Unofficial Chinatown mayor gave generously
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
You can’t overstate Yip Sang’s importance to Vancouver’s Chinatown.
Working as the superintendent for the Kwong On Wo company in the 1880s, he imported 6,000 to 7,000 Chinese labourers to work on the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Yip Sang held several positions: bookkeeper, timekeeper and paymaster. Legend has it he used to pay the Chinese CPR workers by riding his horse to the Chinese campsites carrying a sack of money, and a gun, just in case.
After the railway was completed, he founded the Wing Sang Company, which became one of Chinatown’s biggest import-export firms.
In 1889, he built a brick building for the Wing Sang company at 51 Dupont, which is now East Pender. The main floor was the unofficial bank of Chinatown, where workers could send money to relatives in China.
It was also where Chinese Vancouverites booked passage on steamships to the homeland, because Yip Sang was the CPR’s Chinese passenger agent for its steamship line.
Yip Sang became a wealthy man, and so well-respected he was dubbed the unofficial mayor of Chinatown. But he never forgot his humble beginnings.
He co-founded the Chinese Benevolent Association, and built a seven-storey building in Shanghai Alley for new immigrants to stay until they found work in Canada.
Family legend has it that when members of the Chinese community told Yip Sang his largesse would bankrupt him, he built an eight-storey building on Carrall Street to house even more immigrants.
He also built a six-storey building behind the Wing Sang offices to house his large family — four wives and 23 children.
The 1889 Wing Sang building is still standing, and is Chinatown’s oldest structure. It’s now owned by realtor Bob Rennie, who converted the front building to his offices and rebuilt the back building into a jaw-dropping art gallery with a soaring, four-storey-high interior.
Yip Sang’s life was a classic rags-to-riches story. He was born in Shengtang, China, in 1845, and was orphaned at a young age. According to the Our Stories website, at 19 he sailed across the Pacific to seek a better life in San Francisco, where he “washed dishes, cooked, rolled cigars and futilely panned for gold.”
In 1881, he moved to B.C., but didn’t have any luck sifting for gold here, either. But he prospered after finding work with the Kwong On Wo company.
Yip Sang died on July 20, 1927, at 82. His 17th child, Dock Yip, became Canada’s first Chinese-Canadian lawyer in 1945. (Chinese names have the surname first, but immigrant families often change that after a generation in Canada.) In 1947, he was a key figure in the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923, which had barred Chinese immigration into Canada. Another son, Ghim Yip, was the first Chinese doctor in Canada, and a third, Quene Yip, was a local soccer legend.