page_title: First Chinatown, Toronto
section_title: Beginnings
hierarchical_section_title: First Chinatown, Toronto / History / Beginnings
caption_attribution_description: English: The Ward as seen from the roof of one of the T. Eaton Co. Ltd. factories, looking southwest with the image centred at the intersection of Elizabeth and Albert street. Osgoode Hall is visible at the top right. Most of the houses and other buildings in this photograph were demolished to allow for the construction of Toronto City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square.
context_page_description: First Chinatown is a retronym for a former neighbourhood in Toronto, an area that once served as the city's Chinatown. The city's original Chinatown existed from the 1890s to the 1970s, along York Street and Elizabeth Street between Queen and Dundas Streets within St. John's Ward. However, more than two thirds of it was expropriated and razed starting in the late 1950s to build the new Toronto City Hall and its civic square, Nathan Phillips Square.
  The remaining of First Chinatown still exists as one of Toronto's Chinatowns, with numerous Chinese restaurants, north of Hagerman and Armoury streets and around Dundas Street between Bay Street and University Avenue, albeit much reduced and the neighbourhood is now being better known as Little Japan. The economic and cultural centre of the downtown Chinese community has largely shifted to the newer West Chinatown located at Spadina and Dundas Street West.
context_section_description: The Chinese population in Toronto was sparse and located in the much of the Toronto Financial District in the 1800s. The earliest record of Toronto's Chinese community is traced to Sam Ching, who owned a hand laundry business on Adelaide Street in 1878. Ching was the first Chinese person listed in the city's directory and is now honoured with a lane named after him.
  The first Chinese café (the term referred to Chinese owned establishments that served a combination of western and Chinese food) in Toronto was opened in 1901 at 37 1/2 Queen Street West opposite City Hall.
  Despite the strict limitations placed on Chinese immigration with the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, the first Toronto Chinatown took shape in the early 1900s as hundreds of Chinese men settled close to Union Station after helping to build the Canadian Pacific Railway across Canada. The men originally found lodgings close to the railway station due to its convenience.
  At this time, the Chinese in Toronto separated themselves into those that supported political reform of the Qing Empire under Empress Dowager Cixi and those that supported a revolution overthrowing the Manchu Qing dynasty. The 1909 Toronto city directory showed them as two distinct clusters of Chinese shops located at:
  Queen Street East and George Street, adjacent to the reformist Chinese Empire Reform Association (保皇會)
  Queen Street West and York Street, adjacent to the Chee Kung Tong (致公堂) a Chinese secret fraternal organization supporting the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen.
  When the Qing dynasty fell in 1912 the reform association became defunct and the business next to it move away from the Queen Street East neighbourhood. Meanwhile, the Chinese community in Queen Street West and York Street continued to grow and moved into the adjacent properties within Toronto's Ward district (43.654°N 79.385°W) vacated by the Jewish population.
  By 1910, the Chinese population in Toronto numbered over a thousand. As in the rest of Canada and the US, due to entry resistance into other areas of employment, the Chinese of Toronto had to resort to the labor of food service and washing laundry. In this time, hundreds of Chinese-owned businesses had developed, consisting mainly of restaurants, grocery stores, and hand laundries. The Chinese laundries competed with the other Torontonian laundries leading to publicly called boycotts and demands for the city government to cancel or withhold business licenses from Chinese operators.
caption: The Ward, c. 1910. Toronto's first Chinatown was situated in The Ward, an area that attracted new immigrants to the city.
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