HISTORY I Yip Sang was involved in recruiting many of the labourers who helped build the railway
John Mackie
Sun
The Wing Sang, onetime unofficial bank of Chinatown. CREDIT: Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun
The Wing Sang building was built in 1889 by Yip Sang, a Chinatown merchant who had a long and prosperous association with the Canadian Pacific Railway — he was involved in recruiting many of 6,000 to 7,000 Chinese labourers who helped build it.
After the railway was completed Yip built an empire out of an import-export business, the Wing Sang Company. His building was the unofficial bank of Chinatown, where workers could send money to relatives in China and book passage on steamships to the homeland.
The original two-storey brick building was added to in 1901 and 1912, so it extends over four lots and includes a three-storey building in the front, a six-storey building in the back and 40,000 square feet of space. The rear building was built to house Yip’s large family — he had four wives and 23 children. One of his sons, Dock Yip, was the first Chinese-Canadian lawyer in Canada. Another, Quene, was a soccer star.
The Wing Sang building houses all sorts of historical quirks. The main floor of the 1889 building is a few steps below street level because it was built before the street was paved. The second floor now has a door to nowhere, but originally it could be opened and goods hoisted into the warehouse upstairs.
You enter the back building via an alley just to the west of the building, or through an elevated walkway that connects the third floor of the front building to the fourth floor of the one behind. But you can’t see the rear building from the street, because there is a small wooden facade blocking off the alley.
The front building is in remarkable shape, with upper floors that could be straight out of 1889: Floor-to-ceiling wainscotting, century-old linoleum and even a blackboard where Yip Sang’s children studied their lessons. But someone has stolen the fir flooring in the second storey because the old wood is now worth a small fortune. The back building has been vacant since 1975 when the city brought in bylaws that would have required the Yip family to spend a prohibitive amount of money on upgrades. Pigeons have infested every square inch of the place.
The Yip family sold the building in 2001.
© The Vancouver Sun 2004