The Canadian Pacific Railway is the thing this country points at when it wants to explain itself. A line drawn across a continent, finished ahead of the promise, holding a federation together along its length. It is on the money and in the schoolbooks, and the photograph everyone knows is the one at Craigellachie, where Donald Smith drives the last spike into the ground while several dozen men in hats watch him do it.
There are no Chinese faces in that photograph. There were about fifteen thousand Chinese workers on the British Columbia section, and by the end of 1882 they made up something close to three-quarters of the railway workforce in the province. They were not invited to the ceremony.
This is the part of the story Canada took a century to tell properly, and it is worth telling in the right order, because the order is the argument.
The work came first. The British Columbia stretch was the hardest ground on the line — the Fraser Canyon, where the roadbed had to be cut into rock faces above a river that would kill anyone who slipped. The contractor hired in China and in the Chinese communities of California, because the labour was available and because it was cheaper. The men took the jobs the work gangs from elsewhere would not take: the rock cuts, the tunnel faces, the nitroglycerine.
Macdonald was candid about why they were there. "It is simply a question of alternatives," he told the Commons in 1882. "Either you must have this labour or you can't have the railway." Secondary sources render the line slightly differently and the Hansard page is not easy to come by. Nobody disputes the position: the government knew what it was buying, and it bought it.
Answer the sentence on its own terms and it still holds. The labour was not available at the price and in the numbers the contract required, and without it Andrew Onderdonk would not have finished. The problem is not that Macdonald said it. The problem is what Parliament did once the alternative no longer needed to be weighed.
They died doing it. Nobody kept a proper count, which is itself a fact about how the deaths were regarded. The figure most often given is at least six hundred; the estimates run a great deal higher and this paper is not going to pretend to a number it cannot stand behind. What is not in dispute is that men died of rockfalls, of explosions, of scurvy and of cold. Many were buried where they fell, beside a line their families in Guangdong were never told the location of.
A country that intends to be a serious country keeps an accurate ledger.
The railway was finished in 1885.
The head tax was imposed the same year.
That sequence is the whole of it. Parliament passed the Chinese Immigration Act in 1885, the first law in Canadian history to restrict immigration on the basis of ethnic origin, and it set a fifty-dollar charge on every Chinese person entering the country. The men who had just built the hardest section of the national project were, within months of finishing it, the subject of the country's first racial immigration law.
Fifty dollars did not deter enough people, so the amount went up. It reached a hundred dollars at the turn of the century and five hundred in 1903 — about two years' wages for the men it was aimed at. The effect was immediate and it was measured: in the first full year after the increase, the number of Chinese arrivals who paid the tax fell from 4,719 to eight.
Eight.
Then Ottawa stopped charging and started refusing. The Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, known ever since in Chinese-Canadian families as the Exclusion Act, replaced the tax with a near-total ban. It came into force on the first of July, which meant that for a generation Chinese Canadians did not celebrate Dominion Day. They called it Humiliation Day and stayed home.
The ban lasted twenty-four years. It was repealed in 1947, after Chinese Canadians had served in the Second World War, and the right to vote federally followed.
Set beside that record, what the community built is the more remarkable half of the story. The Chinatowns of Victoria and Vancouver and Toronto were not picturesque districts. They are what you construct when the rest of a city will not rent to you. They held their own schools, their own hospitals, their own benevolent associations and their own credit, because the public versions were closed. Families were split for decades by the tax and then by the ban — men here, wives and children in China, remittances going one way and letters coming the other, for twenty and thirty years at a stretch. The bachelor societies of those Chinatowns were not a cultural preference. They were a policy outcome.
Canada apologised for the head tax in 2006, in the House of Commons, and offered symbolic payments to the surviving taxpayers and to the surviving spouses. By then almost all of the people who had actually paid it were dead.
What should be said about this is not complicated and does not require anybody to feel bad about being Canadian. A country that intends to be a serious country keeps an accurate ledger. The ledger here reads as follows. Chinese workers built the most difficult part of the railway that made Confederation physically real. Parliament's response was a tax and then a ban. The community built its own institutions through five decades of exclusion anyway. Their descendants are now in every part of Canadian life, including the part that writes the schoolbooks.
The photograph at Craigellachie is still the photograph. It is simply not the whole frame, and a hundred and forty years is long enough to have widened it.
This is the first in a continuing series on the Chinese contribution to Canada.
