Performance in the Pacific Northwest

Built without glue or nails, this wooden Cantonese Opera Chair was imported from China in 1910 by the manager of Lun Yick Opera House, a 400-seat Chinese Opera House in Nanaimo, British Columbia. It was used as a stage prop for touring opera productions that entertained immigrant coal miners in Chinatown settlements across Vancouver Island. 

Photogrammetry by Lee Cookson

Cantonese Opera Chair

Research by Laurel Green

Introduction

History

Reactivations

Media

Discussion

Bibliography

Introduction

Built without nails or glue, this Cantonese Opera Chair was imported from China by the manager of Lun Yick Opera House, a 400-seat Opera House in what once was a Chinatown settlement in Nanaimo, British Columbia.

At the Nanaimo Museum the Chair is currently displayed in a glass case accompanied by a sign that reads: 

Wooden Chair, c. 1910 Stage Prop from Lun Yick Chinese Opera House

The Lun Yick Chinese Opera House Company built an Opera House in Nanaimo around 1910, near the corner of Pine Street & Park Avenue. Lun Yick was the name of the group that purchased land for the theatre building by raising funds from Chinatown residents. The opera house hosted the Canton Opera, which toured the Pacific coast. Actors slept overnight at the opera house on wooden beds in the back of the building. This is where the chair was used by actors as a stage prop.

In the early 20th century, coal mining settlements on Vancouver Island were among the largest rural North American Chinese populations, and bustling Chinatowns in Nanaimo and Cumberland featured Opera Houses on their main streets. For immigrant coal miners who faced racism, segregation, and harsh working conditions, touring Cantonese Opera productions became the most popular form of entertainment and an important cultural touchstone for Chinese Canadian communities. These productions relied on community infrastructure, were a business opportunity and, for some performers, became a pathway to immigration. 

Looking at this performance artifact today, it becomes more than simply a Chair. It was a stage prop used by Cantonese Opera performers traveling to Vancouver Island from China, it was observed by immigrant coal miners carving their own destinies in a new country, and it was part of a moment in history that inspired a new Canadian play Jade in the Coal by Paul Yee performed over a century later. It is a Chair that has survived when so many other artifacts from lost Chinatowns on Vancouver Island have not.

History

Nanaimo’s Chinatowns (1860-1960)

Between 1860 – 1960 there were four Chinatown sites in Nanaimo, a home to Chinese immigrants working in the local coal mines. By the mid-1880s Nanaimo’s Chinese community was the third largest in British Columbia and constituted 1/3 of the Island’s mining workforce.

In 1884, facing racism and growing tensions, the mining company relocated the Chinese quarter to outside Nanaimo city limits. The Chinese residents cleared the forest, levelled the site, and erected the buildings themselves, with no funding or support. The second Nanaimo Chinatown was a self-contained and self-supporting community, with its own merchants, doctors and entertainers. Because the increasing government head tax discouraged family members from entering the country, the community was predominantly male.

In 1908, Mah Bing Kee and Ching Chung Yung bought 43 acres of company land, which included the second Chinatown site. To offset the cost of the purchase, they raised rents. In response, the residents formed the Lun Yick Company (Together We Prosper), which is the name of the Opera House mentioned on the placard (described above) accompanying the Chair at Nanaimo Museum. With the help of 4,000 shareholders from across Canada, the community purchased 9 acres of land from the coal company near the intersection of Pine and Hecate Streets. The residents then moved the entire community and its buildings to the new location.

By 1911, Nanaimo’s third Chinatown was well established with a population of approximately 1,500 which would swell on weekends when Chinese workers came from surrounding areas to socialize and purchase supplies, for entertainment and community. It was a segregated area that Chinese immigrants were expected to stay in and keep to their own. It’s remembered by residents as a ‘ghetto.’

During the 1920s, the fourth Chinatown was an extension to the third Chinatown known as ‘lower’ Chinatown or ‘new town’ developed on nearby Machleary Street.

In the 1920s due to a decline in the coal industry and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923 (the head tax having become as high as $500 by 1904), Nanaimo’s Chinatown became increasingly derelict until it was destroyed by fire on September 30th, 1960. By this time, most of the population had dispersed throughout Nanaimo or relocated to larger Chinese communities in Canada and the United States.

