Calgary & Southern Alberta

Calgary's Chinese Community

Boys and staff of the Chinese YMCA
Courtesy of the Glenbow Collection

Canada's Chinese population increased steadily from 1858 into the 1870s as temporary "sojourners" arrived to work as labourers, cooks, and teamsters to augment the incomes of families at home in China. From 1881 to 1885, work on the British Columbian segment of the CPR attracted 15,000 Chinese, some of whom later migrated to southern Alberta. From an early date, however, government legislation restricted Chinese immigration. An entry or "head" tax, first imposed in 1885, was raised from $100 to $500 in 1903. Because it prevented most men from bringing wives and children to Canada, the head tax ensured that the Chinese population remained predominantly male. Of a total Canadian-Chinese population of 46,519 in 1931, only 3,648 were female. In the 1920s, no more than five married Chinese women lived in Calgary. In 1923, additional legislation, not repealed until 1947, virtually halted further Chinese immigration.

Too poor to farm or ranch, the Chinese newcomers took up employment as cleaners, laundrymen, cooks, and vegetable growers – all low paying jobs that Caucasian males shunned. During the 1908 federal election campaign, the Coleman, Alberta, newspaper urged local miners to vote Conservative to prevent Canada from being "overruled by the Mongolians who work for starvation wages on which a white could not exist." Racial discrimination precluded Chinese immigrants from improving their economic status, and reinforced the common stereotype equating Chinese immigrants with poverty.

Most early twentieth century small Alberta towns included one or two Chinese residents, who operated restaurants or laundries. While part of town populations, the Chinese were rarely part of the local communities. Discrimination in rural Alberta found its expression in social ostracism.

Ho Lem, 1921
Community leader and restaurant owner
Courtesy of the Glenbow Collection

The majority of Chinese Albertans lived in urban centres. Calgary's Chinatown, the largest in the province, harboured around 1,000 inhabitants (one quarter of the province's Chinese population) in 1931. The segregated residents, poor and highly visible, were seen as inferior to other Calgarians, and were periodically the targets of verbal and physical antipathy.

In 1892, several Chinese residents contracted smallpox. Shortly thereafter, a number of Anglo-Calgarians died of the disease. When a Chinese man was released from medical quarantine, public anger and suspicion erupted into violence. On August 2, after a dinner following a cricket match, a mob of 300 inebriated Caucasian Calgarians destroyed a Chinese laundry, and then attacked workers in three others. Local police remained conspicuously absent during the riot, which ended only after the Mounted Police arrived to make arrests.

During the 1920s, Chinese involvement in gambling and drug trafficking contributed to the public perception of Calgary's Chinatown as a den of inequity. Alberta author Emily Murphy's popular 1922 book, The Black Candle, reinforced this image.

After laundries and restaurants in Chinatown began to fail during the Great Depression, Calgary's Chinese community became the focus of a series of events triggered by overt government discrimination. In contrast to non-Chinese, who received relief payments of $2.50 a week, unemployed Chinese were accorded only $1.12, the apparent rationale being that the latter people had a low living standard to begin with. In 1936, with the help of the Communist Party, Calgary's Chinese began to protest the disparity. In May, several Chinese were arrested for picketing government offices. In December, after three unemployed Chinese died of malnutrition, the city investigated living conditions in Chinatown. They then closed several substandard tenements, rendering the occupants homeless during a frigid January. In response, unemployed Chinese staged a sit-down strike on the streetcar tracks. On February 6, 1937, the confrontation turned violent and thirteen Chinese were arrested.

Calgary's city council continued to argue vehemently that supporting Chinese residents was not a civic responsibility. One alderman insisted bluntly that "White people ... should be looked after before Chinese." Eventually, pressure from the Communist Party, the CCF, and the Calgary Council of Women forced Alberta's premier to accept Chinese Albertans onto the provincial relief rolls at $2.12 a week.

The Chinese Cultural Centre in downtown Calgary