Canadian photo exhibit documents early Chinese settlers

British Columbia is sending to China a photo exhibition detailing the lives of Chinese settlers in the western Canadian province during the 19th century Cariboo gold rush.

The province said Thursday it will provide 20,000 Canadian dollars (20,335 U.S. dollars) for the exhibit: "Who Am I? Bridging the Pacific: from Guangdong to Barkerville and back."

The interactive exhibit, which features more than 1,600 photos, will go to China for an 18-month tour of Hong Kong and Guangdong starting on Feb. 26, before being permanently displayed at the Guangdong Museum of Overseas Chinese in Guangzhou.

The photos capture the Chinese experience in Barkerville, a town 750 km northwest of Vancouver.

When the first gold was found by the town's namesake, English prospector Billy Barker, it set off a mining frenzy that brought thousands of people to the area, about half of them Chinese migrants from Guangdong province.

Despite racist policies of the day that made it difficult for Chinese to stay in Canada, the new arrivals, mostly men, prospered as nearly 20 million dollars in gold, an amount equivalent to 2.5 billion dollars today, was mined.

The exhibit, after a stay at the Hong Kong Museum of History, will then make stops at museums in Guangzhou, Jiangmen, Taishen and Kaiping, the homeland of the Chinese gold-rush pioneers.

Because an estimated 75 percent of the workers never returned to China, Bill Quackenbush, the "Who Am I?" curator, said it is hoped that the display will shed some light on who many of the people in the photos are.

"Altogether, we've placed everything on the iPads that we're using as an interactive source for information gathering, as well as information exchange," he said.

"All the photographs are captioned and people have the opportunity to make comments on all the photographs. So if they see a relative, that's why the exhibition is called 'Who Am I', because so many of them are portraits of people we do not know their names or where they came from. We know that almost all of them came from a small area of China around Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta," he said.

Speaking at Vancouver's Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, Steve Thomson, the B.C. Forests, Lands and Natural Resources Operations minister, said the photo exhibit tour through China was important as it honored the legacy of the province's early Chinese settlers and would strengthen the growing cultural ties between British Columbia and China.

"By supporting Barkerville's traveling exhibit to China, we are celebrating the important cultural and economic role played by Chinese immigrants in the history of British Columbia," he said.

"Today, Chinese Canadians continue to make key contributions to the development and success of our province -- through business, commerce, the professions and the arts," he added.

British Columbia, a province with a population of 4.6 million people, according to the 2011 Canada census, currently has about 500,000 people of Chinese descent, mostly in the Vancouver area.