Today, no vestiges of Chinatown in Nanaimo remain. As most of the land that these Chinatown sites sat on fell outside of the official town boundary lines, no comprehensive property records are available today. 

At the Nanaimo Archives, the Opera House is listed on a map that was hand drawn from memory by Chuck Wong, a local resident now deceased. In a transcribed interview, Mr. Wong mentioned the Opera House briefly stating that he watched opera troupes from Hong Kong perform there.

Cantonese Opera

Cantonese Opera is a traditional art form that can be traced back to the Chinese Ming Dynasty and is a blend of regional operas and the Guangdong drama tradition of telling stories through song. 

With its elaborate costumes, lively music, engaging stories and powerful vocal delivery, the legacy of Cantonese Opera is a traditional art form that has long been an important cultural touch stone for Chinese Canadians. Cantonese Opera was inscribed onto the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in September 2009. It is arguably one of the region’s best-loved art forms among Hong Kong audiences.

Cantonese Operas feature characters in a role type – 10 in the early days that gradually evolved into 6 major roles called The Six Pillars. Each category had a different style of singing, movement, and costume that defined it, and actors trained to make their careers playing certain characters. Note that in the early Operas there were no female performers. 

  1. The Principal Male 
  2. The Supporting Male 
  3. The Principal Female
  4. The Supporting Female 
  5. The Comic Role (Chou, the clown) 
  6. The Military Role

Early librettos were often a plot synopsis or ‘outline’ with no instructions on actions, spoken parts or lyrics – the actors improvised their performances. Later becoming influenced by Western dramas, these librettos began to be organized into acts and scenes. Musical instruments too have evolved blending traditional operas bowed instruments, plucked strings, woodwinds and percussions with Western instruments including slide guitars, saxophones, and conga drums – reflecting the trade and international flow of Chinese workers.

Chairs are used in stage productions as multifunctional props positioned to reflect the function of what they are symbolically representing in a scene. Colourful embroidered chair coverings are used depending on the setting. As a prop, the Chair can evoke the interior of a royal palace, or a warrior can leap over it when it becomes a mountain. Set and prop pieces like the Chair, were used symbolically on the stage to represent a bridge, a mountain, an emperor’s throne, or even a bed.

Explore the history of this art form at this interactive website made by the South China Morning Post.

Cumberland's Chinatown (1888-1968)

In 1888, Chinese workers were sent from Nanaimo to work in the No. 2 coal mine in Cumberland, British Columbia. The mine was owned by the Union Colliery Company and run by the prominent Dunsmuir family who bought the licenses from Hudson’s Bay and by 1927 owned all the mines on Vancouver Island. The company set aside the swampy area to the south of Cumberland for its Chinese laborers who drained the swamp to construct homes and businesses. Boundary Creek ran through the two main streets of Chinatown, with interconnected boardwalks built to traverse through the wetlands. 

Cumberland’s Chinatown became one of the largest rural North American Chinese populations of the early 20th century – about 1500 residents at peak – by the end of WW2. Its bustling main street boasted two 400-seat Opera Houses, and by 1910 Chinatown in Cumberland had grown into a self-contained community where only half the residents worked in the mines and the other half as domestic servants in Cumberland or providing services in Chinatown: from barbers to laundries, merchants, shop keepers, and apothecaries, and theatres. 

By 1921, there were approx. 160 men to every 10 women in Chinatown – reflecting an absence of the family and kinship networks traditionally found in Chinese society. Chinese men became active in Chinese fraternities such as the Chinese Freemasons, the Dart Coon Club, and the Chinese Benevolent Association, the Chinese Nationalist League and other associations. 

After fire in 1935 destroyed 43 buildings in Cumberland’s Chinatown, many residents chose to move away rather than rebuild and the site became a ghost town in the 1950s and 60s, save for a few elderly residents who remained. It was overrun by bottle pickers and scavengers who dug up Tiger Whisky Jugs(selling for $25 US at the time) tiny opium bottles, fan tan chips, coins – they stole anything they could find. The archivists admitted that there are only a few artifacts from Chinatown in the Museum’s collection, with much of the history being lost to time.

