economic history

2

QUESTIONS

1. Read the following paper:

Man, G. (2004). Gender, work and migration: Deskilling Chinese immigrant women in Canada. Women’s Studies International Forum, 27(2), pp. 135-148. Retrieved from https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/science/article/pii/S0277539504000172

(That link should also work off-campus – just log in to UVic when prompted.)

a. (12 marks) Write a 3-2-1 report on the article using the form provided on Coursespaces.

2. (4 marks) [True/False and Why] Early Chinese immigrants to British Columbia were unskilled, single, male workers who smoked opium to relieve the stress of being separated from their families and facing discrimination. British Columbia’s demand for opium quickly became so large that over a dozen factories had to be built in Victoria just to satisfy the needs of Chinese immigrants on Vancouver Island. This industry ended when the U.S. lowered its tax on opium, meaning Victorians could import it more cheaply from San Francisco than they could make it locally.

True or False? ________

Why?

3. (8 marks) [Graphing] Chinese immigrants came to Victoria looking for, among other things, a better income than the one they could earn in China. However, on arriving in Canada they would have faced a number of fees and taxes in their first year.

In this question, you will use available historical sources to answer the question, ‘How many years of working in China would it take to pay the fees faced by Chinese immigrants in their first year in Victoria?”

While you are expected to follow all the steps and show your work marks will only be given based on the final, completed graph. This is to allow the assignments to be marked in a timely fashion.

You DO need to show your work in order to receive a non-zero mark.

· Answered the question using Excel? Include the spreadsheet with your calculations.

· Answered the question by hand? Submit a sample calculation for ONE year for each step, so we know that you know how to do them. (Handing in ALL the calculations would take too much space.)

You will be given a large amount of data. If performing the calculations by hand, please use only the first ten years (1878 – 1888, inclusive). If you are using Excel, please use the whole data set.

a. The first step is to calculate the total fees and taxes a new immigrant could expect to pay each year. Use the data in the appendix to calculate the total yearly fee by adding up all the individual fees and taxes present in a given year. (This list is NOT comprehensive, so we’re under-estimating the actual burden on immigrants.)

b. Now it’s time to find out how much an average worker in China earned at that time. The good news is that in 2011, Robert C. Allen et al. published a series of wages for rural workers near Beijing from 1807 to 1902. The bad news is that it’s not in dollars per year, and we need to convert it into dollars per year in order to perform our calculations.

Allen et al. have daily wage data, in copper ‘cash’ (or wen, 文). At the time, China was on a silver standard – its currency was backed by silver. Allen et al. also provide information on how may copper wen are in a silver tael (两). A tael weighs about 4/3 (1.33) ounces.

Use this information, and the assumption that a year has 365 days, to calculate the yearly wage of a Chinese agricultural worker, in ounces of silver.

c. Next, we need to turn the yearly wage in silver ounces to a yearly wage in dollars. For the time period we’re looking at, British Columbia was essentially using the U.S. dollar[footnoteRef:1], so we can use U.S. data. [1: “Canadian bank notes, denominated in dollars, were … widely accepted and circulated freely in the United States.” (Powell, p. 19)]

We don’t have the price in dollars of an ounce of silver, but we can build it from two other pieces of information we DO have: the official US price of an ounce of gold, in dollars, and gold/silver price ratio: that is, how many ounces of silver were equal in value to one ounce of gold.

Since the US was on a stable gold standard, one ounce of gold was worth exactly $20.67 throughout our entire period. The gold/silver price ratio (ounces of silver/ounces of gold) was obtained from MeasuringWorth and is provided in the Data Appendix.

Use the information above to calculate the yearly wage of a Chinese agricultural worker, in dollars.

d. It’s finally time to put it all together and create our graph. Divide the Total Yearly Fee from part a. by the Yearly Agricultural Dollar Wage in part b. to find how many years of working in China it would take to pay the first year of fees faced by Chinese immigrants to Victoria. Plot this series as a line graph with well-labeled axes. The vertical axis should be ‘Years to Pay Fees’ and the horizontal axis should be ‘Year’. (Remember: if you’re doing this by hand, you only need the years 1878 – 1888. Otherwise, your graph should cover 1878 to 1902.) (15 marks)

4. [Research] This question will show you how you may combine information from a variety of sources to create a picture of an individual or organization. We will be looking at Hong Yuen & Co. General Vegetable[footnoteRef:2] Dealers. This company was founded in Victoria by Hong Yuen, and is not mentioned after the 1920s. [2: Hong Yuen & Co. did try to start a piggery in 1909, but the neighbours complained.]

We’ll focus on the years 1891 and 1911, because these are years that are unusually rich in information. Both of them are census years, and UVic has online copies of fire insurance maps for both years.

PLEASE ENTER ALL YOUR ANSWERS IN THE TABLE BELOW. ANSWERS NOT IN THE TABLE WILL NOT RECEIVE MARKS.

