¶ Duke Sang Wong's Unique Story
An astonishing 17,000 Chinese men came to the interior of British Columbia between 1881 and 1884. One of those men was named Duke Sang Wong. And it's worth taking a little bit of time to talk about Wang for one main reason. He is the only Chinese rail worker whose writings we have available to us. And I'm not talking about just from the CPR.
Wong is the only Chinese rail worker whose direct testimony we have from all of North America. And that's because Wong was himself a little unusual. The reason he was able to write this is he was a different... type of person than the vast, overwhelming majority of the workers. They were illiterate peasant farm laborers from the countryside, suffering the dislocation of the civil unrest in China at that time.
He had to flee the country for slightly different reasons. He was from a well-off Mandarin type of family, highly educated person whose family had fallen into disrepair because of... His father was a magistrate and had been involved in some shady dealings, and there was poisonings in his family, and the reputation had been so beaten down that he couldn't find a place within the Chinese bureaucratic system.
family's name in ruins, he was forced to leave the country. But of course, this is a very different person who had much more information about the wider world and an ability to write down his thoughts in a highly revealing and interesting manner. Duke Sang Wong was apprehensive about coming to North America. What you're about to hear are excerpts from his diary.
¶ Horrors of Railway Labor
It has been said that the land to which I am now headed is wild and uncivilized, and that people kill each other daily. There surely must be some area where it is not so barbaric. He discovered that his worst fears were in fact true. He recounted witnessing a fight between two white men at a work camp. I could not believe what my eyes were seeing.
There were white people standing around and not one of them moved to stop the beater. Surely there are no manners and rules here. Our people would talk through differences and hear each other no matter how grave the problem. But those white people fight and die in disorganized combat. Such is their law and order. Such is their barbaric justice. But the true horrors came on the job.
Most of the Chinese workers lived in ramshackle shanties that were built alongside the railroad. They were paid less than their white counterparts, and some of even those meager wages were taken by labor brokers back in China. These people didn't speak any of the language and had so little resources. They had no alternative. Once they were there, those labor camps, they were essentially like a form of slavery with the veneer of a contract, of course. The railroad contractors.
gladly accepted this, gladly sent those Chinese workers into the work camps, made them pay for all of their own equipment, provided no medical supplies or food. They were left up to their own devices for that. And in many cases, they were commissioned to do the most dangerous jobs, the jobs that involved dynamite blasting. There was one account that I read that was crazy. The railway is going around these canyons, and...
It cannot just go up a steep mountainside. You have to blast out of the mountainside a grade that's acceptable. And so there was a lot of blasting of rock. And the only way to get to the place that they were blasting in some of these cases, or the easiest way,
would be to lower people down from the canyon above. Some of these workers would have a rope tied around their waist and some dynamite given to them, and they would be lowered over the canyon down to the rocks that needed to be blasted off. They would light the dynamite. stick it into some holes in the rock, then yank on the rope to be pulled up in time before it exploded around them. It's almost cartoonishly dangerous and difficult work. Duke Sang Wong witnessed many of these horrors firsthand.
My soul cries out, I wish I had never experienced such bad days as those in which we now live. Many of our people have been so very ill for such a long time, and there has been no medicine nor good food to give them. Despite the dangers that they faced.
¶ Enduring Anti-Chinese Sentiment
Anti-Chinese racism became a significant political force in British Columbia. The premier, Amor de Cosmos, petitioned the federal government to ban Chinese immigration. In 1879, the Anti-Chinese League was formed by Noah Shakespeare, who would go on to be elected as the mayor of Victoria. There's a lot of organized labor unions in British Columbia and people in the government who are associated with that. Their primary complaints were that these people are undercutting...
the labor rates of non-Chinese workers, which is, of course, absolutely true. But their response was to try and heap more pressure on the Chinese workers and heap more hatred or to try and... prevent them from working on government contracts and trying to limit their work exclusively to the railway rather than to demand that the railway pay them the higher rates.
Duke Tsang Wong saw many of his compatriots completely broken by the combination of hard labor, little food, and extreme discrimination. They're spending their days in the opium shacks, with little food and even less strength. This is a bad omen. So many of us Chinese suffered and died recently. I cannot recount them all.
Wong himself, though, didn't give in to despair. He eventually was able to save up enough money to bring over his wife from China. They moved to New Westminster and then Vancouver, where Wong worked as a tailor and a teacher. But around him... he saw the hostility to Chinese workers grow unabated. Once the railway was completed in 1885 and Chinese labor was no longer needed for this megaproject,
the federal government introduced a $50 head tax for any Chinese people who wanted to migrate to Canada. Wilfrid Laurier increased it to $500. Wong witnessed around him the growth of the Asiatic Exclusion League and would likely have been in Vancouver in 1907 when anti-Asian riots broke out in the city. and racist mobs attack Chinese, Japanese, and Punjabi individuals and vandalize their businesses and homes.
And he was alive in 1923 when Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King passed the Chinese Immigration Act, which legally barred almost all Chinese immigrants from Canada. Duke Sang Wong died in Vancouver in 1935, and in his diary, Wong has a line. that for me captures not just the story of Chinese railroad workers or the Canadian Pacific Railroad, but truly all of Canadian history. These mighty lands are great to gaze upon. But the laws made here are so small.