In 1963, the Village of Cumberland applied for a grant to restore Chinatown as a historic tourist attraction and was unsuccessful, after which they decided to raze the site destroying the remaining structures. From 1970 – 2000, the land was privately owned and leased to the Cumberland Rod and Gun Club who used the property as a shooting range. In 2002, the Chinatown land was transferred to the City of Cumberland who formed an Advisory Committee from a group of Cumberland Chinatown former residents and descendants who have met yearly in Vancouver since 1972.  In 2008, the Chinatown site was renamed ‘Coal Creek Historic Park’ at their request.

Reactivations

The resources below offer examples of scholarly and/or artistic engagements with the artifact and/or its associated histories. These materials are also valuable to consult for classroom discussion and further research.

Jade in the Coal (2010)

Compelled by the story of the Chinatown in Cumberland, Paul Yee, Chinese-Canadian historian and Governor General Award-winning author, wrote the play Jade in the Coal which was co-produced by Pangea Arts and Theatre at UBC in 2010. The play blends traditional music and storytelling with contemporary physical theatre, and featured a cast that included Chinese-Canadian actors and members of the Guangdong Cantonese Opera Academy First Troupe – considered the best Cantonese Opera performers in the world and known for their virtuosic blend of music, singing, stylized gestures, dance, mime, martial arts, and acrobatics.

Jade in the Coal is a theatrical séance that connects us to a lost community and brings their stories and voices into our contemporary imagination. It portrays the arrival of a Cantonese Opera troupe to inaugurate Cumberland’s new theatre with a performance for the Chinese coal miners. One of the Opera performers tours the mines and returns possessed by the ghost of a dead labourer. Opera is only in Cumberland because of the miners – the actor gets possessed and the two worlds merge.

As a young boy growing up in Vancouver’s Chinatown, author Paul Yee watched black and white films of Cantonese Operas. He was familiar with Cumberland’s Chinatown story, having worked on an oral history project about the area with the Vancouver City Archives. At the turn of the century, in the woods above a lucrative coal mine, Chinatown communities were a microcosm of a larger culture with their own class system, economy, and social capital. In Jade in the Coal, Yee represents the immigrant experience by depicting how the miners’ lives had been transformed by working in Canada, for better or for worse, because they had invested in themselves and carved their own destinies outside of the Chinese societal expectations and traditions.

Download the Play

Interview with Paul Yee

Photo Sheet

Jade in the Coal Conversation with Paul Yee

Paul Yee was kind enough to share his unpublished post-production draft of his script with me, and then join me on Zoom for a conversation about the work. I immediately launched into my story of beginning my research finding the chair in the Nanaimo Museum, learning about the history of Cantonese Opera touring through Vancouver Island to entertain the miners, and finding myself in Cumberland walking the Chinatown route. One of the first things Paul said to me was: “Plays by their own nature are transient beings, and you are talking about a transient process”. 

He shared with me the genesis of the play. While on a Vancouver Island holiday, Heidi Specht (the Artistic Director of Pangea Arts) stumbled upon Cumberland and took a walk in the woods on the former Chinatown site. She found a photograph of the old Chinese Opera House tacked up onto the post of a gazebo. It was rain-splattered, pathetic looking, helpless. It moved her to find out more. She did some research and learned about the history of Cantonese Operas in Canada at the turn of the century. Heidi then approached Paul (a Governor General Award-winning author who had never written a play) with the concept for a show that was set in Cumberland and told the story of the touring Cantonese Opera productions that were performed there for the miners.

Paul was born in Saskatchewan and moved to Vancouver’s Chinatown as a young boy after the death of his parents. He was raised by his Aunt, who insisted that he speak Chinese at home and was determined to raise Paul with an appreciation for his culture. He says, “I grew up as a child seeing a lot of Cantonese Opera in the 1960s. When Hong Kong was sending out black and white movies of Cantonese. She would drag me to the movie house every Sunday to watch the Cantonese operas. I didn’t understand the Classical poetry, they were inscrutable to a young boy. When approached to write the book for Jade in the Coal and to include Chinese Opera, Paul says, “how it was sung, the conventions of it…was already in me”. 

