375 descendants of Chinatown patriarch gather to honour family history
John Mackie
Sun
Randall Yip stands in front of the building at 51 East Pender that was constructed by his grandfather Yip Sang. Photograph by : Mark van Manen, Vancouver Sun
Yip Sang died in 1927, but his legacy can still be seen all over Chinatown.
His headquarters at 51 East Pender, built in 1889, is now Chinatown‘s oldest building, and is being refurbished as the new offices and private art gallery of condo king Bob Rennie.
Yip Sang also built the West Hotel at 488 Carrall to house new immigrants from China who were short of cash. It’s still standing, and providing housing to the poor. The Chinese Benevolent Association he co-founded in 1895 is still thriving.
Still, Yip Sang’s main legacy appears to be his descendants.
The patriarch of Chinatown, he had four wives and 23 children, and they have multiplied. This Saturday, 375 descendants of Yip Sang are expected to gather for a family reunion.
The eldest relative in attendance will be Yip Sang’s grandson Henry Yip, who will turn 91 in August. The youngest will probably be a six-month old baby. In between will be Yips who have flown in from all across North America to attend a lunch at the Flota restaurant, then take a tour of Rennie’s reconstruction of the Yip Sang building.
No doubt, Yip Sang’s spirit will be watching over the proceedings, sternly.
“He was a very strict disciplinarian towards the family,” Henry Yip recalled.
“He used to sit downstairs in the store there, right beside the pot-belly stove. He’d watch every family member go in and out. If you were not in by 10, the door was locked.”
There were a lot of people coming and going, because the Yip Sang building isn’t just the three-storey building visible from the street, but also a six-storey structure he built in behind to house his family.
The story goes that each wife and their children had a floor; Henry grew up on the fourth. The children were educated in a private schoolroom on the third floor of the front building.
“The Chinese at that time, they weren’t allowed to go to English school,” explains Henry.
It seemed to work fine. Yip Sang’s 17th child, Dock, became Canada’s first Chinese-Canadian lawyer in 1945, and two years later was a key figure in the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923, which had barred Chinese immigration into Canada. Another son, Ghim, was the first Chinese doctor in Canada, and a third, Quene, was a local soccer legend.
One of the family quirks is that they refer to Yip Sang’s children by number, rather than by name. Dock was number 17, Quene was number 16, and Ghim was number 11.
“I don’t know why, but we always did it that way,” said Randall Yip, one of Quene’s three sons.
“Depending on who it was, I would also call them Uncle Art [or whatever].”
It was a practical way of identifying family members, and Yip Sang was a practical man. Born in Shengtang, China in 1845, he immigrated to San Francisco in 1864, then came to Canada in 1881. In 1882 he settled in Vancouver (then called Granville), where he was in charge of hiring Chinese labourers for the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was a big job — he is said to have hired 6,000 to 7,000 workers.
In 1889 he built a two-storey brick building to house his Wing Sang company, which imported and exported most anything. A Wing Sang ad from the Dec. 6, 1891 Daily News-Advertiser said the company dealt in “China silks, utensils, trinkets and curios, [and] Japanese drygoods.” At the bottom of the ad, in capital letters, it proclaimed “Importers of Opium.” (Opium was legal in Canada until 1908.)
A third storey was added onto the original building in 1901, then the six-storey building was added in back in 1912.
How did he come to have several wives?
“He married his first wife in China, but she wasn’t well and knew that she was probably going to pass away,” said Randall Yip.
“So she told him he should have another wife to look after the kids, that’s how the second wife came along.”
What about the other two?
“Oh … I don’t think I’ll comment,” he laughed.
Rennie said the renovation of the Yip Sang building is 70 to 75 per cent complete. He had offered the family a chance to tour the facility, expecting construction would be completed by the time of the reunion. But there have been delays, so they’ll be doing a hard-hat tour instead.
When the project is finished next spring, the front building will be Rennie’s offices, and the back building will be his private art gallery and museum. The top five floors have been hollowed out into one big space, which he said is quite dramatic. And it was very expensive.
“The six-storey building at the back, we’ve had to go in and build a complete new concrete liner, build another building within it so we could keep that heritage preservation,” Rennie said.
How much did it cost?
“A lot more than we thought,” he laughed.
