Chinese Canadian history web portal

[helen]

www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/2010/08/09/mr-10-112/

UBC gains $900,000 federal award for unique Chinese Canadian history web portal

A bilingual website featuring the legacies of Chinese Canadians who helped shape this country will soon be a reality thanks to an ambitious project led by the University of British Columbia and a $900,000 grant from Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP).

Chinese Canadian Stories: Uncommon Stories from a Common Past History, will launch in 2012 and provide a one-of-a-kind bilingual site with English and Chinese resources for students, researchers and others wanting to learn more about the oft-ignored Chinese experience in Canada.


chinesecanadian.ubc.ca/

[helen]

chinesecanadian.ubc.ca/files/2010/08/Destination-of-Arrivial-1910-1923.jpg

Head Tax Registration Mapping Project

UBC alumni Edith Tam participated in an interdisciplinary project that combined her geography skills with Chinese Canadian historical research. Using GIS technology to create a series of powerful maps, Edith used the Head Tax registry data to create maps, which showed the origins, destinations, distribution and chain migration of the Chinese migrants. Her research was guided by UBC’s Chinese Head Tax Registers digital database, which contained the immigration registration records 96,000 Chinese who arrived in Canada from 1858 through 1949. She went on to apply her training in a series of research projects at the Asian Library that mapped the villages in Taishan and Zhongshan counties from which the majority of migrants came. This map that Edith produced shows the professed destinations of approximately 30,000 of the Chinese who arrived between 1910 and 1949. The results of her research suggest that the Chinese has travelled to almost every small town across most provinces in Canada.

[chak]

Is the mapping project available to check out or do we have to wait until 2012 when the website is launched? What a "fun" project this would be to work on!
Thank you for letting us know about this, Helen!

[helen]

Not sure Chak - but there is a map in the above link - are you from Canada? Your stories would be welcome. I'm from New Zealand, and we are starting to write about our past, but as individuals - not as a collective.

[chak]

No, Helen - I'm from New England - lived in Vancouver for 14 years but moved back here a few years ago.