Jade in the Coal was Paul’s first play, and he worked with a dramaturg, Elaine Ávila who asked him if he believed in doing research, to which he replied, “of course! I’m a historian”. Paul was familiar with Cumberland and Chinatown stories, having worked on an oral history project about the area with the Vancouver City Archives in the 1970’s. Emerging from this research, Paul came up with a concept for the play – as he says, “a social working class tale with a romance, and racism surrounding it”. He wanted to represent the pertinent angles of the time: there was incredible community culture, there was international travel, and women lived in a mostly bachelor immigrant community. He wanted to portray the lead character of Sally’s role in the community, what life was like for women set against the life of miners. This was a community that had its own class system, economy, and social capital. A microcosm of a larger culture, happening in the woods in Canada. Or in Nanaimo, above the most lucrative coal mine in the region.

Paul described that the heart of the story had to be that coal miners were in the forefront. Not just Sally and her father the merchant, but ultimately this play is about the miners who died and their ghosts. Linking the opera of today to the miners of the past who had died. 

CRIMSON says: Coal miners don’t care. They’re uneducated and vulgar.

LITTLE WONG replies: Not so. I met a miner who had tickets for every show! (Yee, 19). 

The play is dominated by the Opera, its colour and its sound, and it helps to move the story along. But Opera is only in Cumberland because of the Miners – the actor gets possessed and the two worlds merge. In China, both Miners and Opera singers are working class. This is the contradiction that the play works with. Using the play within a play format, Jade in the Coal’s operatic possession plot line mirrors the powerlessness of the miners. The Chinese immigrants in Canada at that time were so powerless against the forces of white racism, they had no allies except for the churches. The labour unions, legislation, and the government were all against them. In the play, any semblance of balance is when a ghost comes along and helps them. These ghosts have power that is unimaginable in the lives of the workers, it lifts them, it offers balance to an impossible situation. The play itself is acting on behalf of a lot of ghosts that had no power, giving a voice to bring these lost stories into our contemporary imagination. Jade in the Coal is a theatrical séance that connects us to a lost community.   

Paul talked about how a pivotal part of representing the immigrant experience was depicting how the miners’ lives had been transformed by working in Canada, for better or for worse, because they had invested in themselves and carved their own destinies outside of the Chinese societal expectations and traditions. This is reflected in the conversation around where the miners should be buried, with custom dictating that their remains should be sent back to China. Paul wanted to portray the miners not as forever sojourners, but as people who could change, who had adapted and wanted to be part of Canada. His character’s words encapsulate the paradox of wanting to stay, despite terrible conditions, because ultimately this place became home. 

EVERGREEN: The dead have little control over their bones.

Do not dig up our bones. We will rest here.

Do not send our bones back to China.

SALLY: But people here hate the Chinese!

EVERGREEN: This is where we came for our dreams. Our dreams were the same as the white men’s. They respect us only after we die. 

EVERGREEN:  Our families … had no idea our work was hell.

They never knew our loneliness.

But that is the fate of all immigrants.

Then tell Cumberland’s story to our families.

Sing them our song.

We must not be forgotten (Yee, 77). 

Looking at the production photos and a few moments of archival photos that Pangaea provided me, I noticed that an Opera Chair featured prominently in the mise-en-scene. I showed Paul the picture of the chair from the Nanaimo Museum. He laughed and said immediately: “that chair would have been covered. My Aunt took me to a lot of live opera performances and the furniture is always covered. You almost never saw the bare wood. It would be a very fancy, embroidered, sequined chair. It was meant to look very beautiful, regal, as a prop.”

In Cantonese Opera, chairs and tables are used to move through locations. A warrior can leap over it when it’s a mountain. It can evoke the interior of a royal palace. Chairs are multifunctional, changing coverings or removing them as a function of how it is being used in a scene. A chair is never simply a chair. 

