Herald Street

By the 1910, Chinese residents began to construct or rent buildings to the north on Herald Street. Lim Bang, a Victoria-born Chinese businessman, owned several properties in Victoria, including the Lim Bang Building on Government Street, constructed in three sections with arched windows and recessed balconies, on the slope between Herald and Chatham Streets in 1910. The Hart’s Herald Building, constructed midway between Store and Government streets in 1890 as a carriage repair shop and stable, came into Chinese ownership from 1910 and housed a brothel on the second floor. The Hook Sin Tong, a county association that included emigrants from Zhongshan County and their Canadian-born descendents, hired architect C. Elwood Watkins to design the association’s building at 658 Herald Street in 1911. This building included the Chinese design element of a recessed balcony on the third floor. A beautiful feature of this building is a stained-glass dome, reaching six feet above the third floor, and containing twenty panels with tulip motifs. Today, Herald Street is also the site of the Victoria Chinatown Care Facility, built in 1982 where the Chinese Hospital used to stand from 1899, and the Chung Wah Mansion, an apartment building with subsidized housing, constructed in 1986 by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association.

The Lim Bang Building (1910) as seen from the corner of Herald and Government in 1946 (BC Archives, I-20608) and in 2012 (Photo by Charles Yang, 2012).

Sources

“Hook Sin Tong Charity Building.” Canada’s Historic Places.
http://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=14792&pid=0 (accessed 5 October 2012).

Lai, David Chuenyan. Chinese Community Leadership: Case Study of Victoria in Canada. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co, 2010.

Lai, David Chuenyan. The Forbidden City within Victoria: Myth, Symbol and Streetscape of Victoria’s Earliest Chinatown. Victoria: Orca Book Publishers, 1991.