Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

188 Legal History in the Making
As was the case in several of the Australian colonies, in New Zealand and in
California, the first Chinese in British Columbia went to pan for gold, on the
mainland, in 1859-60. 3 Others followed to satisfy the demand for household
servants in Victoria, the capital of Vancouver Island, where white female
domestics were few and far between. Until the mid 1860s the presence of the
Chinese was suffered. Most of them were distant from centres of population,
and those who were not, occupied jobs for which there were no white takers.
Moreover, as a group they were thought to be 'sojourners' who would pass on
in due course and return home. 4 They also received protection at a formal,
legal level from the policies of James Douglas, the governor of the twin
colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia and Matthew Baillie
Begbie, the first professional judge, appointed by London to the mainland
colony in 1858. These were men committed to British notions of law and
order and equal treatment by the law of all who lived under the British
flag. They both made it clear that they would not stand for discrimination
against the Chinese. 5
Outward hostilities toward the Chinese began to develop in the mid 1860s, as
the gold ran out and white and Chinese workers looked for jobs elsewhere
in the economy. Racist attitudes were quick to surface within the white
community. Fears deriving from the prospect of competition in the labour
market with Chinese soon expanded into a set of economic grievances,
including charges that they unfairly vied for trade and business, refused to
invest their wages in British Columbia, preferring to send the money home
to China, and wilfully eluded payment of local taxes. 6 These materialist
concerns fed on an established pattern of racial stereotyping which branded
the newcomers as generally uncivilized and inferior. 7 They were picked on
because they were seen as remaining socially aloof and culturally distinct
in their own quarters. As they resisted attempts at spiritual assimilation by
Christian missionaries, the label 'heathen' was readily applied to them. They
were charged with being innately immoral, for the few Chinese women who
arrived on the west coast seemed in most instances to occupy the role of
prostitutes. The sanitary practices of the Chinese community came in for
heavy criticism. There was particular revulsion at the custom of exhuming
3 W.P. Ward, White Canada Forever (Montreal, 1978), 23; P. Roy, A White Man's Province: British
Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigration, 1858-1914 (Vancouver, 1989), 4-5.
4 See comments of Amor de Cosmos, editor of the Victoria Daily Colonist, looking forward to the
involvement of the Chinese in building a transcontinental railway - 10 May 1860. Shortly thereafter De
Cosmos, a future premier of the province, became a leading exclusionist.
5 B. Gough, 'Keeping British Columbia British: The Law and Order Question on the Gold Mining
Frontier', Huntington Library Quart., xxxviii (1975), 269.
6 Ward, op. cit.,30.
7 Ibid., 29-30. On the roots and development of the racial stereotyping of Chinese in North
America, see S. Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882
(Berkeley, 1969).