its town centre area which lies between Blundell and Bridgeport on both sides of No. 3 Road. The Chinese propensity to stay where their language is spoken started the snowball effect, making Richmond the new Chinatown for the middle class. Traditional festivals are celebrated in Richmond with the same fervor displayed at shows by pop singers flown in fresh from their homeland. Two Chinese language radio stations, CHMB AM 1320 and CJVB AM 1470, and the Ming Pao newspaper have all chosen to set up offices here. With all this prosperity and rapid ethnic change, however, come problems such as huge ESL (English-as-a-second-language) classes, traffic jams, changes in neighborhood character, pressure on services and higher property prices, to name just a few. Nevertheless, the new dynamic of the city has come from some fundamental changes in the nature of Chinese business which are now dominated by large scale food retailing, professional services, corporate investments and realty. Richmond’s outskirts, on the other hand, have been rapidly taken up by manufacturing industries and have become a satellite of the town itself, whereas farmland on Steveston Highway east of No. 4 Road and a five-hectare nursery site right in the downtown core have given way to new residential and commercial developments. Even the fishermen’s quay has been quick to respond to the delicate Chinese taste for live seafood. Residentially, Richmond tends to attract many affluent or professional Chinese immigrants.
Within the last two decades the Chinese have helped change Richmond from a sleepy fishermen’s village into a city of over 140,000 people. Together with the old Chinatown on the eastside of downtown Vancouver they house about 270,000 Chinese and will surely go down in the history of Canada as models of historical and modern Chinatowns.
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