Inside Chinese Theatre: Cantonese Opera by Nancy Yunhwa Rao

In her essay, “Inside Chinese Theatre: Cantonese Opera in Canada” Nancy Yunhwa Rao describes the infrastructure and economy of touring Cantonese Operas which played the Pacific Northwest region on a circuit from San Francisco to Seattle, Vancouver and onto Vancouver Island. These performances played an important role in Chinatown communities as the most popular form of entertainment that also constituted the community’s sense of cultural self. Cantonese opera performances fulfilled a religious and ritual social function, and while these theatrical productions necessarily relied on community infrastructure, they were also a business opportunity. 

Rao describes the deep relationship between opera theatres and the Chinese community’s identity and self-image: 

Inside the theatre, familiar stories and legends were actualized by real characters, and formed the basis for classics of Cantonese operas. The opera plots were imbued with a traditional hierarchy of moral order and social values. Not surprisingly, then, opera performances were regular features in community gatherings, both for the enchanting music and virtuoso performances, and for their important function of reinforcing shared values in the communities. The arias or songs were coupled with verses and lyrics that were close to the heart and were musical utterances for many, whether labourers, middle-class shop owners, wealthy merchants, or young adults and family workers. Few other music genres had the power of Cantonese opera to transform, amaze, and serve as the perfect conduit of feeling and emotion for early Chinese Canadians.  (Rao, 84)

Rao describes the systemic racism that devalued and ridiculed this art form: 

English-language newspapers’ depiction of Chinese theatres and performance was usually disparaging, reinforcing the notion of Chinese immigrants as immoral and inferior. Its music was regularly ridiculed and dismissed as noise, reinforcing the notion that Chinese Canadians posed a threat to society. Chinese theatres as of low morals and unsuitable for normal cultural function fit very well within the narrative of Western imperialism. Such preconceptions came to frame the reception of these earlier Chinese theatres.

This deep racism has led to an erasure of the vibrancy and significance of Chinese opera and has impacted what we consider to be part of and what has been excluded from Canadian performance history. There is a lack of sources available, beyond a few mentions in English newspapers, and very few playbills, posters, or records remain.

Read the Essay

Visiting Cumberland

I set up a visit to the Cumberland Museum and Archives and drove to Coal Creek Historic Park to take what was described as a self-directed walking tour of the old Cumberland Chinatown site. I arrived on a sunny, clear afternoon, crossed the railway tracks at the end of main street, and pulled into the parking lot. Surrounded by people walking their dogs and stretching for their jog, I made my way past the historic sign and onto the trail.

In 1888, Chinese workers were sent from Nanaimo to work in the No. 2 coal mine in Cumberland, which was owned by the Union Colliery Company and run by the prominent Dunsmuir family. The company set aside the swampy area to the Southwest of Cumberland for its Chinese laborers who drained the swamp to construct homes and businesses. Boundary Creek ran through the two main streets of Chinatown, with interconnected boardwalks used to traverse through the wetlands. At its peak, Cumberland’s Chinatown was one of the largest rural North American Chinese populations of the early 20th century, home to about 1,500 residents. It’s bustling main street boasted two 400-seat Opera Houses, and by 1910 it grew into a self-contained community where only half the residents worked in the mines and the other half as domestic servants in Cumberland or providing services in Chinatown: from barbers to laundries, merchants, shop keepers, and apothecaries, and theatres. The signage on my walking tour site describes the hardworking resilience of the community: the smell of the swamp mingling with lye from the laundry. 

A few steps onto the path and into the trees, I found myself alone in a silence broken only by a plane flying lazily across the sky overhead. A small paper map that had a few numbered stops on it tells me where the Chinese Freemason Hall used to be, the Dart Coon Club, the main street, the creek. At each of the 17 stops, I’m met by a small sign marking what is now a fallen tree, a solitary bench, or a mud puddle. 

After a fire in 1935 destroyed 43 buildings in Cumberland’s Chinatown, many residents moved away rather than rebuild and the site became a ghost town save for a few elderly residents. Overrun by bottle pickers and scavengers who dug up Tiger Whisky Jugs (selling for $25 US at the time), tiny opium bottles, fan tan chips, coins – trespassers stole anything they could find. In 1963, the Village of Cumberland applied for a grant to restore Chinatown as a historic tourist attraction and were unsuccessful. 

