Starting in 1884, what was to become the town of Ashcroft began springing up around the Canadian Pacific Railway’s line — and eventually station and depot — on the banks of the Thompson River. Many of the some 10,000 Chinese immigrants who came to Canada to seek their fortune in the goldfields, and to help build the CPR, would have passed through the fledgling community, or stopped there to buy supplies.
When the railway was complete, some of the turned to farming; others set up their own businesses. One of the first Ashcroft businesses was one established in the 1880s by a Chinese man named Lin Kee, and others soon followed. In 1892 Chow Sing opened the Wing Chong Tai — “Forever Great Prosperity” — store, near where the car wash stands today. By 1900 there were eight Chinese businesses in Ashcroft listed in Henderson’s B.C. Directory: four general stores, two laundries, a fish market, and a gardener and farmer named Leong Shew.
Chinese men were also prized as domestic servants by the white settlers. In 1872, when Sandford Fleming and his party were in the area surveying the route of the CPR, The Rev. George Munro Grant — a member of the expedition — wrote in his account of the trip, Ocean to Ocean, about staying at what is now Ashcroft Manor:
“All the domestic servants we had seen as yet were Chinamen. They are paid from $20 to $45 a month, but as servant girls ask nearly as much, John is usually preferred . . . They are bowling out not only the cooks and servant girls, but the washer-women on the Pacific coast, and we must look to them as the future navvies and miners of our West. . . They are the best of workmen, cleanly, orderly, patient, industrious and above all cheap.”
By the time of the Great War there was a well-established Chinatown in Ashcroft. Chow Jim operated the Club Restaurant, a room of which became a Chinese night school in 1914; the Loy brothers had opened the Wing Wo Lung store; and Wah Lee had a laundry. There were two other general stores, belonging to Lin Kee and Hop Wo, a reading room beside Wing Chong Tai, a small Chinese library, and a Chinese hospital at the foot of Bancroft Street. The importance of Ashcroft’s Chinatown can be judged by the fact that when Dr. Sun Yat-sen came to Canada to gain financial and moral support for his effort to depose the corrupt Manchu government in China, he spent a whole week in Ashcroft in January 1910, and gave lectures in the Chinese library.
When the Great Fire broke out in July 1916, it left most of Ashcroft's business district — including Chinatown — in ruins. Almost immediately, Chinese carpenters were hard at work rebuilding Chinatown, and Wing Chong Tai, Wing Wo Lung, and some eighteen other Chinese-owned businesses were soon back in operation. In 1917 a group of Chinese merchants banded together and rebuilt the Ashcroft Hotel; three years later they rebuilt the Central, and in 1919 they had built the Chinese Hotel and Tea Room where Safety Mart now stands.
After World War I Ashcroft was in a precarious position: the Barnard’s Express Stagecoach Company, long a mainstay of the town, had closed. Its manager, Willard West, was inspired by the sight of local produce being loaded on a train in Ashcroft to be sent for processing elsewhere to wonder if the town could support a cannery, which would utilize some of the Barnard’s Express buildings.
He spoke with the Chinese community, and was assured there would be enough produce (and workers) to support a cannery, which opened on a trial basis in 1924. It was a huge success, and it — and Chinatown — continued to thrive for more than 30 years. By the mid-1950s, however, cheap imported vegetables from the States began flooding the B.C. market, and local growers could not compete with the low prices and still make a profit.
The closing of the cannery in 1957 struck a death blow to Ashcroft’s Chinatown, and one by one the stores closed and were eventually demolished. Today the only remnant on Railway of Ashcroft’s once-thriving Chinatown is the Wing Wo Lung building, which now forms the two-storey portion of the Rolgear building.
The other tangible reminder of Ashcroft’s Chinatown is the Chinese Cemetery beside Highway 97C. It was established in the 1880s, with burials there taking place through the 1940s. It fell into disrepair and was badly overgrown until the 1990s, when volunteers with the Ashcroft and District Lions Club and the Rotary Club of Ashcroft-Cache Creek banded together to restore it to life.
In 2016 two glass mosaics were installed in the cemetery, and in 2017 the Province of B.C. unveiled a commemorative altar at the site to show respect to those buried there, and to serve as a reminder of the contributions made by Chinese immigrants in Ashcroft and beyond. The graves have also been restored, with glass etchings by a local artist adorning each one as a permanent mark of respect and remembrance.
