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The
first Chinese settlers to Victoria had relatively low standards
of living. They lived
in small wooden shacks and huts built on the muddy banks of
the Johnson Street Ravine.
These quarters had no sanitary facilities or sewers.1
By
the 1870s, Victoria’s Chinatown had developed most of Cormorant
Street and was broadening its parameters to Fisguard (Fisgard)
Street.2
The Chinese population of Victoria was still largely
male. In 1874, it
is estimated that the gender imbalance was as extreme as 200
men to one woman.3
Chinese residents of Victoria did not all work within
the confines of Chinatown. Some found work outside Chinatown as domestic
servants and cooks for European settlers and as labourers
for the city. The
employment of Chinese as domestic servants was the result
of a lack of single women in the colony. Most of the women that had settled in the colony
had either come with their husbands or married upon arrival. Some Chinese worked as servants in the home
and others worked as gardeners and launderers.4
The Chinese established a good reputation as reliable
domestic servants and hard-workers.5
 
British
Columbia Archives B-02583 and F-08550
This
first photograph was taken sometime in the 1890s of an employed
houseboy. The second is of Chinese cooks employed at Government
House in the 1860s.
Click
here to continue into the 1880s and 1890s
Endnotes
1.David
Chuenyan Lai, Chinatowns: Towns Within Cities in Canada
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1988), 196.
2.David
Chuenyan Lai, Chinatowns: Towns Within Cities in Canada
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1988), 184.
3.David
Chuenyan Lai, Chinatowns: Towns Within Cities in Canada
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1988), 186.
4.David
Chuenyan Lai, Chinatowns: Towns Within Cities in Canada
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1988), 191.
5.Patricia
Roy, A White Man's Province: British Columbia Politicians
and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants, 1858-1914 (Vancouver:
UBC Press, 1989), 40.
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