Daniel Hui
reporter
Canada and China directly: trade and investment, energy and resources moving to Asian buyers, Pacific and Arctic shipping, and the Chinese-Canadian communities where the relationship is actually lived.
- History
The Shipwrights at Nootka Sound
The first Chinese people documented in what is now Canada arrived in 1788 and built a schooner. An older reference work calls it the first vessel constructed by white men on this coast.
- History
The School They Had to Build
In January 1908 the Victoria school board barred children born in China from its classrooms. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association lost in court, raised money across the country, and opened its own school the next year. It is still standing.
- History
The One Who Could Speak Chinese
Norman Bethune sailed for China in January 1938 without the language. The twenty-six-year-old Winnipeg nurse who travelled with him had been working in it for six years, and almost nobody here knows her name.
- History
The Rail They Built and the Tax That Followed
About fifteen thousand Chinese workers cut the hardest section of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Parliament's answer, the same year it was finished, was the first racial immigration law in Canadian history.
- History
The Surgeon Canada Forgot and China Never Did
Norman Bethune left Montreal for Yan'an in 1938 and was dead within two years. Mao's tribute made him required reading for a generation of Chinese schoolchildren, while his own country took forty years to notice.
- History
The Country to the East, and the People Who Wanted It to Be Here
In 1761 a French scholar read a Chinese court history and decided China had reached America a thousand years before Columbus. The theory has been proposed, demolished, revived and demolished again — and it still shaped how the Pacific was drawn.