Question	Marks	Answer
a	What year was Hong Yuen born in?	1
	Where was Hong Yuen's daughter born?	1
	# of live-in servants (Domestics)	1
b	Business Partner	1
	Suspected of Smuggling	1
c	Address of Hong Yuen Co.	1
	Across the street from	1

a. (3 marks) Search the 1891 census for Hong Yuen, who lives in British Columbia in the District of ‘Victoria’. Once you find the relevant census record, click and the image and read it to find the following information:

What year was Hong Yuen born in? (Write answer in table provided)

Where was Hong Yuen’s daughter[footnoteRef:3] born? (Write answer in table provided) How many live-in servants (Domestics[footnoteRef:4]) did Hong Yuen have in 1891? (Write answer in table provided) [3: The daughter’s family name is listed as ‘Ah’, suggesting Hong Yuen (红袁?) spoke Cantonese. Victoria’s census takers did not know ‘Ah’ (阿) is used in front of one-syllable Cantonese names to make a nickname, and would often write down ‘Ah’ as a first name or family name. This is the equivalent of hearing ‘This is my daughter, Lil’ Alice’ and writing her name down as ‘Alice Little’. Hong Yuen’s wife has a different family name. The census taker at first assumed it was ‘Yuen’, but had to cross it out and correct it to ‘Mon’ (张?). Traditionally, in much of China, a wife would keep her family name, since she was still considered part of her father’s family. ] [4: Listed as ‘Dom’ in the census.]

b. (2 marks) Who was Hong Yuen’s business partner in 1891, and what was he suspected of smuggling? To answer these question, use the British Colonist ‘Advanced Search’ to find instances of ‘Hong Yuen’ in 1891.

Business Partner in 1891[footnoteRef:5]: (Write answer in table provided) [5: Prior to 1875, Hong Yuen was in a farming partnership with ‘Ah See’ and ‘Chong Tie’. An ad in the Colonist in September of that year (see the very bottom of page 3) announces the end of that partnership.]

Suspected of smuggling[footnoteRef:6] (1 type of item is enough, even though he was suspected of smuggling two types): (Write answer in table provided) [6: This was not Hong Yuen’s only run-in with the law. In 1885, there was some confusion as to whether he could testify, as this required swearing on the Bible and he was Confucian. From the Colonist for November 27: “Hong Yuen took the stand and had just been sworn on the Bible, when the court asked if the witness was bound by that course more than the usual one of burning a piece of paper. The interpreter said the last operation was not more binding than the other, as the only oath taken in China was when in the case of two or more disputants they each cut off a chicken’s head.” In 1928, the City of Victoria would actually require Chinese witnesses in an attempted murder trial to swear over two sacrificed roosters (see ‘Chicken Oath Administered’).]

c. (2 marks) What was Hong Yuen Co.’s address in 1891, and what major Victoria landmark was it across the street from (NOT next-door to)?

To answer the first part of this question, you will need to look up Hong Yuen & Co. in a BC Directory for 1891. For that year, there are two choices – Henderson’s or Williams’s.

To answer the second question, you will need to look up the address in the Fire Insurance Plans for 1891[footnoteRef:7]. The first few pages of the Plans are an index that tells you on which pages you will find maps of particular streets. For example, Bay Street is on pages 19 and 21. [7: Revised to 1895, which is why it gives ‘1895’ as the date. Note that all the image files names start with ‘1891’.]

Address of Hong Yuen Co. in 1891[footnoteRef:8]: (Write answer in table provided) [8: In 1912, Hong Yuen & Co. would move to the corner of Fisguard & Quadra. ]

Landmark across the street (NOT next door): (Write answer in table provided)

References

Question 3

Municipal Police Court. (1880, May 1). Daily Colonist, p. 3. Retrieved from http://archive.org/stream/dailycolonist18800501uvic/18800501#page/n2/mode/1up/

Dominion of Canada. (1888). Copy of Imperial Order in Council, The Court at Windsor Castle, the 3rd Day of April, 1886 in Sessional Papers, Volume 16, Second Session of the Sixth Parliament of the Dominion of Canada. Ottawa: A. Senecal. Retrieved from https://books.google.ca/books?id=mAIxAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA268&lpg=PA268

Lai, D. C. (2010). Chinese Community Leadership: Case Study of Victoria in Canada. Canada: World Scientific Publishing.

