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What was it like to live in Emily's town in the 1890s? How did people get to Victoria, BC from places as far away as England? How were Chinese immigrants like Emily's cook Hing treated? What was it like to work all day in a kitchen? What is a "safety" bicycle?
Emily's Home Town
Victoria was founded by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1843 -- yes, the same company that today owns The Bay and Zeller's. At first, Victoria (called Fort Victoria then) was just a small trading post, but when gold was discovered on the mainland of British Columbia in 1858, many Europeans settled in Victoria and it became a prosperous town. In 1871 British Columbia became a Canadian province and Victoria was named as the provincial capital. GO BACK TO THE TOP
The Journey to Victoria
In the days before jet airplanes, it took a long time to travel to Victoria. Until 1885, people travelling from Europe or Eastern Canada had to go by ship -- an extremely long voyage that could take several months or more. And since the Panama Canal wasn't finished until 1914, ships had to go all the way around the southern tip of South America and back up the Pacific coast. After 1885, once the Canadian National Railway was completed, people could take the train to what is now Vancouver, and then get on a ferry to Victoria. GO BACK TO THE TOP
Discrimination
Chinese immigrants were first forced to pay a "head tax" -- a fee that allowed them to enter Canada -- in 1885. It was $50, which was a great deal of money in those days. The head tax was raised to $100 in 1901, and then to $500 in 1904. $500 in 1904 was equivalent to roughly $8,000 today, so very few Chinese people were able to afford the fee. In 1923 the Chinese Exclusion Act completely stopped all immigration of Chinese people to Canada. It was not repealed until 1947. GO BACK TO THE TOP
 Where Hing Spent His Day
Kitchens in 1896 were very different from today's kitchens. There were no labour-saving devices such as dishwashers, blenders or food processors. Cooking was done on big, dirty, tempermental coal-fired ranges. These ranges had no thermostats and the only way to tell how hot they were was by sticking your hand in the oven or over the hotplate. If you had to pull your hand away really quickly, you knew the range was very hot! The range was kept on twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, so imagine how hot the kitchen could get in the summer (and of course there was no air conditioning then). There were no refrigerators: most people shopped for food every day, and then kept things cool by storing them in a pantry on marble shelves, or in an icebox, which was just like it sounds -- a cabinet that contained a large block of ice. It's also important to remember that there were very few prepared or convenience foods. The elaborate New Year's dinner that Emily's family enjoyed -- oyster pie, soup, three kinds of meat, vegetable side dishes, two types of potato, then a plum pudding to end -- was all made by Hing. Nothing came out of a can, or was prepared ahead of time then frozen. And just think of all the dishes he had to wash afterwards! GO BACK TO THE TOP
The Safety Bicycle
The bicycle that Emily dreams about was known as a "safety" bicycle. Before the mid-1880s, the most popular kind of bicycle was a penny-farthing. You may have seen pictures: it had a huge front wheel (the penny) and a small rear wheel (the farthing). The pedals were attached to the bicycle's large front wheel, but the seat was very far off the ground, which led to many accidents when riders lost their balance. Then an Englishman named James Stanley invented a new kind of bicycle: it had two similarly sized wheels and, most importantly, a chain- and sprocket-driven rear wheel, with the pedals between the two wheels. The new "safety" bicycle was much easier to operate, and it became very popular. GO BACK TO THE TOP
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