The final sign on my tour tells me that in 1968 Chinatown was razed by the City after being deemed structurally unsound, and replaced by a forest of fast-growing trees. The only structure that remains is Jumbo’s Cabin, named for Hor Sue Mah or ‘Jumbo’ – one of the oldest and last residents of Cumberland’s Chinatown. Before Jumbo lived in the cabin, the building was once a temporary ossuary–a place to store human bones. When a Chinese miner was killed in the mines, the insurance paid for burial at the Cumberland Chinese Cemetery. Marked by a simple white wooden obelisk painted with characters identifying the man and his home village, seven years after death, his bones would be exhumed and stored in Jumbo’s cabin before journeying on to Victoria, where they were burnt with proper ceremony.

Finally, the ashes were shipped home to China and reburied in ancestral plots tended by family through the generations. 175 Chinese labourers died in the Cumberland mines, and most of their bones were stored for a time in the only building that remains. Stopping under a gazebo, I noticed a paper lantern swinging in the breeze – the red colour catching my eye against the bare branches of the trees not yet blooming with spring.

Cumberland Chinatown Historical Walking Tour Map

Media

Discussion

Question 1

Considering what you now know about the history and contexts of the Cantonese Opera Chair, what would you like to see displayed alongside the artifact in its museum case to tell its story?

Exercise: Write your own curatorial statement for a visitor to the museum that shares the cultural relevance of the Cantonese Opera Chair. Consider how you would design a display. 

Question 2

What do you know about Chinatowns in your area? Are there any vestiges that still remain, or have these settlements disappeared completely? 

Exercise: Research the history of Chinatowns in your vicinity. Visit the site and take a walk through the area. What used to be there, and what is there now? 

Question 3

What is the relevance of Cantonese Opera to the Chinese diaspora in Canada today? 

Exercise: Find and watch 3 contemporary performances that engage with the Cantonese Opera form. How is contemporary Cantonese Opera innovating while preserving traditions?

Bibliography

“Cantonese Performing Art.” South China Morning Post, multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/culture/article/3036661/cantonese-opera/index.html. Accessed 30 Jan. 2022. 

Cumberland Chinatown Brochure 2017. cumberland.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/cumberland_chinatown_brochure_2017_sm.pdf. PDF file.

“Jade in the Coal Archive.” Department of Theatre at UBC, archive.theatre.ubc.ca/jade_in_the_coal/subject.shtml. Accessed 25 Jun. 2021.

“Memories of Chinatown.” CV Collective, cvcollective.ca/memories-of-chinatown/. Accessed 30 Jan. 2022. 

Mining History — Working with Paul Yee and Pangaea Arts: A Cross Cultural Dramaturgy. Avila, Elaine, Canadian Theatre Review. Summer 2009, Issue 139, p84-88. 5p.

“Nanaimo Chinatowns.” chinatowns.viu.ca/. Accessed 30 Jan. 2022. 

“Power and Elegance: Cantonese Opera.” Canadian Museum of History, www.historymuseum.ca/cantoneseopera/intro-e.shtml. Accessed 30 Jan. 2022. 

Rao, N. Y. (2018). Inside Chinese Theatre: Cantonese Opera in Canada. Intersections, 38(1-2), 81–104. doi.org/10.7202/1071675ar

Specht, Heidi Interview. Conducted by Laurel Green. July 8, 2021. 

“Strangers in a Strange Land.” Cumberland Museum, cumberlandmuseum.ca/strangers-in-a-strang-land/Accessed 30 Jan. 2022. 

“Theatre Chair Furniture.” Chinese Canadian Archive Project, ccap.uvic.ca/index.php/theatre-chair-furniture. Accessed 30 May 2021.

Yee, Paul interview. Conducted by Laurel Green. June 21, 2021.

Yee, Paul. Jade in the Coal. Directed by Heidi Specht . Pangea Arts and Theatre at UBC. Nov. 24-Dec. 4, 2010. Frederick Woods Theatre, Vancouver.