During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people from a small number of counties in Guangdong province on the southern coast of China began migrating in large numbers to Southeast Asia and throughout the Pacific region. For those who followed the Gold Rushes that began in the mid-19th century, destinations such as the west coast of North America, the Australian colonies, and Aotearoa/New Zealand were differentiated by the single name  “Gum San” (“Gold Mountain” in their own language, a form of Chinese often referred to as “Cantonese”). Beginning in the 1860s, thousands of migrants originally from these areas of Guangdong came to the Indigenous territories now called British Columbia, following the Fraser River Gold Rush (1858) and the Cariboo Gold Rush (1861-1867). Many of them were already living and working in California following the discovery of gold there in 1849. Besides mining for gold, Chinese migrants would often open businesses providing services such as laundries, cooking meals, growing fresh produce, and providing workers for the construction of roads and ditches and clearing forests. The term “Gold Mountain” began to refer not only to the actual gold being mined in BC and the Yukon, but also the wealth that could be created by working hard in providing these other essential services. Some went on to achieve wealth through their businesses, becoming landowners and investors and speculators and able to loan money to pay for the passage of others to “Gold Mountain.” However, many immigrants never found the “gold” they were looking for. The effects of anti-Chinese discrimination and racism meant that many spent much of their lives in debt, struggling to save enough to establish families and homes.

The first Chinese communities in what is now Canada were built in Victoria, where many of the Chinese who were arriving from across the Pacific first landed, and in Barkerville, which became one of the key settlements of the Cariboo Gold Rush. At Barkerville’s peak, half of its population were Chinese. From running stores and restaurants and laundries to providing accommodation for migrant workers, Chinese migrants in Victoria and Barkerville were an essential provider of services. They were a crucial part of logging and developing farmland as well as growing produce to feed growing non-Indigenous populations as more and more migrants arrived from around the world to colonial British Columbia.

Although many Chinese migrants who helped establish Barkerville relocated after the gold ran out, the gold rushes nurtured a pattern of migration that would seed the growth and spread of Chinese communities throughout Canada. Chinese men who migrated in search of opportunities faced large risks, because in many cases they began in debt from borrowing money to pay for their transpacific voyage. However, the mythology of going to “Gold Mountain” as a route to achieving wealth and economic mobility endured despite the hardships and the reality that many migrants never became rich.

In North America, urban clusters of Chinese owned and operated businesses often became known as “Chinatowns” in English. In practice, these clusters contained businesses such as restaurants and rooming houses, but also mutual aid organizations, family associations, and other services catering to other Chinese. The English term “Chinatown” was coined and used by non-Chinese to describe these clusters, whereas Chinese people referred to these places as “Tongyungai” (“Tang Peoples Street”).

Chinatowns, through the lens of anti-Chinese racism, were often represented as unclean and disease-ridden, with opium dens and gambling houses. Because of anti-Asian racism and the effects of white supremacy, Chinese and Chinatowns were commonly represented in newspaper cartoons and editorials as “foreign” and “unassimilable” along with others considered non-white. This racism justified exclusionary immigration policies along with discriminatory legislation targeting Chinese residents and businesses, and the use of hygiene and health bylaws by municipal governments to target Chinatowns for removal and erasure. By the 1950s and 1960s, Chinatowns were targeted across North America, and in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and other Canadian cities for “urban renewal,” the first areas of cities to be designated as “slums” to be replaced by freeways (in the case of Vancouver) or civic buildings (in the case of Toronto).

Throughout the twentieth century, Chinese Canadians organized against these forms of legalized discrimination. For example, Chinese students went on strike during 1922 to challenge the attempts of the Victoria School Board to segregate Chinese students and remove them from public schools; or, take the many campaigns by Chinese Canadians throughout the early twentieth century to reverse the disenfranchisement of Chinese that the BC Legislature passed as one of its first acts in 1872 (a reversal that was finally enacted in 1947); or the decades long protest from the 1950s to 1970s against the removal of Vancouver Chinatown for a downtown freeway; as well as the recent ongoing attempts in the early 2020s of the Montreal Chinatown community to resist redevelopment plans that would wipe out the oldest and only remaining Francophone Chinatown in North America.

Chinatowns in Canada and North America remain the symbol of the communities who built them and their struggles to create lives for themselves and their families despite discrimination and exclusion, as well as the anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racism that they endured.