The Chinese Canadian Museum recently opened a new gift shop called 1889 Trading Co 貿易公司. The name commemorates the year Yip Sang 葉連生 (字來饒, 號春田), the celebrated Chinese merchant, built the Wing Sang 永生 building to house his store, business headquarters, and eventually his family home. Today, that building houses the museum celebrating Chinese Canadian history. 

Calling it 1889 Trading Co., complete with outpost aesthetics, may seem like a nostalgic nod to the early settler days of British Columbia and an homage to Yip Sang’s entrepreneurial legacy.

But the story is more complicated.

Yip Sang rose to prominence not simply as a merchant of goods, but as a so-called “labour contractor.” His business? Recruiting and managing Chinese men from China to serve as cheap, indentured labour. In other words, his wealth and legacy were built on the direct exploitation of his own people.

This is an underexamined history of the Chinese diaspora in Canada. Figures like Yip Sang of Vancouver, Chan Toy 陳才/Sam Kee 三記 of Vancouver, Mah Bing Kee 馬[炳記?] of Nanaimo, Sue Lem Bing 鄭忠梅 of Duncan, and Ling Lam 林德調 of Steveston in Richmond are often regarded as respected Chinese Canadian “pioneers”, who supposedly paved the way for Chinese settlement.

In the 1880s, the Canadian Pacific Railway company and Sir John A. Macdonald government sought to lower the cost of building the transcontinental railway. Labour was the highest expense, so they turned to cheaper Chinese labour, saving millions of dollars, which was a significant sum at the time.

This demand to arbitrage labour costs gave rise to the Chinese “middleman” between white industrialists and Chinese labourers, with Yip Sang among them. Because he could speak some English and Chinese, he was employed as a foreman by the Kwong On Wo 廣安和 company, where he recruited and managed thousands of workers from China to do some of the most dangerous jobs on the railway, including dynamite blasting crews.

After the railway was completed, Yip Sang founded the Wing Sang Company 永生號 (later renamed the Yip Sang Ltd. 葉生有限公司) in 1888. He leveraged his labour contracting experience to supply Chinese workers to local salmon canneries. In addition to placing them in low-paid, undesirable jobs, he managed their remittances back to China and provided lodging through his extensive real estate holdings. In doing so, he extracted profit from them at nearly every step of their migration journey. He more than double-dipped into their wages and consolidated material power over the very people whose labour he commodified.

Many of the men from villages in China had to pay for their own passage to Canada, lured by the promise that they could support their families back home. And who lent them the money to pay for the head tax for entry into the country? Yip Sang. Who operated CPR’s official agency arranging their steamship passage? Yip Sang. Who managed their bank accounts? Yip Sang. Who withheld part of their wages until the debt was paid off? Yip Sang.

It was not an uncommon practice at the time for labour contractors to withhold labourers’ identification documents until their debts were repaid.

Yip Sang wasn’t the only labour contractor, or rather exploiter, at that time. Chan Toy of Sam Kee in Vancouver, known for building the thinnest spite building in Chinatown, also supplied labourers for canneries, land clearing, and sugar refineries. Sue Lim Bing of Duncan was a foreman and labour contractor in the sawmill industry on the island whose unexpected wealth still raises questions. Ling Lam of Steveston in Richmond was known for his general store Hong Wo Co. 同和, but also built his wealth as a labour contractor for local canneries, while selling goods to the same workers he managed. Mah Bing Kee of Nanaimo, regarded as the wealthiest and most prominent Chinese man in town, secretly purchased the land under Nanaimo’s second Chinatown previously owned by a coal mining company and then raised the rents significantly on his own people. This action triggered a community revolt, the creation of a people’s land co-op called Lund Yick Lands Co 聯益公司, which led to a relocation of the entire Chinatown, buildings and all.

Yet these are the men remembered in Canadian and Chinese Canadian history, as if they were benevolent forefathers, we in the Chinese diaspora should be grateful for. Their buildings are recognised as important heritage landmarks, like in the cases of Yip Sang and Chan Toy. Ling Chung Lam is commemorated in city archives and museum exhibits. Mah Bing Kee even named a street after himself that still has registered addresses today. Many of their stories are now enshrined in school curricula as representative examples of ethnic minority achievement. The very act of writing about these figures right here, more than a century later, is a testament to how much space they continue to occupy in our collective memories.  

Today, their descendants continue to uphold their legacies in museums and media, telling “rags to riches” nation-building stories that highlight how their ancestors were the “model minorities” before “model minorities” who climbed the Gold Mountain 金山 and survived anti-Chinese discrimination in Canada, while overlooking the egregious wealth those men amassed on the backs of indentured workers of their kin.

They also often ignore the fact that they exist at all because their grandfathers had both the financial means to pay the increasingly punitive head tax to bring their wives from China to Canada, and continued to benefit from state-sanctioned merchant-class exemptions even after the Chinese Exclusion Act.

The men they exploited? They weren’t so lucky. They lived in bunkhouses and overcrowded quarters. The Chinese Exclusion Act tore them from their families. Most were denied the chance to have children, not only because there were few Chinese women due to exclusionary state policies, but unlike their bosses, they didn’t have enough means to bring their wives from China. Meanwhile, Yip Sang brought three wives from China and had almost two dozen children, nineteen of whom were male.

Some labourers died by suicide. Many died alone, forever bachelors, forgotten by history. And perversely, a few were only temporarily remembered in a small makeshift alley exhibit in the Chinese Canadian Museum housed in the very building built by their celebrated exploiter.

The so-called Chinese Canadian “pioneers” are still heralded today not just because of their material wealth, but because their control over their communities made them legible to white society and useful to the settler state. 

It’s true that some of them, including Yip Sang, participated in philanthropy, and helped establish and donate to schools, hospitals, community associations, and collective causes. But that doesn’t wash over how they earned their wealth and legacies.

They played a vital role in Canada’s nation-building projects and early economies now recognised as Chinese Canadian “contributions” worth remembering by institutions. But it’s time to critically reexamine their histories and legacies for what they are: the commodification of their own people in service of a colonial government’s and settler-capitalist vision of Canada.

In this light, the Chinese Canadian Museum’s 1889 Trading Co. is no longer a quaint tribute to a local Chinese merchant affectionately dubbed as the “unofficial mayor of Chinatown”. It becomes a romanticized remembrance of violence, oppression, and colonization. It becomes a throwback to lost futures of dignity, love, and justice, buried beneath the profits of a few.

What does it mean to remember history? What does it mean to be honest with honouring? Do we continue with a sanitised version that celebrates the Chinese merchant class, those who were in service of the same white settlers who rioted against Chinese people and tore families apart through exclusion laws? Or, now with more distance and historical clarity, do we finally reevaluate the myth of the Chinese Canadian “pioneer” for what it truly is: exploitation?

Postscript: The kind of “labour contracting” practiced during that era could be considered a form of debt bondage, a practice classified as “a practice similar to slavery” under Article 1(a) of the 1956 United Nations Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery. In this system, a labourer borrowed money from a creditor, such as Yip Sang, and was then required to repay the debt through labour, typically for that same creditor. If the repayment period was indefinite, with vague or undefined terms, and allowed the creditor to maintain control over the worker’s life and wages, sometimes for years or even a lifetime, this would fall under the definition of debt bondage.

Is debt bondage the legacy we want to romanticize and celebrate?

Is this a dignified remembrance of the Chinese diaspora?

Thanks to @no1ricefarmer for pointing me toward the right language to describe this.