The University of Toronto will establish a Chinese-Canadian archive to collect, preserve and digitize cultural and personal records and stories from the Chinese diaspora in Canada, including oral histories, video and photographs.
The Richard Charles Lee Chinese-Canadian Archive is made possible with a $4-million gift from an anonymous donor. The donation will also assist U of T Libraries with the task of digitizing existing and new collections of material related to the Chinese-Canadian community.
The archive will document the Canadian-Chinese experience across Canada, tracing Chinese-Canadian history back to the earliest immigrants, including those who helped to build the national railroad in the late 1800s.
“The plan of building this archive to document Chinese and Chinese-Canadian lives over the last century provides this historical backdrop to the evolution of Toronto and Canada,” said Joseph Wong, vice-provost and associate vice-president, international student experience.
University College, University of Toronto. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
U of T has the largest Chinese-language collection in Canada and one of the largest in North America. Most of the early Chinese immigrants are from Hong Kong or the nearby Canton province area in China, moving to Hong Kong and staying there for a while before making their journey to Canada.
Larry Alford, U of T’s chief librarian, said, “One of the things that happens is people build businesses, families come and they thrive and they contribute enormously, but when you get to the third and fourth generation, the documentation of that history, those contributions, begins to be lost.”
The lives and stories of Chinese Canadians will also be captured in their own words through oral histories – a project that will expand on the work that’s already being done by Lisa Mar, associate professor of history and Richard Charles Lee Chair in Chinese Canadian Studies at University College, and her classes.
Mr. Alford said, “Oral histories are amazingly important in preserving history and culture, as a way to understand what happened, how it happened, how people contributed and their own personal recollections.”
