Skip to main content

About Us

We are members of the Asian Canadian Working Group based at the University of Victoria, and our group includes the university’s faculty members, librarians, students, as well as activists of Asian Canadian communities across Vancouver Island, British Columbia. This website about Victoria’s Chinatown is a gateway project leading towards online preservation and presentation of diverse experiences of all these Asian Canadian communities. Its major participants and sponsors include the following individuals and institutions:

Prof. Zhongping Chen is the principal investigator of the project. He conducted and supervised research on historical documents and photographs, interviewed members of community organizations, and designed the whole website and most home pages.

Prof. John Price is a co-investigator of the project. He also conducted and supervised research on historical documents and photographs, interviewed community leaders, and designed the home pages of Victoria Chung and other figures and organizations.

Mrs. Kileasa Wong, principal of the Chinese Public School and editor of the Chinatown Newsletter, is both a major participant and chief sponsor of the project. She helped us contact members of the local community and make arrangements for interviews and other research activities for the project.

Dr. Jenny Clayton is the chief coordinator of the project. She coordinated the website construction, and wrote all homepage texts for the website, except for those authored by Drs. Zhongping Chen and John Price.

This website was created in partnership with the McPherson Library at the University of Victoria. Two librarians, Mrs. Ying Liu and Tina Bebbington, helped in the beginning stages of this project, and contributed a bibliography on Victoria’s Chinese community, respectively. The library’s digitization branch, including Sam Aquila, Katharine Mercer, Gail Fowler, Min He, and Cheryl DeWolfe, processed images and developed metadata to create the largest collection to date in the university’s Content DM database. University Archivist, Lara Wilson, assisted with copyright permissions and items in the University of Victoria’s Archives and Special Collections.

Robert Amos, an artist with over three decades of experience painting scenes from Victoria’s Chinatown, contributed twenty-four paintings and drawings to our website, in addition to photographs, many of which are from his book written with Kileasa Wong, Inside Chinatown: Ancient Culture in a New World (TouchWood Editions, 2009).

Prof. Jo-Anne Lee at the University of Victoria and Mrs. Lily Chow, an established author writing on the history of Chinese immigrants in British Columbia, also engaged in the project in its initial stages.

Brian Smallshaw and Joel Legassie, two graduate students at the University of Victoria, are the webmasters of the project. Other undergraduate and graduate student participants in the project include Charles Yang, Andrew Wong, and Dennis Chen. In particular, Charles Yang helped conduct interviews, transcribed the resulting audio data, and took photographs for the project.

This project received financial support from the Community Historical Recognition Program of the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and from the Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development of British Columbia. The final stage of website construction was mainly financed by Drs. Zhongping Chen and John Price’s personal research grants. We thank all of these institutions and individuals for their generous sponsorship.

We would also like to acknowledge our gratitude to the moral support and in-kind sponsorship of the following institutions and individuals at different stages of our project:

  • The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Victoria
  • The Chinese Canadian Veterans Association, Victoria
  • The Chinese Public School, Victoria
  • City of Victoria Archives
  • The Department of History, University of Victoria
  • The Faculty of Humanities, University of Victoria
  • The Heritage Branch, Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and the Arts, British Columbia
  • The McPherson Library, University of Victoria
  • BC Archives and the Royal BC Museum, Victoria
  • BC Registry Services, Victoria
  • The Turning Space Inside Out Project, University of Victoria
  • UBC-SFU “Chinese Canadian Stories” Project, Vancouver
  • Prof. David Chuenyan Lai