page_title: Canadian Pacific Railway in British Columbia
section_title: Chinese workers
hierarchical_section_title: Canadian Pacific Railway in British Columbia / Construction / Chinese workers
context_page_description: The Canadian Pacific Railway is a Canadian Class I railway that stretches from Montreal, Quebec, to Vancouver, British Columbia. The British Columbia portion of the railway was constructed between 1881 and 1885, fulfilling a promise extended to BC when it entered Confederation in 1871. For decades, it was the only practical means of long–distance passenger transport in Canada.
context_section_description: Due to a shortage of workers, Onderdonk contracted labour agents in Kowloon to supply six thousand Chinese coolies for the project. The province was outraged at the mass transfer of labour and "Asiatics", fearing that both  would upset the white Anglo-Saxon classes in British Columbia. Macdonald ceded to Onderdonk, due to the savings in labour costs.  BC at the time only had a population of two or three thousand Europeans—not nearly enough to build such a large project.  Macdonald quipped that BC could either have Chinese workers and a railway, or no Chinese workers and no railway. Historians estimate he brought in a total of 15 000 Chinese from China and from California. Chinese workers were kept on crews separate from the white workers and often given the most dangerous jobs, including tunnel-blasting using highly unstable nitroglycerin. Many Chinese laborers were killed in accidents or died of scurvy during the winter, though part of the blame for the scurvy deaths lay with the workers' reliance on rice as a staple. Unlike white workers, injured Chinese workers were not given access to the company hospital and were abandoned to the rest of the workers for help. Discrimination and racism led to fights between Chinese and white workers, including white foremen of Chinese crews.  Chinese workers were generally seen by management as efficient, hardworking and well-behaved.
  The Chinese crews worked year-round in the cliffs and forests, leveling grades. Navvies received between $1 and $2.50 per day but had to pay for their own food, clothing, transportation to the job site, mail and medical care. After two-and-a-half months of back-breaking labour, they could net as little as $16. Chinese navvies in British Columbia made only between $0.75 and $1.25 a day (not including expenses), leaving hardly anything to send home. They did the most dangerous construction jobs. The families of the Chinese who were killed received no compensation—not even notification of loss of life. Many of the men who survived did not have enough money to return to their families in China and spent years in lonely, sad and (often) poor conditions.
caption: Engine 374, the first passenger train to arrive in Vancouver on the transcontinental railway in 1886.
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