Li, P. S. (1979). A historical approach to ethnic stratification: the case of the Chinese in Canada, 1858 – 1930. Canadian Review of Sociology, 16(3), 320 – 332. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1755-618X.1979.tb01034.x/abstract

Allen, R. C., Bassino, J.-P., Ma, D., Moll-Murata, C. & Van Zanden, J. L. (2011). Wages, prices and living standards in China, 1738 – 1925: in comparison with Europe, Japan, and India. The Economic History Review, 64(S1), 8 – 38. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27919531

Powell, J. (2005). A History of the Canadian Dollar. Canada: Bank of Canada. Retrieved from http://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/dollar_book.pdf

Officer, L. H. & Williamson, S. H. (2017). The Price of Gold, 1257 – Present [Web Page]. Retrieved from http://www.measuringworth.com/gold/

Question 4

Library and Archives Canada. (2016). Search: 1891 Census of Canada [Web Page]. Retrieved from https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/census/1891/Pages/1891.aspx

The British Colonist Advanced Search [Web Page]. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://britishcolonist.ca/advancedSearch.php

Vancouver Public Libraries. (n.d.). British Columbia City Directories 1860 – 1955 [Web Page]. Retrieved from http://bccd.vpl.ca/index.php

Goad, C. E. (1895). Insurance Plan of Victoria, British Columbia [Map]. Retrieved from http://contentdm.library.uvic.ca/cdm/compoundobject/collection/collection11/id/136

Estimates Passed by Oak Bay Council (1909, March 2). Victoria Daily Colonist, p. 11. Retrieved from http://archive.org/stream/dailycolonist19090302uvic/19090302#page/n10/mode/1up/

Tatlow, D. K. (2016, November 11). For Chinese Women, a Surname Is Her Name. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/12/world/asia/china-women-surnames.html

Fresh Vegetables [Advertisement]. (1911, February 12). Victoria Daily Colonist, p. 2. Retrieved from http://archive.org/stream/dailycolonist53367uvic#page/n1/mode/1up

Notice [Advertisement]. (1875, September 23). Daily British Colonist, p. 3. Retrieved from http://archive.org/stream/dailycolonist18750923uvic/18750923#page/n2/mode/1up/

Afternoon Session. (1885, November 27). Daily Colonist, p. 2. Retrieved from http://archive.org/stream/dailycolonist18851127uvic/18851127#page/n1/mode/1up

Chicken Oath Administered. (1928, March 29). The Daily Colonist, p. 1. Retrieved from http://archive.org/stream/dailycolonist0328uvic_2#page/n578/mode/1up

No, this is NOT the address you are looking for. (It’s from 1911.)

Data Appendix

This data is also available as an Excel file.

Question 2.a. Details of Fees

Fee Name	Imposed By	Year(s) (Inclusive)	Expected $/Year	Source
Chinese Tax	City of Victoria	1878	$10	Lai (2010)
Chinese Tax	City of Victoria	1879	$30	Lai (2010)
Cubic Air Bylaw	City of Victoria	1880 - 1884	$5	Daily Colonist (1880)
Cubic Air Bylaw	City of Victoria	1885 - 1893	$10	Lai (2010)
Chinese Population Regulation	British Columbia	1884 - 1885	$10	Lai (2010), Dominion of Canada (1888)
Foundation Fee	CCBA[footnoteRef:9] [9: Victoria Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (域多利中华会馆)]	1884 - 1902	$2	Lai (2010)
Head Tax	Canada (Federal)	1885 - 1899	$50	Li (1979)
Chinese Hospital Fee	CCBA	1899 - 1902	$2	Lai (2010)
Head Tax	Canada (Federal)	1900 - 1902	$100	Li (1979)

Question 2.b. Daily Rural Wages near Beijing and copper wen per silver tael

Rural Beijing Daily Wages (Allen et al., 2011, Table A.1)
Year	Copper Wen, 文	Copper Wen per Silver Tael (两)
1878	348	8,314
1879	375	8,342
1880	410	8,510
1881	401	8,341
1882	394[footnoteRef:10] [10: Figures in bold were missing in the original, and have been estimated via linear interpolation.]	7,748
1883	387	7,154
1884	356	6,722
1885	395	7,573
1886	402	6,950
1887	395	7,024
1888	361	7,883
1889	421	7,314
1890	393	7,254
1891	390	7,627
1892	372	7,651
1893	410	7,212
1894	443	6,722
1895	446	6,612
1896	448	6,501
1897	442	6,204
1898	435	5,907
1899	429	5,609
1900	422	5,312
1901	462	5,758
1902	470	6,079

Notes:

1 Tael weights 4/3 (~1.33) Ounces.

1 Year has 365 Days (for the purpose of this question)

Question 2.c. Gold/Silver Price Ratio

Gold/Silver Price Ratio (MeasuringWorth)
Year	ounces of silver / 1 ounce of gold
1878	17.92
1879	18.39
1880	18.05
1881	18.25
1882	18.20
1883	18.64
1884	18.61
1885	19.41
1886	20.78
1887	21.10
1888	22.00
1889	22.10
1890	19.75
1891	20.92
1892	23.72
1893	26.49
1894	32.56
1895	31.60
1896	30.59
1897	34.20
1898	35.03
1899	34.36
1900	33.33
1901	34.68
1902	39.15

IMPORTANT NOTE:

You may assume that during this entire period, 1 ounce of gold was worth $20.67.